8 ms·

Enough with the conspiracy, mystery, scheming, evil explanations of what's going on. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and

Enough with the conspiracy, mystery, scheming, evil explanations of what's going on. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and that's all that's going on here. This is a bunch of amateur app coders, managed by amateur product designers and sales people, who got paid by clueless amateur voting registrars, to make an app that was rushed, not tested at scale, deployed without training, and allowed to get Iowa into this situation by someone not treating it with the seriousness it deserved. No more, no less. Just normal human incompetence.

beepboopbeep 7y ago
Something, something, monorail.
danielg6 7y ago
Or maybe the situation was treated with seriousness, hence the outcome...
ProAm 7y ago
There is no proof of either yet. What makes everyone think this is suspicious is there is proof of election meddling from overseas in the past. So there is proof elections can be modified and I doubt the IT skills groups like these to realize or adequately stop tampering. Without evidence everyone is assuming everything.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  Did Russia actually meddle with (read: modify) the election? Or did they just buy ads? I thought it was only the latter.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    There is no evidence of changing votes by any other nation. Ad buying and fake advocacy accounts have been shown to exist for multiple nations. Also, multiple countries have given money to organizations in the US for non-election work that seems to end up on elections. The DC advocacy culture is a wonder to behold from money both domestic and imported.
  - ProAm 7y ago
    I read there was unsuccessful attempts and not only by Russia, but if foreigners are willing to do it I absolutely would not put it past interested Americans to try either. The ads were meddling but in a different sense, just like the Russians meddled in Brexit with ads.
  - elicash 7y ago
    Most people consider the illegal hacking and distribution of emails as "meddling" with the election and believe it had a greater impact on how people voted than the ad buys did. If you're just arguing that it's irrelevant because vote totals weren't hacked, fine. That's a dispute over word choice of what it means to "meddle." Russia also hacked into and downloaded data from voting registration systems, which should cause us to re-evaluate our voting systems, but again, that didn't impact vote computations or anything like that.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      I’m gonna break a rule, but, honestly, HN confuses me. I asked a genuine question and I’m being downvoted for it because (I assume) some people mistake it as trolling. Anyways, I never said they didn’t do anything. I said, “here’s what I thought: x. Was I wrong?” My use of “(read: modify)” was to clarify that when I said meddle in that instance, I meant actual modification; I was referencing what the parent comment had said.
      - elicash 7y ago
        I didn't downvote you (I promise!). And I hope I answered your question. For those who did, I think what happens is that it's hard to tell which people are and are not operating in good faith and sometimes people mistake one for the other. But it sounds like you genuinely weren't sure whether Russia had actually hacked into the voting machines. Only into the Podesta, the DNC, and into voter registration systems. There's no evidence to suggest they changed tabulations (and by that I mean they almost certainly didn't), so that's why people haven't made that claim.
        colejohnson66 7y ago
        Thank you. I like HN because the community is a lot nicer than others, but it’s frustrating being drive-by downvoted when you just asked a genuine question. It reminds me of other online communities where people just downvote because you said something they disagree with.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Not only that, the party itself has a history of meddling against this election's likely winner.
elicash 7y ago
They're hiring! https://shadowinc.io/jobs https://shadowinc.io/jobs
- yellowapple 7y ago
  "Client Success Representative" sounds like a fun job.
TheHypnotist 7y ago
As anyone in this industry knows, this is very common even with larger, more established companies.
thinkingemote 7y ago
How would you test this type of thing at scale? Disclaimer: not an app developer!
- WarDores 7y ago
  "Scale" in this case is 1,681 precincts, each with a handful of users (the election officials). I'm not sure that was the issue in this case.
- aqme28 7y ago
  This isn't really "scale." It needs to record something like a dozen numbers from each of the ~1,700 caucuses in the state. You could have used Excel as the database here with no problem.
  - honkycat 7y ago
    I was in the shower this morning thinking about how I would solve this, and something like this is exactly what I would have done. Use simple, familiar, battle tested technology to do the heavy lifting.
- davinic 7y ago
  There are apps and libraries that can simulate load.
- yongjik 7y ago
  On production, apparently.
- munk-a 7y ago
  It takes a very dedicated plan to sufficiently test apps at scale when we're talking the scale of 300 million or billions... In this case the scale was 1700 (maybe off by an order of magnitude) when your scale is on the thousands or tens of thousands you can't do outright stupid stuff... but you can do reasonably dumb stuff and be fine - running a test with a hundred or so users should've clearly demonstrated these issues and there are companies out there that excel at resourcing a few minutes of a few hundred folks' time for just this kind of load testing. That said, this was a pretty pathetic failure to scale, and I don't use harsh language like that lightly. I assume we're going to find out someone's brother or nephew runs the company because, for whatever reason, politics loves nepotism.
honkycat 7y ago
I am a big Bernie Sanders supporter and am always eager to put on my tinfoil hat. But I have to agree with you. The owner of Shadow's parent company has close ties to the Hillary campaign, a lot of the Shadow employees worked for the Obama campaign, Hillary campaign, and for the DNC. The scandal here is a bunch of noobs got an extremely important contract through cronyism, and they bungled it horribly.
- derision 7y ago
  I'd surprised you're not more critical of Clinton and her cronies as a Bernie supporter given they abused superdelegates to award Hillary the nomination over Bernie in 2016
  - honkycat 7y ago
