19 ms·

The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

275 points by kitrose 7y ago

tmpz22 7y ago
This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX. The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violates as millions of emails, phone numbers and SSNs, are passed around in plain-text via CSV files. The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously trying shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country. After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system. - in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post duplicate comments to HN. In addition to lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site, it creates a big pain when we go to merge threads (as happened here). If you want to refer to something you said elsewhere, please use a link.
  - tmpz22 7y ago
    My bad, I got emotional over the content discussed and just copy-pasted the content because it seemed like the original thread would be eclipsed. I'll make sure not to do it in the future and in general have a great appreciation for the work you do moderating HN - I imagine it is quite stressful at times.
    - dang 7y ago
      Much appreciated! And no worries—similar things happen to everyone and we're all learning.
skrowl 7y ago
I'm picturing the Dos Equis meme saying "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production. Stay on call, my friends." At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).
- jpindar 7y ago
  The app was sent out through the free version of a beta testing platform. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
  - xhedley 7y ago
    The Verge report says that the Android version was distributed using TestFairy beta testing free version, and that this is limited to 200 users. Assume 25% of the 1600 sites used Android and half of the users would be rejected. But looking at the TestFairy pricing page, the free version is actually limited to 200 sessions per month. I would read this as every time a user logs on - definitely not going to work for 400 users logging on multiple times in one night. The company who produced this app didn't just fail on development but on any procurement/contractual sense. How could they have imagined that relying on a free tier of a beta testing platform could be acceptable in a real life production environment?
  - gruez 7y ago
    Why? Ponying up $100 for a developer certificate is too much?
    - asdff 7y ago
      It is when you workhorse dev is an intern I guess...
- spike021 7y ago
  One time I was working on a Splunk thing at an old job. We had an engineering contact there, and when a question came up about how something in Splunk was tested, the guy literally just replied back to our email with that meme and no other details. Yikes?
pmoriarty 7y ago
How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.
- pricees 7y ago
  I don't know. I feel this may be a great application of blockchain and public ledger tech. Of course it would need to be open source... And... You know.. Obviously written in Rust.
  - mycall 7y ago
    https://votecoin.site https://votecoin.site
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- skrowl 7y ago
  With strong voter ID. Paper ballots do you no good if you can't verify that they were cast by a real person that was eligible to vote in that area, and that they only voted once.
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    This is, in reality, a virtually nonexistent problem. It's often used as a rationale for voter suppression, though.
    - tathougies 7y ago
      False: not having voter ID is used as a rationale for voter ressurection though: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chicago-voters-cast-ballots-from-beyond-the-grave/ https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...
LargeWu 7y ago
If there's any good that comes out of this, it's that people will hopefully see the value of physical paper ballots or records.
- coredog64 7y ago
  There always was a paper trail. The purpose of the app is/was to send a set of numbers from the precinct to central.
  - redisman 7y ago
    I'm kind of amazed at how it failed. 1,681 precincts in Iowa - that data could fit on a floppy disk.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      IKR? And for all options they may end up with, they chose an APP. WHY? Does laptop not exist anymore? Does phones lack the ability to open webpages anymore? Hasn't logging in been one of the things we perfected over 30 years?
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        Yes, if you want to have a small tool for volunteers without logistics of shipping machines, laptops don't exist anymore. Developing desktop software for such purpose is way more complex, especially when considering updates etc. Which Windows version are you targeting? And Mac? What libraries you need? For app development, even if for two platforms (Android and iOS) it is a lot simpler these days, than desktop.
        uoaei 7y ago
        Even just a private Google form has like 95% of the functionality needed here, and can be accessed via mobile browser requiring no download.
        7y ago
oblib 7y ago
I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night. My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning. They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty close to the same in both. I'll say this about it, it's hard to imagine that less than 4500 calls to a server over the course of an hour or two would "crash" it, or even ten times that number. And that I think an SQL db is a poor choice for an app like that. CouchDB, or most any open source "nosql" db, would've been a better choice and, really, so would a dead simple flat file db to store the data for each precinct in and those are both very easy to build for something as simple as this. And they didn't even need an "app" per se. All they needed was a password protected web page with a dead simple form. What happened makes it a bit difficult to avoid pondering if the delays weren't deliberate. Whatever the case may be, the DNC is who ended up taking it on the chin.
- monadic2 7y ago
  I'm not sure what the db has to do with this, you need to structure the data somehow to be able to tally and breakdown results. SQL databases can certainly handle multiple magnitudes more transactions per second so it doesn't strike me as prima faciae bad decision making.
  - eej71 7y ago
    Database? Heck, I would think each precinct could have uploaded their own csv file in a common format. Concatenate all of those, pop it into excel, and pivot table away. But what do I know.
  - oblib 7y ago
    It's basically a "KISS" issue. The data being submitted is so simple that using an SQL db adds a layer of unnecessary complexity. So did their decisions for authentication, which appears to be where things got stuck.
    - 7y ago
abetlen 7y ago
