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Analysis: Reforming Political Technology
Our system for electing presidents takes too long, has grown outrageously expensive, and remains technologically primitive. Most ironic of all, the country that helped give birth to the Net administers its political system in an inconvenient, mish-mashed network of ancient and inconvenient systems, confusing methodology and out-of-touch bureaucracies, all right out of the 18th century.
That means it's time to begin moving towards a digital voting system. New electoral technologies don't have to be -- shouldn't be -- rammed down anybody's throat. People who don't want to drive long distances, ponder complex ballots or wait in long lines shouldn't have to. Those who want to use the Net to register and vote ought to be able to do so; those who prefer the current system could keep on using it. Inevitably, the country and it's political processes will become fully wired, as they should be. Science and technology -- however far from infallible -- could also help address some of the other problems surfacing in last week's election fiasco.
Our political media has suddenly discovered voting procedures, and the challenges that have long faced the average voter. We are hearing about poorly-designed ballots, suspicious tabulation delays, endless lines, possible vote fraud. And that's just out of Palm Beach County in Florida, one of the richest communities in the nation. Imagine the potential scandals and sloppiness still lying uncovered in the rest of the country.
It's easy to be cyncical about votes from Chicago cemeteries, but the primary problem may not be political corruption, but technological incompetence. From local municipalities to state legistrators, government has lagged way behind the rest of the country and private industry when it comes to using digital technology to gather and tabulate information. All kinds of institutions, from retailers to universities, can gather certain kinds of information rapidly with at least passable accuracy. Networked digital systems are far from flawless, but they're far more highly evolved than our lumbering electoral process.
It's time -- past time -- to start considering national online registration, voting and tabulation. For safety and accuracy as well as cost, new technologies can be backed up by software, paper and human beings, in much the same way companies like Amazon, L.L. Bean, or for that matter, Microsoft, deal with consumers and online ordering, and double-check identities to confirm purchase and identity.
In an odd way, this election debacle is about voting theory and primitive balloting systems as well as politics. Even the sophisticated predictive polling operations hired by the networks broke down under the strain of a voting operation out of Jefferson's time, not ours.
As badly as we may need campaign finance reform to keep corporate money from polluting politics, we may need technological reform even more. Those punch-a-hole ballots in Florida are ludicrous (19,000 people were disqualified in Broward County alone because they filled out their ballots improperty), and anyone involved in politics knows hundreds of stories all over the country that are as or more horrifying. There are no uniform standards or procedures for collecting and tabulating votes. It's astounding to track reported voting precincts online on sites like Votes.com and Cnn.com, only to be reminded they are dependent on ancient and unreliable tabulation systems in many parts of the country, in this supposed Information Age. Where's that bridge to the 21st century when you need it? If he ends up winning, maybe the Net's Daddy will remember how he almost lost it.
Shouldn't Americans be able to register from their computers at home or work, as well as at government agencies, post offices and other public facilities? With ISPs and now as cheap as cable television service (which reaches the vast majority of Americans), there would be almost no reason not to vote, and tens of millions of citizens could begin participating in the political system. Polling places could be computerized, machines made available to those who can't afford or don't want home computers (much as voting booths are). The results could be tabulated, stored and archived instantly, replacing a patchwork system of paper, punch, machine, computer and mail balloting.
Registrars could e-mail or snail-mail confirmation of registration, and of voting, in the same way many online commercial sites confirm that orders have been placed. If Amazon can do it, can't the federal government?
There are serious about digital politics and online voting, and plenty of technical problems. One of the biggest would be political zealots, crackers and vandals, people breaking into a political system for fun or for uglier motives. It would definitely happen. But hacking a federal election is different from breaking into Microsoft or the New York Yankees' website. Tampering with elections is a felony with serious jail time. There are serious design issues relating to ballots, bond issues and referendums. Aside from that, only about half of the country is yet wired. Millions of people don't yet have computers or know how to use them.
Possibilities of fraud also exist in any system, including the present one. But perhaps voting records could be cross-checked by independent polling entities, or even by official spot-surveys. If irregularities surfaced, officials would investigate.
The system doesn't have to be completely digital, and can be backstopped in various ways . Voters could receive paper registration and voting receipts, either at the polls or by mail. Human beings could spot-check voting patterns, as software programs check for fraud. Teams of programmers and techs could be trained to monitor the system. Computers could randomly check for fraud a lot quicker than elderly volunteers screening neighborhood address lists.
Naturally, there are plenty of questions about e-voting reform. We might examine the experiences of other countries where digital voting technology works, as in some of the Scandanavian or South American countries, who have been experimenting with it for years.
There are also privacy and authentication issues. In many states, citizens simply affirm their identities in order to register. Digital registrants may need passwords, social security numbers, addresses or pseudonyms to protect their voting choices, techniques most Netizens use when they buy things online or access their local paper's Web version. We may need other means of assuring phobic voters that they aren't being monitored improperly. But the truth is, evil-doers could get their hands on paper or machine ballots now if they really wanted to. It's a serious felony, as would be the case with e-voting.
Most Americans have voluntarily agreed to give up some measure of privacy for retailing convenience. Will they be willing to take some risks to use technology to reform voting? Or should citizens be given a choice of digital and paper voting? As more and more functions, from filing for divorce to renewing licenses, become digitized, online voting and registration seem more feasible. Web-page design and architecture has evolved to the point where election choices might be clearer than on those Palm Beach or other confusing ballots. Write-in votes and absentee ballots can also be transmitted online or, when computers aren't available, by paper or e-mail. A new system doesn't have to be absolute. It can simply take advance of new technology to organize a process that seems tailor-made for the Net, which is all about moving point-to-point information quickly.
There's no question there's potential for mistakes and abuse, for manifold technical difficulties. But that possibility clearly exists now, as "Decision 2000" showed, or in any system devised by human beings. Certainly digital polling would work better than those Palm Beach ballot cards.
Beyond the nuts and bolts of counting votes, the larger question of what a vote should consiste of is also up for grabs. The Internet, mathemeticians Donald Saari and Steven Brams argue in a Discover magazine piece, is a natural laboratory for testing alternative voting methods. Six scientific societies in America use a method called "approval voting," they report, most notably the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Approval voting, which Brams favors, dates to the 13th Century, when Venetians used it to help elect leaders. In an approval vote, Saari explains, a person casts one vote for every candidate he or she considers qualified for the office, rather than just one. The voting is conducted much like a survey or an opinion poll, except the results are calculated to determine the winner. If this year's election had been decided by an approval vote in February, John McCain would be president, by a comfortable margin, since for much of the year more Americans approved of him than the two candidates who eventually led their tickets.
Saari advocates an election method called the Borda count election, in which each voter ranks all of the candidates from top to bottom. If there are five candidates, then a voter's leading candidate gets 5 points, his second-ranked candidate gets 4, etc. In the end, the points are added up to determine the winner. The Borda count, once used in the Roman Senate, was named after a French physicist and American Revolutionary War hero named Jean-Charles deBorda. This method is used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Neither one is likely to take root in the U.S. anytime soon, but in the wake of the current outcry about the role of the electoral college, perhaps systems like these deserve greater consideration.
It's increasingly likely that the uncertainty and confusion over this election will go on for weeks, even months. It's ironic and appalling that the country which has produced the most sophisticated information technology network in world history can't even count up the votes that will determine its most important asset, its own political system.
This has the effect of rendering all Jon's questions somewhat meaningless and replacing his answers with more questions. I think that's a useful effect...
Jon appears to be advocating a sort of populist control of authority- the classic 'vote in your pajamas' scenario. While the problem of political corruption is serious, I'd like to look for a second at some of the underlying assumptions- primarily, the assumption of a hierarchical authority.
If it is possible for invidivuals to specify their values so directly through technological means, might it be possible for this to take the place of hierarchical authority? True anarchism is not simply the destruction of government but a school of thought resisting _all_ imposed authority, governmental, economic and social: for this reason it is always somewhat socialist, for this reason it cannot be considered outside of a community.
Slashdot discussions are anarchy of communications, because while CmdrTaco and the Slashdot staff make the site available, in practice you do not have to get permission to speak- though an amount of authority still persists, it is far from what you'll find on a news.com or msn.com. "Permission" is a key concept to anarchy: it's not an abstract hypothesis for how to set up constant Darwinian struggle, it is a concept for community guidelines, and the question to ask is 'Whose permission must I get in order to do this?'
- Whose permission must I get in order to make a post to slashdot?
- Whose permission must I get in order to walk down the street?
- Whose permission must I get in order to open a store?
- Whose permission must I get in order to mug passersby?
- Whose permission must I get in order to run an Internet server?
- Whose permission must I get in order to buy a pair of shoes?
- Whose permission must I get in order to listen to music?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that I didn't compose?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that is mine?
Plainly, for some of those actions there's going to be resistance from the community- permission to mug community members is not likely to be forthcoming even from an anarchist community, which may be a surprise to some! At the same time, this question reveals the power structures behind many current systems, and it's not always a pretty sight. For instance, if you wish to make a business selling productivity software to as many people as possible, you need to get the government's permission, sure (and it's largely a formality and some taxation) but you also need to get Microsoft's permission. Without it they will use their power to deprive you of resources and render you unable to conduct business.If you produce music, you need the RIAA labels' permission to distribute it widely, as they have a lock on distribution- except that the internet has undercut this radically! To the anarchist community the idea of 'distribution without permission' has to be more exciting all by itself than the typical corollary of 'damaging record company income'. The record company income is not itself a problem- the fact that you have to get permission from their authority in order to access mass media _is_. If Microsoft seized control of online music so that it was all totally costless and administrated through special 'MS content producer accounts', it would be just as repugnant to anarchist thought even though MS is not (quite) government: in this event you would, practically, have to seek permission from Microsoft in order to distribute media.
In this light, it's interesting to look at Katz's questions again: what is being established and why? He is arguing for technology-implemented direct manipulation of authority- yet the authority we have in the USA is based on a concept of public servants, not a concept of fascism or divine rule. This is the strongest argument I can see for what Jon is advocating- the authority we have is in essence community facilitation on a large scale, and only as hierarchical as it is because technology hasn't permitted anything more decentralised.
It may be possible to use technology in the service of community to approximate the anarchist ideal as it intersects with the American Dream: one day the state I live in, Vermont, might (for instance) reject the authority of the RIAA and DMCA and force them to negotiate from a position of equality, rather than an IP-derived position of assumed authority. One thing is for sure- using technology, it becomes much more practical to ascertain the status of USE: it may be difficult to search for 'patent information' denoting the property of ideas, but it's easy to search for usage information. Since usage rights are central to anarchist thought (as a community-derived replacement for hierarchical authority) it's plainly handy to be able to quickly access all information about how a thing is used- something that has historically been a lot more subjective.
Happened in MA 4 years ago. An electrinic count showed that one person won, but a hand recount showed that the punch cards were not counted properly, and it turns out the opponent won. Punch cards were then made illegal in MA for elections, and we use the "fill in the circle with the marker" method. This year's ballot was very clearly written.
However, a compromise may be feasible. Consider this:
After entering and reviewing your votes on a screen, the machine creates three tokens:
- a data-based token
- the voter's preferences
- the current time
- protected via a digital signature specific to the machine
- a physical token
- an actual punched-out card
- printed or punched copy of the data token
- human-readable preference data
Now, consider the safeguards built into this scheme: All electronic data has a physical, printed copy. All printed data should have an electronically stored copy. In the event of any loss of synchronization between these two, the issue can be localized. Since there are three copies of all information -- one in the computer and two on the cards -- any discrepancies can be dealt with. If the digitally signed, probably non-punched copy on the cards doesn't match the punched data, the card can be machine-identified and localized. By comparing with the third, electronic copy (which can be done because the digital signature, done over the timestamp, is the same) the accurate representation of the vote can be found.human-readable, but machine-punched. Ideally, if the voting machine can't read back the info it punched out itself, it reports itself faulty. No more situations with individuals punching out their cards incorrectly.
The data token itself -- digital signature and all -- should be reproduced here. In case of any discrepancies, there should ALWAYS be a physical copy of the data available. Always.
The human can actually read what their vote is when they drop it in the box -- yes, I think that this dropping the physical token in the box is important, and should be continued.
Finally, if a change needs to be made after someone finished with the machine -- and it happens, trust me -- they still get to redo before dropping the ballot into the box. If a machine-registered ballot has no physical counterpart, it isn't counted (but any irregularities, with unually large numbers of ballots being cast and not counted, can be avoided).
But then, don't listen to me. I want preferential voting, too, so what do I know? :)
That would be fine, so long as *fradulent* includeed the common abuse of language where they use the past tense to describe what are merely statistical predictions. It is a *lie* to say, "So-and-so has won in Florida", when no official count has even begun yet in Florida and all they have are guesses based on exit polls. (And they should be slapped around for calling it when it was so close that the difference of votes is lost in the course granularity of the exit polling techniques. (The difference is so small that when scaled down to the small population of an exit poll, it amounts to a fraction of one individual.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
But that said, here's some standards *I* would like to see, assuming that they can even be implemented, which I have my doubts about.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I can kind of live with small states having bigger influence than they would have in purely proportional system, but I really don't see why Floridas 24 electors couldn't split their votes, just as floridas voters apparently did: 12 for Gore and 12 for Bush. The life would go on, and all this s* we see now would not happen.
Please don't give me a recipt. It sounds like a good idea, but in fact it is bad. With a recipt someone who really wants to win just comes by that night and shoots anyone who didn't vote for him. Don't have your recipt and you get shot for good measure.
Fraud hasn't been common in the US elections for a while. (Other shady practices, but in the end you cannot prove the homeless the democrats gave ciggeretts voted for Gore. Likewise if the republicans did something like this that I've not heard of)
Once I can find out who you voted for I can force your vote. If the election is public there will at least be more eveidence of who is cheating the system, making better odds that person is caught.
You forgot a step: the booth prints out a sheet listing your choices, which you then slip into a slot on a fireproof safe (THe slot nullifies teh fireproof, but all well). That way if lightning strikes or the hard drive crashes there is a backup.
in response to 1) we need voter registration as we have no national system of valid IDs (and SSNs are NOT supposed to be used as ID, so if it were used, it would be fought in court). Thus, what sort of block do you put on someone that votes from voting again if you lack registration? There needs to be registration available at the polls (which require some significant ID) while when you are actually there to vote, you should only need to present a photo ID and some encoded registration card (paper, not plastic) which is taken from you when you vote; the encoding would be based on individual so that only you could match that card. This reduces the chance for fraud and voting mulitple times, and you can still leave registration open on voting day.
On 3), there is serious talk in all the election reform to move the vote to a weekend. The second Tues after the first Monday in Nov is a holdover when people had to travel to reach the polls.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Now, most of the time we can deal with that error because the winner in the election usually wins by a few percentage points or more. This election, however, goes against that, where the two candidates differ by around 0.2% nationally, and less than 0.03% in FL. If there is any error (and there *is*), that error could easily be higher than those differences, thus causing inappropriate results.
