Wednesday, November 7, 2012

CallFire: User Error To Blame For Errant Election Call

Oops. Los Angeles startup CallFire, has been looking to drum up interest in its system in the political sector all year, as the election has ramped up--and finally has, but for the wrong reason. That reason? The errant call in Florida's Pinellas County, which told absentee voters they had until "tomorrow" to turn in their absentee ballots--but really should have been a "today". According to CallFire, the provider of the voice broadcast service, that was due to a "user error", and not the firm's technology. CallFire has been named in widespread reports around election issues encountered during the voting yesterday. A spokesperson for the county had blamed CallFire for queuing up 15,525 calls on Wednesday, instead of issuing those calls immediately. For its part, CallFire said there was "no technical glitch" in the system and no "queue", but instead came from user error, when the user of the system restarted a campaign without updating the verbiage in the message to Pinellas County users. CallFire offers up text messaging, voice broadcast, and other services which can be access either via a user interface or through an application programming interface.

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