[captain_dave]

If they understood the program logic then they could rewrite the program in another language. Of course, if they could understand logic they wouldn't be democrats, or working in state gov'ment.

[fuzzylogic]

It wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t understand that the hard part is knowing the application logic and architecture. They probably think there’s a quick fix.

Maybe the system it’s running on could run in a virtual machine and scale it with multiple instances on modern servers?

If not they’ll probably have to choose between a time consuming (expensive) fix to the existing system (for somebody to learn it all, with no promises) and rewriting it.

I’m sure the media will jump on this as “should’ve seen this coming!” </s>