Voting directions by SMS lead nowhere

WITH GREAT fanfare, the government of Argentina announced a new system to let people find out their voting places over SMS in addition to the Web. There's a problem, however, and it's that the judiciary web server seems to have crashed, making the SMS gateway unable to fetch results. The telcos who bill for the SMS messages are surely laughing all the way to the bank.

The October 28 presidential elections in this South American country are just around the corner. While in Blighty people receive a poll card on the mail weeks before the election letting them know what polling station to go in order to cast their vote, that idea has apparently never crossed the mind of election organisers in Argentina. Not that we've had that many elections in the last 100 years, for that matter, with military coups being a shameful national sport during the 20th century.

In any case, it is the job of the citizen to find out where he or she must cast his or her vote, as the government just compiles the voters list and matches people on the list with voting stations -usually in the nearest school to the person's registered address. Most people vote in the same location for years, but since population grows and schools are sometimes closed, relocated and new schools open, there's a small chance that your voting place might have changed, so it's wise to find out before the election day.

Once upon a time, the backwards method of fixed or mobile locations with paper lists was used. Then came political parties which used to have a full blown desktop IBM PC sitting under an umbrella in some sidewalk corners, letting passers-by lookup their voting place in the database - usually a DOS application reading data from a CD-ROM.

Since the arrival of the Interweb, the government tried with various degrees of success to let people lookup their voting place using a web browser. It worked, most of the time, yet the Electoral Justice's web site -like most things on the judiciary branch in this country- struggled to keep with demand and eventually collapsed under the weight of multiple requests.

never knew the kind of server used, but under the strain of the heavy load, it surely felt like it was a 100 MHz Pentium I connected over dial-up. However that didn't prevent this scribbler to finding his voting place on all previous elections.

Except this time. Some people I know visited the electoral justice web site and got their information just fine. I tried on Friday night and couldn't reach the site. The government has been trumpeting all week a new method to find out this information also by SMS. You send a message from your mobile to a given 6-digit number, containing the word "voto" (vote) followed by a space and your national ID card number, and you're done. You're supposed to get back a message -a few minutes later the adverts warn- with the information.

I tried the SMS approach yesterday night. I immediately got a message saying the syntax was wrong, as I forgot to add my gender after the ID#. So the SMS gateway was working!. I sent another one with the syntax fixed. This time... nothing. An hour later, I sent it again... I still haven't received my voting information. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of surely annoyed users of the service, and you get the idea that the telcos who bill for all those SMS messages must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Just a coincidence: Telefonica bills for the SMSs - but does it also provide the link to the dead web server?

So at 3:42 am, in the middle of the night, I tried the Judiciary's web site - surely the web server should not be overloaded at near 4:00 in the morning. Surprise: it was unreachable -and it still is at the time of this writing. Now who provides the connectivity to the judiciary web site? I did a traceroute and what company appears just before the link goes down?.Telefonica!. The local loop monopoly and one of the companies who profits from people sending the SMS messages repeatedly when/if they get no replies.

As of 9:15am Saturday morning time the web server is still not replying to requests and I have not received any SMS replies. The server is unreacheable from many routes -I even tried from a U.S. based shell.

I don't want to imply any wrongdoing by anyone... but it sounds to me as if they mounted a SMS gateway that interfaces to an already overloaded server -surely the one that was collapsing under the judiciary web server load-. Also, making the mobile operators profit from all those SMSs and then seeing the service fall is surely a win-win situation for those operators, and an annoyance for us the voters.

Will those of us who sent SMSs repeatedly get an apology and our money back?. I think it's time to go back to the 80286 IBM PCs under an umbrella with an operator sitting in select street corners. µ