App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested

Re:App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequat... by Slartie on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @08:32AM (#22235293)

Just call people by phone and read off some numbers from paper. Then confirm them by reading them the other way round. Yes, it is actually that easy!!! People have transmitted vote counts this way forever, long before apps were a thing.

You can even use your goddamn smartphone to make the call, if you need that in order to feel "modern" enough. But don't make a shitty app for every one-time event that doesn't need a hundred additional failure modes for essentially no benefit whatsoever.

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Re:App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequat... by NopeNotToday on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @09:38AM (#22235962)

Agreed, the app was a stupid idea.

The backup plan was to call in. However, they only had 12 callers ready to take calls, for ~1800 precincts. At 3 minutes per call, that is 7+ hours to call in the results.

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Re:App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequat... by Slartie on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @10:01AM (#22236232)

They should have rather invested a tiny share of the money spent on that dysfunctional app on one of those gig working websites to rent themselves some personnel for the evening to take calls. Could have even marketed that as "Woah, see how INNOVATIVE and MODERN we are, we're using this gig working thing!".

Combine that with renting a solid and battle-tested VoIP solution for a few days to supply the short-term workers with (soft-)phones and the precincts with numbers to call, the story gets even better from a marketing perspective - now they could add the punchline "See, we're using INTERNET TELEPHONY hosted in THE CLOUD!".

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Re:App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequat... by Corrado on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @10:37AM (#22236730)

Additionally, the results phone number was the same as the helpdesk phone number. This means that everyone that was having trouble with the app was calling the same number that everyone was using to report numbers.

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