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."

Comments

Re:What went wrong?

[cioxx]

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.

Nearly ad free

[Anonymous Coward]

... and one page version of article.

Oh BooHoo

[billmaly]

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!!! :)

Re:Oh BooHoo

[kmellis]

In the UK the media are not allowed to report any exit poll information until *after* the polls have closed, precisely in order to remove any possibility of the media influencing the votes of the populace. I'm very surprised that the same isn't true in the US.

Well, we have that pesky Constutional guarantee of "freedom of the press". You can ask people how they voted (why wouldn't you be able to, and why wouldn't they be able to tell you?), and you can tell other people what you find out.

This is a good example--of which there are many, many more--of a situation where the strict and broad Constitutional prohibition makes less sense than a nuanced and particular law tailored to the situation. It would be better if exit poll results could be suppressed.

The thing that non-USAians don't quite understand about the USA and USAians is that built into the very fabric of our culture is a paranoia about abuses of power by the government. (Periodic lapses into naive trust during wartime, like now, notwithstanding.) All of the Bill of Rights are built upon the same sort of slippery-slope thinking that the gun rights folks use in talking about the Second Amendment: if you cut holes into the brick wall of blanket protections, the government is sure to come barreling through and effectively destroying the whole barrier. How libertarian-minded conservatives can tolerate Ashcroft is beyond my limited ability to comprehend human irrationality.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the reporting of exit poll data has been legally found to be protected speech in prior law. I could be wrong. A better answer is just to encourage a civic-minded sensibility among the news reporting agencies so that they voluntarily refuse to report exit poll data until after the polls close. Or even after all the polls close.

Too many cooks?

[jlanthripp]

Quoth the article:

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?

I'll tell you what went wrong

[dubbayu_d_40]

So they're having a meeting dicussing requirements for a stable system, and an idiot say's "we must have voice recognition."

Java, Oracle, DB2, BEA - nope, those were symptoms of a deeper failure...

Re:That wan't the *last* US election

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

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.

First hand account

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Okay, I'll burn karma...

[Tsar]

"Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed!"

Doesn't that sound like a line from a bad disaster movie?
DIE HARD IV: DIE HARDWARE.

Two words....

[primebase]

"Poor Management".

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.

Cry me a friggin river

[whovian]

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)