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App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested

177 points by jbredeche 7y ago

code4tee 7y ago
The only thing clear about the results at this point is that Iowa will probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting. If there was ever a use for the phrase “You had one job!”
- Hamuko 7y ago
  How will that even work?
  - Lavery 7y ago
    Other states have tried to go before Iowa in the past--being the first state to vote has significant benefits to the local economy, as campaigns spend ad dollars, hire local teams, deploy ground efforts that eat in local restaurants, etc. In the past, the parties have essentially prevented those states' election date moves. That stance could change.
  - code4tee 7y ago
    While states set the dates themselves they generally only do so with consent of the parties. In the past the Democratic Party has supported Iowa in going first. After yesterday’s fiasco that stance will likely change.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      People have been talking about it for a while. Iowa is really really white [0] so people have been saying for a long time that maybe the first state (or group of states) should be more representative of the country as a whole. [0] 90.7% white to be precise where the rest of the US is 76.5% https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IA https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IA https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US
- JaceLightning 7y ago
  Is the app just for Iowa, or for all the caucuses?
  - rwbhn 7y ago
    Most states don't even have caucuses, just more traditional primaries. I'm pretty confident this app is quite specific to the (democratic - republican process is different) caucuses in Iowa.
    - redbeard0x0a 7y ago
      and Nevada (they paid for the app and services along with iowa and pete's campaign)
- Miner49er 7y ago
  Iowa has a law that it holds its primaries 8 days before the first state. Not sure how you can change that without having them change that law.
  - NopeNotToday 7y ago
    This is a state law, not federal. Iowa state law has no standing over other states. If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have? Iowa cannot enforce that law outside of Iowa.
    - krn 7y ago
      > If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have? As I understand, it's up to each state to select the date.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected, including time, place, and manner. Within certain bounds they have historically not gotten into the weeds too much on timing, but they certainly could.
        krn 7y ago
        > It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected, including time, place, and manner. It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself[1]: > Because Iowa had a complex process of precinct caucuses, county conventions, district conventions, and a state convention, they chose to start early. In 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold its Democratic caucus, and it had the first Republican caucus four years later. > Under Iowa law, political parties are required to hold caucuses every two years to select delegates to county conventions and party committees. And each party must respect the laws of the state. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Iowa will probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting. More likely that they'll be forced to abandon caucuses.
samdoidge 7y ago
Shambles. It sounds like there was no load-testing.
- chatmasta 7y ago
  We're not talking web-scale here, either. There are 1,600 caucus sites in Iowa. My understanding is that only the organizers/officials even need this on their phones. So we're talking on the order of 10-20k users, max. My intuition is that the bigger problem is with the caucus format itself, and especially the new rule changes. The app, with its strict data entry requirements, likely didn't cover a lot of corner cases and so people had to call in to ask what to do. There was one caucus on TV last night that had problems because a bunch of people left after first alignment and organizers didn't know how to tally their votes. When some confusion -- any confusion -- happens, that doesn't fit into the app's forms, people are not going to trust it and will revert to calling the IDP/DNC offices to see how to proceed.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    LAN parties have better availability and reliability than this at larger scales.
  - tomlong 7y ago
    This makes more sense to me than actually the app melting down under load which was implied from some reporting. Then if the Iowa DNC (or whoever) didn't staff up the phones to the usual levels as expecting most results to come through the app, you can kind of get to how something this ridiculous happened... Either way it's a complete lack of pretty basic testing/training, whether it's with real life users or the scale of the app, or whatever it was, they seem like pretty preventable problems from the outside looking in.
mikeappell 7y ago
From what I was reading, many of the people responsible for reporting the results hadn't even downloaded the app until the night of, or if they had, hadn't ever logged into it on their phones. Ridiculous.
- pkilgore 7y ago
  Or, maybe, a lesson technologists should internalize when we advocate technical solutions to real world problems. Apple moved a reply button on the iPhone email app -- and I know someone that for weeks just thought it was broken and would text responses to emails entirely out of context. This person had a Ph.D.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    For each problem a technical solution solves, 2 harder to solve problems are created.
  - tr33house 7y ago
    > This person had a Ph.D. So sad but funny
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - elyobo 7y ago
    It was apparently a common confusion. https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_toolbar_in_ios_13 https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_tool...
    - machello13 7y ago
      To be fair, the button was still there and still had the same icon. It's bad design for other reasons, but I'm not sure how you could think it was completely broken just because it moved a couple dozen pixels to the right.
- rwbhn 7y ago
wunderland 7y ago
The Sanders campaign hedged against such an error occurring and had their own internal app to track caucus numbers: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release... No surprise, it shows Bernie Sanders winning solidly. This whole situation reeks of the DNC trying to stunt his momentum.
- phkahler 7y ago
  One would think the person with the most votes is their best hope. But apparently the leadership thinks they know better than data.
  - wunderland 7y ago
    The DNC leadership is controlled by large donors who have billions of reasons to oppose a candidate like Sanders.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.
    - tveita 7y ago
      The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.
      - umanwizard 7y ago
        In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.
tomlong 7y ago
