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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

My bet is that the contractors were incompetents who were hired based on political connections, and they both 1) just finished the app within the past week, and 2) never tested it after it was officially finalized. By bet is that they tested it weeks ago, it failed, they blamed the failure on a few bugs, they eventually marked those specific bugs fixed, then just prayed after shipping it. I know I'm being too specific, but past trauma.

Major sign: Not only wasn't there a dry run before d-day, but they didn't even train the people expected to use the app on the app.

The corruption is traditional corrupt procurement (apparently connected to Buttigieg and the Clinton complex) rather than an attempt to fix the primary. Primary fixing will be done out in the open with sudden rule changes.

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Incompetent is a bit harsh. I think you need to be quite good to hit a home run with a new app/system that will be rolled out at an event to lots of users.

The app's entire purpose is to allow 1700 people to type in 21 numbers, and to send those numbers to a database. I don't know how that's more than a week's work, with another month or two added to design the walkthrough.

A similar intuition may have led this team to skip spending the last few months on rollout / training / testing

There's no intuition that I've had that would involve not testing the app repeatedly, under load, not having a dry run, or not offering any training.

From a technical perspective where only informed and good actors are involved, I suspect many of us could code up a working website in less than an hour. But if you look at the issues reported on at the Des Moines Register [1] it seems the job was about creating a reporting system in an environment where people are actively trying to disrupt the system, possibly some of the reporters themselves cannot be trusted. I think you'd need to sit through a few meetings with the right people before you'd even understand what was required. You've got to find tech/security people from previous campaigns to understand what the dirty tricks are that people use to f with the results for example.

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presi...

Sounds like you'd want DHS to review it then

Does anyone think DHS has the expertise on hand to review source code (and would it be cart blanche style)? When I think of DHS I think more of physical security measures. NSA is whom I think of when it comes to defensive cybersecurity measures.

They likely have a standby contract with someone like Accenture or Deloite for this kind of work.

The reason for putting this under the DHS rather then just outsourcing it directly is that the DHS have some kind of credible neutrality where as nobody trusts the DNC to not censor/rewrite any report they publish on their own.

DHS has a Science and Technology Directorate.

I don't even know why it is an app. A simple web page would be perfect for this.

From anecdote; I've seen a months old project go to internal alpha that crashed immediately because the lead developer didn't set rails to production mode.

There are many web sites where a 1700 request burst would hurt.

To be fair, that's ~1700 requests over the course of an hour or more - it's not like every precinct finished at the exact same time.

Sleep, then try again. There are no websites that take more than 12 hours to handle 1700 requests.

Very wild guess: they did test it and maybe even stress tested it... with the phones they had in their office. Out in the field people were using different phones with various versions of the mobile OS.

Not sure if this is an Android or iOS app but either way, it's possible there was something quirky in the implementation that didn't show up on the test phones or simulator. They may have even made a poor assumption such as there always being a network connection. That would be the case in their office but not guaranteed out in rural areas especially in rural areas with a sudden convergence of lots of people with cell phones in a confined space that doesn't usually have that much device density.

Definition of incompetent

1a : lacking the qualities needed for effective action

b : unable to function properly

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