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Voters News Service: What Went Wrong

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the just-about-everything dept.

ddtstudio writes "Baseline Magazine has a pretty good recounting of how even the national TV networks can have a computer network go wrong -- in this case the night of the last U.S. election. From the article: "VNS had been trying to rewrite and retool the system for years. This was just the most recent attempt and it failed miserably." Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed."

4 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What went wrong? by cioxx · · Score: 5, Informative
    They used Linux.

    The systems in question were mainframe computers running IBM's Operating System 390.

    Not that i'm a linux fanatic, just wanted you to get your facts straight.
  2. Nearly ad free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... and one page version of article.

  3. Re:That wan't the *last* US election by A+Big+Gnu+Thrush · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes it was.

    From the article:

    Back up to Election Day, Nov. 5. The balance of power in Congress was up for grabs. Yet by 10 a.m., the TV networks confirmed what they had feared for months: They couldn't derive any meaningful exit-polling data from a system they had just spent between $10 million and $15 million to overhaul.

    That's 2002.

  4. First hand account by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    OK Folks,
    I'm one of the lead programmers of one of the members

    We KNEW this was going to happen a LONG time before November. At the end of the article, they talk about "set a deadline 2 months ahead of the real deadline"

    Guess what? They did!!! They were supposed to be ready for the NJ Primary, which was before the summer - they missed it, BIG TIME - That's when the alarm bells went into overdrive for me

    I understand (This up in the levels above me) that the steering committee didn't realize that the technical committee was saying "We've got a BIG problem"

    Another warning sign was when their test data generator that they sent us in the spring generated XML that didn't match their own XSDs - and that was with all the fields declared as cdata - the field names didn't match

    The first test, which was supposed to be months ahead, came weeks ahead, and even the most basic message (just a heartbeat) didn't work. That's they day I knew it was doomed for sure. Our prime efforts switched to our backup data source at that time. THAT worked fine. I had a boring election night, watching VNS crash, and laughing