    Oh believe me, I have plenty of venom for the DNC. As far as I am concerned they stole the nomination. The DNC was biased against Bernie Sanders and they ratf*ed him every chance they had. Bernie had staff at most of the caucus locations and they kept their own independent tally to ensure there was no funny business. The bias was so obvious. It damaged Hillary's campaign. I was so disgusted I was tempted to vote for Trump ( I didn't! ), and I am pretty sure a LOT of people tuned out after the circus was over, and didn't bother to vote in the election. It was so obvious the head of the DNC had to step down in shame. And not to say the shadow bungle was not damaging. It robbed the candidate who won from being able to deliver a victory speech. Instead... everyone delivered a victory speech just in case xD
    - derision 7y ago
      Yeah I have a similar story. I was a Bernie supporter but when all that went down I started paying attention to Trump and found out I actually agreed with much of what he was running on
- paulgb 7y ago
  The reports I've seen have the app budget as $60-70k, which seems super low budget for how important it was. If this is cronyism (and not just low bidding), they didn't do a very good job of it. https://www.thestreet.com/politics/acronym-shadow-iowa-caucus-democrats https://www.thestreet.com/politics/acronym-shadow-iowa-caucu...
sky_rw 7y ago
Agree that this is certainly the greatest example of Hanlon's Razor in recent memory. This includes their naming choice.
noja 7y ago
You may be right, but this will always be the case with electronic voting. A normal child could understand and verify the chain of a non-electronic vote. A very technical adult could not do the same for an electronic vote.
- elicash 7y ago
  This isn't electronic voting. This isn't even paper voting (though they also use paper backups). This vote is primarily done by people standing in a particular corner. This is related to the TRANSMISSION of the vote count to the Iowa Dem Party, not the count itself. There was a separate issue from app issues where the different rounds of voting weren't matching up in some precincts. Paper backups of the vote still exist.
skrebbel 7y ago
> * Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice* I like what you did there.
tathougies 7y ago
So the argument is that former members of the Clinton campaign -- highly competent individuals familiar with elections -- put together a company comprised of 'amateur app coders' paid by 'clueless amateur voting registrars'? The founder, Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, have a great pedigree. Niemira was formerly at kiva.org. Davis was on the Clinton campaign tech team. These are not incompetent individuals. Now, you may be right that this is all incompetence. However, your contention that these are 'amateur coders', managed by 'amateur product designers', getting paid by clueless 'amateur voting registrars', is completely ridiculous. The leadership team is clearly professional and tech-savvy..
- aqme28 7y ago
  > the Clinton campaign -- highly competent individuals familiar with elections I'm going to disagree with this premise.
  - coredog64 7y ago
    I get the joke, but c’mon...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- honkycat 7y ago
  "The leadership team is clearly professional and tech-savvy.." And yet they failed miserably. I'm so sick of this attitude. Leadership never takes the fall, it is always the underlings who get the blame. Their important high visibility project failed. The leadership failed. When you fail, that means you did not perform in a competent way.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    I think you mistook me. I am clearly blaming the leadership team, but not for incompetence. For actual malice. They clearly knew what they should do, and decided not to. That should be something they are punished for, not their employees.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
overthemoon 7y ago
A lack of transparency combined with a reputation (earned or not) for guiding primaries to their desired outcome, it's not hard to see why some people might think this is an example of the DNC putting their finger on the scale in some way. There's no evidence either way, which means confidently claiming incompetence is fairly baseless, as well. If we want to talk what things are generally true, sure, I'd put money on incompetence without any context, but there IS context to this.
fuqmachine 7y ago
But it is extremely convenient. So was the cancellation of the Des Moines Register Poll. Pete is conspiratorially involved in both. I tend not to believe in coincidences.
- munk-a 7y ago
  The handling of this situation was terrible and, while Pete Buttigieg Buttigieg did pay the company money, I haven't yet seen any clarity on what service he was after. Your statement is almost pure speculation.
  - fuqmachine 7y ago
    > conspiratorially, meaning speculatively I'm only claiming that it is a convenient coincidence and I tend not to believe in those. I'm not talking absolute corruption. But I believe there is a buddy-buddy effect at the very least
    - munk-a 7y ago
      I think one of the more dangerous aspects of the world we live in right now is how willing people are to immediately assume a conspiracy and making a sweeping a baseless statement only fuels that. Your comment did call out the fact that you're uncertain, but it then continued to make baseless claims. There are interesting things that need to be dug into especially connected to Pete's payment to this app company and I'll be watching closely - but we simply have next to no information yet.
      - fuqmachine 7y ago
        Again, I claimed no explicit corruption. I said that these events favor Pete and he had his hands in making these events occur. Why is evidence regarded as baseless? He called in and pulled the poll that was released in a timely manner for 76 years. His adviser is married to the company's founder, and he bought 42k$ worth of "service" from them before. When app crashed, he claims victory like a rat and all of media announces his speech to the public. Again I'm not claiming Iowa Dem party actively helped him. I'm claiming that he was allowed to help himself in multiple ways and noone stopped him, which is unfair to every other candidate.
dave_b 7y ago
Thank you for putting this issue to rest. Now that you’ve emphatically declared your personal speculation to be true, I’m sure everyone else will stop with all their silly speculation.
taytus 7y ago
I agree 99% with your observations. As you pointed out, this is not just "normal human incompetence", these are layers and layers of incompetence.