Sure, I'd argue that the EC is broken, but as others have pointed out, there's a snowball's chance in heck that will be fixed before 2004. But there are things that can be added that can improve it. I'd personally like to see the splitting of all states electoral votes based on regional results, but I don't think that will happen either as each state would have to do something about it. Instead, what I suggest is to add in at the national level a rules that states if the difference between the top 2 candidates for President is split less than some X percentage, then the states' electors are split equally to both candidates. X here is some percentage that should reflect what the error can be in voting methods, somewhere around 0.1% or 0.2%, the true value calculated by some imparital committee after research of election results in the last 50 years. This would make most of the complaints in FL null and void, and a few other states (NM) would probably be split as well.
What just seems odd to me right now about the current system is that there is a definite cry in FL that there is no strong majority of either candidate, but this fence sitting is worth nearly 10% of the votes needed for Presidency, and by our current system, it's winner takes all. This IMO does not adequetely reflect the will of the people, and these types of problems need to be fixed now.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
because amendment 10 to the US Constitution denys the US government any power not expressly given to it in the constitution -- and that one wasn't. Frankly I'm glad for it. It will allow various states to try different methods and learn from eachother's mistakes, instead of going with the almost certain disaster of a nation-wide switchover.
--
Katz,
You seem to be laboring under the illusion that our voting system can be made to be "fair". It can't. Arrow's Theorem pretty much demolishes the concept.
A google search for "Arrow's Theorem" will turn up lots of useful links, like this on path-voting or this collection of notes.
If you're going to talk about changing how we vote, other than just the mechanics, you really need to read up on this stuff. Yeah, it's all academic and abstract, but it's quite relevent (imagine that!).
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
If you really think that, then you must not get out much. Regional issues are alive and well. For example, in the Pacific Northwest there are all sorts of issues that we see differently than the rest of the nation.
For example, we aren't nearly as interested in the deregulation of power as the rest of the US, and we certainly don't want Californians deciding if our dams get breached. We are also concerned about being able to use Federal lands. I imagine in New York they would probably vote to keep all federal lands "pristine." No logging, no ranching, no roads. However, some of us actually live out here.
Trust me, regional politics will be alive and well long after we are all dead and gone. Silicon valley has its set of issues, and the Magic Valley in Idaho has a totally separate set of issues and values. Part of the reason that the small states chose to join this Union in the first place was that we realized that there would be checks and balances that would keep the more populous areas of the country from imposing their wills on us. Our votes would in essence "count more."
If you really think that the states are merely a convenient partitioning scheme, then you should consider moving to a state where your vote would matter more. For example, Wyoming has just as many Senators as California, and it's people have a lot more of say in the Presidential election per capita. Just don't be surprised when you find that the political climate in Wyoming is very different than in whatever state you happen to live in.
You really need to get out more.
I grew up in Eastern Washington, and so I definitely agree that the current boundaries for the states don't necessarily make as much sense as they should. As a child I could never understand why they called Washington the "Evergreen State." It certainly wasn't green in my home town.
Your solution is to just say that the majority voice should have its say. That's fine and dandy as long as you are on the side of the majority. If you, for example, feel that guns should be banned, then it probably upsets you quite a bit that the people in Eastern Washington are very NRA friendly. Or if you feel like breaching the dams on the Columbia river you are probably sick to death of hearing from the Eastern Washington farmers. On the other hand the people in Eastern Washington probably see these attempts as "those damn Seattle-ites trying to take away our guns and our livelihood."
The whole point of our system is that laws should be difficult to pass simply because any new law will effect some people in a negative manner. Our current system of presidential elections is part of this system. For example, radical candidates (like Nader or Buchannon) have almost zero chance of making any impact at all, and contrary to what the third party folks say this isn't due to advertising. It's due to the fact that Americans are very centrist politically. Our system isn't so much about electing the best man for the job as it is about electing the lesser of two evils. This may seem like a bad thing, but in reality it guarantees that any changes that are made are incremental, and widely popular. Even if your candidate does lose, it's not the end of the world, because the opponent A) was strangely similar, and B) can make incremental changes at best.
Contrast that with a world in which Nader gets elected one year, and Buchannon gets elected four years later. Losing that sort of election would be devastating.
You may feel that universal gun control laws and abortion statutes are important, but I can't imagine that a bureaucrat in Washington D.C. has any chance of coming up with a good compromise if we can't even come up with a workable solution at the state level. If the people on either side of the Puget Sound can't agree on a local issue, then what are the chances that someone not from the area is likely to resolve the issue correctly. Our national leaders would simply decide the issue based on what the average Californian thinks if it wasn't for our current system of government. The average Californian can't even find the state of Washington on a map.
I would rather have separate laws in every state than have one universally poor law in all states. Which is, of course, the crux of this whole argument. Fortunately for all of us it is the local elections that really matter, and we certainly have a say in those.
--
Motherjones suggests The United States needs International Election Observers like any other Banana Republic. Given that the Republican districts in Florida primarily used OptiScan systems which show significantly less error than the Punch Card Systems used in primarily Democrat area such as Palm Beach county, one wonders if this was just one of many approaches used to skew election results. There have been many accusations from Florida regarding voting irregularities, from a previous Republican mayoral candidate who had a an election overturned from absentee ballot fraud who was involved in an "Get out the vote" absentee ballot vote drive, to a large number of allegations regarding voter intimidation and outright fraud. Welcome to the United States, where we citizens don't have the right to vote unless we agree with the decision of our power brokers.
This just disgusts me.
Nope, 2/3 of _Congress_ _AND_ 3/4 of the States. You're right, though, VERY tough to pass.
What would be MUCH better would be for all the states to split their EC votes ala Maine. Then the smaller states would get to keep their unfair influence over the election, but the EC votes would much more accurately reflect the popular vote. Not completely fair, true, but vastly more likely to happen (especially after this year's fiasco).
Why 'unfair', do you ask? Simple - yes, EC votes are alloted by population, but it's not proportional - a state with a population of 10 million doesn't have twice the EC votes as a state with a population of 5 million. If you live in a populous state, THEN YOUR VOTE IS WORTH LESS.
The smaller states get their representation by their Senators & Reps - the President is for everyone, and should, IMO, be elected solely on the popular vote.
President -> Represents everyone, should be elected by everyone (against the Constitution)
Senators & Reps -> Represent their state, should be elected by their state (how it works now)
Simple, right? Fair? Seems so to me! *shrug*
I must say, though, that all this political talk on Slashdot & elsewhere is very heartening to see. Finally everyone seems to give a damn! Right on.
But the regions that have common issues are usually NOT state-wide, and certainly aren't in the same place as the state boundaries. Let's take the PNW as an example, as I live there, too.
Western Washington has MUCH more in common with Western Oregon than with Eastern Washington.
Also, the regions that have REAL issues are usually not as large as a state would be, even IF those state regions were homogenous. Puget Sound has issues completely different than those of, say, Portland/Vancouver. And even smaller than that - Seattle versus the 'East Side' - very different issues.
If you look at how people voted during the election - there were major differences by region even within the small states, yet all you see is the total of the EC votes for that state going to one candidate or the other.
The United States may have started out as a conglomeration of states, true, but it's over 200 years later, and things are VASTLY different now. Implementing laws (say, gun control) in one state and not all is pretty ridiculous - people will (and have) just go over the state border and bring them back in. Same thing for state-by-state abortion laws, etc. The age where a 'state' in this country really made sense is long, LONG gone.
Don't dismiss the possibility of computer error and fraud so lightly. This year, the Republican National Committee's webpage was defacedVolusia County is doing a manual recount now, after computer error injected 15,000 erroneous Socialist Workers and Constitutionalist Party votes into their first tally. Keep in mind: the people who will be administering our first computerized elections will be these people, not Linus and Alan.
Sure, we can have physical "backstops" to try and prevent these kinds of problems... but if these backstops have to be resorted to every time an election comes this close, how is it any improvement over our current situation? If a software glitch in your voting machine causes every voter whose last name begins with Z to get 10 votes, will that same glitch from causing your voting machine to print out 10 punchcards to backstop those votes?
Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a lot of room for technological improvement here. Some Slashdotter suggested a touchscreen voting machine which would give you a clearer GUI, prevent or check for any invalid double votes, and print out a sheet with your ID and only the names of the people you voted for, in easily machine-scannable form, so you could take that sheet and give it to the poll workers. That would prevent both the ballot and the discarded vote problems in Palm Beach, at least.
It's tempting to think that there could be something even better. A little smartcard (because I don't trust the nation who let Melissa and ILOVEYOU loose to maintain their PCs securely) with public key crypto could let your "vote" be a digitally signed statement that you could safely send over the net, and the collection of all those signed statements could be publically downloadable, to allow you to check and make sure nobody tampers with your vote or the vote count. But even in that case, who would we trust to distribute the private keys, and never have their systems compromised? Verisign? Even if you can check your own vote's integrity, how do you know that a 6 million vote list isn't actually 5 million real votes, plus 1 million fraudulent inserts?
Oh, yeah, I forgot; I titled this post "Optimizing Election Fraud" for a reason. Consider: Right now, tampering with n votes is an O(n) operation. A well designed computer system could make that an O(1) operation. In most programs this would be a fantastic optimization; in this particular case it is not an improvement.
How do you intend to vote in the next election?
* In person
* By absentee ballot
* Online
* By writing a Libertarian macrovirus
What you incorrectly call "lying", most people call setting priorities.
No, a ballot that said "I prefer Browne to Nader to Gore to Bush" would be setting priorities (plural). A ballot that says "I prefer Gore to everyone else" sets a priority (singular), and millions of voters regularly set that priority in a way that makes it an inaccurate statement, a "lie".
Voters in the U.S. here have more power because they can decide they dislike a candidate so much that they'll vote for a stronger candidate who would otherwise be their second or third choice just to be able to knock the guy they dislke off.
Did you read about approval voting? Instant runoff voting? Those systems let you express an "I don't want this person to be president" opinion just as strongly; they just don't force you to sacrifice your other opinions in a multicandidate race to do it.
This leads to candidates who not only worry about energizing their base, but also worry about being considerate enough of their opposition to not unduly piss them off.
No, it leads to candidates who cannot afford be considerate of their opposition, lest their least moderate "base" voters splinter off to a more extreme candidate and fracture their party. It leads to primary elections which drop candidates like McCain who have broad bipartisan appeal but less appeal among the party faithful.
On the other hand in most EU democracies,
In most EU demt EU democracies, don't they have proportional representation to ensure that the legislature is just as split as the voters? That has nothing to do with any of the voting methods being discussed; we can dump the plurality system without getting rid of the "one district, one representative" House.
This leads to extremist parties (willing to switch votes on national concerns) in a position to make or break governments
You mean like the Green Party just did?
Is this really an advantage of IRV? I'd think that any system which allows voters to do a complete preference ranking of candidates would allow multiple winners to be selected by one vote: Select first place winner; remove that candidate from everyone's vote; repeat until all seats are filled.
A letter to the editor I wrote to Discover:
I just finished reading your recent article, "May the Best Man Lose".
The author unfortunately underestimates one of the greatest weaknesses of the plurality system, and so fails to realize that this weakness applies nearly as strongly to the Borda count: both voting systems encourage voters to lie!
Of course, the media today doesn't call strategic voting "lying", they call it "not wasting your vote". It is considered standard practice to give your vote not to the candidate you prefer, but to the poll-leading candidate you dislike least.
This practice would not change under a Borda count system. Voters who prefer Nader to Browne to Gore to Bush will still be encouraged to vote for Gore above either Nader or Browne, because that way they will add 3 points to the separation between the leading candidates rather than 1 point, and their vote will have almost three times the impact in the election.
Strategic voting makes independent and third-party candidates nearly irrelevant, and gives the Democrats and Republicans a chokehold on politics. That bipartisan chokehold, by the way, is why we may very well soon see a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college, but we will never see a superior system of voting replace the plurality system. The electoral college is much less damaging to our democracy (and had less of a detrimental effect in this presidential election) than the plurality system, but removing the electoral college will result in only a minor power shift from the Democrats towards the Republicans; changing the plurality system would result in a major power shift away from both.
I was surprised to see that one important voting system was not even mentioned in your article: Instant Runoff. In that system, voters rank their candidates by preference. If no candidate has a majority of first place votes, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is removed from consideration, and from the rankings of voters who voted for him. (i.e. if Alice's second place choice was dropped, then her third place choice becomes her new second, her fourth becomes her new third, etc.) Once a candidate has a majority of first place votes, that candidate wins. The results are not guaranteed to equal Borda count results, but they often will. I don't think strategic voting is impossible, but it's a lot harder.
Tabulating & reporting electronically sounds ok, but I want something that can be looked at later, and know that it hasn't been tampered with. Any solution should still allow some sort of physical, manual count, IMHO.
---
- The popular vote vs the electoral college.
- I mean, come on! 100Million people vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's facing the distinct possibility of losing by less than 500 votes in a single state?
- No universal ballot
- Some one tell me again why presidential ballots aren't designed by the federal government, and are allowed to be different everywhere?
- Hand vote counting introduces human error
- Eh? At least if you hand count ballots you can have them cross checked multiple times. On a polling place basis.
- No matching vote to voter
- Please. If you had some transient method of connecting votes to voters, than those supposed deluded individuals who spoiled ballots in Palm Beach by voting for two candidates could vote again (although I think political darwinism should take this lot out - if you mess up the process you don't count....)
Not that this would make everything perfect. Perfect is never acheivable, but better is, always.... and today's pet project has
Let me say this:
Slowdowns and bottlenecks in the process of the
American government are *features* not *bugs*.
It's better to have slow bureaucracy than rapid
tyranny. Ironically, the success of this system
has sheilded many generations from the consequences of less successful systems.
> For starters - on a state-by-state basis >(because the Presidential election is, after all, >a series of 51 state elections), we must >standardize both
> ballots and recount processes.
Another feature of the election system is that
it cannot be manipulated from a central point.
Again, a feature, not a bug. If all the voting
systems were the same, the door is open to a corrupt federal government keeping itself in office indefinitely.
Changing the electoral process now sets a precedent for the future -- the process can be changed in arbitrary ways! We need to think about whether doing away with the
electoral college and replacing it with "something else" amounts to a bloodless coup d'etat.
Actually, it remains to be seen whether it will
bloodless. No matter what happens, there will be
a lack of confidence in the government that this
process installs. This government should definitely not be allowed to change the electoral process!! It's ONLY four years, and it probably
will not go wrong next time.
Not to worry; I believe the abolition of the electoral college is about as likely as Texas' independence or the voluntary income tax.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
" In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only
takes a few hours to count all the votes. "
My understanding is that in the UK, the people can call a general election whenever they want.
