The Annoying Gap Between Theory…and Practice

My favorite podcast is This American Life, a weekly radio show where they choose a theme and then find a handful of stories from anyone around the country that fit under that theme. I cannot recommend this podcast enough – it’s streamable on any podcast app, or if that doesn’t work for you they have all of their episodes available on their website. They have almost 800 episodes available and every one of them is worth a listen!

Anyway, today I listened to episode #250, titled “The Annoying Gap Between Theory… and Practice,” whose theme is pretty easy to guess. There are three acts in this episode that all have something to do with a theory or an idea, and how that contrasts with the real-life application of whatever that is. To be honest, I found the second act a little boring and the third a little sad, but the first act is pretty relevant to our class and what I wanted to share.

Titled “Rock, Paper, Computer,” Jack Hitt’s story (aired in 2003) walks us through how there are these brand-new touchscreen voting machines run by computers, that have taken over how people vote in elections. Jim March, a lobbyist in California, caught on to a major issue with letting computers control the polls. The main manufacturer of these machines, Diebold, accidentally left its voting software on its website, available for anyone to download. If you understood how to, you could’ve easily gone into the company’s software and tampered with the voting counts, and completely changed the outcome of an election. On the show, March actually walks Hitt through this process and they were able to mess with the numbers for a past election within the software. In essence, this poorly developed software was tracking local elections for months, and pretty much anyone who had a PC and the know-how could skew the results of any election they wanted to. Better yet, Hitt finds that not one but two companies that sold this software to the government had, at some point, leaked their programs so that the public had access to it. Obviously, since 2003, online polling systems have improved dramatically, but this is still a great example of how sometimes large companies don’t think everything through.

Another thing I found funny was towards the end of the episode when Hitt asks Rebecca Mercuri about her opinion on the digital voting systems. She responds that “this idea that we need to computerize everything and get away from paper is in no other place than with voting machines,” so why can’t they just stick with paper? Needless to say, we’ve come a long way in “computerizing” things since 2003…