Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

by Jennifer Pahlka

The problem, it turned out, wasn’t with the programming of the site. It was that mail carriers had been compensating for incomplete data for decades. If you own a home and decide to subdivide it into apartments or add an in-law unit, you will go to your city’s building department to get the permits, but you might never officially inform the Postal Service. You’re not asked and you don’t think of it. It’s not a problem for your mail carrier, who gets one packet of all the mail for that address, sees three mailboxes, and simply divides up the letters appropriately. But it means that the USPS residential address database no longer quite corresponds to the ground truth. It’s just that those gaps in the database had never mattered before. The fix was simple. On the page that told people that tests had already been requested for their address, the team quickly added a little note asking anyone who thought this was an error to fill out a short form, and customer service teams reached out to clarify. It increased the burden on this small number of users, and unfortunately these users were disproportionately of lower income. But the Postal Service didn’t just send them the tests—it also updated its database. Less than a month after the launch of the site, almost two-thirds of all households in the US had requested tests, so about two-thirds of the residential address database had been cleaned up. In the subsequent round of free tests, people who got this glitch fixed had no problem...