Am I right in thinking the app is used by one person per precinct as well? I'm surprised they hadn't tested even at this scale, we're not talking hundreds of thousands of events a second here, surely. It's hard to imagine how they could be under resourced and untested for a really predictable amount of simultaneous traffic.
- pkilgore 7y ago
  I mean, Snapchat could handle the scale of this without a sweat, but you tell 1600 retirees to download it and post a picture (with no training) and provide them a support telephone number, I suspect you'll end up with less than 100 pictures and more than a thousand phone calls.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    The question is whether the problem is a question of misunderstood usage (by the users) or an inability for the backend to handle the load. If it was the former, that’s at least understandable, for the reasons you said, though they still should have practiced it. If it’s the latter, that’s pretty inexcusable, given that they knew precisely the amount of load and that it’s a fairly low amount. I’m pretty sure a naive implementation of any backend for this could handle the load (1600 precincts each reporting a picture over the course of an hour), unless there’s some requirement of this that I’m missing. Either way, this is a pretty good indictment of this entire idea. Stick with what worked for hundreds of years, don’t try “solutions” to non-problems.
    - gbrown 7y ago
      > Stick with what worked for hundreds of years, In Iowa specifically, I’d disagree - primaries are a more robust and inclusive system than caucuses.
  - appleiigs 7y ago
    A simple CRUD website wouldn’t require downloading. Updates/fixes would happen at each refresh. Even seniors know how to use a website these days.
speps 7y ago
Does someone know if it could be related to this? https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/1224559023871033344 https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/122455902387103...
- sswaner 7y ago
  That is the tally sheet used by the precinct captain and secretary to calculate the viability number (the number of supporters needed for candidate to earn a delegate) and then the apportionment of delegates based on supporters. My precinct had these on the table where the staff was coordinating the caucus.
  - SyneRyder 7y ago
    I think the point is that the pin code to login to the app is printed on the top right corner of the tally sheet. Now that various people have been posting photos of tally sheets online - in the case of this tweet, a staffer for Paul Buttigieg - the concern is that members of the public have been trying out the app and pin codes just to see if it would work, and modifying the submitted numbers. Though according to the spokeswoman for the Iowa Democrats in the NYTimes article, they don't believe any of the 3 reporting discrepancies are the result of an intrusion. There's more discussion about this over on the other HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737
- sschueller 7y ago
  Pin is visible, wtf.
ericmay 7y ago
Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.
- Juliate 7y ago
  This. Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.
  - moomin 7y ago
    The UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing. The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact. No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.
    - 7777fps 7y ago
      To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.
    - andygates 7y ago
      The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.
AzzieElbab 7y ago
Shadow inc build a shady app? Honestly, sounds like they are contesting unexpected results
claudeganon 7y ago
The nebulous, shifting accounts about who is actually behind this app, both before and after the caucuses, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence: https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513 https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513 https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1224600468552327168 https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/12246004685523271... Nor does Buttigeig declaring victory before any results have been reported and his comms director tweeting out internal election tallying forms with some kind of PIN data that I imagine should’ve been kept concealed: https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985 https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/12245589259467939...
- sswaner 7y ago
  In my precinct (suburb west of Des Moines) there were observers from the Buttigieg, Yang, Sanders, and Warren campaign. After the first tally, the precinct captains for the campaigns (the people working the room for votes) would run to the back of the room where the observers were standing and report their tally. The Yang and Buttigieg observers would then use some app on their phone, presumably to report these numbers to their campaign. None of that seems abnormal, Buttigieg's claim to victory is based on him winning by the equivalent of an exit poll.
  - fullshark 7y ago
    Reporting bias, not every precinct has candidate support and the precincts with support are the ones most likely to report those numbers back to the campaign.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Declaring victory under these circumstances is certainly abnormal. And moreso in Pete’s case since the group developing the app appear to have been paid by and in favor of his campaign. I don’t even think Sanders should’ve done this in response to Buttigeig.
- dont__panic 7y ago
  Feels very scummy of Pete to declare victory in the absence of data. He's basically taking advantage of the confusion to lay claim to some of the polling boost associated with a win. Not exactly a trait I desire in a president.
coldcode 7y ago
Testing is more than making sure the code works - you have to understand how it will be used, who will use it, how it is designed to be used by them, and even is the app even necessary. This sounds like no one gave much thought to any of this.
- thomk 7y ago
  Welcome to government.
russfink 7y ago
Does anyone have screenshots or more info about this app?
zeveb 7y ago
I am reminded of Senator Romney's campaign's ill-fated ORCA[0] from 2012, which was apparently not well-tested prior to rollout. Seems like technical-project failure does not respect party lines. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system)
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  Far more forgivable offense in 2012 than 2020 though.
patwolf 7y ago
Having built an app that was used for a one time event by a group of people that weren't necessarily tech savvy, I do empathize with the situation. However, If I had $63,000 to build a solution (a price mentioned in a wsj article), I think there are better ways to do this without an app. The problem with relying on an app for a one-time, time-sensitive event is that you'll ultimately run into people that don't know how to download the app, have a phone that can't run the app, don't remember how to authenticate, or are simply confused as to how to use it. No matter how many emails you send out before hand reminding people to install the app and how to use it, some amount of people simply ignore it.
- cableshaft 7y ago
