Primary Rashomon

While most of the rest of the coun­ty focus­es on the vote counts tonight, I’m up late with a few fel­low crew-mem­bers mak­ing sure that the web­site runs smooth­ly and does­n’t crash. Look­ing at the same page but see­ing dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Real­ly, I’m the least crit­i­cal night-owl, I just have to make con­tent updates if request­ed. The devel­op­er and net­work engi­neer are the real impor­tant ones. The site was real­ly get­ting pound­ed at 7:30 when I post­ed the View Results block on the BOE home page, even on our load-bal­anced blades, but one of the engi­neers turned on the sec­ond core on each serv­er and page load-time decreased by 2000%.

The web group did exten­sive test­ing, grab­bing only the tables and rows from the data­base that we need­ed, opti­mized the index­ing of the data and cached it in such a way that the servers would­n’t get too steamed. Time Warn­er final­ly got around to giv­ing us our fat band­width too; with­out all of that every­thing prob­a­bly would have been crushed by about 7:45, since we’re toss­ing out much more than we used to.

Vot­ing this morn­ing went fine; I’ve vot­ed punch bal­lots, opti­cal scan, and elec­tron­ic vot­ing now, and have nev­er had a prob­lem. It did seem that the opti­cal scan pro­ce­dures were a bit need­less­ly com­pli­cat­ed; weird card­board sleeves, con­tra­dic­to­ry tabs and bal­lot box­es, var­i­ous checks and dou­ble-checks and “take this lit­tle card to that per­son who will give you anoth­er card to take to that per­son” Brazi­lesque red-tape, but I sup­pose that’s the inevitable bureau­crat­ic response to the kind of crap­tac­u­lar high-pro­file elec­tion dis­as­ter­ba­cles that have been hap­pen­ing around the coun­try for the last decade.

It’ll nev­er hap­pen, but I think fed­er­al elec­tion days should be nation­al hol­i­days to encour­age more folks with 9–5s to par­tic­i­pate as poll work­ers. It’d sure take a load off of the ancient among us, even if the only addi­tion­al peo­ple avail­able would be those in bank­ing, gov­ern­ment and edu­ca­tion.

Awe­some, I just got the go-ahead to catch some shut-eye. Since I’m at home and con­nect­ed to work via VPN that’s good news. Now I just have to hope for no 3am phone calls.