This Motherboard article has more details on the app including screenshots https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3m33x/heres-the-shadow-inc-app-that-failed-in-iowa-last-night https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3m33x/heres-the-shadow-i... My favorite screenshot is the last one, it looks like a generic mobile Firefox error for a misspecified URL.
- oblib 7y ago
  Wow! That provides some great info on this. Still leaves me wondering if the end result wasn't by design though. It's kind of hard to buy into the "Opps" explanation.
  - abetlen 7y ago
    It certainly could've been done by design but I think more likely this was a doomed project from the start. They rushed this app out with too little time for testing. I don't want to speculate too much on that screenshot but it looks like they have an error in their Auth0 integration. When you use a service like Auth0 you give it a redirect url to send authenticated users to. It looks like they passed in an invalid url for that redirect. Maybe they only tested this 2fa step locally and something was different when they deployed to users' phones, I can't say for sure, but it doesn't look good.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've switched the URL to that from https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122337/iowa-caucus-app-bug-results-reporting-crash-election-tech-democrats https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122337/iowa-caucus-app-b.... Thanks!
- jimbo1qaz 7y ago
  In particular it looks like Firefox Fenix/Preview (or possibly Reference Browser), not Fennec (regular Android). Only Fenix and Reference have bottom URL/tab bars. Fenix has a purple "Try Again" button, I don't know about Reference Browser, and Fennec has a gray button. One possible issue is that Fennec/Fenix doesn't open http URLs in external apps by default (unsure about custom protocols), whereas Chrome does.
tmpz22 7y ago
This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX. The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of emails, phone numbers and SSNs, are passed around in plain-text via CSV files. The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously try shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country. After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system. - in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.
- tptacek 7y ago
  The DNC doesn't run the Iowa Caucuses.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    What’s the relationship between the Iowa DNC and the “main” DNC?
    - tptacek 7y ago
      There's no such thing as an "Iowa DNC". You presumably mean the IDP, the Iowa Democratic Party. They're separate organizations. The DNC and the state parties are often at odds with each other. There's a good series of "Reply All" episodes about this, focusing on the Alabama Democratic Party.
everdrive 7y ago
"[topic] was supposed to [perform action on] X, instead, it may have [performed in inverse action]."
marcell 7y ago
My coworker has an alternate theory that frankly makes a lot more sense than “the app broke.” The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted. The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has smartphones to post embarrassing mistakes on social media. And this year is a very crowded primary for the democrats, raising the chance for error. Under this theory, the app is a convenient scapegoat to hide the fact that the process is inaccurate and bad. For politicians this seems pretty convenient. Who would you rather blame, and decades old tradition or an app contractor?
- neonate 7y ago
  I don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    There were some confounding factors, like an apparent day-of decision to require the caucuses to report the results of every vote cast, not just the last one. This led to considerably higher data requirements in precincts where multiple votes were necessary to reach consensus. The new requirements were apparently not reported to the staff until around noon on the day of the election. As anybody can tell you, nothing sinks projects faster than changing requirements late in the development cycle. The app also sucked for another reason. Lots of Iowa is rural and cell coverage can be spotty. The app was designed with the all too common assumption in this day and age that the Internet works everywhere.
    - coredog64 7y ago
      The extra information has been known since 2016. Bernie (or his campaign) asked for it as a means of providing additional transparency into the process.
  - 7y ago
allovernow 7y ago
The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. Other suspicious dealings are a premature victory announcement by Buttigeig's campaign and a leak of a picture of paper tallies which included a PIN allegedly used to login to the tally app. Looking for the tweet now... >https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shadow-hillary-staffers-n2560675 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shado... Edit: I'm not necessarily trying to suggest anything, but I'd like to point out that this post went from +10 to +2 in a matter of minutes.
- sl1ck731 7y ago
  Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    They don't have to be, but much like with insider trading rules, it's better to avoid even the appearance of a possible conflict.
  - allovernow 7y ago
    No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.
    - jmull 7y ago
      How is this even helping Buttigieg? There doesn’t seem to be any indication this was anything but a regular screwup. Throwing around suggestions of a vague conspiracy looks unwarranted. You’re suggesting that to avoid suspicion companies providing services to political campaigns must be apolitical and to have never previously provided services to a candidate in the race or any previous opponent of a candidate in the race. How could that even be possible?
padseeker 7y ago
Shadow has got to be the worst name for a company associated with politics, unless you want to rub it in everyone's face
- js2 7y ago
  I’m truly astounded that anyone thought this was a good name and took the time to write this marketing copy: Why Shadow? When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large. https://shadowinc.io/about https://shadowinc.io/about
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    That makes it even worse.
    - hcknwscommenter 7y ago
      Really? They're basically saying: 'shadow' is your 'buddy' who is always there for you. So, we want to be that. In retrospect, it sounds bad but really, it's just a nothingburger.
      - cma 7y ago
        Given the party tried to make them hide their name, can we really only say it is retrospect?
  - uoaei 7y ago
    About as good of an intuition about optics as HRC and her whole campaign. Remember "deplorables"? Many people at this company were directly involved with the HRC '16 campaign.
generalpass 7y ago
Should Google or Apple take the app off the app store? Seems like a scam...
- inkeddeveloper 7y ago
  IIRC they aren't on the app store. The app was side loaded onto android devices.
