Those administering the Iowa caucuses this year faced increased complexity in their task amid rules changes and a decision to use a third-party app to transmit election results.
Systems do not tend to grow less complex over time. On the contrary, they grow more complex.
I would have thought they would have accounted for this. They knew the number of candidates they were dealing with.
They used a free tier of service for which platform? Because in addition to reduced features and capacity, free tiers generally don’t have quality-of-service or reliability guarantees.
(Also, since Nevada was going to be using this app as well it sounds as if they had something pseudo-off-the-shelf and were customizing it for multiple states at $60K a pop. Except that multi-stage caucuses don’t fit the architecture of any other kind of election…)
OT
" Susan Collins predicts Trump will be ‘much more cautious’ about cheating as she votes to acquit"
" Trump says he will award Rush Limbaugh with Medal of Freedom"
Can Hannity be far behind ?
Was there any stress testing before going live?
“With Oxycontin Clusters!”
(“And Vietnam Draft Avoidance Ribbon.”)
not funny. sorry
TRump and shrub also get that ribbon.
And tiny Thai underage hooker recumbent.
So would lots of people I know
I mean, really? This should just be a data collection app, dumping three sets of data into a database. I realize that there’s an element of security here, but it can’t be that complicated unless it’s over-engineered and the complexity is self-made. But maybe I’m just too naive and unskilled at making these things, who knows.
Lots of people I know, too.
But they haven’t made entire careers posing as über-patriot demagogues screaming for Moar Wars!
Oh, but then you have to do complex stuff like arithmetic /snark
I don’t buy the notion that a properly functioning app would have been too expensive. Don’t tell me that there aren’t competent app designers out there who wouldn’t do this at cost.
That jumped out at me too. Your average co-op student working a summer term wouldn’t make that mistake. Yikes!
Further proof that caucuses are dumb, and the media circuses around them are really dumb.
Lame-horse race foolishness.
" One of the big hopes of the Iowa caucus was for it to bring clarity to a divided campaign season. Instead, it brought what one former Iowa party chairman has called “a systemwide disaster,” with results still delayed as of this morning. How does this affect the Democratic primary going forward?"
Why the hell was this an “App” at all? This fetish of making absolutely everything a mobile app has gotten way out of hand.
For something as simple as submitting a modest amount of data to a server (even with all the extra complexity having this many candidates, and three rounds or “alignments” or whatever they’re called), a web browser based tool with a proper SSL certificate would have been amply secure, accessible via a laptop instead of just mobile devices, wouldn’t require users to install updates at the last minute as bugs are worked out, and wouldn’t cause any anxiety over seeing warning messages about going to a site called “TestFairy.”
It’s like the Internet of Shit, but for elections.
It wouldn’t pass muster on security these days, but about 20 years ago the town I lived in elected its board via a two-tier voting system. The votes were fed into a SAS program written by a local programmer. The results were updated on a screen every 2,000 votes, or 15 minutes. Worked like a charm
Because Silicon Valley believes that Apps can solve every problem the world has ever faced.