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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

This thread is full of the dumbest takes imaginable.

There are no conflicts of interest beyond those in niche markets anywhere. There are a finite number of people and companies serving in this space. Multiple campaigns use the same contractors, and those contractors will advise campaigns. The conflict of interest is known and the key thing is declaring them, siloing information, and policing behavior. This happens in every startup board where a customer participates in a funding round [and gets board seats].

Also, what was DHS going to do here? This is a private organization doing a [private] caucus in a single state. We've all read the mythical man month. DHS should focus on securing the national elections, which there is ample evidence they are behind on.

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Really? You're going to call out the entire rest of this thread, many posts with links to back up credible claims being made, and go with "There are a finite number of people and companies serving in this space"?

Do you honestly believe that there isn't a company that could have made the app without direct financial ties to one candidate? There are certainly a number of developers who fit that description in this very thread.

There are plenty of credible and factual claims being made here, they are just not material. Just because someone has a financial relationship doesn't mean their is malfeasance. That's why all sorts of legal documents have conflict disclosures. That's why their are legal consequences for not disclosing conflicts. A conflict is not a de facto problem, acting on that conflict is and I see no reason to believe that happened here. I don't see anyone in the Democratic party that benefits from this.

There are a million companies that could have written this app. I could have written this app. The reason I didn't is that I don't target this market, don't have domain expertise in how caucuses are run [at the level of writing an app to administer one], and have no prior work to reference in the space. I have no doubt that's the reason the vendor was selected.

I think the fact that one of the people on the ballot also paid a bunch of money to the maker of the voting software is noteworthy and an obvious conflict of interest. And I think pretending that this conflict of interest is unavoidable is intellectually dishonest.

Potential conflict of interest. Being paid for one service and being paid for another is not a conflict of interest. It's just plain how business and politics works. The potential conflict of interest comes in if the company has any incentive to sabotage one project because they could make more money off of another.

Here transparency is our resource to investigate whether these accusations are true. For instance, if there are monies not reported correctly or if there is some discrepancy between services provided and service rendered, then we would have evidence of a conflict of interest.

Are you actually saying the DHS couldn't have ran some script kiddie attacks to see if it was vulnerable to the most trivial of interference, which it was? Or is it just important to you for people to ignore this colossal fuck up?

Do you know if nobody did a basic pentesting with metasploit or not, or some other security audit? Was that actually the root cause of the problem? From the actual article

"Such a test from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would have focused on security and not the performance issue that Wolf said was most likely responsible for the failure. Still, Wolf said this was a “concerning event” given the amount of scrutiny around elections security after Russians targeted the 2016 presidential election.

“We don’t see any malicious cyber activity going on,” Wolf said. “No one hacked into it -- so this is more of a stress or load issue as well as a reporting issue that we’re seeing in Iowa.”"

I think they had a buggy app collecting caucus votes and I see people claiming it's some kind of vast conspiracy without any evidence. With all the people (metaphorically) tripping over their d*s around the world, it seems odd what kind of coverage this is getting. Particularly since (referencing my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239685) a much more egregious issue happened in the same state's caucuses 2012 (not to mention the 2016 NV Democratic party screw up). The reasonable conclusion is caucuses are a mess and should be scrapped (which both parties are gradually doing).

There are no federal elections in the United States. All elections, including for selecting federal officers, are run at the local level.

> This thread is full of the dumbest takes imaginable.

Such as yours.

> Also, what was DHS going to do here?

Test the app, as they offered.

> This is a private organization doing a [private] caucus in a single state

...So what? How is that a good reason to not care about it?

> DHS should focus on securing the national elections

The national elections are run by the states too. That's how elections work, they are decentralized..

The director of the DHS said that their testing would not have caught this issue. They are quoted as such in the article referenced in this submission (and I quote their statement here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239826).

"So what? How is that a good reason to not care about it?" Yes.

"The national elections are run by the states too. That's how elections work, they are decentralized.." Yes, and the FBI, DHS, and a number of federal agencies are consulted and have resources devoted to it. DHS has a webpage describing their involvement https://www.dhs.gov/topic/election-security.

> How is that a good reason to not care about it?" Yes.

What an excellent answer.

I don't know what you want. We disagree. I don't think the DHS needs to be involved in party primaries of any party.

> I don't know what you want.

It wasn't a yes or no question...

The Iowa caucus has a huge effect on the elections. Multiple employees of this shadow company worked directly for Hillary's campaign:

https://mobile.twitter.com/heterodoxious/status/122458084831...

Hillary was the Democratic party nominee in the general election. Everyone in the Democratic party technical consultancy world worked for her in 2016. Just pointing this out without context is useless. How does that compare to the Democratic party in 2008, or the Republican party in 2016?

> Everyone in the Democratic party technical consultancy world worked for her in 2016.

Well, if they worked on the Presidential general election at all, which obviously not everyone in that space did.

It's quite concerning that the CTO/chief architect spelled software with a "d".

Also loving the profile pic that says "profile photos enable unconscious bias. I code with my brain, not my face."

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