- metabagel 7y ago
  It's not on an app store. "The app was not deployed through traditional app stores or even sideloaded using an enterprise certificate. Instead, it was deployed through the TestFairy testing platform, which is similar to Apple’s TestFlight and used predominantly for Android and iOS apps that are not yet finalized." https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
- bluGill 7y ago
  An app like this should not be on any app store ever. You want only pre-chosen people to have access to the app. It does no good for anyone else to have access to this and it can hurt. 4 years ago I had the Republican app on my phone. I was the backup reporter just in case the main reporter had problems. Since the main reporter used the app correctly I didn't use it, but I had access to it.
  - csours 7y ago
    Access to install the app MUST not constitute Access to the system behind the app.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      I agree, and there was more security. However access to the app implies the ability to DoS the remote with too many login attempts... Restricting access to the app was just one layer in the security scheme making it a little harder for someone who wanted to mess with the system.
nooron 7y ago
I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transparent. It was well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in. Introducing tech can help but you have to spend tons of money to make it reliable and usable, then you have to spend more to train everyone in using it. This is a problem organizations of all sizes and shapes face when making massive IT changes. Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. It has an unnecessarily sinister name. There are not a lot of companies that make software for Democrats because it’s an awful job. You make very little money. Everyone hates you when things go wrong, which they will, because the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent. Then everyone will assume things went wrong because you are some combination– you choose– of secretly evil, secretly working for Bernie, secretly working for The Establishment/Hillary (per someone's unpersuasive Imgur post below), or secretly working for Buttigieg. Others have noted that Shadow also made software for the Buttigieg campaign. If you take my claims above as true, this should be unsurprising to you: a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you is not attractive to enterprising software engineers, so there are few firms available to choose.
- whylie 7y ago
  >Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. If I can ask, why the specific nature for their clientele? Isolating your solutions to a specific political party seems strange to me especially if the emphasis on making money. If anything, money normally supersedes political leanings at the end of the day which makes the whole fiasco even stranger to me. Wouldn't you want to provide a solution for both parties by default? Not doing so seems nefarious on it's own. It sounds like pairing products with political leanings is not a good business decision? Which may explain where all the 'hate' is coming from - it's just bad business and sows the seeds of doubt in their credibility in the minds of many.
  - 7y ago
3uclid 7y ago
Checked their LinkedIn and the employees who work there. The founder is non-technical and there are two developers: one who is a "back-end intern" and the other is a front-end developer (both are fresh from bootcamps). ...Yikes.
- sct202 7y ago
  The CTO is a former Googler SWE.
  - 3uclid 7y ago
    Nice -- they market the company as "made by former Google and Apple engineers", but built the product with...an intern? Lmao.
    - corporateslave5 7y ago
      Haha! Guaranteed that was the pitch somewhere
    - runawaybottle 7y ago
      I mean, isn’t that obvious. Our industry is just as ridiculous as any other. Cheers to a good lol.
  - trianglem 7y ago
    I’m so furious I’m willing to say she was a “woman” hire.
    - thedance 7y ago
      Look at the linkedin for the company. Almost all women in fact.
      - pcunite 7y ago
        link?
geoff-dot 7y ago
What did this app do exactly? It was just a reporting app, I'm assuming that the source data collected, albeit perhaps in different formats, lived somewhere else and that there wasn't a lot of data or a lot of variations. From my understanding it seems there was an Auth0 redirect issue, but why wasn't this just a night of taking the source data and doing scripting then shipping out the reports via a secure DropBox type service? We've all be there where an ETL job fails, since it isn't critical (e.g., financial transaction), it wasn't tested every which way and we just had to some scripting. Even if it is, say, 500TB of data, in 300 different formats usually those formats aren't drastically "different." Maybe I'm not understanding what the application was supposed to do to not understand why this wasn't solved every quickly. Or maybe given the timeline it was solved quickly once the right people got involved and figured out what needed to be done.
trianglem 7y ago
I think the great problem of our age is that UAT is nothing like production.
- ulkesh 7y ago
  This makes a pretty big assumption that UAT was even done. Or rather, UAT == production in Iowa.
jessaustin 7y ago
I blame Russia.
code4tee 7y ago
I don’t agree with the use of an app here for many reasons. That said, such an app would basically need secure authentication and a form to upload some pre-templated numbers. It seems pretty hard to screw that up so badly but clearly it’s quite easy to make a complete dumpster fire from those requirements.
- eagsalazar2 7y ago
  fresh bootcampers with no sr devs to guide things. If you have no real world expertise then it is that easy to screw things up, apparently.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  From this article, https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-... they used the a free tier of TestFairy that limited the number of test users to 200 and on iOS used TestFlight and did not use either the app store for the final version or make an enterprise version, and possibly could not distribute the app to the approximate 1700 users. They still would have needed to get the app through the app store approval process for general release to fix the app at least on the iOS side as far as I understand it. To fix it quickly would have just required them to go back to calling in results by voice as in past years. Don't know why they did not just do that.
  - SyneRyder 7y ago
