A few months back, against my better judgement, I decided to try to help out the DNC voting operations team.
I had read several detailed, independent technical analysis reports that indicated that this election was headed toward a disaster, based on (1) technical and process issues with voting machines, (2) problems with how voter enrollment is managed, and (3) problems with how (1) and (2) systems intercommunicate — as various state IT outfits attempt to (a) maintain distributed CRUD integrity while (b) providing sophisticated security from external hacking and in-house fraud on a (c) 24×7, 99.9% uptime basis.
I never heard back from Tom Perez’ elite team in Washington, this being some outsourced recruitment outfit working on contract.
Maybe they — if my resume ever made it past their auto scanners — thought that someone like me, an ex SVP CTO with over 25 years experience designing, building and running mission critical, large scale financial trading systems on Wall Street, had nothing to contribute to the DNC.
Maybe they were too busy doing other important things to even think about suggesting to Tom that the DNC appoint a data czar who would be responsible for ensuring election result data intergrity and security.
Or maybe the Dems simply have no idea what the fuck they are doing, and are going to be buried by the Republican party in November due to their monumental incompetence, as the Iowa caucus has revealed. If heads do not roll in the next 72 hours as a result of this giant hinterland clusterfuck, then you can take it to the bank that Donald Trump is going to be re-elected as President of the United States.
If the DNC does not appoint an election data czar NOW — a deeply technical, full-stack savvy executive, with hands on product development experience and complete, final say technical authority on a national scale over the Democratic party’s IT election rollout — then they are not IMHO serious about winning in 2020.
If I were that person, my first action today would be to immediately FIRE the secretive, incompetent company named Shadow, Inc., whose fly-by-night, hastily-built, and inadequately tested mobile app was the source of this epic meltdown.