I'm not convinced that the voting public has any
real franchise in Britain (and N. Ireland).
On the other hand, Britain as a whole does give proper credibility to political parties.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"The US is a republic not a democracy....
If the electoral college decided to screw the election... there is absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it."
During this long period of relative peace and tranquility that we have enjoyed, we seem to have forgotten the very basis on which our Republic was founded: That it is acceptable and necessary, under extreme circumstances, to violently remove the lawful authority from power and completely rebuild the nation from first principles. This is easier to do when the issues are divisive enough to divide the military as well as the common people. We don't want to exercise the option because it might cause us to miss our programs on cable tv, or we might go a week without a paycheck; not to mention that we might DIE, or be forced to kill our own brothers.
The remedies are all spelled out in the laws of the land, but either we don't have the stomach to perform the duties mandated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or else circumstances have not deteriorated enough to lead us to such dire consequences. But to say there is "nothing we can do" is to deny the entire history of this country, and shames everyone who has ever died for freedom.
"As it currently stands 50% of the college is bound by law to vote for their party's choice. "
Do you realize the fines are $1000.00 or less? That no criminal penalties would be imposed? There would be little risk to the faithless elector, who might actually be seen as a hero for
taking the risk, voting their conscience and bringing us out of this dark space.
The resulting government would at least have been legally elected. I would much prefer faithless elector votes to decide the president than for the decision to be made by the judicial branch or appointment by the House.
"A real democratic system would be a lot cheaper. "
Maybe in the short term, but I fear the real price would be paid in graves. Does no-one take into consideration the fact that the people who decided a representative system would be more stable and more equitable, were standing on bloodstained soil?
The rest of your message is rhetoric that I can't address right now.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Australia doesn't elect judges, sheriffs, school boards, doesn't have citizen-initiated referenda (a few local councils are starting to try them, but it's not widespread) and so on, and federal, state, and local elections are on different days, so the problems of knowing how to vote on ten squillion different ballots doesn't arise. If voting is shifted online over time, the need to have one big polling day disappears and people can consider each ballot appropriately.
Additionally, could somebody convince me that it's really appropriate to elect judges, prosecutors, and police? While I'm not naive enough to believe that those jobs aren't political, wouldn't that just encourage those people to make legally dubious but politically popular decisions?
As for misinformed people voting, that is a concern, but in Australia we look at the American system, see that it's overwhelmingly the young, the poor, and minorities who don't vote, and the general (but not universal) view is it's better to make sure that politicians have to work to attract votes from those people. There has been some agitation towards voluntary voting from the conservative parties, but support for a change is very limited.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Oh, please. You can't have it both ways. Either I stole it from someone or I invented it myself (possibly simultaneously with others).
I will grant that I wasn't trying to be original; I was critiquing a fool's rant. It's entirely obvious that Katz doesn't give much thought to what he writes, as the logical and historical errors in his columns almost always demonstrate. One need not have original or stolen ideas to nevertheless be "insightful" in pointing out a writer's errors (and I do not mean to say that I was "insightful" or "interesting;" I'm merely pointing out that neither of those descriptions requires "ideas" and can apply to one's analysis of another's writing).
You're not a Gore drone, are you? Or are you Katz himself? :-)
No, I'm not a Bush drone; I didn't vote for him and would never even consider voting for him. I simply reject the fantasies of those who suppose -- as Katz does -- that there's something wrong with the system. There's nothing wrong with it. Gore and his gang of election thieves could figure out a way to steal the election under *any* voting scheme we might devise, and it's simply absurd to pretend otherwise.
Our system of government has always assumed and depended upon the fundamental notion that the citizens must be virtuous, because without that it cannot work. Gore's chicanery (preceded by Clinton's in the impeachment) is simply evidence of the veracity of what the Founders believed: the Republic cannot survive if the people are not virtuous.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Our system for electing presidents takes too long. Rubbish. Under normal circumstances it does NOT take long. This happens to be a very close election with an increasing amount of political fighting instigated by a poor loser (that would be Gore).
the country that helped give birth to the Net administers its political system in an inconvenient, mish-mashed network of ancient and inconvenient systems, confusing methodology and out-of-touch bureaucracies, all right out of the 18th century.
This is an adequate example of Katz's historical myopia. If it's older than he is, it can't be any good -- or so says Katz. Of course this is pure nonsense. Katz has no problem with that good 'ol "ancient" First Amendment, though.
What part of a punch card system comes from the 18th century, Katz? Which modern American bureaucracy dates from the 18th century, Katz?
Science and technology -- however far from infallible -- could also help address some of the other problems surfacing in last week's election fiasco.
This is laughable. Everyone in the Gore campaign is sputtering and fuming about the errors and failures in Florida, and Katz wants to replace it with...another fallible system! What a "brilliant" idea! Note to Katz: fallible sytems fail. That's why they're fallible. Absent physical data as we have now, exactly how would we verify an election if we were to go to a digital election system as you so blithely recommend?
We are hearing about poorly-designed ballots Baloney. That ballot was NOT, NOT, NOT poorly designed. As has been demonstrated in various news reports, 2nd graders have been able to successfully fill that ballot out. Whining about that ballot after the fact is pure sour grapes. The ballot was designed by Democrats, approved by Democrats, and sent in advance to every registered voter in the county. No complaints. If these whiners really did screw up, they were a) incompetent (because it was NOT hard to fill out that ballot), and b) unworthy of the privilege of voting, because they failed to exert even a tiny bit of energy to get help with it at the time they were voting -- which shows the contempt in which they held their privilege.
And that's just out of Palm Beach County in Florida, one of the richest communities in the nation. Imagine the potential scandals and sloppiness still lying uncovered in the rest of the country.
In Katz's demented worldview, having less money implies carelessness about a solemn privilege. He has no evidence for such an assertion, but he makes it nonetheless. I'm sure the poor would be pleased to hear about this.
Networked digital systems are far from flawless, but they're far more highly evolved than our lumbering electoral process.
Katz doesn't really care whether the process is error-free; he just wants more "highly evolved" errors. Great, Katz.
As badly as we may need campaign finance reform to keep corporate money from polluting politics,...
We don't need any such thing. It's called "Freedom of Speech", Katz. See that First Amendment you love so much.
There are no uniform standards or procedures for collecting and tabulating votes.
Katz assumes that if the national government inflicts national standards on everyone, then we won't have problems with the election system we use. Dumb, Katz. Dumb.
they are dependent on ancient and unreliable tabulation systems in many parts of the country
So Katz would replace them with...new and unreliable tabulation systems? Great, Katz. No thanks.
There are serious about digital politics and online voting, and plenty of technical problems. One of the biggest would be political zealots, crackers and vandals, people breaking into a political system for fun or for uglier motives. It would definitely happen. But hacking a federal election is different from breaking into Microsoft or the New York Yankees' website. Tampering with elections is a felony with serious jail time.
Katz is also terminally naïve. Even though there is all sorts of computer crime going on even as we speak, and even though people commit felonies all the time, he thinks that crackers would be scared off of tampering with a computerized election. Wake up and smell the reality, Katz.
Approval voting, which Brams favors, dates to the 13th Century,
But Katz! That's "ancient!" You don't really mean that, do you??? What hypocrisy.
Katz, you fancy yourself an informed critic, but you are desperately far from being informed at all. The shallowness of your historical perspective is simply appalling. You far too readily condemn systems and ideas that have stood the test of centuries, in favor of the latest modern fad. Hint, Katz: there's nothing new under the sun. Your "ideas" have been done, and we don't use them because they don't work.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
IIRC (and I may be mistaken), the 1996 ballot was a straight-line one-side ballot layout. If that's correct, then the number indicates there's a problem far more fundamental than the butterfly layout.
Ah, well... it's only news, not like it's supposed to be investigated or make sense or anything.
Don't pretend that this somehow justifies us overturning the results of a lawfully conducted and lawfully counted election! This is a motivation for overhauling the system in the future, not for overturning what has already been lawfully done. ex post facto, dude.
Again, arbitrarily inserting words in my mouth. Thanks for your input. Election law requires that a voter exercise due care and give due attention to the process of executing their vote. You can argue until the cows come home about what constitutes an "adequate diligence" and whatnot, but it seems to me that we're stooping pretty low on this one; call me elitist if you want, but this is the kind of decision lawmakers and judges make daily, and many of them set a much higher bar for "due diligence" and "appropriate care" than I would. And it worries me that "elitism" is (once again) being used as an inflammatory mark against those who disagree with the political ends some wish to see accomplished.I do not disagree with you that there may be room for improvement in the layout and format of ballots - in Palm Beach County and at large. I would love to see computerized voting stations printing out bar-coded hard copy ballots, so we have a physical ballot count to validate the computer count. But as a matter of present case law, there is no right to ballots being a "perfect user interface", and as a matter of present statutory law the election was conducted properly, and as a matter of constitutional law we are able to redress concerns raised by this election (that, if they're such a big deal, should have been raised and addressed long ago) for the purposes of future elections.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.) Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote? Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
The only answer I've heard anyone make is "I was too embarassed to ask for help". Which is not surprising given the pride and snootiness that permeates much of PBC. But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
I'll probably get marked as flaimbait for saying this, not to mention ruin my chances of ever getting elected to public office in PBC, but I'm getting tired of seeing so much pandering to this kind of irresponsibility and foolishness.
All you have to do is convence Senators Strom Thurmond (about 100yrs old) and Robert Byrd - geez these guys were in their prime when the Model-T and Victrola were state of the art technology, yet they cling onto their 'seniority' status and have a big influence on the way things are.
Yet again, I don't think they could understand any other solution than buying a ton of Microsoft VOTE©® licenses at taxpayer expense, then we'd really be in a pickle.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The ACM Risks Forum ("Risks Digest") has lately been full of talk about elections, vote-counting, and electronic voting. Most notable is this item:
Security of electronic voting in public elections
which contains many pointers to discussions on the topic of "net voting". Also see issues 21.11 and 21.12, which contain some interesting comments on the current recounts going on in Florida and whether machine counting is more or less accurate than hand counting (spoiler: Peter Neuman and Lauren Weinstein disagree with the Bush campaign's contention that machine counting is more accurate).
--Jim
And it really doesn't matter anyway.
The US is a republic not a democracy. The elections are there as a salve to public opinion but its not the people who vote. If the electoral college decided to screw the election and write in votes to elect Ralph Nader or even you there is absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it.
As it currently stands 50% of the college is bound by law to vote for their party's choice. (Though that's never been tested in the courts and of dubious legality or practicality.) In this election, that 25% for Gore, 25% for Bush and 50% for grabs.
If we could corrupt enough college members (and a million each ought to do it,) we could dispense with this expensive and humiliating election process of racking up favors by one party and the other (notice, and nor or,) which will have to be paid back with partisan contracts awarded or with non-interference in illegal but lucrative business practices. (What M$ is hoping for after contributing to (both sides.)
If you want a democracy, you just have to recruit representatives by conscription.
Just pick names from the phone books. Four years in, and you're out, here's your job back. See ya, an' thanks.
Imagine! Government without constant currying of favors, whining about the opposition who have said exactly what you said because both of you are two sides of the same slice of tasteless white bread.
And not to watch these Bozos trying to come up with creative ways to repay hose $50,000,000 worth of favors. Remember, vulture capitalists and other industrial strength investors expect to be repaid between 10 and 100 times their investment. That's gonna cost you between $500,000,000 and $5,000,000,000 over the next four years in sheer budget fat that wasn't trimmed.
Remember Papa Bush's famous line, proclaimed loudly at every sound bite opportunity? Read my lips. No, New, Taxes! Remember the next famous line, muttered once while he signed a new tax bill to pay for those favors? Read the page.
A real democratic system would be a lot cheaper.
Total cost 1 television program every four years. No election race, no people not doing their job because they're too busy running for re-election. No trees dying for A to talk trash about B.
If you want a democracy, you just have to recruit representatives by conscription.
Just pick names from the phone books. Four years in, and you're out, here's your job back. See ya, an' thanks.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Reforming the mechanism for registering votes bought with your money by people who are going to owe so many favors that they are completely hog-tied is a waste of time.
Anyway YOU don't elect a president. The electoral college does. You are there to contribute, (and not just crowd noise either.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This would be a very bad idea. Why shouldn't groups of like-minded people be able to organize and pool their resources for political purposes?
Did you ever notice that when someone agrees with a group, it is grass roots democracy. When they disagree with the group, it is an evil special interest group.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Sen.-Elect Clinton has, if memory serves, already publicly stated that she would support the elimination of the EC.
Not suprising, New York is one of about 4 states I could see supporting that. However, it will never make it through the Senate, where each state has equal voice.
Finkployd
Origionally the Electorial College system was seen as a compramise between the framers of the Constitution who wanted the President elected as a popular vote, and those who wanted the Senate to choose. While, on the surface a straight popular vote may seem fair, remember that our from of government is representative, with the strongest emphasis on state's rights. I think the Electorial system is the best wany to preserve state's rights and also have the popular vote mean something, but I also also agree that Maine's system is the best. Lobby in your state to get it changed to that because the federal government has NO authority to tell a state how to run it's Electorial College system.
Finkployd
Never happen.
Why? It would require an amendment, which requires a 2/3 state vote to pass. There is no way in hell any of the small states would do that (since they get a boost from the EC). That would be like voting to lessen the impact of their voice. With a straight popularity contest, all a candidate would have to do is woo FL, CA, NY, and TX, and to hell with those other insignificant states.
Finkployd
If that was the case, then that's what candidates would do anyhow. With so many states in the midwest having 4 or 6 EC votes, they really don't have that much impact on elections.
And any system that can make the 2nd place runner up winner is rather flawed, wouldn't you say?
The EC makes votes count less, and keeps canditates form campaigning at all in states which they know they won't do well in, because the votes a state hands out are on an all or nothing basis. There's no incentive for a canditate to try to get 50,000 votes out of a state that the majority of citizen won't go for him, because if they don't get the majority of votes, they get nothing.
If we don't get rid of the EC altogether after this election, we really need to move to make each vote independant of one another. So a candidate would have to fight for votes in every county. And mandate that electors vote according to the "will of the people" rather than being allowed (in some states) to disregard the citizens votes and cast their ballot however they choose.
EC: Get rid of it altogether, or at least reform the hell out of it.
I couldn't agree more with that.
We also use a similar system in France, where we
also elect directly a head-of-state with executive
power (a not-so-frequent situation in industrialized democraties).
We use pre-printed ballots instead of pencils,
but the system basically consists in putting on
of the ballots in an envelope and putting the
enveloppe in a poll box.
Counting is proposed to people when they vote.
I did it once and it couldn't be more transparent
and efficient. It is quite formal, we formed
groups of four on separate tables, number one
opens an envelope, number 2 reads the name on
the ballot, number three counts, number 4 checks.