    > To fix it quickly would have just required them to go back to calling in results by voice as in past years. Don't know why they did not just do that. They did that - but apparently the phone number for calling in the results was the same as for "help my app doesn't work", so the phone line was flooded. Unfortunately I don't have the source link to hand, so feel free to treat that as hearsay. However, CNN had a live cross to someone trying to call in their results, and after an hour on hold, when they finally got through, the other side hung up on them while they were broadcasting live on air: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-cnn-sebastian/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus... "It took an hour and a half for Shawn Sebastian to get hung up on in 10 seconds. And it unfolded on national television Monday, making the moment, in the words of some, “one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen on cable TV.”"
meristem 7y ago
A small drop in the sea of technical problems: did anyone design the app to work for ages 20-90? People well in their 80's work caucuses. Ok, did anyone actually design the app?
smoyer 7y ago
Are we irrigating our crops with Brawndo yet?
mindgam3 7y ago
Let me get this straight. A company deeply embedded in the Democratic establishment (0) that has worked directly with Buttigieg — the candidate with close ties to Facebook aka the company undermining democracy since 2016 — managed to totally screw up, potentially undermining the campaign of Sanders, the anti-establishment candidate. Yeah, democracy is fucked. 0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-acronym/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-a...
- hodgesrm 7y ago
  If you are arguing a conspiracy of some kind it is probably best to rule out incompetence before moving on to active malfeasance. This is after all the same political party that managed rollout of the non-functioning Obamacare website.
  - ballark 7y ago
    Please provide a reason why incompetence is any likelier than malfeasance.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Because incompetence is vastly more common than malfeasance?
    - asdff 7y ago
      Because for malfeasance you need to be smart and clever and for incompetence you need to be dumb or just tired that day and write a typo.
      - boring_twenties 7y ago
        For malfeasance to remain undiscovered you need to be smart and clever. For the kind of malfeasance that concatenates an SQL query with user input and then shows the whole thing to the user in an error message, you don't need that.
    - 7y ago
EGreg 7y ago
This is why we need to start using Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed systems to vote via our mobile phones. No need for a voting holiday or standing in line. Bigger turnout, too. If it's secure enough for banking apps, why not for opt-in voting via app. Maybe it's too hard to move to electronic voting nationwide. But every organization has governance and could use an electronic voting system based on BFT consensus of mutually distrusting parties. Vote using an app, it gets stored "on-chain", then you can check it on another app.
killjoywashere 7y ago
Is it just me, or is the money just draining away from the economy right now? It's like we were all splashing around in the ocean and suddenly everyone is noticing that their toes are touching the bottom, and there's a few people standing on the steps, floaties on, looking around at us in horror.
altitudinous 7y ago
$50000 for a mission critical, scalable app? They got exactly what they paid for. I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000
- wizzard 7y ago
  Alternatively, they could have paid IBM a billion dollars and still gotten an app that didn't work. At least they saved some money?
  - altitudinous 7y ago
    Well, at least if they paid a billion dollars they could have had an expectation that the app would work, and they could sue IBM if it didn't. Indeed at that $$$$$ they would have been ripped off though!! At $50k they certainly weren't going to get what they wanted delivered, and they have no-one to blame but themselves.
- meshko 7y ago
  to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
This app failed because no one did enough testing and enough training. What I saw was a relatively simple app to input some data. The problem seems to have been that they never tested it at scale and they assumed that all the users would be able to download it and use it. My experience is that customers hate to pay for testing once they see the product running. They assume that it's done. I had a customer tell me that if I did the programming right it should always work and testing should be minimal. I had to explain to him that that's not the case with software and testing is one of the most important parts of the software development cycle. He felt it was a waste and that I was looking to add extra costs for no reason. I bet there was not enough money. People seem to feel that a few grand will cover the costs. They figure 10k is an outrageous amount. What they don't seem to understand is that it will barely cover the costs of planning the app. Both the developers and the people that approved the app for use need to take responsibility. Too bad since it could have saved a lot of money and time in the long run. BTW, this could have been a Google Form with a spreadsheet as a back end. But user training would have still been an issue. You can't get around that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nyounker 7y ago
This is ridiculous. Paper. Use a Paper as the true vote. Cross check after that. I have read so many comments on here up-selling the ability of technology but no one in this thread has the answer. It's apparent. Do the paper vote - as it was always done. Let our technology analyze it afterwords. Why are we all trying to put our technology in front of this simple device. of paper. You all know this rule = "make a single application do one thing well." Again, this is ridiculous from a Credibility sense. Paper + networks, Paper + mobile, forget the paper, Mobile only, Mobile + scale. Where are we at? No where and much less. Just take a paper vote and tally it. Is that so hard?
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
I'm all about Hanlon's razor but naming the ticking time-bomb of a voting software startup "Shadow Inc." seems a bit too on the nose to be pure stupidity. Everything about this reeks of a publicity stunt to "ruin" electronic voting in the public eye.
jessaustin 7y ago
More info: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth...
- eldarian 7y ago
  That's not a reputable source in any way, please do not promote conspiracy sites.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    ...says the greenbean account. Blumenthal is an excellent reporter, and all of his reporting is extensively sourced. The article linked above is liberally peppered with links to sources, several per paragraph. If there's anything there you doubt, you can just click through.
fuqmachine 7y ago
According to multiple reports, the vote counts entered into app and sent were not what was received by HQ. How do we know that the company wasn't paid to change the numbers on the backend? How would the numbers change by themselves? I'll be called a tinfoil-hatter for assuming malice.