beepboopbeep 7y ago

Something, something, monorail.

danielg6 7y ago

Or maybe the situation was treated with seriousness, hence the outcome...

ProAm 7y ago

There is no proof of either yet. What makes everyone think this is suspicious is there is proof of election meddling from overseas in the past. So there is proof elections can be modified and I doubt the IT skills groups like these to realize or adequately stop tampering. Without evidence everyone is assuming everything.

colejohnson66 7y ago
Did Russia actually meddle with (read: modify) the election? Or did they just buy ads? I thought it was only the latter.
- protomyth 7y ago
  There is no evidence of changing votes by any other nation. Ad buying and fake advocacy accounts have been shown to exist for multiple nations. Also, multiple countries have given money to organizations in the US for non-election work that seems to end up on elections. The DC advocacy culture is a wonder to behold from money both domestic and imported.
- ProAm 7y ago
  I read there was unsuccessful attempts and not only by Russia, but if foreigners are willing to do it I absolutely would not put it past interested Americans to try either. The ads were meddling but in a different sense, just like the Russians meddled in Brexit with ads.
- elicash 7y ago
  Most people consider the illegal hacking and distribution of emails as "meddling" with the election and believe it had a greater impact on how people voted than the ad buys did. If you're just arguing that it's irrelevant because vote totals weren't hacked, fine. That's a dispute over word choice of what it means to "meddle." Russia also hacked into and downloaded data from voting registration systems, which should cause us to re-evaluate our voting systems, but again, that didn't impact vote computations or anything like that.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    I’m gonna break a rule, but, honestly, HN confuses me. I asked a genuine question and I’m being downvoted for it because (I assume) some people mistake it as trolling. Anyways, I never said they didn’t do anything. I said, “here’s what I thought: x. Was I wrong?” My use of “(read: modify)” was to clarify that when I said meddle in that instance, I meant actual modification; I was referencing what the parent comment had said.
    - elicash 7y ago
      I didn't downvote you (I promise!). And I hope I answered your question. For those who did, I think what happens is that it's hard to tell which people are and are not operating in good faith and sometimes people mistake one for the other. But it sounds like you genuinely weren't sure whether Russia had actually hacked into the voting machines. Only into the Podesta, the DNC, and into voter registration systems. There's no evidence to suggest they changed tabulations (and by that I mean they almost certainly didn't), so that's why people haven't made that claim.
      - colejohnson66 7y ago
        Thank you. I like HN because the community is a lot nicer than others, but it’s frustrating being drive-by downvoted when you just asked a genuine question. It reminds me of other online communities where people just downvote because you said something they disagree with.
solarkraft 7y ago
Not only that, the party itself has a history of meddling against this election's likely winner.

