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The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

vice.com

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Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#31

Post by truthwhisperer »

tmpz22 wrote: post #14

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX . The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of…

No you don't get the point. IT is used as an "acceptable excuse" to bias the outcome in favour of a pre-selected candidate.

Don't be naive. This is not a technical problem but a political "problem"

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#32

Post by dang »

abetlen wrote: post #9

This Motherboard article has more details on the app including screenshots https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3m33x/heres-the-shadow-i... My favorite screenshot is the last one, it looks like a generic mobile Firefox error for a misspecified URL.

Ok, we've switched the URL to that from https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122337/iowa-caucus-app-b.... Thanks!

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#33

Post by ikeyany »

yongjik wrote: post #23
pmoriarty wrote: post #4

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

Sorry for tooting the horn again, but this is really a solved problem. You go with paper ballots and vote-counting machines. The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand. This is how it's supposed to work: https://youtu.be/ViK9pe9Pv_s?t=27

That's never been how caucuses work, so it's not quite a solution to this problem.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#34

Post by walshemj »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

Um hand counting in primary elections - you think the Blackadder episode where they try to get Baldric elected to a rotten borough is a good idea.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#35

Post by neonate »

marcell wrote: post #30

My coworker has an alternate theory that frankly makes a lot more sense than “the app broke.” The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted. The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has sma…

I don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#36

Post by sjm-lbm »

tmpz22 wrote: post #14

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX . The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of…

This seems overly paranoid to me - wouldn't we want people with experience in the civics tech space to be leaders at a company working in the civics tech space? Besides, wouldn't most of the good Bernie tech people... go back to work for Bernie? There's a reason why the Hillary people need new jobs.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#37

Post by spike021 »

skrowl wrote: post #3

I'm picturing the Dos Equis meme saying "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production. Stay on call, my friends." At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).

One time I was working on a Splunk thing at an old job. We had an engineering contact there, and when a question came up about how something in Splunk was tested, the guy literally just replied back to our email with that meme and no other details.

Yikes?

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#38

Post by mdavidn »

oblib wrote: post #6

I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night. My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning. They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty clo…

Any database should work just fine for this application. 1678 precincts. 11 candidates. 2 rounds. That's 37 thousand records to fully represent everything.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#39

Post by awb »

yongjik wrote: post #23
pmoriarty wrote: post #4

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

Sorry for tooting the horn again, but this is really a solved problem. You go with paper ballots and vote-counting machines. The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand. This is how it's supposed to work: https://youtu.be/ViK9pe9Pv_s?t=27

> The result is available pretty fast, and when there's concern you can always re-count everything by hand.

Good old progressive enhancement. Not sure why people want to rip out the old functionality (paper) until the new functionality (e-voting) has a solid track record on it's own.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#40

Post by allovernow »

The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company.

Other suspicious dealings are a premature victory announcement by Buttigeig's campaign and a leak of a picture of paper tallies which included a PIN allegedly used to login to the tally app. Looking for the tweet now...

>https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shado...

Edit: I'm not necessarily trying to suggest anything, but I'd like to point out that this post went from +10 to +2 in a matter of minutes.

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