275 points by kitrose 7y ago

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX. The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violates as millions of emails, phone numbers and SSNs, are passed around in plain-text via CSV files. The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously trying shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country. After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system. - in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.

dang 7y ago
Please don't post duplicate comments to HN. In addition to lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site, it creates a big pain when we go to merge threads (as happened here). If you want to refer to something you said elsewhere, please use a link.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  My bad, I got emotional over the content discussed and just copy-pasted the content because it seemed like the original thread would be eclipsed. I'll make sure not to do it in the future and in general have a great appreciation for the work you do moderating HN - I imagine it is quite stressful at times.
  - dang 7y ago
    Much appreciated! And no worries—similar things happen to everyone and we're all learning.

skrowl 7y ago

I'm picturing the Dos Equis meme saying "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production. Stay on call, my friends." At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).

jpindar 7y ago
The app was sent out through the free version of a beta testing platform. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
- xhedley 7y ago
  The Verge report says that the Android version was distributed using TestFairy beta testing free version, and that this is limited to 200 users. Assume 25% of the 1600 sites used Android and half of the users would be rejected. But looking at the TestFairy pricing page, the free version is actually limited to 200 sessions per month. I would read this as every time a user logs on - definitely not going to work for 400 users logging on multiple times in one night. The company who produced this app didn't just fail on development but on any procurement/contractual sense. How could they have imagined that relying on a free tier of a beta testing platform could be acceptable in a real life production environment?
- gruez 7y ago
  Why? Ponying up $100 for a developer certificate is too much?
  - asdff 7y ago
    It is when you workhorse dev is an intern I guess...
spike021 7y ago
One time I was working on a Splunk thing at an old job. We had an engineering contact there, and when a question came up about how something in Splunk was tested, the guy literally just replied back to our email with that meme and no other details. Yikes?

pmoriarty 7y ago

How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.

pricees 7y ago
I don't know. I feel this may be a great application of blockchain and public ledger tech. Of course it would need to be open source... And... You know.. Obviously written in Rust.
- mycall 7y ago
  https://votecoin.site https://votecoin.site
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
skrowl 7y ago
With strong voter ID. Paper ballots do you no good if you can't verify that they were cast by a real person that was eligible to vote in that area, and that they only voted once.
- LargeWu 7y ago
  This is, in reality, a virtually nonexistent problem. It's often used as a rationale for voter suppression, though.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    False: not having voter ID is used as a rationale for voter ressurection though: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chicago-voters-cast-ballots-from-beyond-the-grave/ https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...

LargeWu 7y ago

If there's any good that comes out of this, it's that people will hopefully see the value of physical paper ballots or records.

coredog64 7y ago
There always was a paper trail. The purpose of the app is/was to send a set of numbers from the precinct to central.
- redisman 7y ago
  I'm kind of amazed at how it failed. 1,681 precincts in Iowa - that data could fit on a floppy disk.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    IKR? And for all options they may end up with, they chose an APP. WHY? Does laptop not exist anymore? Does phones lack the ability to open webpages anymore? Hasn't logging in been one of the things we perfected over 30 years?
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      Yes, if you want to have a small tool for volunteers without logistics of shipping machines, laptops don't exist anymore. Developing desktop software for such purpose is way more complex, especially when considering updates etc. Which Windows version are you targeting? And Mac? What libraries you need? For app development, even if for two platforms (Android and iOS) it is a lot simpler these days, than desktop.
      - uoaei 7y ago
        Even just a private Google form has like 95% of the functionality needed here, and can be accessed via mobile browser requiring no download.
      - 7y ago

oblib 7y ago

I think the author's take on this is a bit heavy with hyperbole, but there's no doubt Iowa was a mess last night. My son was there working as volunteer, and so was his ex-girlfriend, who's still a close family friend. I was chatting with them both throughout the evening and into the wee hours this morning. They worked different locations in the Des Moines metro area and the results they reported to me were pretty close to the same in both. I'll say this about it, it's hard to imagine that less than 4500 calls to a server over the course of an hour or two would "crash" it, or even ten times that number. And that I think an SQL db is a poor choice for an app like that. CouchDB, or most any open source "nosql" db, would've been a better choice and, really, so would a dead simple flat file db to store the data for each precinct in and those are both very easy to build for something as simple as this. And they didn't even need an "app" per se. All they needed was a password protected web page with a dead simple form. What happened makes it a bit difficult to avoid pondering if the delays weren't deliberate. Whatever the case may be, the DNC is who ended up taking it on the chin.

monadic2 7y ago
I'm not sure what the db has to do with this, you need to structure the data somehow to be able to tally and breakdown results. SQL databases can certainly handle multiple magnitudes more transactions per second so it doesn't strike me as prima faciae bad decision making.
- eej71 7y ago
  Database? Heck, I would think each precinct could have uploaded their own csv file in a common format. Concatenate all of those, pop it into excel, and pivot table away. But what do I know.
- oblib 7y ago
  It's basically a "KISS" issue. The data being submitted is so simple that using an SQL db adds a layer of unnecessary complexity. So did their decisions for authentication, which appears to be where things got stuck.
  - 7y ago

abetlen 7y ago

This Motherboard article has more details on the app including screenshots https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3m33x/heres-the-shadow-inc-app-that-failed-in-iowa-last-night https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/y3m33x/heres-the-shadow-i... My favorite screenshot is the last one, it looks like a generic mobile Firefox error for a misspecified URL.

