When Open Government Gets a Glitch
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, November 4 2010
The usual rule of thumb is that midterm elections have a lower turnout than election years where Americans get to choose their next president because fewer people care. But in California this year, there was enough interest to crash the state's election-returns website.
The resulting back-and-forth is as much an interesting example of how much reliance is placed on imperfect technology as it is an example of how open the decision-makers involved are to discussing the results.
Writing on GovLoop (as well as apparently forwarding the information along to the Los Angeles Times), California Secretary of State Debra Bowen explained Wednesday that Rackspace, the state's web hosting provider, didn't provide enough computing power in a "cloud computing" solution the state had procured to handle traffic from people wanting access to election results. Many Californians were undoubtedly eager to know the results of their high-profile gubernatorial race, in which once and future Gov. Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay.
"I'm not read up on how the State of California is using 'the cloud,' but it's sure giving it a bad rap with this one," wrote GovLoop blogger and Gov 2.0 advocate Adriel Hampton, later adding, "This issue sure highlights how vacuous it can be to use the term 'cloud' when referring to many different types of data center structures."
Bowen responded by passing along the apology she had received from Rackspace, in which the vendor assumed responsibility for the failure:
I'm using "cloud" as in "cloud." We were using Rackspace, which has now issued a formal apology. Here's the text (I'll post the pdf tomorrow so people have the original document):
"We at Rackspace wish to apologize to the Secretary of State and the people of California for the mistakes we made which prevented results of the Nov. 2 election from being reported in a timely manner.
Officials in the California Secretary of State's office called Rackspace well before the election and asked what measures would be needed to handle the spike in website traffic that they expected on Election Day.
We have the equipment and experience to handle such traffic spikes, and told them so. But we did not comprehend the extremely high volume of traffic that was expected, and we failed to deploy the appropriate resources. We regret this error, and we apologize for it.
We are taking steps to see that it doesn't happen again, to any of our customers. We are also refunding to the Secretary of State all charges for services related to this incident."