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Voters News Service: What Went Wrong
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."
...it was three elections ago. I hate it when people only count (and vote in) presidential elections, as though the other ones didn't matter!
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Quote from article: "Also, the networks would be unable to give the type of detailed explanations as to why voters voted the way they did this time around. For example, according to TV network analysts working the election, the networks wouldn't be able to tell viewers why particular demographic groups voted for specific candidates nor the issues that they considered most or least important when voting. "
:)
:)
So, what this means is that people were able to go late to the polls, and cast a vote free from the influence of network prognostication. They were able to cast a vote that they thought was right, free from the spectre of "throwing a vote" as the election had already been "called" by *INSERT NETWORK NAME HERE*. Boo Hoo to the networks. Wow...why the hell is this a bad thing???
Up until the 1960's, most US citizens were able to vote just fine, all by themselves, without the need for knowing why *INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC HERE* people voted for *INSERT CANDIDATE NAME HERE*. Why does it need to be different today? There's already enough blather on TV, if we could eliminate it from just one night every 4 years....oh man, that'd be sweet!
Of course, I won't know because I'll be watching something that is entertaining, rather than a farce, on my TiVo!!!
All members, including 19 newspapers, shared in the management of the company and oversaw its $33 million operating budget for the current four-year election cycle.
Could the failure of VNS be the fault of having far too many PHB's droning on about mission statements and TPS reports?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Java, Oracle, DB2, BEA - nope, those were symptoms of a deeper failure...
As someone who finally bailed out of an extremely poorly run company (WebMD) burdened with dumb management, it's easy to see the echoes.
The list on the last page of the article is nearly perfect, with one small addition:
6) Listen to your employees!! You hired them because you thought they were good at what they do. Why would you ignore their input into the process now?
Nothing in this article is the "fault" of the technology (Oracle, Java, IBM, Linux, or anything) itself any more than it's the fault of a head of cabbage.
It's just poor management.
So....they want them to use Java instead of OS/390? That is like saying "I want you to use Perl for your program instead of Solaris". How does one replace an Operating system with a language?
Nevermind the fact that Java runs just fine under OS/390
Finkployd
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.
.
Projecting winners and losers in various races would take several hours longer than in the past.
(sarcasm)
Y'know, it is truly a sad day when you can no longer count on the media to tell you what might happen and instead have to settle for what did
(/sarcasm)
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Or make sure you know what kind of better hardware you could buy, if needed.
When developing a system you should try to overload it so you can recognize what a failure state looks like. This may give your engineers valuable insight.
What is the resource that gets exhausted first? What is the system's behavior when it is completely overloaded? Does it just stop functioning, or does it lose data? Or maybe generate bad data?
These things could be nice to know, and may suggest quick improvements so that, if 6 years later the customer puts in 20 times as much usage as was originally budgeted, the failure isn't completely embarrassing.
I don't completely agree with that. Just because a client is not completely a technical genius they can still impose technical requirements. Some of the time it actually makes sense. Some clients might have plans for future interoperability, or anything. If a client makes a request, especially something so generic as using Java and XML, the development team is being payed to honor that request within reasonable limits.
Some of the time a client picking a language and implementation details can be a real PAIN! Yet, there are almost always circumstances, possibly just silly bias, that cause them to ask for this. Maybe they are planning to have development staff capable of handling that application. Maybe they already have a development staff that could only maintain an application written in Java. Maybe they don't want MS technology in their apps. I don't think it is always fair to assume someone imposing a request on a developer is immediately wrong. The client is *always* right. Even if they are right and it is doomed to fail. I don't think using Java and XML doom a project to fail.
Anyway, some of the time it is easier to go with the flow as a software development company;)
I actually liked having a little suspense and watching the ACTUAL local returns rather than some "projected" guestimate that was in at 2:00PM. People actually voted up to the end here. If VNS died completely I'd be fine with it.
-- $G
And yet votes still got counted. Reporters were still able to cover the votes being tallyed.
Now why do they use this? And why is it government funded?
Voting in this country is a fraud. Voting machines of any kind can be rigged. They don't count the ballots at the polling place. How do I know that my ballot box is the same one that arrives at city hall.
When Jimmy Carter goes to some third world nation to help prevent a rigged election he makes them count the votes at the polling place. How come we don't do that here?
It is a fraud. I don't vote because of it. Our rights were stolen from years ago.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Interesting stuff.
;-)
My problem with this article is that it's describing the scenario as a "perfect storm", ie. it only happened bcos a whole bunch of unlikely things occurred together at precisely the wrong time, and there wasn't anything ppl could do about it.
In fact, as you've shown, the project went into freefall, and no-one at any oversight level had the balls to say so. As usual, it seems they committed the standard IT sin of saying "let's put all this incompatible data together, with a new architecture, a new interface and a new team", which has a well-tested track record of producing failures.
I'm constantly amazed by failures of IT projects being categorised as "one-off" events. History has shown that the *success* of a major IT project is a one-off event, and can only be achieved by major effort and good organisation. And in general, the guys at the coal face know full well that the project is screwed, but the layers of management filter out the bad news, so it ends up that managers don't know quite how bad it is until the iceberg actually hits. Some software guru (Yourdon?) said only half-jokingly that the chance of success is in inverse proportion to the cost of the project, and above some cost (or some number of people) the project is basically doomed to fail.
Grab.
The article states that they dumped the S/390 hardware, probably in favour of some *nix servers. Its the same old story, company ditches the mainframe, company spends millions trying to get the replacement to work, company fails, company dies.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
"Maybe the crash was deliberate?"
That is a very plausible possibility that will get no airplay.
It is just not in the interests of the "powers that be" for there to be independent evidence of actual vote counts... Ponder a bit about why they denigrated the paper ballots. They want everything to go electronic, and to eliminate all outside monitoring of the count, such as the VNS was doing. SO they can have COMPLETE control over the eventual results.
If anything, the VNS reports durign Florida 2000 actually SUPPORTED what was eventually discovered, (but what was AGAIN suppressed by the media): That BUSH LOST FLORIDA.
The "this" in question, the Voters News Service, is funded by news networks and newspapers, not the government. They use it so that they can provide as up to the minute information on voting results as possible, and so that they can provide in depth analysis of voter behavior.
I suggest volunteering to work at the polls, or to be a monitor of the polls. You're free to watch the entire process yourself. In hotly contested races, the various parties will send people down to monitor things themselves.
If you are absolutely convinced that the system is fraudulent, what are you doing about it? Might I suggest:
Your claim that our election system is rigged is extremely serious. If you seriously believe it, don't you owe it to yourself and your country to fight back?
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