Any ballot with anything written on it or any mark
of any kind, or any enveloppe containing anything
else than one ballot are presented to the
people in charge who stamp it, have everybody
on the table sign it, and it is put aside to
be discarded.
Results are progressively entered on a computer
system that sends them to the interior ministry.
The counting was done by 11pm in an office that
closed at 8pm. Even though exit polls have always
called the election at 8pm when the last offices
close, final results are given by the interior
ministry the morning of the next day.
Another thing is that there is no vote-by-mail
at all. It would be considered non-constitutional
since it doesn't guarantee that the vote is cast
free from any pressure. It is possible to mandate
someone to vote in your place, if you can justify your need for it (I did it during my military service).
Bottom line : the simpler the better.
This problem we are seeing with the election is asymptomatic of the problems in the goverment today. We need to implement a better and easier way of dealing with elections. People also need to be able to get a reciept after they vote so that they know who they voted for.
The patent office is filled with this type of inadequacies. The DMV, and many other offices. What can be done? Don't let Bush or Gore in the white house. Neither of them know enough about technology althougth Gore may be a little better. Get this the Republicans think that the electronic counting system is more accurate than hand counting Yet there were 33 votes that were found when hand counted cause the card reader did not pick up on holes that were not punched through correctly. To top it off who do they think programmed that thing? Robots? How stupid do they have to be to think that? Now they want to mess with the Fl voting system which is none of there business. Both Bush and Gore need to get the hell out of Fl and take there parties with them and let FL do its job. If Bush gets into office then let it be after all the counts are done. Let the Fl voting system work its way out.
Even if we reform the political system and govement beaurocries (sp), we will still have problems. There is not an easy answer and technology is only as good as its programmer. Hey what programmer out there has never made a mistake? ALL software has bugs and by putting a machine in to deal with the voting system does not guarentee anything. Just my .02 cents.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
What do you suppose happens when the government DOES "get it"? We wind up with things like Echelon and move ever closer to a police state. I for one, am happy that the government remains incompetent because at least then they're relatively harmless.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
..there doesn't seem to be too much wrong with the electoral college system you have over there. The only degree of unfairness seems to be the 'all or nothing' allocation of votes that most of your states seem to implement. That said, when a state only has 3 or 4 votes, the method chosen is the only way of making them count. In the UK, you can get the majority of seats in Parliament with about 40% of the popular vote AND your man gets to be Prime Minister, meaning you have theoretically almost total power for the next 5 years.
OTOH, I think both candidates have caused a certain loss of dignity to America with this pulling and tearing over the corpse of the election. Maybe they should both agree to step down and allow someone else to try. Both candidates should wait till all the postal votes are in and agree to accept the result. For once Tricky Dicky Nixon was in the right in accepting the result even though there was clear evidence of some vote rigging. This problem is not even due to criminal influence, just a major cockup in form design.
The common opinion in the UK seems to be that if you can't see a damn big arrow pointing at the hole you should punch out then you are too daft to vote. Secondly both main parties accepted the format of the paper before the vote and therefore should accept that it wasn't quite perfect after the vote. In the UK, I believe that you have the ability to get a new ballot paper provided you return your spoiled one before you pop it in the box.
P.S can anyone provide a link to that joke Florida ballot paper that's doing the rounds ? I think it says it all...
BTW, as far as being poorly sighted goes I was -10.25/-9.75 till the wonders of LASIK had their effect, so I do understand about eyesight problems.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
..a lot of them said they were too embarrassed to ask for help at the polling station. People are there at the polling station to help out and if the voter doesn't take advantage of what is available that is their loss.
You didn't have to be that literate to understand the form, just punch the hole indicated by the d**n big arrow for your candidate. Both parties accepted the form layout before the election, so they should accept the result after the election. All elections have some spoiled votes, and it is only due to the closeness of the result that both parties are doing themselves no justice by squabbling over them.
As for getting the same number in two different counts forget it. Any two manual workers will disagree in small ways as to what constitutes a valid paper and what is a spoiled paper; no matter what system you use there will always be spoiled papers, sometimes done deliberately to indicate none of the above.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think there is a strong case to be made for a more 'democratic' form of government based on the fact that technology now makes representative goverenment all but obsolete. Why be represented when you can participate directly? As the current U.S. system stands, it's not particularly democratic. Candidates say anything to get elected, often promising to deliver many things they have no control over. Ultimately one of them gets elected, and then gets wined and dined by big money -- special interests, corporations, etc.
In my view, the current political system pays lip service to 'democracy' while in fact to be represented you have to pony up $millions in various contributions (bribes). The only way, for example, some piece of 'important small business legislation' could ever be passed is if the small business owners got together, threw a bunch of money in a pot, and hired a professional lobbyist.
Whether we vote on punch cards, or computers, the basic political system itself will not change. I suspect that computerizing the election process would cause much more trouble than it cures. Have you ever voted? The people signing you in and operating the equipment are not exactly your typical computer literate crowd.
The implementation details are what kills this -- it's one thing to have a slashdot poll, but any election comes under a lot of scrutiny. By the time everyone has had their say in the system it's unlikely that it would ever work, and even if it did, it would cost 10-20 times what we pay now.
Disgruntled voter in New York -- the carpetbagger state!
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Others have thought about it already, and despite my positive view of technology, I have to agree that we're not ready to vote in the home, and won't be for a long time. Where's all those people decrying SDMI for having the "trusted client" problem? This one is thousands of times worse! What if someone plants a lil' program on your computer that causes your vote to magically change from Democrat to Republican between the time you click "Vote" and the transmission of the results?
An excellent essay that has actual thought involved instead of just knee-jerf reaction is this study from the Voting Integrity Project, Is Internet Voting Safe? It's a great essay, it doesn't say "Yes" or "No", it says both and qualifies them.
Think, people, think! This is too importent to just throw technology at the problem and assume it will magically make the problems just go away!
In 1996, 16,000 Palm Beach County ballots were discarded. In 2000, of the 19,000 ballots, only a small percentage were discarded due to multiple presidential votes. As a resident of West Palm, I have yet to hear from ANY of my friends or family (Republican or Democrat) who found the election difficult. Long, yes. Mechanically difficult, no.
The people crying fraud out my friggin office window seem to be blissfully unaware that a Democrat designed and another Democrat approved the ballot. Where's the fraud?
On another topic, on Friday night, a whole bunch of us went down to the protest with signs like "Vote for J.R. "Bob" Dobbs", "fnord", "Garage Sale", and a blank, black poster board. You can see us behind the announcer on CNN and on Larry King Live. :) Tonight, I'm going to carry a "First Post" sign.
--
Evan (Long dark hair in a neat ponytail, dark trimmed beard, glasses. On Friday, we were on the Bush side of the street)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
> I asked myself why there why there were so many idiots who claimed that they voted wrong, and then didn't figure this out until they got home.
Does it take an idiot? There have been a number of times in my life that I took an exam and figured out about the time I got home that I had misunderstood a question and therefore gotten it wrong. Does that make me an idiot too?
Sure, knowing human nature, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it turns out that lots of liars are stepping forward now. But are they all liars? There were plenty of complaints on election day -- before the polls closed -- and the double-punched ballots tell a tale that does not need human testimony for support.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> "Florida state officials stated...." This is the conclusion as to whether or not the ballot was invalid on the link you gave.
Florida state officials are saying lots of things this week. The more interesting question is, which of those things will hold up in court?
The page also gave a link to the actual text of the law, so Slashdot readers (and Florida's judges) can develop their own opinions about how well the sayings of the Florida state officials are supported by the laws of the State of Florida.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballor
Not. See this note on jurist, and read the part about allegations of a confusing ballot. IANAL, but it certainly sounds like the ballot does not conform to the requirements of Floridian state law.
> Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida.
Actually, the problem was reported long before the outcome of the election was clear. By 11:24 AM Florida time, there had already been enough complaints to prompt a FAX from the DNC to contact county officials, asking them to post a clarification. A note was then distributed by the county to the actual voting sites, arriving mostly between 1:00 and 2:00 PM. (I have seen at least once source claiming that the clarification never did reach all the sites.)
See th is Salon article for a pretty good review of the situation, including a link to a scan of the memo.
Also, now that a bit of information about the disqualified ballots is finally leaking out, it turns out that there was indeed a high fraction of Gore+Buchanan punches (over 2x the number of Gore+Bush punches, IIRC).
It is at best misleading for you to portray the current dispute as a post hoc attempt by the Democrats to throw a fair election.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Let's not confuse 'most technologically advanced' with 'most widely used'. They are not at all related, or the same thing.
tcp/ip is NOT the most technologically advanced, it is simply the most popular, and most widely used protocol out there.
Ironically, the state that has a reputation for being one of the most technologically backward states in the nation, my adopted home state of Louisiana, has one of the most technologically advanced voting systems.
In Louisiana, the voting is 100% digital. With the exception of absentee ballots, no vote ever touches a paper ballot, its all done electronically.
Here's how it works:
The voting machines contain an embedded computer and consist of a panel that is a programmable array of pushbuttons and LED's.
A PC software application programs the machine, assigning the buttons and LED's to certain functions, and the same application prints out a paper overlay, that they actually call a "ballot" that is placed over the button and LED array on the voting machine.
The paper overlay contains detailed instructions and the names of candidates. A black square is printed on the overlay above each active button. An arrow points from the candidates name to his/her assigned button. When the button is pressed, a green LED directly behind the arrow lights up. The LED shows through the paper at the arrow, and confirms the selection.
Any selection can be cleared and re-entered as many times as desired. When the voter is happy with his/her selections, he/she presses a "cast ballot" button that registers the selections in Flash EEPROM.
When the polls close, all the machines are taken to regional collection centers where their data ports are plugged into collection computers that spool the votes out of the machines and directly into an Oracle data base. With the exception of omitting an entire machine (or precinct!), no human error is possible, it's 100% electronic.
This is a far cry from that system in Florida where 19th century technology mechanical machines count punched holes using rotating wheels with mechanical metal feelers! Each time a ballot is run through one of these machines there is a risk that additional punch-outs will fall out, rendering that ballot invalid.
And hand counting, give me a break! Studies have shown that reasonably intelligent and diligent human beings can't even sort white marbles and black marbles from one another once they have been overcome with the monotony of sorting several thousand! It surely would be even worse staring at hundreds of thousands of ballots with little holes punched in them!
Louisiana's system is a huge step in the right direction and should be a model to the other states with more primitive systems. Throughout the 20th century, Louisiana was a national laughing stock due to continuous allegations of voter fraud. They've made it a priority to start out the next century with a robust solution. I think they're doing an excellent job in that regard.
I disagree with almost all this analysis. The problem in Florida is that the voting method is too high-tech, not too low-tech. The machines can't count valid ballots correctly because the chad wasn't always punched out fully.
In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only takes a few hours to count all the votes.
If you vote by computer, how can you ensure public confidence in the outcome? How can you refute allegations of 'hacking'? How can you recount if you need to?
I do agree about the need for electoral reform, but that's not likely to happen because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution. (The only change which could happen is states allocating electoral college votes in proportion to their popular votes, but even that's unlikely because states gain from being able to swing a large electoral college vote).
One other factor which I've not seen mentioned in the extensive coverage the last few days is, why are the electoral officials themselves elected? The electoral officials should be non-partisan civil servants, otherwise people won't have confidence in the impartiality of their decisions.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Pen/paper/punch ballots are the SIMPLEST form of voting out there. Could you imagine when everything is on computer, and the server goes down? watch complexity rise to a near-infinite level as they scramble to put back what was discarded.
Then you add in the 3r337 h4x0rz and you are in for a world of hurt, reliability issues with the outcome become of paramount concern.
The "complexity" of the WPB ballot came from ignorance on the part of the voters. And who said that those 19,000 ballots didn't include those who voted correctly after realising a mistake. And why would either side double-punch those ballots? Those are the questions, and they all too often come up this century..
Lowmag.net
Umm.. granted there's probably be some problems that would crop up in a digital voting scenario, but it can't be any more scary than the current system. I walked into my voting precint last week, and voted without showing any kind of id. All I needed was a name (which I could have easily looked on the list the officials had on the table in front of me), and an address. That's it -go vote for president now. That's pretty damn scary that there's no verification of identity.
I have a comment on why not making it a holiday (as it was around here).
First of all - when you aren't obligated to vote (as brazilians are) - people that don't care will just stay home - as a matter of fact, most people will just stay home, the voter turnout will be much lower than the already are (think about it, would you go out in the cold to vote for something that won't affect you). Second, not giving a holiday is good to keep vote herders to a minimum, I know it's legal but doesn't everybody hate to be harassed by some smuck (or smuckette) giving you stickers, pins and hats for their candidate?
I can't see the reason to make it a holiday, especially when it isn't a mandatory vote. Even for a mandatory vote, holidays are just an excuse to go travel and have a plausible cause to not vote.
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
Candidates qualify separately in each state. Each state can use various voting systems, and the winner in each state is used to select that state's electoral votes. But this system won't work interstate if different candidates are in each state, as the points can't be compared between states.
Not that I'd like to be forced to rank nine candidates. It would be quite enough work to rank the top four, as it involves finding out the issues of each of them and trying to compare various phrasing. "Okay, this one is totally in favor of bringing the dodo back from extinction, while that one is totally against it, but this one hasn't answered the question, and the last one is against it if it is found to be impossible do do it."
Brasil might indeed teach us something about electronic elections, particularly as U.S. laws which protect our elections don't apply to someone in another country. "Hello, I'm the Great Vote Robber of 2012, live on CNN from Sao Paulo."
Mod me down, the Pim up. He's right.
However, "Condorcet" is not a descriptive name for a voting system. Call it "Instant Pairwise Runoff Voting". That way it sounds more palatable to IRV supporters. It also emphasizes that the two are related improvements on the current system.
Both are ranked ballot methods. Unlike the Borda count, neither one rewards partisan tactical voting (favoring your favorite candidate by lying about your less favored candidates). However, IRV rewards defensive tactical voting (disfavoring a hated candidate by lying about preferred candidates), whereas IPRV/Condorcet does not.
Also, IPRV can deal better with "spoiled" ballots and recounts. Each ballot can be counted in any pairwise race where it's unambiguous. The matrixes of pairwise preferences can be hand-counted and added precinct-by-precinct. Ballots with X's instead of numbers, or duplicate numbers, or indecipherable numbers can still be counted as a matrix, simply put a 0 wherever it's ambiguous. This is not so for IRV.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
(1) seems to conflict with (5). Perhaps there's some way with digital signatures and one-way keys to accomplish this? Perhaps the voter has a printed token that they can use to verify their vote is "as cast", without revealing what it was, and if they have significant doubt (like in the Palm Beach butterfly ballot) and don't mind revealing how they voted, they could combine their token with the Registrar of Voters' token to see how their vote was recorded; the same information as on the screen when they voted. You need both the token on the slip of paper the voter got and the Registrar token to get the individual vote information.
