Quick observation: the vast majority of Democrats with the social connections to feel confident starting this kind of company will be affiliated with candidates who have won previous elections. This centralization is by design: the winner of presidential primary effectively becomes "head of party" and installs their own leadership at the national committee level.
This is true, but it's also part of what's broken in the poli-tech space -- if you're starting a business there, the connections you have matter much more than your experience and/or competence in application design, UX, operations, etc. You don't get customers by building a better product, you get customers by lining up influential people behind you. So the software products that serve this space tend in general to be pretty underwhelming.
This can be classified as a mutated variation of Enterprise Software Syndrome, the disease that makes enterprise software suck so badly.
We work with, spend time with, and collaborate with people we trust. That trust usually comes from repeated, direct, human interaction or as a referral from someone who has that long-built trust.
That applies to the vendors we choose, the babysitters we hire, and the doctors we visit.
Asking someone to choose someone they don't trust is inherently risky, even if it works out.
Yup. This is no different than a bunch of blue collar tradesmen trading references. There's higher dollar amounts involved and it's a different industry but it's the same behavior.
This is true for all business. People don't buy the objectively best product, they buy the product from the people they know best. Until you are capable of changing human nature and purchasing behavior challenging this phenomenon will be an uphill battle.
I dont think "hiring someone who knows the social landscape" for your sales/networking position is a flaw. You really just need to plan for this if you want to start that type of company. A company needs more than just product builders.
Broken is just your judgement. I would rather say that quite objectively, it's just the way the world works, one can play with it or try to change it, but better be sure it's not just human nature.
Buying software services from an ideologically driven consulting firm is the mistake here. The DNC is supposed to be completely neutral in this situation, so to hire former Clinton tech people is a poor decision.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
The DNC provides funding to both state level parties. I can imagine that they may have had some level of influence over which contractor was picked. What's the point of becoming a party insider if you can't use that to get your company contracts later?
This is such a wildly uninformed take. Firstly, Clinton isn’t running this year. Why is hiring people from her campaign “not neutral”? Secondly, every single person in politics has previously worked for a bunch of different campaigns. That’s how political jobs work; campaigns only last a few months so you’re constantly hopping from one role to another. It’s not possible to hire only people who are untainted by prior association with previous campaigns.
Remind me how that worked in the last presidential primary.. I appreciate the aspirational “supposed to” comment but they don’t have a good track record of neutrality. As the problems are never dealt with, I’m not sure why expectations would be different.
> I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale.
And now you see why so many non-Democrats have a fear of them getting elected. If the DNC can't give equal treatment to its own people with whom they disagree, what of the rest of the country for whom they have apparent disdain?
The problem is that there are a limited number of people in the world who have experience dealing with the kinds of problems large-scale political enterprises deal with. Many (maybe even most) of those people are going to have gained that experience by working on campaigns. So if you automatically rule out anyone who's ever worked on a campaign, you're ruling out most of the people who would know how to do the things you want to do.
A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. You don't need to hire a developer with political experience so much as security experience.
Either way, the app broke, so even a shop with "experience" here completely failed at their job.
A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters.
That is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to a disastrous rollout like this. You're applying a brand-new app and process to help with complex rules changes, and now you have a new organizational problem.
As someone who has had skin in the game with keeping political web tools working, this type of thing is terrifying. Nobody should be depending on new, single-use, day-of, tools. You can't test them or train them well enough.
I have to second this. This is real time polling data that has to be counted, most developers have to put a million checks just to make sure they report polling data accurately, forget actually having to count them as actual legal votes that determine real life outcomes (propelling a presidential candidate to the forefront). Yeah, no, keep the junior developers the fuck away from something like this.
How is this "large-scale" -- I think you may be assuming this was a conventional election where everyone has to cast a vote...that's not how it works... n in this case was <2,000... I mean you could have scaled to 2000 with mysql and manage.py runserver...there's no way this issue was about scaling the app...and there's no way they needed an app to begin with.
Another observation: caucuses arguably have only one single advantage over traditional voting and that is making it incredibly hard to commit voter fraud or any type of election stealing. The public nature of the voting and tallying means that there is large group of witnesses to the results. It would take pretty brazen and easily provable fraud for someone to report numbers that didn't match the results that everyone witnessed. That plus Hanlon's razor should be enough for us to require some type of evidence beyond circumstantial connections between political operatives before we accuse someone of nefarious behavior.
> This centralization is by design: the winner of presidential primary effectively becomes "head of party" and installs their own leadership at the national committee level.
That's not really true; the winner of the general election becomes effective head of their party; a primary winner who loses the general generally has less (but significant) influence. Hillary Clinton has less control of the DNC after the 2016 election than before it (she had unusual influence before the election for a number of reasons); the reform eliminating first-ballot superdelegate voting rights was due to influence gained by the Sanders-aligned faction.
