[anigbrowl]

Well, think this out a bit farther. Let's say the SNAFU coefficient of a piece of software is 5%. If you're using the software to manage your election campaign, you lose 5% of your digital premium (over traditional electioneering using posters and TV commercials and other one-size-fits-all mass communication media), most of whom will presumably vote for The Other Candidate - that's bad, but you can just as easily lose the same or larger with a careless remark (eg Mitt Romney's casual dismissal of 47% of the electorate as 'takers' at the last election which ended up alienating an awful lot of swing voters even though he was obviously pandering to his audience of wealthy donors at the time he said that).

But put that in the government, and you're potentially disenfranchising 5% of the citizenry which is not only politically foolish but quite likely illegal, given constitutional requirements about equal treatment and so forth. If you have to provide universal service of some kind, then your marginal costs go way up. Suppose 99% correctness were the acceptable standard, such that Social Security, Medicare, VA etc. could just ditch that 1% of claimants that caused the most administrative problems; the administrative savings would probably be far more than 1%, I'm guessing more like 10-15% because once the administrative burden of dealing with a given citizen rose above 1 or 2 standard deviations you could just dump them from the system and cut your losses.