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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

by 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.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Since I heard those episodes I've been hoping that the Alabama situation isn't typical. Do you have any special insight about Iowa? Is there an Iowa kingmaker running everything from behind the scenes?
      - claudeganon 7y ago
        Given that the failed caucus app CEO is married to a Buttigeig staffer and was partying with the Iowa Democratic Party head and other members of the Buttigeig campaign right before the caucuses, I would say so: https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/1223990978127724546 https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/12239909781277245...
      - azernik 7y ago
        Most notably, the IDP has a strong interest in maintaining their first-to-vote status, which the DNC hates. Hence the eternal drift of primaries earlier and earlier - the DNC will try to move non-Iowa/NH primaries earlier, and those two will in response go even earlier to preempt them. (To the point where New Hampshire even passed a law saying that they have to be the first primary by at least 7 days.)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      Looks like the DNC has taken over accounting of the Iowa caucus, so I guess they’re really not so independent. https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/05/more-manipulation-national-dnc-club-takes-over-iowa-caucus-accounting-from-iowa-democrat-party/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/05/more-manipul...
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  "HuffPost, citing multiple Democratic sources and campaign finance records, reported amid the caucus chaos late Monday that Shadow Inc. was behind the app. ACRONYM, a Democrat-linked technology and campaign consulting nonprofit group, owns Shadow Inc." "Shadow Inc.’s website has scant information about the firm and its employees. But a review of social media accounts shows that three of the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s top executives worked on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. The CEO of Shadow Inc., Gerard Niemira, was the director of product on Clinton’s campaign, his LinkedIn profile says." https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious-clinton-linked-company-counting-iowas-caucus-votes-120136 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious...
  - tptacek 7y ago
    This is a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with my comment or with the DNC, the subject of the parent comment, which, again, does not run the Iowa Caucuses.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Looks like that has changed: https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/1224810617355362306 https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/122481061735...
- purephase 7y ago
  Conspiracy theorists will be out in force, but it's important to remind people that the State parties run the elections and their processes. Edit: Seeing downvotes on this, but it's in support of tptacek's comment. The DNC and State democratic parties are separate and the latter run the elections. You might believe that the DNC is fixing the process, but the reality is that they have little influence in how the States choose to run their election/nomination processes. In all honesty, the Iowa caucases are likely a huge pain in the ass for them and this failure is probably driving a lot of DNC folks crazy right now.
- sbierwagen 7y ago
  Tell that to Tom Perez https://twitter.com/jeffzeleny/status/1225472426894647296 https://twitter.com/jeffzeleny/status/1225472426894647296
  - sbierwagen 7y ago
    Now it seems the DNC also needs to be told it as well: https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents...
ch4s3 7y ago
> But in 2016 it wasn't Well, you aren't technically wrong here, but I disagree with the sentiment. The RNC leveraged a the same kind of data used by the Obama team in '12 to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. I think it's easy to get overly ambitious with civic tech and deliver expensive garbage. However, when people stay focused and deliver then I think the results speak for themselves. While the '12 and '16 elections didn't turn on candidates tech strategies alone, it's clear that they contributed.
- briandear 7y ago
  > to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. 304 to 227 wasn’t a “squeak”
  - throwaway_tech 7y ago
    I think its a general reference to losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and otherwise having nothing to do with the electoral college margins.
  - Multiplayer 7y ago
    It is actually to my thinking. There is some analysis that boils down to the below: “He concluded, with help from The Cook Political Report, that the election hinged not on Clinton's large 2.8 million overall vote margin over Trump, but rather on about 78,000 votes from only three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (by the same logic, Obama won in 2012 due to three counties in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) That’s definitely a squeak.
  - hcknwscommenter 7y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. Another way, is to break out how many of those electoral college points were won at razor thin margins. The reality is that the election was VERY close. 107,000 votes in three states decided the whole darn thing. WI, MI, PA, and FL were won by Trump with less than 2% margins each.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
chrisweekly 7y ago
"jest" -> gist (funny substitution tho)
