Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Help Iowa Caucuses Go High-Tech
jfruh writes: Poltical party caucuses are one of the quirkier aspects of American political life: local party members gather in small rooms across the state, discuss their preferences, and send a report of how many delegates for each candidate will attend later county and statewide caucuses to ultimately choose delegates to the national convention. It's also a system with a lot of room for error in reporting, as local precinct leaders have traditionally sent in reports of votes via telephone touch-tone menus and paper mail. In 2016, Microsoft will help both Democrats and Republicans streamline the process in a fashion that will hopefully avoid the embarrassing result from 2012, when Mitt Romney was declared the winner on caucus night only for Rick Santorum to emerge as the true victor when all votes were counted weeks later.
Iowa is about to get their accounts completely ass fucked by a company that cannot even create a decent stable program with a good interface (well, sorta if they have 20+ years).
Are these people insane? They could probably just hire a web developer or 2 and get the same result.
Government employees in my mind lately are sorta like babies, if you jangle something shiny at them (OHHH MICROSOFT I KNOW THEM) they shit themselves and blurble for it without thinking of anything else. Sorta like how the health care website got all screwed up by oracle.
They need passionate people who care about technology, microsoft only cares about business and the products they make are horrific shit.
As a Canadian that still uses paper ballots when voting, I still can't understand how it takes weeks to count votes in the U.S.A.
"We have to wait until the other precincts report their totals to know how many extra votes we need." -anonymous poll worker