Election-Day's Effect on the Net

eastMike writes "ABC News has an article that tells of how "a good chunk of the Internet crashed ? spectacularly" during the election in 1996. I wouldn't have thought this would be much of a concern, but if it had that much of an effect in '96, then who knows. The internet has come a long way since then, but there are also a lot more people using it now." Sort of like the old Victoria's Secret/Super Bowl problem, over the whole net. I doubt we'll see much this year, but it still will be interesting.

Comments

Re:Good for second-tier news sites

[Bob Uhl]

The electoral college system was instituted because the Founders didn't want a democracy. The idea is that government should be of the people, not by the people. There was also a much stronger idea of the individual states as entities in their own right. `The United States' was once a plural...

Originally Senators were selected by their states' legislatures, not by popular vote. The idea is that the Representatives would represent the people, but the Senators--an older and wiser group--would represent the states themselves. The reason for the electoral college is that it enabled the states, not the people, to select the president.

And electoral votes are allocated on the basis of population--they more-or-less reflect the distribution of the popular vote. Only once in more than 200 years have they disagreed. And those who think the the college keeps third parties down are more than stupid. What keeps third parties down is the fundamentally dual nature of almost every issue, and the fact that single-issue voting is incorrect. An official will decide many issues--one votes for the cadidate who most nearly matches one's own opinion. All parties try to maximise the number of people willing to vote for them--if there is a party A with 40% of the vote, then party B will be its polar opposite, in order to get that other 60%. When the majority of the people agree on an issue, then so too will the parties, for the most part.

This is why the two big parties--as well as Nader's Greens--are flip sides of the same authoritarian coin: the populace likes telling others what to do, and is willing ot be told what to do. It's who does the telling they care about. Most people are stupid, selfish sheep. They will vote to kill their neighbour if it enriches them (= voting socialist; rob the rich and give to the poor!), to pry in their neighbour's bedroom (= voting far-right; husbands and wives cannot do as they consent), to placing their security in the hands of an unworkable bureaucracy (= voting far-left). They care little for their own liberties and not a bit for anyone else's.

The situation is really quite hopeless. Rule of one fails because the one is selfish. Rule of the few fails because the few are selfish. Rule of many fails because many are selfish. Rule of all fails because all are selfish.

Election 1996

[DeusExLibris]

As someone working for one of the major political websites in 1996, I can tell you two things:

1) There were more than "localized" outages in 1996.

2) It is not going to happen to the major news sites this year.

Now for some explanation:

1) On Election Day 1996, about 6:30pm, UUNet had a major outage. What caused it, I don't remember. This caused a cascade effect, with everyone trying to route around the UUNet outage clogging the peering points (particularly the MAEs) causing widespread congestion.

The outage only lasted for about an hour. But once traffic started to flow, an hours worth of queued updates and requests flooded the servers causing additional congestion and/or failures.

Combine the above with the fact that no one had any idea how many people were going to look to the net for election coverage and we basically underestimated the impact that this would have.

2) I know most of the people that designed the systems used by the major news sites (WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, ABCNews.com, USAToday.com) and they will not make those mistakes this year.

Clearly, the last four years has allowed us to gather a great deal more information about traffic patterns and ways to improve throughput (CDNs, lightweight pages, proxy caches, etc.). In addition, bandwidth is cheaper and more reliable than ever.

In fact, election night turns out to be anti-climactic in most cases. I designed and built the election returns system for Washingtonpost.com in 1998. I busted my ass for a month prior to the elections. On election night, I ate pizza and watched returns. There was simply nothing for me to do.

When considering the events of 1996 as compared to 2000, you have to remember that we were all flying by the seat of our pants in 1996 and had no idea what to expect both in terms of traffic and problems. We have learned a great deal since then and I would be incredibly surprised to hear of problems of this sort at any of the mainstream news sites on the net.

Some Links

[jonfromspace]

Here are a few links for those that wish to monitor Internet Usage durring the election.

Intenet Health Report

Internet Traffic Report

Internet Weather Report

Brownouts in the Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle

[WillSeattle]

Here's your Internet IP forecast for the West Coast. Expect Net brownouts and timeouts all along the West Coast, especially since we're waiting on Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, and other swing states to declare victors in the Presidential races to see if we can vote Green or not.

We have DSL and Cable modems, and we're not afraid to use them, especially at Election Night Ballot Stuffing parties where we plan to drop our absentee ballots off at 11 pm PST based on the votes already cast. It's legal, it's fun, and it really upsets those East Coast voters, cause they realize we get to find out who they voted for and then swing the vote back.

Prediction: Win, Win, Win - Bush will win the popular vote (by a minority), Gore will win the Electoral College and the presidency (due to nice people like me), and Nader will win national recognition for the Green Party, especially in Texas, with more than 5 percent of the vote.

If you don't believe me, I'll buy you a hard lemonade (or a beer, if you're one of those old fogies) if I'm wrong - collectable in person, just come up to me and say the magic words: "Will in Seattle, you owe me a drink or your karma will suffer." If you're not sure who I am, it's not like there's tons of Afflecks in the phone book, right? Especially ones involved in politics ...