Absentee ballots definitely fail (1), but I don't see any help for that. (Guess why the Democrat operatives were carting the homeless down to the Registrar's office to pick up absentee ballots in exchange for cigarettes, rather than to the ballot box on election day?)
Unfortunately, any Internet voting scheme is also going to fail (1), because you can't verify that the voter is alone at his/her PC. Unless, perhaps, you make it possible for the voter to change his/her vote at any time before the polls close.
One of the critical concepts in the american voting system is anonymity. The current system, for all its flaws, achieves this. They know that I voted, but they don't know who I voted for. This was done because people in power (at any level: bosses, politicians, even husbands) were able to force people to vote one way or another by retaliating if someone voted "incorrectly."
A lot of the "vote on the internet" stuff that you see doesn't have this anonymity. Electronic booths to replace the levers and punchcards are a good idea. Voting booths that might permit traceable votes aren't. If we're worried about people making it to the polls, we need to look at the absentee ballot handling (Oregon has a fantastic system for this) and perhaps we should declare voting day a national holiday and strongly discourage businesses from remaining open.
--
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
There are many problems with election fraud that we don't see because we've developed voting methods that work to counteract them. These methods don't work with online voting. Do you really want to take the risk of huge amounts of voting fraud? I don't.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There is absolutely no reason not to use a simple scantron. In my district we used the "connect the arrow" ballot. Simple. Hole punching and loosely hanging chad is a recipie for disaster.
Unfortunately, there is a reason. It's called money. I live in Osceola County, Florida. I know that I had asked the elections office after an earlier election why they were using a punch card system. The response I recieved, same response a lot of the media has gotten, the county can not afford the couple of million dollars to upgrade the voting equipment.
Granted, Osceola is a small county compared to the others in this mess. I am not sure why Palm Beach county can't or won't change. However, Volusia county shows even the scantrons aren't infallible. One precicnt had a problem with the scanner and could not get through too the tech desk because of the volume of calls. They had an emergency bin that filled up, so she did the only thing she knew how, cycled power. Guess what, it last the records of the 300 or so ballots that had already been scanned. It would have been caught and corrected later; but even the scantrons are not perfect.
Money is probably the biggest issue to upgrading these systems. It always will be.
It would be rather simple to make some basic changes.
Whoever wins the entire state gets the 2 senate seat votes, and whoever wins each house district gets the appropriate vote... this is an automatic 3 for the small states, of course, but would break up the larger states such as NY, CA, FL, IL, MI, PA, etc... so that you wouldn't see that 55 vote swing. The two Senate seat votes give you that popular vote edge, but the others come down more locally. It would be interesting to calculate what that would have resulted in for this election...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Even if we were to allow the wheels of government to grind along slowly, and give them a few more elections to get technology in place, effective information design is not new.
The private sector occasionally knows the importance clearly presented information. Ask for a picture menu at McDonalds sometime. Of course the private sector counts ever $.69, government is currently content to ignore thousands and thousands of votes each year.
The Palm Beach ballots were not alone in their incompetence. Evidence from all over the US indicates many ballots were as easy to understand as a Tax form, which is not at all. The nature of English reading (and all other horizontally read languages) is to read down one verticle column and then move on to the next column. This reminds me of those silly high school tests where there was a long list of convoluted directions with the last item in the list saying "ignore all previous directions."
A whole lot of people on both sides of the party fence are having their careers skewered over this. I feel bad for the local Democrat woman who approved the ballot. Her job was not to redesign the voting system, her job was to make sure the names were spelled correctly. Florida law indicated the order of candidates on the ballot, maybe it should have put everyone in the middle. A whole lot of grief could have been avoided if the ballot design had "wasted" a bit of paper and left some space between the candidates names. There appeared to be plenty of unused space at the bottom of the ballot card.
Regardless of who wins this election, wouldn't it be nice if Florida could get the same number in two separate recounts?
Some of the protest signs have been rather disturbing. I don't believe the people who screwed up their votes were "stupid" as I've heard and seen them referred to. But even if they were, we are all free to be stupid, and to be frail, confused, illiterate. All votes are equal, no one voter has any more importance whether they have an MBA or never went to high school.
I am a student. .gov) I just don't care THAT much. I don't like waiting in lines. I think the candidate who wins is always most likely to be the one who appeals to people who don't mind waiting in lines.
I didn't vote for a few reasons the BIGGEST being that the process of voting is more prohibitive than any other process in my life (besides renewing my drivers liscence or other interactions with
The system is self perpetuating in a sense
this sig is deprecated
It seems a little strange to me that just becasue we have a close presidential race, there has to be a problem somewhere. I don't see how the vote count can be chalked up to not enough technological reform.
There was an election some time in the 1800's that took six months...SIX MONTHS...to decide. How's technology going to help absentee balots? Americans that live and work abroad have the right to vote, and if the vote is close enought that it comes down to those absentee balots, well, then that's how it's going to be.
Now, if people have a problem with the electoral college, then that's a separate thing. I'll admit that the system could use some reform, but it has worked well up to now. I think this is a matter that doesn't have a correlation to technology; we don't have to tie technology to every single issue in our lives. If anything, this illustrates the need for people to vote, not the need for technology. We saw one case in florida, where a confusing ballot machine (technology) may have caused people to vote incorrectly. Now, you can say, hey, that's how the cookie crumbles; we can't be held responsible for every person that votes incorrectly, or is confused by the ballot. But they're old people; cut them some slack. It's somewhat strange to have a platform that harps on social security reforem (something that the elderly are more concerned about than any other age group), and then be unsympathetic when your system confuses them. It's easy for Bush to say, "tough", cause he's ahead.
And then people bitch about people that voted for Nader, saying that their votes probably would have gone to Gore, and blah blah. Well...at least they voted!!! I don't see how we can complain about the voting system when a staggering percentage of our popultation doesn't even vote!
If we think that more technology in the voting sector is going to help, then we're way off the mark.
Actually, it would be prudent to have a printout card listing the voter's choices drop into place behind a window (look but don't touch). If the voter confirms the vote, it drops into the locked ballot box. If the voter rejects the vote, it is marked "VOID" and dropped into the locked reject box (or maybe all dropped into the same box, if the VOID marker is sufficiently reliable and indelible), and the machine allows the voter to enter new choices.
That provides a printed confirmation as a double-check against machine error (or corrupted programming). The cards can be counted automatically or manually if the machine tally is called into question.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I don't think that issuing voter receipts is a good idea, precisely because of the coercion issue. Even if the receipt merely contained an ID number for the vote, someone could use it to verify that he voted "correctly".
IMO, providing a printout for final review behind a window (which could be marked VOID if the voter rejected it and started over, or dropped into the verification lockbox if the voter accepted it and entered the vote) is sufficient.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The states can do as they please.
When will people (especially /.ers) learn to read.???
Good question. Your reading test for today is:
And, from the advanced reading excersize:/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
One of the gripes raised in Florida was that about 19k ballots in Palm Beach County (not Broward County, as Jon Katz stated) were thrown out because of a double-vote...someone punched a candidate, realized he made a mistake--and then failed to get a new ballot and proceeded to screw up his vote altogether by punching another candidate.
The electronic voting machines used here in Nevada (or at least in Clark County; I'm not sure about the rest of the state) since 1996 or so keep this from happening. When you step into the booth, an arrow shows up for each candidate/question for which you can vote (since one booth can serve multiple precincts). When you press a button for a candidate, the arrow moves to that candidate. If you then try to select another candidate, the machine won't allow it until you press the button for your first selection to deselect it. Double-voting is impossible with this system. Once all your choices are made, you hit a big "cast vote" button and your ballot is recorded in a memory cartridge. At the end of the vote, all of the cartridges are read into the tabulating system, which then spits out the vote. There's much less room for monkeying with the vote. About the only thing that can happen is an electronic or mechanical failure of the equipment, and that isn't as likely or as prone to fraud or manipulation as looking at a punchcard and determining if a bit of chad is or isn't punched out.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
While there are many problems with the balloting system, the idea that it "takes too long" is silly. This is not an instant-win scratch-off game, there are month-long delays between election day, the meeting of electors, and inauguration exactly so that problems can be dealt with.
Also, the suggestion that some people should be able to vote from their homes while those who can't afford, or choose not to own, computers have to wait in line raises serious "equal protection" issues - not to mention huge technical hurdles. Forget it.
Yes, we needd better tech at the voting booth and the counting centers. But the concern should be accuracy and usability (check out the Sun-Sentinel's virtual Palm Beach ballot and tell me we can't do better!), not speed of results.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This technology is from the 70s.
When I first voted in 1980 in Delaware, they had mechanical voting machines. You pulled levers inside a booth and it advanced mechanical dials indicating who was voted for. At the end of the day, those results would be phoned in, the machines locked up, and the results later certified by officials checking the dials.
Now we have computerized voting machines. Loud audible tones are heard when a poll worker sets it up for a vote, the watchers hear this so they can be assured no one gets more than one vote, the voter goes inside a booth and presses buttons to indicate who to vote for. You can change your mind and unselect it, all candidates chosen are lit up by bright red LEDs and those races where you haven't voted have a reminder LED blinking.
The votes are recorded into a cartridge and also into the machine. At the end of the day, the cartridge is somehow uploaded to a central place and the machine itself folds down into a self-carrier that can be sealed for later reverification if needed.
From what I can gather, the system also advances analog counter dials as a backup if the electronic part fails. (I couldn't get near the rear of the machine at my polling place but at a friend's poll I tagged along to, I was actually able to wait for her by sitting behind one of the machines and checking it out visually!)
In a primary election this past September, the two Republican governors were within 44 votes of each other. A recount was quickly done and lo and behold, the result was again 44 votes.
These computerized machines have been in use for about 6 years. When is the rest of the country going to catch up?
Absolutely!
By calling for "standard ballots and recount processes", I was not counting for a single, Federally-mandated ballot/process.
Like I said in my first post - it's 51 state elections - each state should standardize its own process. My only concern is that 51 standards selected be uniform across each state.
I was certainly not calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. I guess I didn't make it clear that not only is "it's 51 elections" required by the Constitution, but that I believed the "51-ness" of the system is a feature, and not a bug.
Agreed -- but with the caveat that each county should have used the same method when voting, so that the errors introduced by the voting/counting methodology were evenly distributed across the population.
Unfortunately, that was not the case in this election. Some counties used the Optiscan system (not subject to "chad" error), and others used punch cards (which, as we're painfully aware, are).
So any inaccuracies introduced by the hand-count (or rather, by the original vote, and possibly corrected by the hand count) are not evenly distributed among counties.
Depending on how you vote, this either unfairly skewed the election to Bush on November 7th, or it will skew the election to Gore in the days ahead as the hand recounts progress.
The time to have decided this was before the vote, when one's political leanings wouldn't have entered into the equation. Sadly, it's too late for that, which is why we're in this mess.
Quoted from a Canadian commentary (albeit a highly partisan one in favor of Bush) on the subject:
If (if!) this report (I see no substantiation here, and the article is extremely partisan, so I'm still classifying it as "rumor" - I'm sure if there's evidence for it, a Bush partisan will substantiate it :-) about the changing
of the standard between three-point severance to "sunlight" or the
"dimpled chad" partway through the recount turns out to be
true, it raises questions about the impartiality of the hand recount.
Back to my "standards" thread - this Salon article points out that heavily-Republican counties use the Optiscan system, which isn't subject to the "chad" issue. If true, it appears that votes in Republican counties already "count" about 0.001% more than those in Democrat counties, and there's a legitimate argument that Gore's calling for a hand-recount evens the score.
IMHO both the National Post and Salon articles (and the post to which I'm replying) constitute evidence that we need both a standard ballot and a standard counting system.
(And that, Constitutionally, these standards should be set on a per-state basis, not the Federal level.)
Ballots: For reasons which should be obvious to all. Whether the Palm Beach County ballot was "simple" or "confusing" appears to be a matter of whose party you support.
By standardizing the ballot, we could ensure that these allegations are no longer an issue, and that if a usability issue becomes a problem, at least the effects are uniform across the state.
(I'd argue that if we go to an electronic system, the order in which the candidates are presented should be randomized on a per-voter basis.)
Process: The more important issue to me would be standardizing the process whereby votes are counted or recounted.
This election is likely to turn on chad - bits of paper from punch cards that either fall out of the card or remain attached by a corner.
That's bad. But at least chad affects both candidates identically. Or does it?
Ballots Again: An election in which voters in heavily-FOO counties vote with #2B pencils, and voters in heavily-BAR counties punch cards (with attendant risk of "chad" not being counted by the counting machines) will skew the results for FOO.
Indeed, even if we use the same technology (say, "fill in the dot with the pencil"), but FOO-county voters use #2B pencils, and BAR-county voters use #2H (hard) pencils, the lighter markings produced by the "hard" pencils will lead to a higher "uncounted" rate, and a skew to candidate FOO.
Process Again:Because the Bush team screwed up and didn't demand a recount in heavily-Republican counties (and the deadline passed on Friday), and Gore was smart enough to demand a recount in four heavily-Democratic counties, votes in those four counties count more than votes in other counties.
(Which is to say that while the "old farts" in Palm Beach may have been "stupid" if they couldn't tell Gore from Buchanan, the Bush team made an even dumber mistake - effectively giving the election away because they didn't understand how the mechanical technologies of the voting machines affected the results. The "old farts" can be excused. The guys who are being paid millions to run a campaign can't ;-)
But because our ballots aren't standard, it's possible that votes in heavily-Republican counties may not even have used a punch-card system. If that's the case, then votes in Republican counties count more (by about 0.001%), and Gore's just evening the score.
(Evidence: The fact that almost all counties show an "uptick", not a "downtick" in the number of votes cast, and that the hand recount in the four precincts last week showed a 33:14 advantage for Gore, in line with the ~2:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans in that county.)
So because the laws call for recounts, but don't specify how the recount must be conducted on a statewide basis - it's up to each county to decide - both teams have the option of calling for recounts until they get the result they want, leading to a crisis of legitimacy (in the minds of the people, even if not in the eyes of the law) if the results differ.
Bottom line: How to make sure this never happens again.
If all voters in Florida used the same ballot and ballot-marking technology, there would be no controversy over whether "a misleading ballot in one county" could swing the result:
If all counties in Florida were required to use the same ballot-counting technology, there would be no controversy (the issue hasn't surfaced in the press, but it's clearly a possibility) over whether the counting technology could skew the results.
Finally, if all counties in Florida were required to use the same recounting technology, and agree to it in advance of the recount, we wouldn't be having the flurry of lawsuits we see today.
The voting technology, default counting process, and recounting process (including number of recounts) must be laid down in law, and must be laid down before the vote is taken.
