A Real Live Caucus-Race in Iowa

In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Alice falls into a pool of her own tears (don't ask) and eventually makes her way to shore amid a crowd of animals.  One of them, a bird called a Dodo (which was extinct long before Carroll published his work in 1865) suggested that they all dry out by running a caucus-race.  The Dodo marked out an irregular course, and everyone "began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over."  The ensuing chaos was echoed in Democratic politics last week.

Last Monday, Feb. 3, the Iowa Democratic Party inadvertently staged a caucus-race of its own when precinct leaders in the 1,700 or so Democratic caucus sites tried to use a new smartphone app to report their results to headquarters.  To make a long and nail-biting night short, the app failed, and it took another day or longer before the nation learned the results of the very first official 2020 party selection process for the Democratic nominee.

Numerous analysts and commentators have opined on what went wrong and why, and as I'm no software expert, I will take their word that the cause was a combination of factors:  a programming flaw that led to serious inaccuracies in the transmitted data; a failure to test the app thoroughly before deploying it; and a user-hostile interface that required chairpersons to download auxiliary apps and/or change obscure phone settings to get it to work.  In view of the fact that the people using the app were not software experts, but volunteers from many walks of life, it's not surprising in retrospect that something went wrong.

One commentator I read remarked that sometimes the old-fashioned telephone is better than a newfangled app, noting that the Associated Press election-night results that serve as the national gold standard for election news are still reported by human beings over the telephone to a central location, where they are collated and disseminated to news outlets.  When it became clear that the app wasn't working, the Iowa precinct chairs resorted to phoning, but the headquarters phone bank was not prepared for such an onslaught of calls, and most callers just got a busy signal.

At no time were the actual vote tallies at risk of being lost.  The whole problem was one of communication, and not just on the night of the caucuses.  Reports indicate that the app was developed in haste and without adequate testing.  Its deployment was marked by insufficient training of volunteers, many of whom weren't able to get the thing to run on their phones easily even after they followed the instructions.  As a result, the very leading edge of what will be a long and twisting road for the Democratic candidates for nomination from here to the national election night next November was blunted by needless confusion and delay.

Software engineering as a discipline is one of the younger divisions of engineering, and in contrast to the older fields such as civil and mechanical engineering, traditions and standards for it are fairly new and still in a state of flux.  It is still a discipline in which people without college degrees can make viable careers, as many a high-school nerd who fell in love with coding can attest.  And this is not to say that a college degree is a guarantee of professional integrity.  The most such a degree can do is expose the student to a standard set of educational experiences that include a warning about the wider implications of what software engineers do, and how to take responsibility for the potential for failure that any act of programming entails.

In the absence of any detailed information about the firm that developed the failed app, all we can do is look at the results.  Unlike product rollouts, election and caucus dates are firmly entrenched in the calendar.  It looks like whoever had the bright idea to get an app developed for this purpose either didn't have the idea soon enough, or wasn't able to get the process rolling until just a few months before it had to be used. 

One of the reasons I'm in academia rather than industry is the fact that I don't work that well under time pressure.  Other people, including some software developers, thrive on it, and if so that's fine for them.  But there are limits to any speedup of work, and even if the software itself had been flawless, the time remaining between when the developers said it was ready to be deployed and the caucus date itself may not have been long enough to allow for adequate training.  It's difficult to get volunteers together for a purely auxiliary thing like software training.  It begins to sound too much like a job.  So that may be one reason that training was neglected.

And when the full magnitude of the disaster became obvious, there was evidently no Plan B in place.  I don't know how much it would have cost for the headquarters to have hired enough phone-answerers to handle telephoned-in results just in case the app didn't work, but it would have been money well spent.  The rule that ocean-going vessels must have enough lifeboats for everybody wasn't adopted until after the Titanic sank with all the people who couldn't get on the inadequate number of lifeboats.  If your primary system fails, a secondary system that works only halfway isn't much better than no system at all. 

In the event, the absence of results enabled all the candidates to claim victory for a while that night, just as at the end of Alice's Caucus-Race, the Dodo said, "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes."  The losers last Monday, unfortunately, were not only the candidates who came in behind the eventual winner, but everybody who wanted to know the results right away.

Sources:  I referred to a New York Times opinion piece by Charlie Warzel at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/opinion/iowa-caucus-app.html and articles at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/iowa-caucus-app-was-rushed-flawed-beginning-experts-say-n1131216 and https://gritdaily.com/iowa-caucus-tech-disaster/.  I thank Michael Cook of Mercatornet.com for suggesting this topic and drawing my attention to the Times piece.

Yik Yak—Yuck

In discussions about the ethics of technology, every now and then you hear something like the following argument:  "Technology is neutral—it's just people who are good or bad."  Or take the bumper sticker favored by some members of the National Rifle Association:  "Guns don't kill people—people do."  While there is a measure of truth in this idea, it applies better to some technologies than to others.  It doesn't make much sense to apply it to the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill Jews at Auschwitz, for instance.  So those who use this argument as a blanket excuse for opposing the regulation or curtailment of a certain technology should know that their case is not airtight, and needs to be considered with regard to the circumstances in which the technology is typically used.  This is especially true of the new smart-phone app called Yik Yak.