oblib 7y ago
Wow! That provides some great info on this. Still leaves me wondering if the end result wasn't by design though. It's kind of hard to buy into the "Opps" explanation.
- abetlen 7y ago
  It certainly could've been done by design but I think more likely this was a doomed project from the start. They rushed this app out with too little time for testing. I don't want to speculate too much on that screenshot but it looks like they have an error in their Auth0 integration. When you use a service like Auth0 you give it a redirect url to send authenticated users to. It looks like they passed in an invalid url for that redirect. Maybe they only tested this 2fa step locally and something was different when they deployed to users' phones, I can't say for sure, but it doesn't look good.
dang 7y ago
Ok, we've switched the URL to that from https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122337/iowa-caucus-app-bug-results-reporting-crash-election-tech-democrats https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122337/iowa-caucus-app-b.... Thanks!
jimbo1qaz 7y ago
In particular it looks like Firefox Fenix/Preview (or possibly Reference Browser), not Fennec (regular Android). Only Fenix and Reference have bottom URL/tab bars. Fenix has a purple "Try Again" button, I don't know about Reference Browser, and Fennec has a gray button. One possible issue is that Fennec/Fenix doesn't open http URLs in external apps by default (unsure about custom protocols), whereas Chrome does.

tmpz22 7y ago

This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX. The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of emails, phone numbers and SSNs, are passed around in plain-text via CSV files. The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously try shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country. After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system. - in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.

tptacek 7y ago
The DNC doesn't run the Iowa Caucuses.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  What’s the relationship between the Iowa DNC and the “main” DNC?
  - tptacek 7y ago
    There's no such thing as an "Iowa DNC". You presumably mean the IDP, the Iowa Democratic Party. They're separate organizations. The DNC and the state parties are often at odds with each other. There's a good series of "Reply All" episodes about this, focusing on the Alabama Democratic Party.

everdrive 7y ago

"[topic] was supposed to [perform action on] X, instead, it may have [performed in inverse action]."

marcell 7y ago

My coworker has an alternate theory that frankly makes a lot more sense than “the app broke.” The Iowa caucus is not a paper ballot. People stand in groups in a large multipurpose room and raise their hands for who they vote for. Depending on the viability threshold, people move to new groups and are recounted. The exact rules are complicated and the process is run by unpaid humans. Moreover, in 2020 everyone has smartphones to post embarrassing mistakes on social media. And this year is a very crowded primary for the democrats, raising the chance for error. Under this theory, the app is a convenient scapegoat to hide the fact that the process is inaccurate and bad. For politicians this seems pretty convenient. Who would you rather blame, and decades old tradition or an app contractor?

neonate 7y ago
I don't think that's a better theory. The process may be 'bad' but it has been that way, and worked, for a long time. As far as we know, the new ingredient was the app.
- jandrese 7y ago
  There were some confounding factors, like an apparent day-of decision to require the caucuses to report the results of every vote cast, not just the last one. This led to considerably higher data requirements in precincts where multiple votes were necessary to reach consensus. The new requirements were apparently not reported to the staff until around noon on the day of the election. As anybody can tell you, nothing sinks projects faster than changing requirements late in the development cycle. The app also sucked for another reason. Lots of Iowa is rural and cell coverage can be spotty. The app was designed with the all too common assumption in this day and age that the Internet works everywhere.
  - coredog64 7y ago
    The extra information has been known since 2016. Bernie (or his campaign) asked for it as a means of providing additional transparency into the process.
- 7y ago

allovernow 7y ago

The owners and staffers at Shadow INC have a severe conflict of interest. The company is loaded with former Clinton staffers and the CEO sent a tweet in support of Buttigeig, who recently paid tens of thousands to the company. Other suspicious dealings are a premature victory announcement by Buttigeig's campaign and a leak of a picture of paper tallies which included a PIN allegedly used to login to the tally app. Looking for the tweet now... >https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shadow-hillary-staffers-n2560675 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/02/04/shado... Edit: I'm not necessarily trying to suggest anything, but I'd like to point out that this post went from +10 to +2 in a matter of minutes.

sl1ck731 7y ago
Should a company's employees/CEO have to be apolitical? I'd be surprised if there is such a company where none of its employees are involved in politics in any way. Especially if its a company whose sole purpose is developing software for a political party.
- jedberg 7y ago
  They don't have to be, but much like with insider trading rules, it's better to avoid even the appearance of a possible conflict.
- allovernow 7y ago
  No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.
  - jmull 7y ago
    How is this even helping Buttigieg? There doesn’t seem to be any indication this was anything but a regular screwup. Throwing around suggestions of a vague conspiracy looks unwarranted. You’re suggesting that to avoid suspicion companies providing services to political campaigns must be apolitical and to have never previously provided services to a candidate in the race or any previous opponent of a candidate in the race. How could that even be possible?

padseeker 7y ago

Shadow has got to be the worst name for a company associated with politics, unless you want to rub it in everyone's face

js2 7y ago
I’m truly astounded that anyone thought this was a good name and took the time to write this marketing copy: Why Shadow? When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large. https://shadowinc.io/about https://shadowinc.io/about
- conanbatt 7y ago
  That makes it even worse.
  - hcknwscommenter 7y ago
    Really? They're basically saying: 'shadow' is your 'buddy' who is always there for you. So, we want to be that. In retrospect, it sounds bad but really, it's just a nothingburger.
    - cma 7y ago
      Given the party tried to make them hide their name, can we really only say it is retrospect?
- uoaei 7y ago
  About as good of an intuition about optics as HRC and her whole campaign. Remember "deplorables"? Many people at this company were directly involved with the HRC '16 campaign.