  This was a hard lesson my wife and I learned on our wedding night. For pictures, instead of a Polaroid style camera (which I had bought originally for the purpose but we decided against it later) we thought it would be great if people could use their own phones to take their own reception pictures and then print them off a Bluetooth photo printer we brought, and then put those pictures into a photo guestbook. Instead, no one could get the app downloaded or working (well almost no one) the night of, and one person in the wedding party had to act as a technology liaison and get pictures from other people, then print them from his phone. We ended up with around 14 pictures in the photo guestbook. If we had just gone with the polaroid camera we probably would have had 3 or 4 times that many pictures. All because we assumed the technology would work as easily as we were able to get it working at home, for everyone else.
- cm2187 7y ago
  A simple website that doesn't need to be pretty. Raw html, no css, no javascript.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    You also need authentication and security. HN has a definite anti-JS fanaticism that strikes me as unhelpful.
    - 7y ago
thomk 7y ago
How is there not widespread open source software for voting out there? It seems like this type of problem could be avoided by creating public software.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  There should be, but it’s not just a case of “build it and they will come”. The major parties would need to actually use it (in at least a few states) and for that to happen I think it would need some prominent backers (which could be the parties themselves).
- zach_garwood 7y ago
  Because electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem. Paper voting works and has worked for centuries. There's no need to bring apps/smartphones/whatever into this equation.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  The app isn't for the actual voting it's for reporting the results quickly so news can be written and campaigns changed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
why was this an app and not a website? are apps considered more secure or sth?
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  I’m just guessing it was a combination of (1) an app could be distributed / authorized to only specific email addresses, so far less chance of interruption than you’d get if the website got leaked to the public, and (2) wanting to simplify the reporting logistics by just having people use their private phones, rather than having to set up laptops and internet, and possibly (3) an attempt to stick a toe into the realm of widespread voting by app. Of course there’s always the possibility it’s a simple matter of (4) someone lobbying politicians into giving money to his brother to slap together an app, because government money.
  - inkeddeveloper 7y ago
    I suspect a strong sense of 4.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    It's not government money. This is a party function, and the parties are private organizations, not official parts of the government. (That said, I don't understand why the cost of primaries and, presumably, these caucus events, fall on local taxpayers.)
jordanpg 7y ago
The naivety on the part of the various parties involved here is breathtaking. It is interesting to observe how little distinction non-technical users are aware of between high quality and comically buggy software because of the ease of producing flashy UIs these days. They have no idea how the sausage gets made. No idea. I have never seen a stronger case for the need to have third-party certification and testing of software and the people involved in building it.
- rglover 7y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with what you propose. Serious question: what do you think that certification looks like?
  - peteradio 7y ago
    Veterans form a guild. Entry into guild is prestigious and solemn.
- thomk 7y ago
  I'm getting voted down for mentioning this in another section of this discussion, but, is this not the perfect use case for open source? The certification is anyone and everyone can double check the source code. If this is a bad idea, I would appreciate the feedback, because, it is my understanding that a big draw of using OSS is transparency.
  - flatiron 7y ago
    For something like public voting I agree. But it would be a hard sell to get a lot of companies to pay for software development and release the source because their competitors would get it for free.
    - thomk 7y ago
      I could be wrong, but, I have to believe that there are developers who would donate their time to something as fundamental to democracy as voting. Grassroots, not corporate funded. A corporate funded voting system feels like what we already have.
dadarepublic 7y ago
Paper & electronic. If electronic fails or is called into question, you manually count the paper. I had thought this was the standard. I guess I was wrong?
- dadarepublic 7y ago
  Why was I downvoted? I was asking a question on my assumption I am assuming was wrong. I am truly baffled sometimes.
huffmsa 7y ago
Daily reminder that "well it works locally" is an entirely different animal than "it works at scale". Scale, especially efficient scale, is hard.
tuke 7y ago
No! How could that be?
Slartie 7y ago
Just call people by phone and read off some numbers from paper. Then confirm them by reading them the other way round. Yes, it is actually that easy!!! People have transmitted vote counts this way forever, long before apps were a thing. You can even use your goddamn smartphone to make the call, if you need that in order to feel "modern" enough. But don't make a shitty app for every one-time event that doesn't need a hundred additional failure modes for essentially no benefit whatsoever.
- NopeNotToday 7y ago
  Agreed, the app was a stupid idea. The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to call in the results.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as "Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working thing!". Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".
  - Corrado 7y ago
    Additionally, the results phone number was the same as the helpdesk phone number. This means that everyone that was having trouble with the app was calling the same number that everyone was using to report numbers.
hngryhppos 7y ago
The shadiest part of this whole thing is that the developer of the Shadow app has ties to the Buttigieg campaign: * https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/04/mysterious-startup-shadow-under-scrutiny-after-iowa-caucus-meltdown/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/04/mysterious-startup-shadow... * https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-paid-firm-that-developed-voting-app-blamed-for-iowa-caucus-delays https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-p... And the CEO of Shadow was a vocal Buttigieg supporter: https://twitter.com/WhereIsLawrence/status/1224572032781778945 https://twitter.com/WhereIsLawrence/status/12245720327817789... Come on! This doesn't necessarily mean foul play but at the very least this fails a basic test for impartiality in the voting process.
claudeganon 7y ago
There’s a lot of good technical and failed opsec discussion in this thread, which people should check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737
cipherboy 7y ago
