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There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of

by zaroth 7y ago

There’s an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it. Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart. I’ve heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we’re still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event. We’re talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?

giansegato 7y ago
That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"
kjaftaedi 7y ago
Even blaming the app is wrong in my opinion. They had backup plans in place where the precincts would just phone their results in. (as you would expect) ... except nobody was answering the phones. They were interviewing people on TV who were trying to report their precincts results over the phone, and were interviewing them while on hold. I remember one guy saying he's been waiting for hours for someone to answer. The app is a scapegoat because people are willing to accept "testing in production" as something that just happens, instead of what in reality should be considered gross negligence.
jellicle 7y ago
Yep. They've obviously had much longer than needed to simply report the values via paper and telephone calls, so the only reason you don't know those numbers now is that the party possesses them and is declining to release them. I believe it's perfectly legitimate to speculate about why the party might be declining to release them and to make adverse inferences. The time delay granted by claiming "technical problems" has been exceeded.

by zaroth 7y ago

giansegato 7y ago

That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"

kjaftaedi 7y ago

Even blaming the app is wrong in my opinion. They had backup plans in place where the precincts would just phone their results in. (as you would expect) ... except nobody was answering the phones. They were interviewing people on TV who were trying to report their precincts results over the phone, and were interviewing them while on hold. I remember one guy saying he's been waiting for hours for someone to answer. The app is a scapegoat because people are willing to accept "testing in production" as something that just happens, instead of what in reality should be considered gross negligence.

jellicle 7y ago

Yep. They've obviously had much longer than needed to simply report the values via paper and telephone calls, so the only reason you don't know those numbers now is that the party possesses them and is declining to release them. I believe it's perfectly legitimate to speculate about why the party might be declining to release them and to make adverse inferences. The time delay granted by claiming "technical problems" has been exceeded.