originallly posted by ranger78
Fundamentally, there is a huge hole in State Department’s explanation. They are claiming that
a) some in-house programmer approached them saying that he wanted to improve an algorithm that worked perfectly fine in all previous years, but otherwise there was no particular reason to do it;
b) they did not notice the mistake until after they posted the results (ie 6 months after the draw)
c) most interestingly, according to AP, nobody was disciplined.
So, do they really want me to believe that it’s OK to make the staff sift through 100,000 selected candidates (and pay them salary for 6 months), based on incorrectly selected data? I mean, we are all humans, and we can make errors, but what is completely unacceptable is that there was no quality control performed, even after the change of algorithm.
This check would have taken them just a couple of minutes, using the most basic of statistical packages (heck, one can do it in Excel). All that is required is to build a simple histogram by the selection date, and any pattern would have been obvious (especially a pattern where 90% were selected during the first 2 days). Yet this was not done, and “nobody was disciplined”. Even putting aside the fate of 22,000 foreigners (American taxpayers don’t care about them), what about the monumental waste of resources? Why is nobody paying for this negligence?
I have a simple theory explaining this. The State Department knew all along about the algorithm (first, randomly select 2 days, then select the majority of applicants from those 2 days) . They were fine with it all along. Perhaps the algorithm was also used in previous years, too (hence the rumors there were similar patterns in the past). What was different this year is that the results were announced on the first day, and quite a few naive winners shared this information on internet forums. In turn, some unscrupulous people who noticed this pattern started to bombard the Department with threats of suing them for doing a non-random lottery. The Department caved in, and the 22000 were made the scapegoats.
Yea, anything could happen. But remember Judges do judge based on facts available before it. All facts available before DV 2012 22k is mis-information, un fairness etc but the DOS law requires that Diversity Immigrant visas be made available through a strictly random process. A computer programming error resulted in a selection that was not truly random.
So i think Judges can’t judge wrongfully on what is against the law that established what is being deliberated upon...The will just ask DOS to follow the right path.
There’s is no emotion in a law court but facts. (DV 2012 22,000 TEARS)