elicash 7y ago

They're hiring! https://shadowinc.io/jobs https://shadowinc.io/jobs

yellowapple 7y ago
"Client Success Representative" sounds like a fun job.

TheHypnotist 7y ago

As anyone in this industry knows, this is very common even with larger, more established companies.

thinkingemote 7y ago

How would you test this type of thing at scale? Disclaimer: not an app developer!

WarDores 7y ago
"Scale" in this case is 1,681 precincts, each with a handful of users (the election officials). I'm not sure that was the issue in this case.
aqme28 7y ago
This isn't really "scale." It needs to record something like a dozen numbers from each of the ~1,700 caucuses in the state. You could have used Excel as the database here with no problem.
- honkycat 7y ago
  I was in the shower this morning thinking about how I would solve this, and something like this is exactly what I would have done. Use simple, familiar, battle tested technology to do the heavy lifting.
davinic 7y ago
There are apps and libraries that can simulate load.
yongjik 7y ago
On production, apparently.
munk-a 7y ago
It takes a very dedicated plan to sufficiently test apps at scale when we're talking the scale of 300 million or billions... In this case the scale was 1700 (maybe off by an order of magnitude) when your scale is on the thousands or tens of thousands you can't do outright stupid stuff... but you can do reasonably dumb stuff and be fine - running a test with a hundred or so users should've clearly demonstrated these issues and there are companies out there that excel at resourcing a few minutes of a few hundred folks' time for just this kind of load testing. That said, this was a pretty pathetic failure to scale, and I don't use harsh language like that lightly. I assume we're going to find out someone's brother or nephew runs the company because, for whatever reason, politics loves nepotism.

honkycat 7y ago

I am a big Bernie Sanders supporter and am always eager to put on my tinfoil hat. But I have to agree with you. The owner of Shadow's parent company has close ties to the Hillary campaign, a lot of the Shadow employees worked for the Obama campaign, Hillary campaign, and for the DNC. The scandal here is a bunch of noobs got an extremely important contract through cronyism, and they bungled it horribly.

derision 7y ago
I'd surprised you're not more critical of Clinton and her cronies as a Bernie supporter given they abused superdelegates to award Hillary the nomination over Bernie in 2016
- honkycat 7y ago
  Oh believe me, I have plenty of venom for the DNC. As far as I am concerned they stole the nomination. The DNC was biased against Bernie Sanders and they ratf*ed him every chance they had. Bernie had staff at most of the caucus locations and they kept their own independent tally to ensure there was no funny business. The bias was so obvious. It damaged Hillary's campaign. I was so disgusted I was tempted to vote for Trump ( I didn't! ), and I am pretty sure a LOT of people tuned out after the circus was over, and didn't bother to vote in the election. It was so obvious the head of the DNC had to step down in shame. And not to say the shadow bungle was not damaging. It robbed the candidate who won from being able to deliver a victory speech. Instead... everyone delivered a victory speech just in case xD
  - derision 7y ago
    Yeah I have a similar story. I was a Bernie supporter but when all that went down I started paying attention to Trump and found out I actually agreed with much of what he was running on
paulgb 7y ago
The reports I've seen have the app budget as $60-70k, which seems super low budget for how important it was. If this is cronyism (and not just low bidding), they didn't do a very good job of it. https://www.thestreet.com/politics/acronym-shadow-iowa-caucus-democrats https://www.thestreet.com/politics/acronym-shadow-iowa-caucu...

