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A comment on Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App. Parent comment

Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by GVIrish on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:36AM (#22237569)
The challenge there is that if you're hiring people who are a venn diagram of developer and politically active/connected, you're always going to be getting people who have some sort of history with candidates.

Maybe it's just generally a hand grenade to hire any company that does political IT. Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by Miner49er on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:55AM (#22237851)
In 2016 Microsoft created this app. It can just be a tech company, no need to find political technical people.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-...

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by slg on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:04PM (#22237989)
It is interesting to note how that article talks about this app being used by both Democrats and Republicans. That is likely a requirement for any neutral tech company that wants to get into the business. Even that might not be enough to shield the company from employee protests regarding their participation in political causes even indirectly. Remember that employees of nonpartisan businesses are not necessarily nonpartisan themselves.
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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by tempsy on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:42AM (#22237669)
Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? You're paying a contract developer to develop an app that tallys numbers together...I would pick a shop that has experience with security over any political tilt.
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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by eropple on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:51AM (#22237799)
> Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?

Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking.

(These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by tempsy on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:59AM (#22237925)
It's an app that adds numbers together for a few thousand users.

Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this.

I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by eropple on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:03PM (#22237983)
I agree! I was trying to explain why these shops exist and are used in the general case, while also noting that this was a bad call here.

They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by mattrp on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:55PM (#22240212)
There are roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa give or take with one ballot each...any decent 10-key operator could have transcribed the entire caucus result by midnight last night...and they needed an app? I don't care how much they spent on it, $1 was too much.
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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by bilbo0s on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @12:20PM (#22238210)
>Because they tend to be motivated

I think that's the concern people have about handing over control of anything remotely electoral in nature to them.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by GVIrish on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:19PM (#22239789)
I would tend to agree. Maybe I'm ignorant of the inner machinations of political campaigns, but it seems like it's not the type of work that requires domain experience to be effective in. But that's what we would think as IT professionals, people in political campaigns may not think that way.

And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by _-david-_ on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @07:20PM (#22242684)
>Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?

Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt?

Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.

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Re:Democrats Declined DHS Offer to Test Caucus App by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @03:15PM (#22240417)
> Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.

Truly neutral companies are hard to find; most companies of any proven competence have well-known political preferences, and those that don't there is going to be a concern of unknown and hostile-to-the-customer leanings, which you really don't want to discover after they've manifested.

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