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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."
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
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.
... and one page version of article.
...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.
Well, no where in the article is it mentioned that there was a problem with IBM and Oracle. It just says that there were delays in transferring data. So I don't know why Oracle and IBM were named in the original post.
What's under yellowstone?
From article:
Now, it does not mention what OS they were running WebLogic on in the article, but it was definately not OS/390.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Java, Oracle, DB2, BEA - nope, those were symptoms of a deeper failure...
Who wants to start an open source project to replace this failed service. We'll use Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP and Apache. Any takers?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
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
One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages--Java and the Extensible Markup Language-- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets.
That sounds great. People who have no idea how to accomplish the goal telling the people tasked with doing it, how it should be done. I can't believe it failed. They should have laid out what they wanted to acheive and left the rest up to the designers on how to meet those goals...
Also, some interesting older information on the VNS can be found a the Votescam website. Although they seem to have a few extreme views, along with some wild conspiracy theories..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
"Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed!"
Doesn't that sound like a line from a bad disaster movie?
DIE HARD IV: DIE HARDWARE.
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.
One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages--Java and the Extensible Markup Language-- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets.
Ah, yes. The programming language OS 390. Are there any O'Reilly books on that subject?
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
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 certainly perceived bias in VNS when I read that article. In both the 2000 presidential and 2002 North Carolina senate races, the system erroneously showed Democrats winning against republicans. Since this corresponds to the widely perceived bias in the media, it could easily look like a fix to a lot of people.
I metamoderate, therefore I am
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
perhaps we should go back to using hand written ballots. The computerized voting that this administration is pushing will only lead to more vote fraud because the count will not be audited. In the 2002 elections in 5 different states Republican candidates won by the same score of 18181 (a prime number). Now, I am willing to give Diebold the benefit of the doubt and say this is a programming error but the fact that this isn't being discussed in the media is a problem. This voting machine code should be GPL'ed so we can all look at it and make sure it works. If they do go to computerized voting there needs to be an audit trail.
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.
apparently they weren't connected with .NET enterprise software!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This is utterly predictable. Long projects with a
single deliverable at the end are notorious for
not delivering on time.
Several things come to mind immediately from the Agile methodologies
playbook:
1. The customer should not set technical requirements.
2. A working (but not feature complete) version
of the product should be delivered no less
frequently than every three months.
3. The customer should set business requirements
with one voice. If that means that the various
customers have to vote on what's most important,
then so be it.
4. Features should be implemented in the order
that it's most important to the customer.
And we haven't even gotten into the software
engineering yet!
John Roth
Indeed the "old ways" still work. Canada's federal elections are run by an independent federal agency, not by the individual provinces. This allows for uniformity in the voting and counting process. The ballots are sheets of paper, with the candidates listed in alphabetical order by surname, and the party affiliation (if any) printed below each candidate's name. To the right of each name there is an open circle, where you can make any mark you wish (without mutilating the ballot) as long as it does not identify the voter. If you mismark your ballot, or stick your pencil through it, you can ask for another one from the returning officer, who has to mark the incorrect ballot uncountable (not spoiled; that's a separate category) and set it aside. Blind voters can mark their own ballots, because they get a template that shows them where the circles are on the paper. You have the right to submit an unmarked or spoiled ballot.
When the local poll closes, the deputy returning officer unseals the ballot box, pulls out the ballots one by one, and reads off the name of the candidate the ballot is for. Any scrutineer (candidate-appointed observer) can inspect and challenge any ballot. The ballot is then placed in a pile for that candidate, and challenged ballots are set aside for a judicial inspection and recount if necessary. The votes are tallied by all scrutineers and the poll clerk as they are read, and the counts verified by all observers. Then the sorted piles are counted to validate the tally. Spoiled ballots (unmarked, marked more than once, or identify the voter) get their own tally and pile. Each pile of ballots is placed in an envelope, one for each candidate, the envelopes are sealed, and the seals are signed. Then the envelopes are placed back in the ballot box, which is resealed (with signatures of all scrutineers if they so choose), and returned to the constituency's returning officer for a judicial recount, if required. Once the ballot box has been resealed, the poll's results are phoned in to the candidates' headquarters and the constituency's returning officer. The counting process takes about an hour for each poll. If the consolidated results show a sufficiently narrow margin between the higher-polling candidates, then a full judicial recount is automatic. All the ballot boxes from the constituency are unsealed, the envelopes opened, and the ballots reinspected and recounted by the returning officer and a judge. This, too, is open to scrutiny by the candidates or their agents. (The other candidates may be interested in the recount as well, because it may determine whether they get their nomination fee back for gaining more than 10% of the vote.)
