Remember that time Mitt Romney bought his campaign a massive IT system that completely broke down and failed utterly, because they gave all the money to their mates’ outsourcing company and did everything on the cheap, and nobody would take any responsibility for it? Now consider the possibilities of getting Grant Shapps to procure a major computer system. He’s a digital entrepreneur, after all. Both of him.
Thirdly, there’s the question of campaign technology. VoteSource has arrived, Merlin is mercifully on its way out, and I gather that after its latest update many of the new system’s early teething problems have been solved. However, it’s far from ideal to receive and have to adapt to a whole new platform so shortly before polling day. Grant Shapps would, I’m sure, have introduced it earlier had he been appointed Party Chairman earlier, and previous Party Chairmen should have acted on it years ago, but the practical impact remains the same regardless of intentions. Most associations still only have a small number of people trained in using VoteSource, while recent weeks have been spent battling with and then ironing out problems (either of the system or of its users’ abilities or both).
O HAI. It looks like Flipper’s trying to tell us something. Shapps decided to cut over to a completely new platform? After the campaign started? This could be fun. You’ve got to love the “if only the Tsar knew!” bit where they say the solution would obviously have been even more Shapps.
That said I did have an exciting technology moment on the doorstep the other weekend when our voter ID database claimed I was about to canvass probably the only black, cockney Plaid Cymru voter in London. Well, as the board runner said, anything’s possible, but the returns use a one-letter code for most things and then get OCRd, so it’s quite possible that a slightly sloppy character going through the slightly chancy OCR process gives you a weird data point.
She’s going to vote Labour.
Let me:
I gather
Management tell me
that after its latest update
that a whole pile of fixes have been applied, and
many of
some of
the new system’s early teething problems
that thing where the new system didn’t work
have been solved
seems to have gone away, so that’s good
If Shapps turns out to be the Tories’ Dan Centinello that will be the definition of poetic justice.
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