HuffPost has some more details here: - State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech company that joined with ACRONYM last year, more than $60,000 for “website development” over two installments in November and December of last year. - The Iowa Democratic Party had refused to reveal details about the app, including the company behind it and what security measures were being taken to safeguard the results, arguing that it made the technology more vulnerable to hackers. - In 2018, the group funded an onslaught of ads on platforms like Facebook and Google. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824?lng https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e39...
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  Is $60,000 supposed to be a lot? That's, like, 2 developers for November and December.
  - 333c 7y ago
    If anything it sounds like they paid next to nothing for an app and then got what they paid for.
    - inkeddeveloper 7y ago
      My thoughts exactly.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nextstep 7y ago
The Sanders campaign had an internal app to keep their own tally, in case something just like this happened: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release...
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Interesting difference in the numbers, Pete's camp was talking about 77% of their captains reporting vs Sanders reporting (roughly) how many actual precincts they they had results from. Makes it really hard to think about who has the more accurate numbers.
AndrewBissell 7y ago
These problems were easy to see coming, and predicted by many security experts. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on it January 27 but no attention was paid and here we are. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-caucus-voting-app-stirs-security-concerns-11580063221 https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-caucus-voting-app-sti...
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Not quite 'votes'. Its delegates being chosen in a caucus. Different from a vote, in that 'one person-one vote' isn't how it works. You go stand in a group that wants a delegate chosen for a candidate. If your group is too small to earn a delegate, then you wander away to a larger group. Or maybe combine two small groups and wrangle which candidate your delegate will 'declare' for. And yes, paper documents were created this year to facilitate counting/recounting.
curveship 7y ago
From twitter user @XMPPwocky: - each precinct got a PIN to report their results - the PINs were printed on the paper result worksheets sent to precinct captains - multiple precincts and participants posted pictures of their worksheets to Twitter, with the PINS clearly visible - hence multiple PINs were compromised https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169 https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169
- Corrado 7y ago
  It just keeps getting worse and worse...
dkarl 7y ago
The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at over a thousand different precincts for many decades, and then hold up the results when -- shocker -- you realize a large number of precincts are reporting results that show evidence of mistakes or inconsistent interpretation of the rules. Any commercial software company with thousands of data entry users would regard it as a massive mistake to suddenly, overnight, begin rejecting all data that wasn't in compliance with a complex set of rules that most people can't explain. You'd bring a smoothly running business to a grinding, embarrassing halt. Of course all the individual precinct officials whose result were rejected are going to blame the app. Why not? The makers of the app didn't have a mandate to fix the caucus process. And of course when people's accuracy and competence are called into question they will do everything they can to discredit the source. I don't know if that's what happened, but it's consistent with what we're observing: the state office is saying they're trying to resolve inconsistencies in the returns, and the precincts are blaming the app. The right thing to do would have been to use software to measure the prevailing level of data quality and compliance with the state official's interpretation of the rules, and decide later whether to do anything about it in 2024, if ever.
- Balgair 7y ago
  American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot. The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War. The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his Theodore Rex series. To us today, it's ghastly. I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos (my memory is a bit fuzzy here though). The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives. The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself; drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.
reilly3000 7y ago
I was recently asked by a friend to help my local county's Democrats to evaluate and recommend a volunteer organizing app. I sort of expected a medium-sized non-profit with some What I found was an all-volunteer group that is incredibly dedicated, but under-resourced with an extremely shallow tech bench and no technical leadership whatsoever. I saw things that made me shudder as a developer: - Nobody knows how to use the CMS, so no new content in months. - Their site lists a dated version of their team, with _personal_ emails on the public web, since nobody knows how how to set up new mail accounts under their domain. They get destroyed with spam. - I overhead a volunteer clicking really rapid fire, like 100 times in a minute. I probed a bit and found that is how they send out messages. Its something straight out of the excellent "How to Automate the Boring Stuff" - All data has to be manually entered into 2 systems, and they want to add a 3rd. All of those things and 100 others could be fixed expediently, but there is literally nobody to do it, and no committee that handles that role. My day job in a journalistic organization means I really cannot engage in partisan political work, but I'm just itching to help. If you are progressively-minded and want to make a difference in 2020 elections, please show up and help. There is plenty of work to be done, and shockingly few volunteers or staff with the skills you have, HN reader.
- dorkwood 7y ago
  I think clicking manually to send messages might be a legal thing. I'm not sure they're allowed to send automated messages. Can anyone confirm?
- Agustus 7y ago
  If you are technically-minded and want to make a difference, please show up and help. Whatever your political spectrum, you can make a huge difference in a campaign by personally selecting who you align with or believe in, then going and helping. Our capabilities can organize groups and maximize the time of volunteers who are not technically savvy. I have worked on a few campaigns and my skill sets were invaluable to getting candidate voices heightened. TLDR: volunteer and you can make a difference.
user234683 7y ago
How much more secure would it be for precincts to phone in the results? Phone numbers are trivial to spoof. Perhaps the party headquarters could call the precincts instead of the precincts calling the headquarters. But that still leaves questions about the security of the telephone system itself, even with the spoofing issue out of the way. Are there any alternatives other than phoning in the results?

