Make the technology easy to use, or lose people, lose elections, lose money, and lose your shit.
E-TRADE understands.
This is the kind of customer-focused copy I can get behind:
You should be mad that they gave this guy a promotion.
You should be made at forced camaraderie.
You should be mad at tech that makes things worse.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the copy above is a description of last night’s vote-counting fiasco in Iowa.
The Iowa Example—A Harbinger of Failures to Come?
The E-TRADE ad (featured above) popped up on my radar this morning, and I was intrigued and surprised by the ad’s newfound relevance.
According to Wired, “All software has bugs, but a flaw in the core functionality—reporting data—is a major failure.”
Monday night’s debacle underscores the stakes of debuting new technology in elections and the inherent risks of layering more tech into systems to solve problems rather than looking for their root cause.
Ben Adida, executive director VotingWorks, a nonprofit maker of voting machines, says, “when we do introduce technology in the foundational layer of our democracy, it should be broadly vetted, load tested, security reviewed, and open source.”
None of which appears to have happened in Iowa.