sky_rw 7y ago

Agree that this is certainly the greatest example of Hanlon's Razor in recent memory. This includes their naming choice.

noja 7y ago

You may be right, but this will always be the case with electronic voting. A normal child could understand and verify the chain of a non-electronic vote. A very technical adult could not do the same for an electronic vote.

elicash 7y ago
This isn't electronic voting. This isn't even paper voting (though they also use paper backups). This vote is primarily done by people standing in a particular corner. This is related to the TRANSMISSION of the vote count to the Iowa Dem Party, not the count itself. There was a separate issue from app issues where the different rounds of voting weren't matching up in some precincts. Paper backups of the vote still exist.

skrebbel 7y ago

> * Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice* I like what you did there.

tathougies 7y ago

So the argument is that former members of the Clinton campaign -- highly competent individuals familiar with elections -- put together a company comprised of 'amateur app coders' paid by 'clueless amateur voting registrars'? The founder, Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, have a great pedigree. Niemira was formerly at kiva.org. Davis was on the Clinton campaign tech team. These are not incompetent individuals. Now, you may be right that this is all incompetence. However, your contention that these are 'amateur coders', managed by 'amateur product designers', getting paid by clueless 'amateur voting registrars', is completely ridiculous. The leadership team is clearly professional and tech-savvy..

aqme28 7y ago
> the Clinton campaign -- highly competent individuals familiar with elections I'm going to disagree with this premise.
- coredog64 7y ago
  I get the joke, but c’mon...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
honkycat 7y ago
"The leadership team is clearly professional and tech-savvy.." And yet they failed miserably. I'm so sick of this attitude. Leadership never takes the fall, it is always the underlings who get the blame. Their important high visibility project failed. The leadership failed. When you fail, that means you did not perform in a competent way.
- tathougies 7y ago
  I think you mistook me. I am clearly blaming the leadership team, but not for incompetence. For actual malice. They clearly knew what they should do, and decided not to. That should be something they are punished for, not their employees.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

overthemoon 7y ago

A lack of transparency combined with a reputation (earned or not) for guiding primaries to their desired outcome, it's not hard to see why some people might think this is an example of the DNC putting their finger on the scale in some way. There's no evidence either way, which means confidently claiming incompetence is fairly baseless, as well. If we want to talk what things are generally true, sure, I'd put money on incompetence without any context, but there IS context to this.

fuqmachine 7y ago

But it is extremely convenient. So was the cancellation of the Des Moines Register Poll. Pete is conspiratorially involved in both. I tend not to believe in coincidences.

munk-a 7y ago
The handling of this situation was terrible and, while Pete Buttigieg Buttigieg did pay the company money, I haven't yet seen any clarity on what service he was after. Your statement is almost pure speculation.
- fuqmachine 7y ago
  > conspiratorially, meaning speculatively I'm only claiming that it is a convenient coincidence and I tend not to believe in those. I'm not talking absolute corruption. But I believe there is a buddy-buddy effect at the very least
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I think one of the more dangerous aspects of the world we live in right now is how willing people are to immediately assume a conspiracy and making a sweeping a baseless statement only fuels that. Your comment did call out the fact that you're uncertain, but it then continued to make baseless claims. There are interesting things that need to be dug into especially connected to Pete's payment to this app company and I'll be watching closely - but we simply have next to no information yet.
    - fuqmachine 7y ago
      Again, I claimed no explicit corruption. I said that these events favor Pete and he had his hands in making these events occur. Why is evidence regarded as baseless? He called in and pulled the poll that was released in a timely manner for 76 years. His adviser is married to the company's founder, and he bought 42k$ worth of "service" from them before. When app crashed, he claims victory like a rat and all of media announces his speech to the public. Again I'm not claiming Iowa Dem party actively helped him. I'm claiming that he was allowed to help himself in multiple ways and noone stopped him, which is unfair to every other candidate.

dave_b 7y ago

Thank you for putting this issue to rest. Now that you’ve emphatically declared your personal speculation to be true, I’m sure everyone else will stop with all their silly speculation.

taytus 7y ago

I agree 99% with your observations. As you pointed out, this is not just "normal human incompetence", these are layers and layers of incompetence.