(The reason for that should be obvious - it appears that old Republicans had no trouble with the Palm Beach County ballot, but old Democrats had trouble with it. It appears that Republicans think hand counts are a great idea in Texas, but fraught with inaccuracy in Florida. It appears that Democrats think that a machine recount is adequate for all counties in Florida except for the four most havily-Democratic ones.)
The only thing that's certain now is that all parties involved have lost sight of what's at issue - what constitutes a fair recount. "Fair" has ceased to be an issue of ensuring uniform error rates across the state and between candidates, and has been redefined by both sides as "that which may give our candidate the lead".
Umm, countries that aren't republics are monarchies. Aristocratic
government is the opposite of mob rule...
You are still very confused. All governments that aren't monarchies
are republics, and all governments that aren't republics are
monrachies. End of story.
It's like saying that a car got in an accident because the wipers were broken & the driver couldn't see, then replying that it wouldn't have been a problem if the car had been a diesel or LP engine or something -- the engine has nothing to do with matters here, the broken interface is the true culprit.
It's not resisting change, it's refusing to accept it blindly. Consider: a lot of these proposals surround the idea of online voting, on grounds that [1] encryption is strong these days, [2] online transactions are pretty secure now, and [3] results would be fast. Consider each of those points more carefully though:On the server end, what about a DOS attack that brings down the polling server in a district where one candidate has too much of an edge, or some kind of DNS or IP spoofing attack that siphons off all the would be votes for that district into some digital circular file somewhere, lost in the great bit bucket in the sky. And nevermind attacks that actually breach the server somehow, corrupting whatever database tables or installing whatever worms or trojans or what have you. Suffice to say, there's all kinds of fun ways to violate the integrity of the polling system.
Then there all the fun out-or-band attacks that could be done. When my legit absentee ballot arrives in the mail, will they invalidate it if voter records show I already voted online? Which, if either, would count? To turn it around, could someone covertly submit absentee ballots for every person that is known to support an opponent & will vote online, thus invalidating their votes & turning the election to the other side? How about a distributed Perl script cracking tool to vote online for every registered voter in a district, trying each password against each voter, in an attempt to stuff or invalidate ballots? When pressed, it would be relatively easy to product paper documentation of the forged results, no matter which side of the attacks you may be trying to press. Again, there are lots of ways to overwhelm the system.
I'm not totally against using computers as a tool in elections, but I see some huge problems with the idea and no clean solutions to them any time soon. Proposals that fix a non-problem while exacerbating the real problems will not win approval. Any proposal that dismisses with the idea of on-site, accountable, secure elections will win my disgust, because you're scrapping what's good about the current system & replacing it with something that can never be trusted.
If you really want to see digital elections happen, then hey go for it, but you had better come up with a clear, safe, and fair system that thinks through the sorts of problems with what you've described thus far. Choosing national leadership is far too important for anything less.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
1a) No
...] and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
1b) Yes
1c) No
2) No
3) Third party alternative
1[a]) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters.
Registration is that difficult for a reason: To make the election more accurately model a civil war. Registration is about as hard as enlisting in a militia. Throughout the history of the U.S., the vote has been extended to various subgroups of the population only after they had proven capable of organizing war-style violence.
By modeling a civil war, the elections serve, not fairness, but stability: As long as the losers believe it is a good model and a reasonably valid count they don't try to reverse it by violence, because they believe they'd lose THAT battle, too. (And they HAVE reversed very heavily and publicly corrupted elections by violence, repeatedly.)
[1b)] Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls,
Yes. Failure to check lets corrupt politicians rig the elections. Just don't create a national ID card usable for other purposes - like tracking, and then oppressing, the population. Otherwise people who would fight might also refuse to vote out of principle - or even go to war RIGHT THEN. (In addition to people concerned about privacy and oppression there is a major religious faction that is fanatically opposed to hanging numbers on the people on religious grounds.)
[1c)
Same as 1[a]). If they're not interested enough to take the trouble to register they certainly won't take the trouble to fight. So if the civil-war model is to hold they shouldn't vote.
2) If campaign money is speech (Buckley vs Valejo!) then my voice is being drowned out by the roar of corporate cash. Let's investigate public financing so that we know in advance who has bought the candidates - us!
Forget it!
In addition to the problems with limiting free speech (which will cause the courts to CONTINUE to strike down your efforts), that puts the people in power in charge of handing out the ONLY money that can be spent by their oppostion.
Do you want the same people that have kept Nader and Browne out of the debates chosing who will be able to buy TV and newspaper ads, or even print pamphlets, posters, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons?
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Because when they STARTED only the landowners voted, and most of those could take the day off and ride into town.
There is already a law on the books to guarantee time off to vote. A holiday would be better, but not perfect. (Some jobs have to keep running even on holidays.)
Better yet: Just keep the polls open for 24 hours, closing them all simultaneously about the start of TV primetime at the population centroid.
That would also eliminate the problem of the networks influencing the election by calling the results before everybody has voted - causing voters to give up prematurely and usually making the prophecies self-fulfilling.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem with the punched card system is NOT that it is low-tech. The problem is that it buries the processing behind a wall, where cheating can take place and be undetectable.
It already WAS a "high-tek" replacement for paper ballots. And the problems we see now are exactly the problems we'd see in spades with a more electronified solution.
Katz says you don't have to ram a new system down people's throats. But you DO ram the results down their throats. That's the nature of elections. They'll only swallow them if they believe in the system. But they've seen how computers can go wrong, and now they've seen how punched cards can go wrong. So don't bet on them EVER accepting a netified election.
"Pay the Two Dollars!" Count the bloody ballots.
(It's a LOT better than counting the bloody bodies after the people stop trusting the elections and go back to pre-election methods of conflict resolution.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Electoral College is there for a reason: To keep a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the bulk of the states.
Go to any news site and look at the election map. (Here for instance.) This election is EXACTLY what the electoral college is INTENDED to address.
Further: The partitioning of the vote into states limits the ability of a corrupt political machine in one big state to swing the election. With it a cheater can only capture the electors of his state - which MIGHT swing the election, but only if the other states split just right. Without it his fake votes could swamp the genuine voters any time the election is at all close. And we'd be recounting the WHOLE COUNTRY, not just a few counties or a couple states.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Technology is an handy baton to wave, but I don't think the most severe problems in our electoral system are technological. Even if every voter in this country had a trusted-ASIC smartcard reader and a token shipped to them (which they manifestly don't), you would still have to cope with issues like the inconvenience of registration, human duplicity, and collusion/coercion.
Rather than try to graft cryptography on top of the voting process, I would rather see human reforms. For example:
1) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters. Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls, and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
2) If campaign money is speech (Buckley vs Valejo!) then my voice is being drowned out by the roar of corporate cash. Let's investigate public financing so that we know in advance who has bought the candidates - us!
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Technology can help us solve our problems, but it's important to realize that voting in America is defective in ways that go far beyond mere ballot mechanics.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
You're just being absurd. He wasn't talking about voting online or even connecting the booths to the Internet (which would be an astoundingly stupid idea). He was talking about computerized voting booths, which would allow you to clearly see who you're voting for. Those would be much MORE difficult to "crack" than sabotaging a hole-punched ballot counter.
Believe it or not, it is possible for something to be electronic without being a computer or being networked.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Much better would be Instant Runoff Voting, which still can be manipulated by strategic voting, but not nearly as much as the Borda Count or a simple majority. The best solution would theoretically be Condorcet voting, but remember that this is America. Not so many Americans would be able to grasp the concept of how a Condorcet vote is tallied. Then again, CNN could make a killing making pretty illustrations of the results.
The other system Katz recommends is approval voting, which is simply dumbed-down IRV. And someone who doesn't grasp the concept of ranking candidates in order of preference is probably voting for the candidate whose hair they like best.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Audit Trail. Each ballot can (in theory) be tracked from the polling place to the final re(re-re-re-re...)count
Security. It's very difficult to h4x0r a paper ballot (punch card or otherwise)
What happens when we go to internet voting, and J. Random Script Kiddie steps up and announces: "1 4M 50 31337! 1 h4x0r3d the v073!!!" How can we prove or disprove his claim?
Where is the audit trail?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Presumably, the argument here is that people DID ask for help, and were told, essentially, to fuck off by the staffers.
See http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/11/13/politics/13 TOCK.html
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If there were 16K ballots cast in 1996 that were disqualified, that to me is a strong signal of a poorly designed ballot.
If there is a history of disqualified votes being cast in Palm Beach, then the system needs to be changed.
My county does not have problems with so many votes being disqualified. Want me to send you a copy of our ballot?
The only reason that Cheney got away with this is that he does maintain an address in Montana. It's pretty much his vacation cabin, but he does have a valid residence there by state standards. I suppose that 10,000 Texans might get away with claiming that they had a time-share in Florida, but probably not.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I'm not in anyway saying that I think the Electoral College is a completely fair system. It's just that no one has suggested a different system that is less unfair in every way.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
ooops... you're right. Sorry about that.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
That ballot design is not a new one, if memory serves; it's also been used in Chicago, as Mr. Daley is no doubt aware. In addition, 4-5% isn't that high of a discard rate, for PBC or elsewhere...
And, FWIW, Gore only called for hand counts in certain Democratic counties. That introduces additional inaccuracies in the margin, which is what matters, since hand counting is biased towards finding additional votes. The ONLY fair hand-recount is a statewide hand recount with uniform standards (e.g. standards for dealing with chad), and where each ballot is handled a minimum number of times (because this can loosen chad).
It's analogous to rolling 200 fair six-sided dice, rerolling all the dice that showed 1 or 2, then re-rolling those that still show 1 or 2, and then reporting that the dice have an average of 4.8 or whatever instead of 3.5. Any self-respecting statistician would die of laughter.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Think there's a problem with people buying/selling votes now? Just wait until people can do so in the privacy of their own home. As it stands, there is no way for a vote buyer to ensure that the seller did, in fact, vote according to the agreement -- only one person in a booth at a time. The same security cannot be had in a non-seclusioned voting environment.
Katz argues that people shouldn't have to drive long distances to vote, so they should be able to vote in their own homes, electronically. There just isn't enough security this way. I guess, IMHO, the ideal voting scheme is electronically, in a private booth, where you may have to drive a long distance.
sig: sauer
One thing that might be a help in Katz's model would be a standardized voting kiosk that would replace the current polling booths. Big letters, boxes that are very obvious, touch screen technology, etc. When the voter finishes the last page, s/he is presented with a list of the choices s/he made on the ballot. The voter could then review the ballot or click OK. After that, a last chance "Are you sure?" just to get it right, and then the vote is processed.
Processing, I think, should involve a variety of online and offline methods. Prints of the vote should be kept locally at precincts--at least in the near term while the technology gains acceptance--as an integrity check mechanism. Votes or vote stubs would be printed for the voters to take home. The vote would be sent directly to tape as an additional record. And in terms of online storage, copies of the vote could be migrated to multiple locations.
By keeping the same data in many places, I think that would give people who are non-technical some warm fuzzies about their vote being handled well. And I think that perceived assurance is possibly more important than reality right now. People who are already technical may express concerns about security, but they will at least appreciate the concept and can build on it moving forward.
Learning and moving forward. If we can achieve this from the 2000 election, then it will have been worthwhile. Please spare me these same partisan accusations the next time around.
I have not done a cost analysis of this approach, but it sure would be nice to move away from the arcane pencil/pen/stylus and paper/chad/connect-the-dots methods we have now. (That's right--connect-the-dots was the method used at my polling place in Redwood City, CA. On second thought, I might miss that--it was kind of fun...)
i'm going to decide who gets meta-moderated in slashdot... then I'm going to buy some books on amazon... then i'm going to vote online for the President of the leader of the free world... then i'm going to order lunch online...
yea, all could be done without leaving our comfortable hermann miller chair through the web with a simple web form. but should they be? i tend to be of the mind that voting for the Prez is an action that should have a little more importance and should demand a little more attention than any of the above mentioned activities. we SHOULD go down to a local gathering center to stand in line with others to vote. atleast there we get a little bit of the feeling that we're doing something important and recognize the gravity of our choice.
this might be a bit out there, but if anyone's read Signal to Noice by Nylund... there's an interesting idea that we should be allowed to vote unless we've passed tests that are administred that demonstrate that we're responsible enough to vote, have studied the issues, have formulated true opinions and not just those that the media has spoon-fed us, and that we EARNED the right to vote, that it wasn't just given to us.
of course, this sets up a class of those that are able to vote and those that aren't... but considering the way the media is being said to control us (and especially the less intelligent), then maybe it's a worthwhile idea. not like it would ever happen here... but something to think about.
I have to admit, the thing which startled me (an Australian) about the current US election was discovering that every state and every county organises the election process separately. This completely shocked me, as I had no idea that things were that backward and awkward in a country which prides itself on being up-to-date and technologically aware.
In Australia, there is *one* federally funded organisation (the Australian Electoral Commission) which handles *everything* election related, from voter registration and electoral district boundaries to organising, conducting and counting an electoral ballot. They do this for federal elections, state elections, and even for local council elections. This one organisation standardises ballot design and educates voters on how to fill out their ballot (with advertising on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet, as well as a brochure about how to fill in the ballot being delivered to every house). They deal with the mechanics of the way that an election is conducted, and it is a full-time government department (which recruits a lot of temporary staff during election years on ballot night) rather than being a temporary gathering of a few volunteers. They have well-publicised rules as to what is and isn't a valid ballot.
Just this *one* small organisation prevents the Australian electoral system from having events like those in Florida. We still have close elections (our current PM has been elected on less than 50% of the popular vote, but on a majority of seats), but we don't have anywhere *near* the amount of legal wrangles over them.
Perkin's Postulate: Online tech support is designed to provide everything short of actual help.
You know what, a lot of people claim that those 19000 ballots that were disqualified were simply punched by stupid people. I might agree with that if it weren't for one simple fact. All 19000 of those ballots were in ONE county! I don't care if it was a county of 20000 or two million, thats WRONG. 19000 state wide in florida I could understand, but all in one county? Someone fucked up, pure and simple, and it wasn't the people who cast the ballots.
/.ers who believes they are infallable, I can't wait until you get into a car accident and the law declares you are at fault when you thought you did everything right.
And heaven forbid YOU (you meaning those of you who have blasted people as being stupid for making this kind of mistake) ever make a mistake that you can't reverse. Sheesh if 19000 people can make a mistake like this than so can you! If you are one of the arrogant
In any case, I think all ballots in broward county need to be thrown out and then the county recast. Its the only fair thing to do.
He's also right that we need a standardized election method. Every state/county/district needs a voting booth with levers. They are simply, easy, effective, and you can fix mistakes easily. You can't fix mistakes on punchcards.
