
Iowa Democrats Should Have Known Better Than to Use an App - DarkContinent
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/iowa-democrats-should-have-known-better-than-to-use-an-app/
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PopePompus
The article mentions the paper trail backup. Good luck with that. Given our
experience with Florida in the 2000 presidential election, who would be
willing to bet that the paper ballot results would agree with the head count
results? I was at one of the caucuses - there were two paper ballot rounds and
three head counts (done by people counting themselves, supervised by staffers
for the various candidates). 626 people attended my caucus. I'm sure none of
them were in the bathroom during one of the three head counts over the course
of a couple hours; that just couldn't happen.

The paper ballots required attendees to fill in the full name of their
preferred candidate (plus a second choice), as well as their own name and
address. Considering the fact that people cannot be counted on to fill in a
circle or punch a hole in a piece of paper with 100% accuracy, how likely is
it that multiple lines of text can be written on a card correctly and
legibly?. If they actually fall back on the paper ballots, I predict all hope
of a clear result will be lost.

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m_ke
Based on the linkedin profiles of people who work at the company that made
this app it doesn't look like there was a single senior engineer involved.

EDIT: the CTO actually has a lot of experience, I didn't see her first two
positions at SRI and Google because linkedin folded it.

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vsareto
I hope no one comes away from this thinking the engineers were at fault

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designcode
... they can't just deflect blame either. I'm sure they'd be happy to take
credit for any success. Anyone who had direct control over the product is at
fault.

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asdfasgasdgasdg
I would not blame an engineer whose experience and training was inadequate to
the task _unless_ they participated in the misrepresentation of the app as
ready for prime time. The blame lies with the leadership.

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nwvg_7257
Why on earth did they make an app which they didn't even have time to get
approved? This could have been done easily with a website. Honestly, they
could have used Google Forms. A secure, off the shelf, and much cheaper option
would have be to setup a G Suite workplace, mail security tokens to the caucus
leaders, have them make accounts on a computer, and submit the results through
a form.

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sky_rw
You can't bill 10's of thousands of dollars to a donation funded political
organization if you do that.

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TylerE
Why not?

"IT Services and Support"

The real issue with that approach would probably be a requirement to have a
computer on site.

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sky_rw
Ironically the real issues is that they probably weren't able to bill enough.

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glial
Software and voting don't mix well. We should have collectively realized this
by now.

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SigmundA
Software runs our cars, planes, spacecraft and banks. I think we could make it
work for voting if we want to put the effort into it.

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colejohnson66
There’s so many things wrong with digital voting. The biggest being that it’s
so easy to hack compared to analog (paper) voting. You want to change an
election, just hack the machine. With paper, you need a grand conspiracy.

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otachack
It's easy to hack analog as well if the administration is in on it.

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iso947
Sure with gerrymandering. I’ve been involved in two major elections in the
last 12 months in the uk, one as a candidate. I couldn’t think of any way of
significantly changing the votes without another party finding out. Can’t
register fake people in bulk, can’t registrr normally non voting people for
postal votes without them finding out, can’t vote as multiple people without a
lot of co conspirators and without at least some finding out they’d already
voted, can’t introduce fake ballots without many conspirators, can’t change
ballots or lose ballots

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bradknowles
Gerrymandering isn't the only solution there.

If you're the secretary of state for a given state of the union, and you're in
charge of the voter rolls, and you're running for office, then you are fully
empowered to just remove anyone from the voter rolls who has a name you don't
like, or who has a race you don't like, or who has a political affiliation you
don't like.

And you can stymie all attempts to uncover your malfeasance by just shoving
all those requests in the drawer, where they get mysteriously lost.

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colejohnson66
I don’t think this would work. Isn’t Georgia in the middle of some lawsuits
regarding their elections?

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HarryHirsch
Why do you need anything beyond a stack of Excel spreadsheets? The polling
locations call in the tally to the town, the town calls in results to the
county, and the county forwards the results to the state, to be certified.
Like this you get the final result two hours after polls close. Everything
else is needless complexity.

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planetzero
..Not if you want to commit election fraud.

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dmalvarado
Iowa's caucus has been more or less working fine since it started in 1972.

What was the value add of introducing an app? Knowing results sooner?
Certainly not simplicity or reliability.

I'm reminded of an xkcd comic (I think) where the fight to eradicate some
disease is essentially making stead,y predictable progress, and a room full of
developers is ready to chuck the whole process in favor of app-ification. This
is that.

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briandear
Why don’t they have an actual primary instead of that quaint barndance of a
caucus?

Every state should have a primary on the same day instead of giving states
like Iowa and New Hampshire outsized influence on the media narrative.