The first public results are announced shortly after the polls close in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. However, under Canadian election law, these results cannot be reported where the polls are open. Thus television and radio coverage is limited to where the polls are closed, and Canadian-based Internet coverage does not begin until the polls close in British Columbia and Yukon. With staggered polling hours across the country, that's usually three hours after the polls close in Atlantic Canada, with enough extrapolation of reported results to declare a winner usually an hour before that, because of the 176 or so (of 301) seats that come from Ontario and Québec. The key is that the projections are made on real vote tallies, not exit polls and demographic profiles. If something is too close to call, the networks and newspapers won't call it. They will wait until they can make a statistically confident decision.
It doesn't make the political analysis any more informed or interesting, though. Usually the analysis boils down to one of "Canadians are grumpy," "Canadians are complacent," or "Ontario doesn't think the way the rest of the country does, but their weight carries the vote."I may not like the outcome of the process, but that's because I don't usually like the inputs to the process, not the process itself. The process is not completely foolproof, but it is open and verifiable if candidates choose to avail themselves of that openness.
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
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?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
...a company which had GOP connections which was given taxpayer money to eliminate ineligible voters from the voting lists. They explored the possibility of getting lists of convicted felons from other states and crossing those names off the eligible voter lists in Florida. Most states balked at such a process because it was so hard to tell whether the voter was the convicted felon or just somebody with the same name. A small number of states (including Texas, with the biggest list) went along.
The company told Florida they didn't think the names should be eliminated without adequate safeguards to make sure eligible voters were not eliminated. Florida didn't want to spend the money to verify. So the names were eliminated. The affected voters didn't find out 'til Election Day.
(Note that the company demonstrated some Republicans are not as corrupt as the Bushes and their cronies.)
The 2000 election showed that Bush was out of touch with half the voters and Gore was out of touch with half the voters. Democrats were out of touch with Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court. That's why they lost.
Anyone who claims the 2000 election was some mandate for their ideas (on either side) deserves to have all their ideas treated with as much respect as the rest of this post deserves.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Reading further, I think that one can tell what went wrong with this project: rather than relying on proven technology, they wanted to make it all snazzy: voice recognition, Java, web application, XML &c. &c. &c. ad infinitum. Instead of sticking to what works, they went with what doesn't. It's like replacing a rock-solid program written in Lisp and running on a Unix system with something written in Visual Basic written on Windows. Don't have high hopes: it may run as well or better, but I'm not betting on it. The likely answer is that this system was over-designed and under-implemented. Too much fun, cutting edge technology and not enough old-fashioned engineering.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM--when I saw the writeup, I read the article. I have nothing to do with our OS/390 division or our DB2 division. I'm a Unix admin, that's all.
VNS itself is screwed up. It's a cartel of newspapers and news services so they can cover lots of elections. Sounds good, right? But they normally only cover the "real candidates" -- so that a two-party race between a and a green will be reported as " candidate running unopposed."
This combination leads to skewed, pro-establishment news reporting.
So I wouldn't be surprised at all if they had a specification problem (as reported by the message from the guy who worked on it). It's completely consistent with the charter of the organization.
Ah, I see. So, the Rhodes trust mistakenly sent him to Cambridge instead of Oxford, and Oxford mistakenly claims that he was a Rhodes scholar for the usual two-year term.
Easy mistakes to make.
As a Western-state voter, I fully intend to lie to any exit pollers who ask me how I voted.
There are already several groups systematically lying to pollsters - especially exit pollsters, but also telephone pollsters, etc.
One of the points is to foul up the "parallel election" you mentioned, in the hope that they'll either stop it or be discredited and ignored.
But others are making various political points - again trying to get the pollsters to make wildly inaccurate predictions and lose credibility with the public (some of whome try to conform with the crowd and/or "vote for the winner") and/or with politicians (who, once elected become isolated from their constituents and tend to believe the media and the polls).
Meanwhile: When listening to poll results, take careful notice of WHICH polling outfit is doing the work. Some polls (including most that hit the airwaves) are commissioned by people who want to create an image and use it to swing popular opinion and/or legislators, rather than to actually measure public opinion. And some poll operations cater to this market to make money.
My impression:
Zogby: Actually tries to predict elections, and does perhaps the best job of it.
Field: Their results seem to completely mirror the Democratic Party line and are often wildly at odds with the actual results once an election is held.
Gallup: Depends on the poll and the season. Better than Field come election time (though not as good as Zogby) but still seems to whore on other issues between elections.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way