I can't recommend enough to read the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. You will be surprised how often we barely escaped nuclear war because wise people chose to not trust the machines.
Did the gate agent do any follow up verification? Like checking the flagged passenger's ID?
In retrospect, modern computer systems are inscrutable and unreliable enough (as a category) that it's rational to disregard them, especially if you've done some independent verification. Rational doesn't always mean correct in a specific case.
1. Computer says no, leading to the true passenger being rejected. Probably would have resulted in the guy managing to steal her seat and maybe not getting caught.
2. Computer says no, overreact, and reconcile everything until the computer is satisfied (e.g. deplane everyone and start over, maybe checking IDs). I'd guess this attitude would result in hundreds or thousands of delayed flights when everything was fine.
The question is what's the incidence rate of real glitches. If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes, staff will be used to overriding it.
On a large plane that would be 2-4 people per flight.
Honestly an error rate of even .01% would be enough errors per day that your average gate agent would order ride pretty commonly.
The system's incentive: (1) make sure no pass is used to board more than once, (2) indicate whether all ticketed passengers have boarded, and if not which are missing
The gate agent's incentive: (1) board everyone as pleasantly and quickly as possible
So the errant boarder played on the misaligned incentives and time pressure, to bet that the gate agent would ignore any errors.
I'm incredibly distrustful of any system that requires:
- Someone deal with a rare situation
- In realtime
- Under pressure
- While not being incentivized against an adverse outcome
No one tips a lawnmower for a really tight trim. The lawnmower manufacturer may have worried about that but the lawnmower itself doesn't even worry.
Likewise, the dumb software the agents are using is not making decisions or incentivized.
Now if it were AI, we might worry . . .
Accidentally carrying a non-paying passenger on an underbooked flight is also adverse I guess but it's not the only way the system can err and it's not the only thing they are trying to avoid.
2) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, notice that the partner went to the bathroom, wait, give the ticket again to the first person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot.
You're traveling as a family. You print boarding passes and distribute them to everybody. Somebody loses theirs. So you print new copies, but you don't necessarily give people the same seat number as the first time.
When boarding the plane, one of you reaches into their bag and grabs the one they thought they had lost. So two of your family members are using the same pass, and one is going unused.
No harm is caused because the number of passengers on the plane is still as expected, and the family is able to figure out for themselves who takes which seat.
So, I'm sure the general issue of "this pass was used already" happens a lot. How often it gets resolved without the would-be passenger presenting a "good" one, who knows.
The mistake was letting the original passenger on and that was fixed later.
One person was a passenger and the other was a stowaway.
You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic.
As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted.
This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are.
They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic.
No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time.
Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.
The trust model for paper ballots and observed human counting is so superior to any proposed or implemented electronic voting that it's madness to downgrade to electronic.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association
> With 75 presidents of different Argentine clubs voting, on election day something went wrong when the final count resulted in a draw of 38 to 38 (76 votes in total). The explanation given was that one of the electors put a double vote and that mistake was not reported. As a result, the executive committee decided to postpone the election.
Proper paper voting cannot be gamed by ballot stuffing. Voting paper has serial numbers, is guarded like a currency during creation, and like currency during transfer, has checks and bounds at both ends, is counted by representatives of all parties, the list is endless.
For example in Canada you vote, fold the form shut from prying eyes, take it to the lady with the ballot box (usually a retired person), and she detaches the two parts of the card, one she keeps, the other you deposit into the sealed ballot box under her watchful eye.
There is no chance to stuff anything extra, again members of all political parties are present, and any trickery is made doubly difficult by unknown serial number ranges at the voting station. A serial number you are assigned when your voting card is taken off of the randomized stack.
I assure you any "but... what about..." has been thought of, and any security hole you perceive is likely just me missing facts.
There is a plan to make a single ballot printed by the goverment, but the local county chiefs don't like it becuase it avoids a lot of dirty tricks. (The elections are quite fair anyway. The petty cheating just changes very little globaly. I don't agree with cheating, but I can't fix it.)
Some parties distribute their ballot before the election to avoid the missing ballots problem. Some local county chief ever distribute their own local ballot with the national ballot of the opposing party if people want to vote a combination. Some people distribute old ballots to that are invalid to void the votes of confused persons of the other party. In some places, the rabbit hole is deeper than you think.
And that has nothing to do with paper ballots.
Here, you'd end up in jail for those things, and trickery wouldn't get you out of it. And you'd get caught too, because members of your own party would turn you in.
You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.
(Aside: it’s actually pencil and paper since pencils are more reliable. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/polling-place.htm#pencils)
In some ways, but the ability to erase a pencil mark is a huge issue with ballots.
IMHO, pens with tamper resistant ink, plus a process for making an exchange for a new ballot paper in case of error, is a much better choice.
The security is in how ballots are treated, how they are monitored and handled, not how they are marked. It's never a problem that they are in pencil. Ever.
If someone has an opportunity to monkey with the ballots? The system has already failed.
As I said in another post, if you think you found a hole, it's because you didn't research what's actuallly happening.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/25/evan-low-up-by-one-vo...
> Some of those challenged ballots in San Mateo County had illegible or no postmark dates and Assistant Chief Elections Officer Jim Irizarry said they were waiting on information from the U.S. Postal Service
With small margins, an election could come down to how people read a smudged postmark. It might not be an issue, but you won't know who "really" won, either. It depends how you count it.
The ballots were fragile, and this is an example of not using pen and paper.
You're actually proving my point here. Keep it simple! Pen and paper is perfectly fine, and all problems with how to handle the marking has been resolved for centuries.
It's change that is the problem here, and change for no sensible reason.
There's nothing to fix, to improve, to resolve with paper ballots. Nothing, except the pocket books of companies pushing ridiculous solutions.
Most importantly, there might not even be a standard process to follow here - remember this passenger was properly ticketed. There previously was a glitch. The agent probably didn't want to deal with angry passengers (there was a fight between passengers and a Delta agent in the past couple years).
We don't trust the machines because some of us aren't outsourcing their critical thinking faculties. If this person assumed it was a computer glitch that probably means that it happened before and they guessed, probably correctly, that glitches happen more often than people trying to reuse boarding passes
I was wondering exactly this, how is it possible to use a boarding pass twice. The answer is, "the agent assumed it was a glitch".
It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. Many plane accidents happen for a similar reason, the pilots thinking the systems on board are wrong and they're right.
Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more?
If the checking had been on paper, with the agent simply ticking off a list of passengers at the gate, would they have made the same mistake and assumed they got it wrong? What if the list had been ticked off before by somebody else?