generalpass 7y ago

Should Google or Apple take the app off the app store? Seems like a scam...

inkeddeveloper 7y ago
IIRC they aren't on the app store. The app was side loaded onto android devices.
metabagel 7y ago
It's not on an app store. "The app was not deployed through traditional app stores or even sideloaded using an enterprise certificate. Instead, it was deployed through the TestFairy testing platform, which is similar to Apple’s TestFlight and used predominantly for Android and iOS apps that are not yet finalized." https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
bluGill 7y ago
An app like this should not be on any app store ever. You want only pre-chosen people to have access to the app. It does no good for anyone else to have access to this and it can hurt. 4 years ago I had the Republican app on my phone. I was the backup reporter just in case the main reporter had problems. Since the main reporter used the app correctly I didn't use it, but I had access to it.
- csours 7y ago
  Access to install the app MUST not constitute Access to the system behind the app.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    I agree, and there was more security. However access to the app implies the ability to DoS the remote with too many login attempts... Restricting access to the app was just one layer in the security scheme making it a little harder for someone who wanted to mess with the system.

nooron 7y ago

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transparent. It was well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in. Introducing tech can help but you have to spend tons of money to make it reliable and usable, then you have to spend more to train everyone in using it. This is a problem organizations of all sizes and shapes face when making massive IT changes. Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. It has an unnecessarily sinister name. There are not a lot of companies that make software for Democrats because it’s an awful job. You make very little money. Everyone hates you when things go wrong, which they will, because the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent. Then everyone will assume things went wrong because you are some combination– you choose– of secretly evil, secretly working for Bernie, secretly working for The Establishment/Hillary (per someone's unpersuasive Imgur post below), or secretly working for Buttigieg. Others have noted that Shadow also made software for the Buttigieg campaign. If you take my claims above as true, this should be unsurprising to you: a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you is not attractive to enterprising software engineers, so there are few firms available to choose.

whylie 7y ago
>Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. If I can ask, why the specific nature for their clientele? Isolating your solutions to a specific political party seems strange to me especially if the emphasis on making money. If anything, money normally supersedes political leanings at the end of the day which makes the whole fiasco even stranger to me. Wouldn't you want to provide a solution for both parties by default? Not doing so seems nefarious on it's own. It sounds like pairing products with political leanings is not a good business decision? Which may explain where all the 'hate' is coming from - it's just bad business and sows the seeds of doubt in their credibility in the minds of many.
- 7y ago

3uclid 7y ago

Checked their LinkedIn and the employees who work there. The founder is non-technical and there are two developers: one who is a "back-end intern" and the other is a front-end developer (both are fresh from bootcamps). ...Yikes.

sct202 7y ago
The CTO is a former Googler SWE.
- 3uclid 7y ago
  Nice -- they market the company as "made by former Google and Apple engineers", but built the product with...an intern? Lmao.
  - corporateslave5 7y ago
    Haha! Guaranteed that was the pitch somewhere
  - runawaybottle 7y ago
    I mean, isn’t that obvious. Our industry is just as ridiculous as any other. Cheers to a good lol.
- trianglem 7y ago
  I’m so furious I’m willing to say she was a “woman” hire.
  - thedance 7y ago
    Look at the linkedin for the company. Almost all women in fact.
    - pcunite 7y ago
      link?

geoff-dot 7y ago

What did this app do exactly? It was just a reporting app, I'm assuming that the source data collected, albeit perhaps in different formats, lived somewhere else and that there wasn't a lot of data or a lot of variations. From my understanding it seems there was an Auth0 redirect issue, but why wasn't this just a night of taking the source data and doing scripting then shipping out the reports via a secure DropBox type service? We've all be there where an ETL job fails, since it isn't critical (e.g., financial transaction), it wasn't tested every which way and we just had to some scripting. Even if it is, say, 500TB of data, in 300 different formats usually those formats aren't drastically "different." Maybe I'm not understanding what the application was supposed to do to not understand why this wasn't solved every quickly. Or maybe given the timeline it was solved quickly once the right people got involved and figured out what needed to be done.

trianglem 7y ago

I think the great problem of our age is that UAT is nothing like production.

ulkesh 7y ago
This makes a pretty big assumption that UAT was even done. Or rather, UAT == production in Iowa.

jessaustin 7y ago

I blame Russia.

code4tee 7y ago

I don’t agree with the use of an app here for many reasons. That said, such an app would basically need secure authentication and a form to upload some pre-templated numbers. It seems pretty hard to screw that up so badly but clearly it’s quite easy to make a complete dumpster fire from those requirements.

eagsalazar2 7y ago
fresh bootcampers with no sr devs to guide things. If you have no real world expertise then it is that easy to screw things up, apparently.
stevenwoo 7y ago
From this article, https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-... they used the a free tier of TestFairy that limited the number of test users to 200 and on iOS used TestFlight and did not use either the app store for the final version or make an enterprise version, and possibly could not distribute the app to the approximate 1700 users. They still would have needed to get the app through the app store approval process for general release to fix the app at least on the iOS side as far as I understand it. To fix it quickly would have just required them to go back to calling in results by voice as in past years. Don't know why they did not just do that.
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  > To fix it quickly would have just required them to go back to calling in results by voice as in past years. Don't know why they did not just do that. They did that - but apparently the phone number for calling in the results was the same as for "help my app doesn't work", so the phone line was flooded. Unfortunately I don't have the source link to hand, so feel free to treat that as hearsay. However, CNN had a live cross to someone trying to call in their results, and after an hour on hold, when they finally got through, the other side hung up on them while they were broadcasting live on air: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-cnn-sebastian/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus... "It took an hour and a half for Shawn Sebastian to get hung up on in 10 seconds. And it unfolded on national television Monday, making the moment, in the words of some, “one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen on cable TV.”"