177 points by jbredeche 7y ago

The only thing clear about the results at this point is that Iowa will probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting. If there was ever a use for the phrase “You had one job!”

Hamuko 7y ago
How will that even work?
- Lavery 7y ago
  Other states have tried to go before Iowa in the past--being the first state to vote has significant benefits to the local economy, as campaigns spend ad dollars, hire local teams, deploy ground efforts that eat in local restaurants, etc. In the past, the parties have essentially prevented those states' election date moves. That stance could change.
- code4tee 7y ago
  While states set the dates themselves they generally only do so with consent of the parties. In the past the Democratic Party has supported Iowa in going first. After yesterday’s fiasco that stance will likely change.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    People have been talking about it for a while. Iowa is really really white [0] so people have been saying for a long time that maybe the first state (or group of states) should be more representative of the country as a whole. [0] 90.7% white to be precise where the rest of the US is 76.5% https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IA https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IA https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US
JaceLightning 7y ago
Is the app just for Iowa, or for all the caucuses?
- rwbhn 7y ago
  Most states don't even have caucuses, just more traditional primaries. I'm pretty confident this app is quite specific to the (democratic - republican process is different) caucuses in Iowa.
  - redbeard0x0a 7y ago
    and Nevada (they paid for the app and services along with iowa and pete's campaign)
Miner49er 7y ago
Iowa has a law that it holds its primaries 8 days before the first state. Not sure how you can change that without having them change that law.
- NopeNotToday 7y ago
  This is a state law, not federal. Iowa state law has no standing over other states. If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have? Iowa cannot enforce that law outside of Iowa.
  - krn 7y ago
    > If the DNC decides Nevada would be first, what options does Iowa have? As I understand, it's up to each state to select the date.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected, including time, place, and manner. Within certain bounds they have historically not gotten into the weeds too much on timing, but they certainly could.
      - krn 7y ago
        > It's up to each party to set the rules on how delegates can be selected, including time, place, and manner. It seems that Iowa chose both, the time and the manner, itself[1]: > Because Iowa had a complex process of precinct caucuses, county conventions, district conventions, and a state convention, they chose to start early. In 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold its Democratic caucus, and it had the first Republican caucus four years later. > Under Iowa law, political parties are required to hold caucuses every two years to select delegates to county conventions and party committees. And each party must respect the laws of the state. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Iowa will probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting. More likely that they'll be forced to abandon caucuses.

samdoidge 7y ago

Shambles. It sounds like there was no load-testing.

chatmasta 7y ago
We're not talking web-scale here, either. There are 1,600 caucus sites in Iowa. My understanding is that only the organizers/officials even need this on their phones. So we're talking on the order of 10-20k users, max. My intuition is that the bigger problem is with the caucus format itself, and especially the new rule changes. The app, with its strict data entry requirements, likely didn't cover a lot of corner cases and so people had to call in to ask what to do. There was one caucus on TV last night that had problems because a bunch of people left after first alignment and organizers didn't know how to tally their votes. When some confusion -- any confusion -- happens, that doesn't fit into the app's forms, people are not going to trust it and will revert to calling the IDP/DNC offices to see how to proceed.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  LAN parties have better availability and reliability than this at larger scales.
- tomlong 7y ago
  This makes more sense to me than actually the app melting down under load which was implied from some reporting. Then if the Iowa DNC (or whoever) didn't staff up the phones to the usual levels as expecting most results to come through the app, you can kind of get to how something this ridiculous happened... Either way it's a complete lack of pretty basic testing/training, whether it's with real life users or the scale of the app, or whatever it was, they seem like pretty preventable problems from the outside looking in.

mikeappell 7y ago

From what I was reading, many of the people responsible for reporting the results hadn't even downloaded the app until the night of, or if they had, hadn't ever logged into it on their phones. Ridiculous.

pkilgore 7y ago
Or, maybe, a lesson technologists should internalize when we advocate technical solutions to real world problems. Apple moved a reply button on the iPhone email app -- and I know someone that for weeks just thought it was broken and would text responses to emails entirely out of context. This person had a Ph.D.
- pixl97 7y ago
  For each problem a technical solution solves, 2 harder to solve problems are created.
- tr33house 7y ago
  > This person had a Ph.D. So sad but funny
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elyobo 7y ago
  It was apparently a common confusion. https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_toolbar_in_ios_13 https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/mails_message_action_tool...
  - machello13 7y ago
    To be fair, the button was still there and still had the same icon. It's bad design for other reasons, but I'm not sure how you could think it was completely broken just because it moved a couple dozen pixels to the right.
rwbhn 7y ago

wunderland 7y ago

The Sanders campaign hedged against such an error occurring and had their own internal app to track caucus numbers: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release... No surprise, it shows Bernie Sanders winning solidly. This whole situation reeks of the DNC trying to stunt his momentum.

phkahler 7y ago
One would think the person with the most votes is their best hope. But apparently the leadership thinks they know better than data.
- wunderland 7y ago
  The DNC leadership is controlled by large donors who have billions of reasons to oppose a candidate like Sanders.
- dmurray 7y ago
  Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.
  - tveita 7y ago
    The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.

tomlong 7y ago

Am I right in thinking the app is used by one person per precinct as well? I'm surprised they hadn't tested even at this scale, we're not talking hundreds of thousands of events a second here, surely. It's hard to imagine how they could be under resourced and untested for a really predictable amount of simultaneous traffic.

pkilgore 7y ago
I mean, Snapchat could handle the scale of this without a sweat, but you tell 1600 retirees to download it and post a picture (with no training) and provide them a support telephone number, I suspect you'll end up with less than 100 pictures and more than a thousand phone calls.
- gbear605 7y ago
  The question is whether the problem is a question of misunderstood usage (by the users) or an inability for the backend to handle the load. If it was the former, that’s at least understandable, for the reasons you said, though they still should have practiced it. If it’s the latter, that’s pretty inexcusable, given that they knew precisely the amount of load and that it’s a fairly low amount. I’m pretty sure a naive implementation of any backend for this could handle the load (1600 precincts each reporting a picture over the course of an hour), unless there’s some requirement of this that I’m missing. Either way, this is a pretty good indictment of this entire idea. Stick with what worked for hundreds of years, don’t try “solutions” to non-problems.
  - gbrown 7y ago
    > Stick with what worked for hundreds of years, In Iowa specifically, I’d disagree - primaries are a more robust and inclusive system than caucuses.
- appleiigs 7y ago
  A simple CRUD website wouldn’t require downloading. Updates/fixes would happen at each refresh. Even seniors know how to use a website these days.