- 333c 7y ago
  And on that note, "could care less" -> "couldn't care less."
faizshah 7y ago
So if we are interested in helping the DNC improve their software what do you think we should do? Is there a route for something like 18F for the DNC?
- jdkee 7y ago
  Maybe open-source the apps they propose to use?
- RealisticImpact 7y ago
  The Democratic Party must be destroyed to save it. This is a material manifestation of underlying shit, just a symptom at several degrees of remove from any more-than-superficial cause. The only thing that could conceivably provide a systematic opening to fix things (ie, not just fixing specific things, after they've become apparent, because they've already catastrophically failed), in the realm of badly-written science fiction and fantasy, would be: Bernie Sanders (or another equally popular candidate, in the near-future) is ratfucked so badly and obviously (which this could be the start of the perception of, even if it is just sufficiently advanced incompetence to be indistiguishable from malice), then the nominee loses to Trump so convincingly, that it completely shatters the party -- like it is no longer able to function at a basic level, and will clearly, even to the most delusional, never be able to win another election again -- and then... something, I don't even know how this would work. I am not creative enough to write this laughable science fiction any further. There might also be a route involving Bernie Sanders winning both the primary and the general by a landslide, but that comes with its own and different set of systematic problems that I don't think would make the party's competence at dealing with technical problems, at least, any better. But in either case, the deepest underlying rot is still the toxic interests of its financial backers, which are reproduced in the very bones of the party, and occasionally pop up in especially ridiculous and very indirect ways like this (and many more that don't get frontpaged as a problem on HN, or the New York Times for that matter). There's no fixing anything without somehow getting rid of them. And there is no realistically traversable path to that.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    ...ratfucked... If they ratfuck him this time anywhere near as bad as they did last time, he'll run independent. In that case, Trump will win even more easily than I've been expecting since February 2017. Of course, Trump has a sort of death wish, so he could invade Canada or something and then Bernie would win without owing anything to the other face of the status quo party. The most recent results (at 62% reporting, somehow not including urban areas, for many hours now) show Bernie winning the popular vote but trailing in convention votes. I hope I'll hear Democrats complaining about the Electoral College again soon...
truthwhisperer 7y ago
No you don't get the point. IT is used as an "acceptable excuse" to bias the outcome in favour of a pre-selected candidate. Don't be naive. This is not a technical problem but a political "problem"
sjm-lbm 7y ago
This seems overly paranoid to me - wouldn't we want people with experience in the civics tech space to be leaders at a company working in the civics tech space? Besides, wouldn't most of the good Bernie tech people... go back to work for Bernie? There's a reason why the Hillary people need new jobs.
- there_the_and 7y ago
  > This seems overly paranoid to me This is not even close to paranoid. Conflicts of interest are an important issue for nonprofits because it can cause them to lose tax exempt status, and the IRS makes a whole todo about it, and therefore so do competent boards. Trying to brush this under the rug because of politics is disgusting and would not be tolerated at ethical and competent organizations.
  - nooron 7y ago
    There is a very small pool of engineers who work full-time in politics because it is a small and highly cyclical industry with extraordinarily small margins. I have personally worked with many competing campaigns and nearly all vendors in the space do. Many organizations grapple with these conflicts of interest in and outside of politics, and do so successfully. From my perspective, it is quite paranoid.
nooron 7y ago
tmpz22, where do you work in this space? I started Tuesday Company. I would love to talk more with you and hear about your experiences, I am sure we have a lot in common.
peteradio 7y ago
"clueless fucks" Sounds like they know exactly what they are doing. Why ship a competently built project when you can ship a broken POS and scoop up even more money?
asdff 7y ago
There's no reason why it has to be this way other than DC careers being an absolute rat race. Elections happen literally like clock work. There is no need to get an app out in 2 months; there will always be the next election if the app isn't ready to ship. Plenty of elections have happened smoothly without your app; it isn't necessary. However, if you are only a campaign manager for six months or whatever and have to prove your worth or else move back in with your parents and spend the rest of your working life fetching coffee and slowly paying for your $200k georgetown political science degree, then yeah that app better be out in 2 damn months. Rat races don't lead to quality, they lead to desperate people taking shortcuts and making mistakes, and fodder for managers to point to on a slide when they have to appear in front of superiors. Things that woudn't otherwise happen if pressure was lowered and we thought about things like burnout and well being rather than whatever meaningless work-related metric is hot right now. This sort of failure is inevitable in fields operating like this.