The present method is both quick and easy, however, and a paper method is far less prone to tampering with all the controls we've established now.
finally, what most people are failing to realize is that the difference between who voted for gore and who voted for bush is statistically insignificant!!!!! We are split down the middle and at this point it doesn't matter who gets elected because it won't reflect a majority of voters. It will matter economically and socially in that I believe one candidate is better on that than the other but I won't say who.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
You seem to be implying that Liberals have lots more sex and generate more progeny. Although this suggestion is a nasty troll, from another angle I have been thinking about the maps shown on the news that are a sea of red (for Bush) with a few small splashes of blue (for Gore) and yet the blue equal or outweigh the red.
Just for discussion's sake, I would think that the main driver of population levels in various locations is not birthrate but rather (surprise) location. People like to be near certain types of places, things or other people, so they naturally tend to gravitate to "likeable" places, regardless of where they were birthed.
Hence the high population concentrations on the US coasts and around cultural or economic centers. And higher density urban populations tend to be more immediately benefited by Democrat populist policies, to the detriment of other more conservative population segments like the small-town (non-union) worker or the independent business owner. But since they are fewer and more spread out, they don't count as much :-)
I think it's a great idea to computerize the whole voting system. It eliminates the need for recounts (the polls would close, the winner would be announced a half hour later (or less!)). One problem. All of the seniors and anyone who knows NOTHING about computers would get all panicky about other people knowing who you voted for. The problem with these people is that they actualy believe things they see in movies like War Games and the like and believe that all computers are the spawn of the devil (no, they aren't spawn of the devil, they are our spawn :)). People trust that piece of paper or that worker. What shocks me is that they don't even check (in our county) your ID when you go vote. All they do is ask your name and ask you to sign your name. THAT'S IT! What if my grandpa died and I could sign his name well enough to fool the women at the booth (being that the average poll worker age is 65-70, that would be easy enough)? That would get me two votes (if we lived in two different locations and we did). With computers, I know it would eliminate that, but those seniors can't get hollywoods image of computers out of their head. People trust what they know (and get complacent with it.). Until we can get people to feel comfortable with computers, they won't trust them with their votes. What's funny is that they trust computers with something much more valuable...their money. Computers keep track of your checking account. The only reason you keep track of it is in case there's a HUMAN error (computers, when programmed right, are infallible as long as there are no hardware faliures (I know there's no "perfect" os or software, but most bank errors are HUMAN related and not computer related)).
Gorkman
I think it's attrocious that our country still uses the Electoral College. It's not fair for someone in one state with fewer electoral votes to have less of a voice in the election. We need major electoral reform. We the people, need to start working at moving towards an approval based system, and eliminate the Electoral College all together.
With more direct voting, like an approval based system, more people would turn out to vote. The level of apathy among voters, especially young voters, is sad. I'm 24, and the only connection I feel towards politics is helping a third party get federal funding. But I know that my vote for them didn't help at all... and plenty of other people must feel the same way.
Is it any wonder why only 50% of our population turned out to vote in the last election? People need more interaction with government, and that has to start with a fair, modern election system!
"Being alive is a crock of shit." --Kilgore Trout
I think this should be obvious. If you actually reformed the election process, how could they manipulate the system?
"The only problem with this is that people might start questioning the validity of any expensive media operation designed to influence them. "
And this is a bad thing because...?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
The Florida goverment invested a lot of money on computers for the Florida Lotto system, and it's been working with no mistakes for years now.
I have never heard of any missed bet or fucked up entry so far.
So, why can't they invest some money in a computerized voting system?
The answer is simple, they don't really care about voters, they DO care about stealing your money with a lotery system that's very lopsided. But hey, it's our fault for not kicking their collective asses to hell.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
It's called the Florida Lotto.
The Florida goverment invested a lot of money on computers for the Florida Lotto system, and it's been working with no mistakes for years and I have never heard of any missed bet or fucked up entry so far.
So, why can't they invest some money in a computerized voting system?
The answer is simple, they don't really care about voters, they DO care about stealing your money with a lotery system that's very lopsided. But hey, it's our fault for not kicking their collective asses to hell.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
The problem is that no one ever accounted for margin of error. A known margin of error could be determined for the mechanical system, as well as for a hand-tallied system. In either case, I'll bet that the margin of error completely swallows the tiny lead Dubya has over Gore.
So, the problem isn't with HOW votes are tallied, its with how much faith we put in those tallies. There is a margin of error in every system. Both candidates are arguing about variances that fall within that margin of error.
We need to account for error and decide what to do when the decision is within the error. Do we throw out the whole state? Use an alternative voting method? Have a 100 yard race?
Who would have thought that Gore would beat Bush in a popularity contest, or that Bush would beat Gore in a college?
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Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
By definition, anybody who actually runs for public office is probably one of the least eligable, or desirable, people to have in that office.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
"The country that helped invent the most technologically advanced information network in world history can't eliminate bureaucratic lines, create simple ballots, or tally up the votes that will determine the future of its own government."
Could this have anything to do with the fact that the country has nothing to do with it, it's up to the individual states? Don't tread on me...
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I think there are two segments to this discussion about overhauling the electoral college and addressing this may make it acceptable to both small and big states. The process of assigning the electors by a states representation in congress favors small states. However, the assigning of all of the electors to the winner of a state regardless of the popular division of votes in that state also skews the voting away from a popular representation. A compromise could include keeping the small state bias in number of electors, but have states divide up electors by popular vote percentage. This method would also allow third party candidates to be involved in the election of the president. Also, those who say that the small states will vote against reforming the electoral college because of the bonus that they get may not be right. Lets assume (or hope) that the people of this great country can actually see the validity of the greater good, see beyond their own benefit and make a choice to better the country.
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
Katz will pay for it all!!
Hip Hip Horray!!
Technology has to be perfected before it can be put to use in something like our voting system.
I mean when they invented the printing press they didnt immediatly start making ballots and have everyone vote by paper.
Think about some back country voting booth in Louisiana where they dont know jack about computers, it would be hard to get a computer out there and tell people to use it to vote. I know thats not what he meant but if we are going to have any use of technology it should be sponsored by the government and you know how they fuck things up.
Give computers 8 - 12 more years and they should be more widely accepted and maybe by then we can use them to aid in the voting process.
We are taking several days to figure out who our new president is.... So what??? We are still running fine (besides the pussies who are selling on the stock market). We will have a president eventually. Imagine the potential for corruption if we used electronic voting, whole new system would need to be developed, hacking, electronic fraud, computer crashes, OS compatibility, etc.. okay enough ranting on my behalf
Thanks :-)
I used to think that IRV was the best you could do with ranked votes, even though it had occurred to me that it would be unfair to a "compromise" candidate (who gets lots of 2 votes). I was surprised that such a clearly superior alternative exists. I guess runoff voting has a large familiarity advantage.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
A system in which strategic voting is really hard is Condorcet voting. In Condorcet voting, strategy is only possible when the public prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A, and even then, it's tricky. Condorcet also satisfies many rigorous fairness criteria that instant runoff (and other methods) fail.
While it is important to realize the problems with simple majority voting, it is also important not to fall into another, less obvious, snare, like Borda or instant runoff. Instead, look at the results of hard logical and mathematical analysis. People who study this generally agree on Condorcet. (There are some variations, so to be precise, they agree on the basic idea.) See electionmethods.com or other sites
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
on Saturday Night Live (paraphrased from memory):
"Some people claim that voting over the internet would prevent the kind of confusion we have had in this election.
Oh, yeah, that's great. These old folks who can't even work a punch machine are just gonna love the internet. Hey, my grandfather can't even program a VCR."
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Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm voting for this guy, he makes some damn good points.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
DISCLAIMER: These are my immediate thoughts, feel free to point out any problems with my ideas, propose alternate solutions, etc. I'm open to intriguing political discussion.
Anyhow, on with the show:
Campaign funding sucks. Given enough money, one person could do just about anything they wanted within the laws of physics.
Campaign funding should be a static amount allocated by the government and *every* Presidential canidate should receive equal amounts. There should be no campaign spending that does not come from this alotment. This will ensure that each canidate gets equal opportunity finances. How you apply your alotted finances to your campaign is up to you.
All presidential canidates should participate in debates and be given equal opportunities to speak, grill the other canidates, etc, etc.
Basically, we need civil rights for the government. It's political racism, it's segregation of the parties. The people need to understand that the democratic and republican parties are not the only two parties, nor are they neccessarily the two best parties. The only reason the democratic and republican parties control the election is because they have the money and they have the popularity.
Slander should be forbidden. Even discussing another canidate in advertisement should be forbidden. Commercials that proclaim "mr. doe says he is against an income tax, but look, he signed this pledge to institute a 47857% income tax in 97 states" should be forbidden. To run such a commercial would disqualify you from the race. Advertising should proclaim only what the canidate believes and stands for, his stance on the issue, not anyone else's.
The electoral college is a hassle. Abolish it or change it. The president should be chosen by popular vote, directly or indirectly. If not abolition, electoral votes should be split according to state popular vote.
Anyhow, these are just a few of the things I see wrong with the US republic, oh, excuse me, "democracy."
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Yeah, I tried to invent a completely impartial committee that had lots of power over an election.
Maybe the committee could be made of a panel of judges or something, some type of system that maintains checks and balances.
Or perhaps the judicial branch could review committee decisions if they were made in bad faith. And make it an expedited process. No one wants to sit in court because some damn committee said you couldn't run a commericial.
Sigh, I just don't know. I can't think of a system that ensures general fairness.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Alright, so what if I could vote online. Will that suddenly change voting patterns? I wouldnt bet on it. Personally, we need to explore other forms of voting. I'd like to see us ditch the whole just plain one vote system. I like the Borda count, but I'd prefer a ranked style system in which instant runoffs become possible. Simply eliminate the lowest vote getter, and place that persons vote for the next highest ranked person on the list. I havent done the math, it may end up the same as a simple borda count. Still, this sort of setup prevents the Nader-Gore dilemma, and allows me to vote for my 3rd party of choice but still influence the main party choice. It also prevents the problem with the vote for whoever is qualified setup, that being, you cant choose between the kinda qualified, and the nowhere near qualified. I couldn't say that I even though I dont like any of them, I'd still prefer bush or gore to Buchanan.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
So in other words, a very human problem creates a technical problem that creates another human problem .. you get the idea ..
The events in Florida have raised questions about the best way to ensure that your vote is counted for the candidate you intend and how, if results were invalidated, we could re-poll only the affected voters.
I think this could be accomplished by issuing receipts to voters that showed their choices along with a randomly generated ID number that would also be assigned to their ballot--as is currently done with blood donation.
In this way, we could avoid some of the current confusion, while still protecting privacy. This solution could be applied both to voting live and in person, or to voting electronically.
States' rights notwithstanding, I think we need more consistency in polling methods for national elections.
The problem is with these slothful and unthinking voters that do one of the following things:
- Do not double-check their ballot before depositing it in the ballot box. Voters finding errors on their ballot are supposed to call the attention of a poll supervisor, and the supervisor will provide the voter a fresh ballot. When the voter is happy with the condition of his votes on the new ballot he can deposit it with pride; his vote went how he wanted and will be counted.
- Finding they marked the wrong candidtate, they do not call a poll supervisor and instead just mark their indended candidate. This is even dumber than not checking your ballot, since the voter leave the voting booth with the full knowledge that their ballot is invalid.
- After voting the way they intended, they leave the poll to go to their victory parties. At the parties they note that their candidate isn't doing as well as they had anticipated. They walk across the room to their local representitave and tell Mr. Wexler that they "accidently" voted for the wrong guy! Mr. Wexler takes the ball and runs with it. They also . Meanwhile, Mr. Wexler repays the voter's allegience by saying that his constituents are all but complete idiots.
In any case, the responsibility lies entirely with the voter to mark his ballot properly. If the voter makes a mistake, it is his responsibility to get a fresh ballot to correct his mistake. Once the voter is satisfied with his choices, he must personally place his ballot in the box. No one can do it for him.As far as voter confusion, if a voter doesn't understand the ballot, it is again his responsibility to find a poll supervisor to explain it.
Don't forget the piece of string that the pencil is tied to!
I can vote for members of 5 different bodies, parish council, district council, county council, parliament and Eurpean parliament. I also onced voted in a local referendum, on council policy too boring to bring up here. Sometimes elections for more than one body fall on the same day. Council elections usually occurr in May.
in say the past 50 years. Once now granted the Nixon/Kennedy thing was close but was not this close and Ford/Carter was also close but not this close. This was a one off in which some spoiled ballots in a place that happens to make a difference this time came to light. To give you another example. There are thousands of spoiled ballots here it Utah discarded because they can't run through the machines. Guess what no one cares. Why? Because they are not going to matter. Guess what there are thousands of spoiled ballots everywhere in the country that do not matter this time around. Then there are the spoiled ballots that happen to matter this time around and everyone talks about how the system is broken. The system is not broken. It is working how it should we have a very close vote in which spoiled ballots may play a role. So it is going to be looked at my everyone involved depending on what is decided by the people who decide such things it will all work out. Think about it when was the last time you did not know who was the next president by about 7 or 8 in the evening local time. For most of us this is the first time. It is very intersting that all the news shows are talking about "how every vote counts this time" because you know what they like everyone else know that in the past every vote did not count. This is true even if you don't want to deal with it. So what are we left with? The system is working like it has worked and I for one see no real reason to try to reform it. I mean look at Brazil with their online voting and they are just really stable and have not problems with elections. yea right.....
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Sorry for not reading All the other posts, but...
It is and should remain up to the state to decide how to cast their ballot for a national figure, as well as (obviously) for one of their own. Yes, there are technical solutions to the ballot-counting problem, but they may not be implemented nation-wide, just suggested. Polling places must remain public vis a vis, the 'gun to the head' problem. Only in public can you reasonably be assured that votes weren't coerced.
I think Gore has a legitimate claim, but, more importantly, the state of Florida Must find it in their best interests to assure the rest of the nation that their method of choosing their electorate is fair and trustworthy.
I am so damn close to entering into flamebait about so-called 'stolen elections' that I will stop now and go have lunch. This is an extremely heated topic right now. Lemme just say this: I hope both gentlemen stand back and let the Florida legislature, in full view of the entire nation, establish the legality and restore the integrity of its state electoral process. Anything less might (should?) incite rioting in the streets.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Election history in the US teaches us that a hand-count means
1. A longer, more expensive counting process.
2. More opportunities for human error to effect the count.
3. More opportunities for ballot fraud, especially in the late stages of counting a close race.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Secondly, all this talk about thousands of people claiming they were confused is a fraud. It has just been discovered today that Al Gore's people hired a telemarketing firm to call thousands of Gore-friendly voters (in those close Florida districts we are hearing about) on election night, asking them to complain about confusing ballots. Over 5,000 people were called by that firm in the first 45 minutes, once the decision was made to start making a stink about the election.
