I also think the political process just doesn't work well with the iterative process necessary to adopt new technology. Politics is so focused on immediate res

I also think the political process just doesn't work well with the iterative process necessary to adopt new technology. Politics is so focused on immediate results and sound bites and whether it fixes a problem immediately. Implementing any new technology just doesn't happen right the first time. It's a learning process. You forgot to consider XYZ so you had to go back and add some new features. A feature might not work as expected and another might have had some unintended consequences. It happens. It gets fixed. The technology gets better. Not in spite of these challenges, but because of them. Politics, on the other hand, is all-or-nothing. They didn't go back and reconsider the algorithm or the weights or discuss why certain factors were assigned certain weights. It was either implement the algorithm or don't. They balanced progress with political reputation and when "too many" voters voiced displeasure they abandoned ship for fear of a day or two of bad PR. That's not a recipe for success when it comes to technological change, it's a recipe for disaster.