meristem 7y ago

A small drop in the sea of technical problems: did anyone design the app to work for ages 20-90? People well in their 80's work caucuses. Ok, did anyone actually design the app?

smoyer 7y ago

Are we irrigating our crops with Brawndo yet?

mindgam3 7y ago

Let me get this straight. A company deeply embedded in the Democratic establishment (0) that has worked directly with Buttigieg — the candidate with close ties to Facebook aka the company undermining democracy since 2016 — managed to totally screw up, potentially undermining the campaign of Sanders, the anti-establishment candidate. Yeah, democracy is fucked. 0. https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-acronym/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-a...

hodgesrm 7y ago
If you are arguing a conspiracy of some kind it is probably best to rule out incompetence before moving on to active malfeasance. This is after all the same political party that managed rollout of the non-functioning Obamacare website.
- ballark 7y ago
  Please provide a reason why incompetence is any likelier than malfeasance.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Because incompetence is vastly more common than malfeasance?
  - asdff 7y ago
    Because for malfeasance you need to be smart and clever and for incompetence you need to be dumb or just tired that day and write a typo.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      For malfeasance to remain undiscovered you need to be smart and clever. For the kind of malfeasance that concatenates an SQL query with user input and then shows the whole thing to the user in an error message, you don't need that.
  - 7y ago

EGreg 7y ago

This is why we need to start using Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed systems to vote via our mobile phones. No need for a voting holiday or standing in line. Bigger turnout, too. If it's secure enough for banking apps, why not for opt-in voting via app. Maybe it's too hard to move to electronic voting nationwide. But every organization has governance and could use an electronic voting system based on BFT consensus of mutually distrusting parties. Vote using an app, it gets stored "on-chain", then you can check it on another app.

killjoywashere 7y ago

Is it just me, or is the money just draining away from the economy right now? It's like we were all splashing around in the ocean and suddenly everyone is noticing that their toes are touching the bottom, and there's a few people standing on the steps, floaties on, looking around at us in horror.

altitudinous 7y ago

$50000 for a mission critical, scalable app? They got exactly what they paid for. I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000

wizzard 7y ago
Alternatively, they could have paid IBM a billion dollars and still gotten an app that didn't work. At least they saved some money?
- altitudinous 7y ago
  Well, at least if they paid a billion dollars they could have had an expectation that the app would work, and they could sue IBM if it didn't. Indeed at that $$$$$ they would have been ripped off though!! At $50k they certainly weren't going to get what they wanted delivered, and they have no-one to blame but themselves.
meshko 7y ago
to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

This app failed because no one did enough testing and enough training. What I saw was a relatively simple app to input some data. The problem seems to have been that they never tested it at scale and they assumed that all the users would be able to download it and use it. My experience is that customers hate to pay for testing once they see the product running. They assume that it's done. I had a customer tell me that if I did the programming right it should always work and testing should be minimal. I had to explain to him that that's not the case with software and testing is one of the most important parts of the software development cycle. He felt it was a waste and that I was looking to add extra costs for no reason. I bet there was not enough money. People seem to feel that a few grand will cover the costs. They figure 10k is an outrageous amount. What they don't seem to understand is that it will barely cover the costs of planning the app. Both the developers and the people that approved the app for use need to take responsibility. Too bad since it could have saved a lot of money and time in the long run. BTW, this could have been a Google Form with a spreadsheet as a back end. But user training would have still been an issue. You can't get around that.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nyounker 7y ago

This is ridiculous. Paper. Use a Paper as the true vote. Cross check after that. I have read so many comments on here up-selling the ability of technology but no one in this thread has the answer. It's apparent. Do the paper vote - as it was always done. Let our technology analyze it afterwords. Why are we all trying to put our technology in front of this simple device. of paper. You all know this rule = "make a single application do one thing well." Again, this is ridiculous from a Credibility sense. Paper + networks, Paper + mobile, forget the paper, Mobile only, Mobile + scale. Where are we at? No where and much less. Just take a paper vote and tally it. Is that so hard?

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

I'm all about Hanlon's razor but naming the ticking time-bomb of a voting software startup "Shadow Inc." seems a bit too on the nose to be pure stupidity. Everything about this reeks of a publicity stunt to "ruin" electronic voting in the public eye.

jessaustin 7y ago

More info: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth...

eldarian 7y ago
That's not a reputable source in any way, please do not promote conspiracy sites.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  ...says the greenbean account. Blumenthal is an excellent reporter, and all of his reporting is extensively sourced. The article linked above is liberally peppered with links to sources, several per paragraph. If there's anything there you doubt, you can just click through.

fuqmachine 7y ago

According to multiple reports, the vote counts entered into app and sent were not what was received by HQ. How do we know that the company wasn't paid to change the numbers on the backend? How would the numbers change by themselves? I'll be called a tinfoil-hatter for assuming malice.