December 01, 2006

"Consultant rips into Sequoia's vote wares, election commission"

"Denver's Election Day debacle was caused by custom Sequoia software that was "very poorly designed and fundamentally flawed," a consultant said Wednesday.

"It does not meet or even approach professional standards," said Fred Hessler, of Fujitsu Consulting, in his first report to Mayor John Hickenlooper's task force examining the election mess.

Hessler was reporting on voter registration software that slowed to a crawl and stopped, causing three-hour lines and leading an estimated 18,000 citizens to give up their attempt to cast a ballot.

Hessler said his team had 100 users open the first log-on page of the software, and it slowed when only one person logged on. He said that's because the program started accessing the database with that first page, and it should not.

Users followed standard computer procedure and closed a page by hitting the "x" in the upper right corner, but the program wasn't designed to work that way.

"Ninety percent of users did not exit correctly," he said.

The software failed to close these open sessions even after three hours.

"These are not minor oversights or errors," he said. "This is Programming 101."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at December 1, 2006 08:43 AM