speps 7y ago

Does someone know if it could be related to this? https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/1224559023871033344 https://mobile.twitter.com/adelcambre/status/122455902387103...

sswaner 7y ago
That is the tally sheet used by the precinct captain and secretary to calculate the viability number (the number of supporters needed for candidate to earn a delegate) and then the apportionment of delegates based on supporters. My precinct had these on the table where the staff was coordinating the caucus.
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  I think the point is that the pin code to login to the app is printed on the top right corner of the tally sheet. Now that various people have been posting photos of tally sheets online - in the case of this tweet, a staffer for Paul Buttigieg - the concern is that members of the public have been trying out the app and pin codes just to see if it would work, and modifying the submitted numbers. Though according to the spokeswoman for the Iowa Democrats in the NYTimes article, they don't believe any of the 3 reporting discrepancies are the result of an intrusion. There's more discussion about this over on the other HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737
sschueller 7y ago
Pin is visible, wtf.

ericmay 7y ago

Why can’t we just count votes by hand? To me this is over optimization and really just helps a special interest group who wants to sell apps and voting machines. It’s not like we pay a lot of money for election volunteers.

Juliate 7y ago
This. Automation and digitalization of the voting process bring little advantage (speed) to a process where publicity, transparency, accountability need to happen slowly and to consolidate slowly, for the partial & full results to be trusted.
- moomin 7y ago
  The UK, and in particular the north east are well worth looking into here. All paper ballots, no counting machinery, 30,000 voters (smaller than Iowa but of a similar order of magnitude), voting from across the constituency (no cramming into halls), pretty much zero fraud. Accurate results within two hours of the polls closing. The ballots are also kept and can be verified by the voters after the fact. No state in America has any excuse for running an election less effectively than Sunderland.
  - 7777fps 7y ago
    To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.
  - andygates 7y ago
    The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

AzzieElbab 7y ago

Shadow inc build a shady app? Honestly, sounds like they are contesting unexpected results

claudeganon 7y ago

The nebulous, shifting accounts about who is actually behind this app, both before and after the caucuses, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence: https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513 https://mobile.twitter.com/lhfang/status/1224561674679488513 https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1224600468552327168 https://mobile.twitter.com/ryangrim/status/12246004685523271... Nor does Buttigeig declaring victory before any results have been reported and his comms director tweeting out internal election tallying forms with some kind of PIN data that I imagine should’ve been kept concealed: https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/1224558925946793985 https://mobile.twitter.com/bhalle87/status/12245589259467939...

sswaner 7y ago
In my precinct (suburb west of Des Moines) there were observers from the Buttigieg, Yang, Sanders, and Warren campaign. After the first tally, the precinct captains for the campaigns (the people working the room for votes) would run to the back of the room where the observers were standing and report their tally. The Yang and Buttigieg observers would then use some app on their phone, presumably to report these numbers to their campaign. None of that seems abnormal, Buttigieg's claim to victory is based on him winning by the equivalent of an exit poll.
- fullshark 7y ago
  Reporting bias, not every precinct has candidate support and the precincts with support are the ones most likely to report those numbers back to the campaign.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Declaring victory under these circumstances is certainly abnormal. And moreso in Pete’s case since the group developing the app appear to have been paid by and in favor of his campaign. I don’t even think Sanders should’ve done this in response to Buttigeig.
dont__panic 7y ago
Feels very scummy of Pete to declare victory in the absence of data. He's basically taking advantage of the confusion to lay claim to some of the polling boost associated with a win. Not exactly a trait I desire in a president.

coldcode 7y ago

Testing is more than making sure the code works - you have to understand how it will be used, who will use it, how it is designed to be used by them, and even is the app even necessary. This sounds like no one gave much thought to any of this.

thomk 7y ago
Welcome to government.

russfink 7y ago

Does anyone have screenshots or more info about this app?

zeveb 7y ago

I am reminded of Senator Romney's campaign's ill-fated ORCA[0] from 2012, which was apparently not well-tested prior to rollout. Seems like technical-project failure does not respect party lines. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system)

creaghpatr 7y ago
Far more forgivable offense in 2012 than 2020 though.

patwolf 7y ago

Having built an app that was used for a one time event by a group of people that weren't necessarily tech savvy, I do empathize with the situation. However, If I had $63,000 to build a solution (a price mentioned in a wsj article), I think there are better ways to do this without an app. The problem with relying on an app for a one-time, time-sensitive event is that you'll ultimately run into people that don't know how to download the app, have a phone that can't run the app, don't remember how to authenticate, or are simply confused as to how to use it. No matter how many emails you send out before hand reminding people to install the app and how to use it, some amount of people simply ignore it.