It sounds harmless enough at first.  You can buy it at the Apple iTunes store and other places, and it runs on iOS or Android phones.  It's sort of like Twitter with a 200-character limit.  But there are two main differences.  One, it is limited to communicating within a 1.5-mile radius (by a tie-in with your phone's GPS system).  Two, all posts are anonymous—no passwords, no usernames, and no way to tell who posted what.  Yik Yak is the digital equivalent of a wall waiting to be covered with graffiti.  And as you might expect, the average level of messages on Yik Yak appears to be pretty much what you'd find scribbled on a bathroom wall. 

The way I found out about Yik Yak wasn't by buying it and trying it out.  (My clamshell phone is so old it barely manages texts.)  I happened to pick up a copy of the University Star, the student paper at Texas State University, and read an editorial by a journalism major urging students not to do drugs.  And by the way, he said, it's so easy now—all you have to do is get on Yik Yak and start asking around, and presto—here comes the pusher, or dealer, or whatever they call the scumbag these days who sells illegal drugs. 

Normally I don't read editorials in the student paper, because I typically disagree with 95% of whatever they say.  But here was a man-bites-dog story—a student saying that Yik Yak was leading fellow students astray.

That's not all.  Although Yik Yak is supposed to be limited to those 17 and older, the app simply asks you to certify your age.  Anybody old enough to spell and use a smart phone can register, and nowadays that means grade-schoolers.  The anonymity of the app is an open invitation to bullying, sexual-themed texts, and bomb threats.  One Long Island teen found out the hard way that the purported anonymity of Yik Yak has a limit.  He posted a bomb threat, the cops presumably got a warrant and went to Yik Yak, and the company fingered their unhappy customer, who is now facing a possible jail sentence.  So much for truth in advertising.  The firm does have some legal boilerplate on their website to the effect that the only way they will break anonymity is if a duly authorized government entity asks them to.  But that can certainly happen.

Nevertheless, a lot of bad stuff can and does go on before the police have to get involved.  A Google search turns up numerous cases of cyber-bullying aided by Yik Yak.  If five or more people within your range vote your posts down, you disappear—but how often is that likely to happen?  Mob psychology dictates against it.  Asking a mob to transform itself into a deliberative democracy and vote bad actors off the air is like putting a pound of hamburger in front of a pack of hungry dogs and asking them to vote about fasting for Lent. 

I don't often unequivocally condemn a particular technology, but Yik Yak is getting my Bonehead-App-Of-The-Year award, which I just came up with.  Putting a way of posting anonymous comments in the hands of teenagers is simply asking for trouble.  There are places for anonymity—the ballot box, for instance.  But voting is something we want to encourage.  Buying drugs, making sexual and other kinds of insults, and threatening mass destruction are things that we want to discourage—I hope there is still enough left of the tatters of Judeo-Christian civilization in U. S. culture to form a consensus on that.  And ever since the app came out last year, the firm has evidently been engaged in various types of damage control—posting warnings about misuse on their website and discouraging users from the very types of behavior that drive the app's popularity. 

I've run across this kind of insidious fraud before—websites that sell ready-made essays and homework solutions to students and warn that "these documents are for reference only."  Corporations are increasingly immune to moral arguments and tend to respond only to threats of legal action, either by civil lawsuits or by criminal-law regulation.  With the heightened sensitivity we have these days to the problem of bullying, it would not surprise me if a clever lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children have been abused by means of Yik Yak.  Failing that, I would hope that some regulatory agency—the FCC comes to mind—would step in to tell Yik Yak either to change their rules radically or get lost.  In today's deregulated political atmosphere, the latter is unlikely, and the lawsuit route requires the prospect of a large financial settlement to get enough high-dollar lawyers motivated.  Unfortunately, Yik Yak is a small startup with only a few million dollars of funding, and so the lawsuit might have to wait till a big company like Google swallows it up. 

But Google's code of ethics—"Don't be evil"—would presumably make them hesitate before getting mixed up in a technology that panders so easily to the worse angels—in other words, devils—of our nature.  So let's hope that Yik Yak either gets buried under a pile of lawsuits and is never heard from again, or even better, the people in charge of it realize that they've created a monster, and drive a digital stake through its heart.

Sources:  The editorial about drug use and Yik Yak I read was written by Rivers Wright and posted on the University Star website at http://star.txstate.edu/node/2817.  I referred to articles on Yik Yak from several news sources.  The story of the Long Island teenager was carried by WPIX-TV, New York City, on their website at 

http://pix11.com/2014/09/16/li-teen-now-behind-bars-learns-that-yik-yak-is-not-anonymous-after-all/.  Internet security expert Tim Woda warns parents about Yik Yak at the website http://resources.uknowkids.com/blog/why-yik-yak-is-the-most-dangerous-app-you-have-never-heard-of.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Yik Yak and Auschwitz.