Why we can’t develop voting software that works
Found on Infoworld on Monday, 10 February 2020
The uproar after the Iowa Democratic Party caucus reporting software failed was a harsh reminder for programmers of how bad things can get. Counting up a few simple votes isn’t as complicated as building an autonomous car, training an AI to recommend movies, or even updating a bank database safely, yet the programmers couldn’t pull this off. One particular damning tweet read, “Hard to believe we put men on the moon.”
The thing is that the comparison to flying to the moon isn’t really fair. Even though guiding the Apollo lander to the moon seems much harder than tabulating a few thousand votes, all of the extra work wrapped around the modern vote tally is what makes it much more complex.
Not to forget, developers get worse. Back then, they really knew what every bit they flipped did, today most just copy&paste some code they found online together and barely manage to get the different chunks working together.