cableshaft 7y ago
This was a hard lesson my wife and I learned on our wedding night. For pictures, instead of a Polaroid style camera (which I had bought originally for the purpose but we decided against it later) we thought it would be great if people could use their own phones to take their own reception pictures and then print them off a Bluetooth photo printer we brought, and then put those pictures into a photo guestbook. Instead, no one could get the app downloaded or working (well almost no one) the night of, and one person in the wedding party had to act as a technology liaison and get pictures from other people, then print them from his phone. We ended up with around 14 pictures in the photo guestbook. If we had just gone with the polaroid camera we probably would have had 3 or 4 times that many pictures. All because we assumed the technology would work as easily as we were able to get it working at home, for everyone else.
cm2187 7y ago
A simple website that doesn't need to be pretty. Raw html, no css, no javascript.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  You also need authentication and security. HN has a definite anti-JS fanaticism that strikes me as unhelpful.
  - 7y ago

thomk 7y ago

How is there not widespread open source software for voting out there? It seems like this type of problem could be avoided by creating public software.

iainmerrick 7y ago
There should be, but it’s not just a case of “build it and they will come”. The major parties would need to actually use it (in at least a few states) and for that to happen I think it would need some prominent backers (which could be the parties themselves).
zach_garwood 7y ago
Because electronic voting is a solution looking for a problem. Paper voting works and has worked for centuries. There's no need to bring apps/smartphones/whatever into this equation.
rtkwe 7y ago
The app isn't for the actual voting it's for reporting the results quickly so news can be written and campaigns changed.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

buboard 7y ago

why was this an app and not a website? are apps considered more secure or sth?

GarrisonPrime 7y ago
I’m just guessing it was a combination of (1) an app could be distributed / authorized to only specific email addresses, so far less chance of interruption than you’d get if the website got leaked to the public, and (2) wanting to simplify the reporting logistics by just having people use their private phones, rather than having to set up laptops and internet, and possibly (3) an attempt to stick a toe into the realm of widespread voting by app. Of course there’s always the possibility it’s a simple matter of (4) someone lobbying politicians into giving money to his brother to slap together an app, because government money.
- inkeddeveloper 7y ago
  I suspect a strong sense of 4.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  It's not government money. This is a party function, and the parties are private organizations, not official parts of the government. (That said, I don't understand why the cost of primaries and, presumably, these caucus events, fall on local taxpayers.)

jordanpg 7y ago

The naivety on the part of the various parties involved here is breathtaking. It is interesting to observe how little distinction non-technical users are aware of between high quality and comically buggy software because of the ease of producing flashy UIs these days. They have no idea how the sausage gets made. No idea. I have never seen a stronger case for the need to have third-party certification and testing of software and the people involved in building it.

rglover 7y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with what you propose. Serious question: what do you think that certification looks like?
- peteradio 7y ago
  Veterans form a guild. Entry into guild is prestigious and solemn.
thomk 7y ago
I'm getting voted down for mentioning this in another section of this discussion, but, is this not the perfect use case for open source? The certification is anyone and everyone can double check the source code. If this is a bad idea, I would appreciate the feedback, because, it is my understanding that a big draw of using OSS is transparency.
- flatiron 7y ago
  For something like public voting I agree. But it would be a hard sell to get a lot of companies to pay for software development and release the source because their competitors would get it for free.
  - thomk 7y ago
    I could be wrong, but, I have to believe that there are developers who would donate their time to something as fundamental to democracy as voting. Grassroots, not corporate funded. A corporate funded voting system feels like what we already have.

dadarepublic 7y ago

Paper & electronic. If electronic fails or is called into question, you manually count the paper. I had thought this was the standard. I guess I was wrong?

dadarepublic 7y ago
Why was I downvoted? I was asking a question on my assumption I am assuming was wrong. I am truly baffled sometimes.

huffmsa 7y ago

Daily reminder that "well it works locally" is an entirely different animal than "it works at scale". Scale, especially efficient scale, is hard.

tuke 7y ago

No! How could that be?

Slartie 7y ago

Just call people by phone and read off some numbers from paper. Then confirm them by reading them the other way round. Yes, it is actually that easy!!! People have transmitted vote counts this way forever, long before apps were a thing. You can even use your goddamn smartphone to make the call, if you need that in order to feel "modern" enough. But don't make a shitty app for every one-time event that doesn't need a hundred additional failure modes for essentially no benefit whatsoever.

NopeNotToday 7y ago
Agreed, the app was a stupid idea. The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to call in the results.
- Slartie 7y ago
  They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as "Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working thing!". Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".
- Corrado 7y ago
  Additionally, the results phone number was the same as the helpdesk phone number. This means that everyone that was having trouble with the app was calling the same number that everyone was using to report numbers.

hngryhppos 7y ago

The shadiest part of this whole thing is that the developer of the Shadow app has ties to the Buttigieg campaign: * https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/04/mysterious-startup-shadow-under-scrutiny-after-iowa-caucus-meltdown/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/04/mysterious-startup-shadow... * https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-paid-firm-that-developed-voting-app-blamed-for-iowa-caucus-delays https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/buttigieg-campaign-p... And the CEO of Shadow was a vocal Buttigieg supporter: https://twitter.com/WhereIsLawrence/status/1224572032781778945 https://twitter.com/WhereIsLawrence/status/12245720327817789... Come on! This doesn't necessarily mean foul play but at the very least this fails a basic test for impartiality in the voting process.