by tmpz22 7y ago

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.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Since I heard those episodes I've been hoping that the Alabama situation isn't typical. Do you have any special insight about Iowa? Is there an Iowa kingmaker running everything from behind the scenes?
    - claudeganon 7y ago
      Given that the failed caucus app CEO is married to a Buttigeig staffer and was partying with the Iowa Democratic Party head and other members of the Buttigeig campaign right before the caucuses, I would say so: https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/1223990978127724546 https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/12239909781277245...
    - azernik 7y ago
      Most notably, the IDP has a strong interest in maintaining their first-to-vote status, which the DNC hates. Hence the eternal drift of primaries earlier and earlier - the DNC will try to move non-Iowa/NH primaries earlier, and those two will in response go even earlier to preempt them. (To the point where New Hampshire even passed a law saying that they have to be the first primary by at least 7 days.)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    Looks like the DNC has taken over accounting of the Iowa caucus, so I guess they’re really not so independent. https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/05/more-manipulation-national-dnc-club-takes-over-iowa-caucus-accounting-from-iowa-democrat-party/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/05/more-manipul...
corporate_shi11 7y ago
"HuffPost, citing multiple Democratic sources and campaign finance records, reported amid the caucus chaos late Monday that Shadow Inc. was behind the app. ACRONYM, a Democrat-linked technology and campaign consulting nonprofit group, owns Shadow Inc." "Shadow Inc.’s website has scant information about the firm and its employees. But a review of social media accounts shows that three of the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s top executives worked on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. The CEO of Shadow Inc., Gerard Niemira, was the director of product on Clinton’s campaign, his LinkedIn profile says." https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious-clinton-linked-company-counting-iowas-caucus-votes-120136 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious...
- tptacek 7y ago
  This is a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with my comment or with the DNC, the subject of the parent comment, which, again, does not run the Iowa Caucuses.
claudeganon 7y ago
Looks like that has changed: https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/1224810617355362306 https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/122481061735...
purephase 7y ago
Conspiracy theorists will be out in force, but it's important to remind people that the State parties run the elections and their processes. Edit: Seeing downvotes on this, but it's in support of tptacek's comment. The DNC and State democratic parties are separate and the latter run the elections. You might believe that the DNC is fixing the process, but the reality is that they have little influence in how the States choose to run their election/nomination processes. In all honesty, the Iowa caucases are likely a huge pain in the ass for them and this failure is probably driving a lot of DNC folks crazy right now.
sbierwagen 7y ago
Tell that to Tom Perez https://twitter.com/jeffzeleny/status/1225472426894647296 https://twitter.com/jeffzeleny/status/1225472426894647296
- sbierwagen 7y ago
  Now it seems the DNC also needs to be told it as well: https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents...

ch4s3 7y ago

> But in 2016 it wasn't Well, you aren't technically wrong here, but I disagree with the sentiment. The RNC leveraged a the same kind of data used by the Obama team in '12 to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. I think it's easy to get overly ambitious with civic tech and deliver expensive garbage. However, when people stay focused and deliver then I think the results speak for themselves. While the '12 and '16 elections didn't turn on candidates tech strategies alone, it's clear that they contributed.

briandear 7y ago
> to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16. 304 to 227 wasn’t a “squeak”
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  I think its a general reference to losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and otherwise having nothing to do with the electoral college margins.
- Multiplayer 7y ago
  It is actually to my thinking. There is some analysis that boils down to the below: “He concluded, with help from The Cook Political Report, that the election hinged not on Clinton's large 2.8 million overall vote margin over Trump, but rather on about 78,000 votes from only three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (by the same logic, Obama won in 2012 due to three counties in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) That’s definitely a squeak.
- hcknwscommenter 7y ago
  That's one way of looking at it. Another way, is to break out how many of those electoral college points were won at razor thin margins. The reality is that the election was VERY close. 107,000 votes in three states decided the whole darn thing. WI, MI, PA, and FL were won by Trump with less than 2% margins each.
bart_spoon 7y ago

chrisweekly 7y ago

"jest" -> gist (funny substitution tho)

333c 7y ago
And on that note, "could care less" -> "couldn't care less."

faizshah 7y ago

So if we are interested in helping the DNC improve their software what do you think we should do? Is there a route for something like 18F for the DNC?

