The Death of Iowa | Hacker News Reader

The Death of Iowa

politico.com

11 pointssmacktoward10 comments

This looks political but I think it raises a different, more important point about the naïveté people exhibit when it comes to software and complex technology. This was exhibited by the developers of course who promised and/or agreed to a time scale that did I not include any sort of reasonable performance or user testing, but also the faith that the elections folks had that magical technology could simply spring from the ground fully grown like Athena from the head of Zeus.

In addition, whatever you think of the Iowa process, this was in the end a technology failure and unless the tech was deployed to address some other deficiency (which as far as I know it was not — it was just intended to be an optimization), it’s failure should change nothing.

However the failure could be used as a scapegoat. It brings to mind the 2000 election in which a technology failure (of a manual punch) lead to a rushed adoption of a worse approach that had the gloss of magical computerism.

I see it as a flaw to even consider needing complex technology.

Elections are a system that require little more than simple addition. Encryption is helpful for authentication and data protection, but this technology exists already and just needs implemented.

If you've gotten to the point where you've made counting complex, you have failed IMHO.

Perhaps its the ability to manipulate the results that gummed up the works?

Cute but unlikely. They did keep a complete paper record so anyone concerned could do a recount.

Then why has a full count taken so long to do? The paper records were supposed to be failsafe.

It may look old-fashioned, but you can't beat paper and pencil ballots, with counts watched carefully by scrutineers from all the major parties, and the results sent to a central tally-room where once again, scrutineers from all the major parties can act as checks and balances to ensure that the final results are accurate and wide-spread.

This is straight politics. From the HN guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Except the whole debacle springs from a spectacular series of software failures, making this somewhat relevant.

How bad can a few bugs be? Bad enough to destroy the hopes of 7 presidential contenders making it to the White House?

Maybe that’s an overstatement, but it makes the party look incompetent, and by association, all the nominees. What does it take to convince someone not to vote? How about “they’ll probably just mess up your vote anyway, look at Iowa”. And yes, that’s a dumb statement, and no, as we’ve seen that doesn’t make it unconvincing one. The narrative is key, and the narrative is bad. And it was a poorly implemented piece of software that caused it.

Seems like something worth talking about.

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> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I'd argue this counts as that.

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