Did Siri cost Biden or Trump some votes?

Over the years we have knocked Applefor its failure to make Siri as good and accurate a digital helper as Google Assistant is. Siri has been known to make the occasional blunder. For example, let’s say that last weekend you had forgotten when Election Day was. So you turned to  Siri. According to TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney, iPhone users were told by their virtual assistant that Election Day was scheduled for November 8th. The problem with that answer is that it is wrong. Very wrong. Election Day was November 3rd  so if you were relying on Siri’s response to remind you when to visit your polling place, you would have arrived five days too late missing your opportunity to vote for president.

This is not the first time that the iPhone told users the wrong information about time and date. For years, the idea of Daylight Saving Time continued to elude the grasp of iOS. One year, instead of moving iPhone clocks ahead an hour, it moved the clocks back an hour instead which really helped iPhone users get their day off to a very poor start.

The interesting part of Siri’s most recent screw up is that November 8th was the date of the last U.S. presidential election back in 2016. On the other hand, November 8th 2022 will be when the U.S. holds its next major election, the mid-terms. Either way, Siri’s response was wrong and we wouldn’t vote for either one.

While only the most clueless would have ended up missing election day because of Siri’s response, well, such clueless people do exist. Luckily, the number of those who listened to Siri was probably not large enough for its faux pas to impact the election results.

So here’s a word to the wise. If you ask Siri for the date of an upcoming event that you must attend, it might behoove you to confirm the answer with another source even if that goes against the reason for Siri’s existence in the first place. Like any digital assistant, Siri is only as good as the data bank it gets its information from.