jdkee 7y ago
Maybe open-source the apps they propose to use?
RealisticImpact 7y ago
The Democratic Party must be destroyed to save it. This is a material manifestation of underlying shit, just a symptom at several degrees of remove from any more-than-superficial cause. The only thing that could conceivably provide a systematic opening to fix things (ie, not just fixing specific things, after they've become apparent, because they've already catastrophically failed), in the realm of badly-written science fiction and fantasy, would be: Bernie Sanders (or another equally popular candidate, in the near-future) is ratfucked so badly and obviously (which this could be the start of the perception of, even if it is just sufficiently advanced incompetence to be indistiguishable from malice), then the nominee loses to Trump so convincingly, that it completely shatters the party -- like it is no longer able to function at a basic level, and will clearly, even to the most delusional, never be able to win another election again -- and then... something, I don't even know how this would work. I am not creative enough to write this laughable science fiction any further. There might also be a route involving Bernie Sanders winning both the primary and the general by a landslide, but that comes with its own and different set of systematic problems that I don't think would make the party's competence at dealing with technical problems, at least, any better. But in either case, the deepest underlying rot is still the toxic interests of its financial backers, which are reproduced in the very bones of the party, and occasionally pop up in especially ridiculous and very indirect ways like this (and many more that don't get frontpaged as a problem on HN, or the New York Times for that matter). There's no fixing anything without somehow getting rid of them. And there is no realistically traversable path to that.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  ...ratfucked... If they ratfuck him this time anywhere near as bad as they did last time, he'll run independent. In that case, Trump will win even more easily than I've been expecting since February 2017. Of course, Trump has a sort of death wish, so he could invade Canada or something and then Bernie would win without owing anything to the other face of the status quo party. The most recent results (at 62% reporting, somehow not including urban areas, for many hours now) show Bernie winning the popular vote but trailing in convention votes. I hope I'll hear Democrats complaining about the Electoral College again soon...

truthwhisperer 7y ago

No you don't get the point. IT is used as an "acceptable excuse" to bias the outcome in favour of a pre-selected candidate. Don't be naive. This is not a technical problem but a political "problem"

sjm-lbm 7y ago

This seems overly paranoid to me - wouldn't we want people with experience in the civics tech space to be leaders at a company working in the civics tech space? Besides, wouldn't most of the good Bernie tech people... go back to work for Bernie? There's a reason why the Hillary people need new jobs.

there_the_and 7y ago
> This seems overly paranoid to me This is not even close to paranoid. Conflicts of interest are an important issue for nonprofits because it can cause them to lose tax exempt status, and the IRS makes a whole todo about it, and therefore so do competent boards. Trying to brush this under the rug because of politics is disgusting and would not be tolerated at ethical and competent organizations.
- nooron 7y ago
  There is a very small pool of engineers who work full-time in politics because it is a small and highly cyclical industry with extraordinarily small margins. I have personally worked with many competing campaigns and nearly all vendors in the space do. Many organizations grapple with these conflicts of interest in and outside of politics, and do so successfully. From my perspective, it is quite paranoid.

nooron 7y ago

tmpz22, where do you work in this space? I started Tuesday Company. I would love to talk more with you and hear about your experiences, I am sure we have a lot in common.

peteradio 7y ago

"clueless fucks" Sounds like they know exactly what they are doing. Why ship a competently built project when you can ship a broken POS and scoop up even more money?

asdff 7y ago

There's no reason why it has to be this way other than DC careers being an absolute rat race. Elections happen literally like clock work. There is no need to get an app out in 2 months; there will always be the next election if the app isn't ready to ship. Plenty of elections have happened smoothly without your app; it isn't necessary. However, if you are only a campaign manager for six months or whatever and have to prove your worth or else move back in with your parents and spend the rest of your working life fetching coffee and slowly paying for your $200k georgetown political science degree, then yeah that app better be out in 2 damn months. Rat races don't lead to quality, they lead to desperate people taking shortcuts and making mistakes, and fodder for managers to point to on a slide when they have to appear in front of superiors. Things that woudn't otherwise happen if pressure was lowered and we thought about things like burnout and well being rather than whatever meaningless work-related metric is hot right now. This sort of failure is inevitable in fields operating like this.