claudeganon 7y ago

There’s a lot of good technical and failed opsec discussion in this thread, which people should check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22232737

cipherboy 7y ago

HuffPost has some more details here: - State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech company that joined with ACRONYM last year, more than $60,000 for “website development” over two installments in November and December of last year. - The Iowa Democratic Party had refused to reveal details about the app, including the company behind it and what security measures were being taken to safeguard the results, arguing that it made the technology more vulnerable to hackers. - In 2018, the group funded an onslaught of ads on platforms like Facebook and Google. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824?lng https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e39...

freddie_mercury 7y ago
Is $60,000 supposed to be a lot? That's, like, 2 developers for November and December.
- 333c 7y ago
  If anything it sounds like they paid next to nothing for an app and then got what they paid for.
  - inkeddeveloper 7y ago
    My thoughts exactly.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nextstep 7y ago

The Sanders campaign had an internal app to keep their own tally, in case something just like this happened: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release-caucus-numbers-iowa-buttigieg/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release...

rtkwe 7y ago
Interesting difference in the numbers, Pete's camp was talking about 77% of their captains reporting vs Sanders reporting (roughly) how many actual precincts they they had results from. Makes it really hard to think about who has the more accurate numbers.

AndrewBissell 7y ago

These problems were easy to see coming, and predicted by many security experts. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on it January 27 but no attention was paid and here we are. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-caucus-voting-app-stirs-security-concerns-11580063221 https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-iowa-caucus-voting-app-sti...

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Not quite 'votes'. Its delegates being chosen in a caucus. Different from a vote, in that 'one person-one vote' isn't how it works. You go stand in a group that wants a delegate chosen for a candidate. If your group is too small to earn a delegate, then you wander away to a larger group. Or maybe combine two small groups and wrangle which candidate your delegate will 'declare' for. And yes, paper documents were created this year to facilitate counting/recounting.

curveship 7y ago

From twitter user @XMPPwocky: - each precinct got a PIN to report their results - the PINs were printed on the paper result worksheets sent to precinct captains - multiple precincts and participants posted pictures of their worksheets to Twitter, with the PINS clearly visible - hence multiple PINs were compromised https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169 https://twitter.com/XMPPwocky/status/1224563396873351169

Corrado 7y ago
It just keeps getting worse and worse...

dkarl 7y ago

The naivety is in adding error-checking on top of a caucus process with a notoriously complex set of rules that have been executed by hand, by humans at over a thousand different precincts for many decades, and then hold up the results when -- shocker -- you realize a large number of precincts are reporting results that show evidence of mistakes or inconsistent interpretation of the rules. Any commercial software company with thousands of data entry users would regard it as a massive mistake to suddenly, overnight, begin rejecting all data that wasn't in compliance with a complex set of rules that most people can't explain. You'd bring a smoothly running business to a grinding, embarrassing halt. Of course all the individual precinct officials whose result were rejected are going to blame the app. Why not? The makers of the app didn't have a mandate to fix the caucus process. And of course when people's accuracy and competence are called into question they will do everything they can to discredit the source. I don't know if that's what happened, but it's consistent with what we're observing: the state office is saying they're trying to resolve inconsistencies in the returns, and the precincts are blaming the app. The right thing to do would have been to use software to measure the prevailing level of data quality and compliance with the state official's interpretation of the rules, and decide later whether to do anything about it in 2024, if ever.

Balgair 7y ago
American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot. The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War. The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his Theodore Rex series. To us today, it's ghastly. I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos (my memory is a bit fuzzy here though). The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives. The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself; drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.

reilly3000 7y ago

I was recently asked by a friend to help my local county's Democrats to evaluate and recommend a volunteer organizing app. I sort of expected a medium-sized non-profit with some What I found was an all-volunteer group that is incredibly dedicated, but under-resourced with an extremely shallow tech bench and no technical leadership whatsoever. I saw things that made me shudder as a developer: - Nobody knows how to use the CMS, so no new content in months. - Their site lists a dated version of their team, with _personal_ emails on the public web, since nobody knows how how to set up new mail accounts under their domain. They get destroyed with spam. - I overhead a volunteer clicking really rapid fire, like 100 times in a minute. I probed a bit and found that is how they send out messages. Its something straight out of the excellent "How to Automate the Boring Stuff" - All data has to be manually entered into 2 systems, and they want to add a 3rd. All of those things and 100 others could be fixed expediently, but there is literally nobody to do it, and no committee that handles that role. My day job in a journalistic organization means I really cannot engage in partisan political work, but I'm just itching to help. If you are progressively-minded and want to make a difference in 2020 elections, please show up and help. There is plenty of work to be done, and shockingly few volunteers or staff with the skills you have, HN reader.

dorkwood 7y ago
I think clicking manually to send messages might be a legal thing. I'm not sure they're allowed to send automated messages. Can anyone confirm?
Agustus 7y ago
If you are technically-minded and want to make a difference, please show up and help. Whatever your political spectrum, you can make a huge difference in a campaign by personally selecting who you align with or believe in, then going and helping. Our capabilities can organize groups and maximize the time of volunteers who are not technically savvy. I have worked on a few campaigns and my skill sets were invaluable to getting candidate voices heightened. TLDR: volunteer and you can make a difference.

user234683 7y ago

How much more secure would it be for precincts to phone in the results? Phone numbers are trivial to spoof. Perhaps the party headquarters could call the precincts instead of the precincts calling the headquarters. But that still leaves questions about the security of the telephone system itself, even with the spoofing issue out of the way. Are there any alternatives other than phoning in the results?