All these "disenfranchized" voters picketing the streets in Florida is a total lie. Every one of those people is a Gore activist trying to reverse the loss of their favorite candidate, regardless of the legitimate outcome.
The democrats now claim to have somehwere around 8,000 sworn statements from people who think they accidentally voted for Buchannan, even though he only got about 3,500 votes in the disputed district.
The ballot that Jesse Jackson is waiving around and calling unfair is the same style as was used to elect his son in Chicago.
This ain't about a poor election system, folks. It is about a PR campaign to undermine the nations confidence in the process which left Al Gore on the losing side.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nobody complained to Wexler until Gore's people had a telemarketing firm call 5000 Democrats in that district, asking them to put up a fuss. This is not a groundswell we are seeing, but the spin of a Politcal Action Committee. (...and I'm sure Senator Wexler knew it, too.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
all rather unbelievable, and disturbing.
My main concern is the scalability of the various voting solutions. and the need to have a method to properly validate results. Thus original documents seem to be vital, in order to at least be maintain in unaltered form the original actions of the voters. While there is no doubt that small electronic communities can handle the voting process well, in large communities those with vested interests have too great a temptation to try and monkey with the system. I believe that the technology will take a generation or two to become viable, probably via a quantum security system.
In the meantime, there are too many scary scenarios possible, many that play into the hands of the lunatic fringe, and many that justify paranoia, protected by the shear audacity and unbelievableness of the scheme.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In a popular vote, every vote counts
WRONG! go back and read the article at Discover (and re-read Katz's article above) If you elect your president by a purely popular vote every vote DOES NOT count - only the people who vote for the (eventual) winner count, everyone elses' vote means nothing. This is the basic problem with plurality voting (as you propose).
There will certainly be allot of debate take place about how to change the present electoral system in the USA as a result of this mess. Please dont let this opportunity for REAL change pass you by, send a letter to your elected officials demanding the following 3 things (if your Canadian, just #1 & #2):
1) Stop electing people using Plurality and switch to Borda Voting - which is best suited to reaching consensus, which is what we want isnt it?
2) All 3rd party money should be stripped from all politics - arent you people tired of watching your politicians selling legislation and accepting bribes, money for your campaign in exchange for favour is nothing more than a bribe, what the hell are we thinking...
3) Toss out this silly EC idea* - allow each state to split its electoral college votes based on 'ridings' where each vote comes from, ie. divide Florida up in 25 'ridings' and allow each small area to elect the candidate that best speaks to that smaller region, maybe the candidate will have something that appeals to them more specifically. This smaller region can have a greater say in what is relevant specifically to them.
REAL-BASIC CHANGES ARE NECESSARY and with this mess, some changes are going to take place - PLEASE make the right choices and REALLY fix the problems...
*and for every person who is now going to say "we live in a Republic not a Democracy - because Democracy doesnt work - blah blah" give your head a shake... you had a Republic in a time when it took 3 weeks to send a letter to someone in Washington it wasnt technically feasible to govern such a large area with a democratic system... CHANGE IS GOOD stop thinking of your 'Forefathers' as infallible Gods and your 'Constitution' as their bible... BUILD A BETTER SYSTEM - RAISE YOUR EXPECTATIONS - CONTINUOUS IMPROVMENT SHOULD BE THE GOAL
The Electoral College -- or, more precisely, an electoral system where each State has a given number of votes for president -- does have at least one major advantage in a close election. It serves to contain disputes and demands for recounts and actually makes it easier to determine the winner; it serves as a buffer that protects against a Florida fiasco on the national level.
Nationally, out of the 98,303,931 votes cast (and unofficially counted so far) for the two major-party candidates, Gore leads Bush by only 216,291 votes, a fraction of one percent. (You can get these numbers from any number of places; I've taken them from http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/poli tic s/.)
If it weren't for the Electoral College, I think you'd be seeing challenges to the results and demands for recounts or revotes even in those areas where everyone agrees that one candidate or the other won comfortably. In Chicago, for example, Gore got 769317 votes to Bush's 164919 (http://www.chicagoelecti ons .com/CHI1100ReportPage5.html), but I wouldn't be surprised if there somewhere around a third as many spoiled ballots (50,000 in Cook County, IL in the 1996 election rings a bell) as there were votes for Bush, but there's no need for a recount because everybody agrees that Gore won Illinois, and it isn't the nation-wide popular vote that matters. The two sides would be trying to squeeze every last vote out of every last precinct in the whole country if it weren't for the Electoral College limiting that nightmare to Florida and a few counties elsewhere.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that the Electoral College should be retained in its present form, but it certainly does suggest that we shouldn't be so quick to discard the balance it provides between national and federal elements in the American system of electing presidents.
Digital Signatures are legal now. There is no need mail paper to back up the election. A voter could potentially print a signed copy of his ballot. Signed by the election authority at the time he votes. This could then be compared to his online ballot at any time.
Yes, there is always the potential that a site could be Hijacked. But, as the author says, few would risk federal penalties for tampering with an election when they would be so relatively easy to track down.
The question of the electoral college and this mechanisms ability to represent sparsely populated states is another wank. In an Australian style voting system with built-in runoffs rural areas would gain added representation by third, fourth, etc. party candidates. When it becomes possible to vote for the candidate you prefer without the possibility of sacrificing your vote every viewpoint can be represented fairly. Imagine being able to vote for a pro-choice fiscal conservative!
Strange to think that even the majority viewpoint can't be adequately represented by our current pathetic two party system.
The current outcome of this election is a timely blessing. It emphasizes the dire need to reform our election process. Thank god the founding fathers realized that our government would need the ability to evolve. It is not overstating the case to say that our ability to adapt and fix this situation now could easily determine whether we remain the preeminant world power in the 22nd century. It may not be a matter of the election process itsself but merely the fact that we are unable to change to correct something that is so obviously broken. If we can't fix this we will ultimately strangle on our own democracy.
I think it is also useful to view this in the light of another major issue; Campaign Finance Reform. Interesting to note that a well conceived fix would also reduce the power of special interests and diminish the need for huge contributions. Maybe these problems were just the undiagnosed symtoms of our diseased electoral process? Is there a doctor in the house?
An example would be the people running for sherriff. If you are unaware of the candidates for that office, you may vote for someone who is being paid off by drug dealers and such. It's hard to know all the candidates that you want to elect. Some people do research before they vote, but the majority do not, and simply vote for names by political party, or even randomly. I once voted for someone because he had a funny name (Dick Wood or something like that) but I knew nothing of the guy and can't remember what office he was running for.
A misinformed vote is a bad thing. What you propose is that we not only continue with how the system works now (picking by who has a better haircut, nicer looking kids, etc.) but making it worse, so that we have people voting that don't know and don't care, and only vote because they are forced to. I do agree that there is something wrong with not caring. I hate Republicans and Democrats so I always vote 3rd party. Even though I don't agree with them 100% I do think they are a lot more honest than the two main parties and if they can win some smaller offices then they can do some good there to make things better locally.
Now...to go on another subject about mandatory voting, some places are very exclusive about who they let vote. I moved recently to Georgia. Now, they have the motor voter registration, so when I got my driver's license they let me register to vote. That was in September. When the day came for me to vote, I went to the place I was told to go, and prepared to make my vote. The problem is that Georgia is worse than Florida. When you register to vote, they might lose your paperwork, they might forget to process it, etc. Basically, I was told that I was not in the books, and therefore could not vote. I was pissed. I was shocked to learn that I was not the only person with that problem, and that it had happened to a lot of people. At least 2 others in the 5 minutes I was there. So how can you make voting mandatory, when they don't even want us to vote in the first place?
Well, those are my two arguements against it...feel free to agree or disagree.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
What the electoral college does is require the winner to have received a broad base of support across the whole country. Whoever wins, we can be sure that lots of people in lots of different places voted for him.
We do not live in a democracy, we live in a constitutional republic. Were we to live in a democracy, this nation would be called The State, not The United States. The Constitution exists to limit the powers of the national government that binds the individual states; each of which have their own state constitution, laws, government, and militia.
Democracies do not scale. The centralized infrastructure to support them cannot be guarded from corruption via peer review because the central government by nature has no peers. The viability of the US lies in the republic. States and counties are given autonomy over much of their actions with expicit regard to voting.
Cook County, Illinois, was a mess in the 1960 election. The US can absord and survive such corruption because it cannot proceed beyond that level. Voting handled on a national level is subject to fraud on a national level without the inclusion of excessive collaborators. History has plenty of democratically elected tyrants.
In a popular vote, every vote counts. Anywhere in the country. Whether you're a democrat in Alasca or a Republican in Washington, you have the same influence as everyone else. You do NOT let the whole election be decided by a couple of pensioners in Palm Beach (I'm not saying they should have no say, but not more than people in other states!)
random question: As Dick Cheney managed to quickly change his voter registration to be allowed to be VP despite coming from the same state as Bush, has any party thought about having a bunch of their members change their voter registration from a "safe" or "lost" state to a "swing" state? If the Republicans had got 10000 Texans to quickly register in Florida, it wouldn't even be close now!
Anyway, my view: Where you live should have nothing to do with how important your vote is!!!
Second, Slashdot is a geek haven, yet even Slashdot was hacked recently. You honestly expect the Government to do a better job securing their Internet voting system than Slashdot does securing their web server and ensuring no abuse of the Moderation system? If the geeks here can't do it, why would anybody assume it can be done somewhere else, and on a much larger scale? Maybe nobody has hacked Brazilian elections, but they are hardly the target US Elections would be, are they?
Third, and this is something people often don't think about, voting isn't SUPPOSED to be easy. Without creating an Elitist slant (which is not my intent), it's important to realize that making voting at least a little inconvenient serves the purpose of eliminating those voters who have absolutely no initiative. If they can't expend the effort to get to the polls (usually a 5 minute drive), they probably also didn't expend the initiative to consider the candidates and the issues. They might have some opinion spoon-fed to them by last nights news, but they are hardly qualified voters.
Fourth, ballots are supposed to be secret. Internet voting cannot be secret. You have to be identified to the system and tracked to prevent spoofing. If you separate the logon from the actual vote, then we've still got to cover what happens if someone votes on the Internet AND votes in the polling station. You have no idea who they voted for in either place, but they've been allowed to vote twice (and trivially at that).
I'm not opposed to improving the system, I just don't think we are ready to go full-bore into hi-tech, Internet voting, without a lot more effort being spent to solve the myriad technical and human problems involved. We don't really need the most technical solution possible, we need the most reliable and effective. If simply redesigning the ballots cures the problems, we don't have to scrap the whole system, we can just redesign the ballots.
See 1st steps at: http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/ivote/final_report. htm
C'est une monde triste qui ne prend pas le temps de savoir tout ce qu'on peut faire.
Saari advocates an election method called the Borda count election, in which each voter ranks all of the candidates from top to bottom. If there are five candidates, then a voter's leading candidate gets 5 points, his second-ranked candidate gets 4, etc. In the end, the points are added up to determine the winner. The Borda count, once used in the Roman Senate, was named after a French physicist and American Revolutionary War hero named Jean-Charles deBorda. This method is used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Tell me, if this was used by the Roman Senate, why is it named after someone in the Revolutionary War? Did the Romans not have a name? Or is this just some sort of cultural imperialism? And if the Roman system differed, in what particulars did it differ?
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
As I see it, the main problem is that balloting is controlled by each individual county. Lacking a common standard to which to conform, counties are free to invest as little as they can get away with. For many, this means that they end up using decades-old machines employing a century-old technology. For others, it means hand-marked paper ballots. Another factor is bureaucratic inertia ("we've always done it this way and it works fine"). I don't favor a national law forcing a uniform method (it would probably not be constitutional anyway), but it would be a great start to have each state come up with a modern standard, and have each county conform. It would cost money, but the present mess makes it clear that it would be money well spent.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
We should strive to make even stupid and lazy peoples' votes count the same as intelligent, non-lazy peoples'. This is a basic principle (or at least should be) of our democracy.
Regardless of the technology (or lack thereof) used, every precinct of every state should use the exact same algorithms and tools to carry on democracy. That way, even if the system is not fool-proof, it will fail consistently and predictably. This non-uniform occurrance of difficulty is the biggest problem and because of the lack of uniformity, the only way to be sure would be to do a hand count of every vote in every state. Who knows what happened elsewhere...
Why not just use touch screens where you would just touch the name (or even the picture) of the candidate that they wanted. At the end of the voting screen a person could touch a button that said, "submit" and if the person voted for two candidates for president (or any other office) they'd get an error message and the opportunity to correct their mistake. That would pretty idiot-proof and not near as many votes would need to be disqualified.
--
- After an election like the one we are - amazingly - still in the midst of nearly a week after the voting booths were closed up, their curtains at half-mast, it has never been so apparent that change to the election process is necessary. After focusing so much attention of the prior stages (ie. campaign reforms and campaigning tactics), it is now clear that the voting procedure must be updated as well. Certainly a system run electronically would be the way to go, but it will be.....
Tough to ImplementO P E N___S O U R C E___H U M O R
great comedy company.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
The first amendment holds that the free exercise of speech shall not be abridged. No where does it regulate the free exercise of nonspeech.
Countries like Belgium and Australia already have mandatory voting: don't vote and you get a small criminal sanction. Voting is no less intrinsic to proper civic participation than paying taxes.
If you're worried about how mandatory voting would remove an important means of demonstrating dissatisfaction with the system, then allow for a final option of "none of the above". Every year in Australia, a significant portion of ballots are (legally) mutilated in protest.
-- Anne Marie
The voting machines in my county in New Mexico, which does not require any sort of recount, allow editing. Every selection button is lighted and you can change selection at any time until you press a big 'commit' button which finalizes and ends your voting. We do not handle the ballot cards or whatever before or after the voting. All is automatic.
I'm sure these machines are costly. What is generally needed are terminals or thin clients in each voting booth that are connected to a local Linux precinct server. The stations would allow a clear presentation of the candidates and/or issues, one per one-or-more screens, and would allow editing and confirmation as should all well designed software. And because everything would be done in software the cost would be drastically reduced. The precinct server would be connected via dial-up or wireless to a master server that would act as backup to it should it fail. In addition to a record of votes maintained on disk, it would write a paper tape or punch card copy of each voters selections immediately after they finish voting.
The closed system should NOT be connected to the Internet.
Absentee votes could easily be handled online through the Internet or a dial-up BBS.
Well, the ballots may be ludicrous, but I thought it was interesting that a bunch of kids were able to do the voting correctly. http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=\Poli tics\archive\200011\POL20001110o.html
I just read your post, needless to say I had to get off the floor as I fell out of my chair from laughing so hard.
I am amazed you are not so effing ignorant to claim Jeb Bush as to having authored the ballots. I guess you realized you libelous suppositions could only get so far before even stupid people would laugh.
Let me give you some facts, though from your message its obvious you don't like facts.
Palm Beach county is majority Democrat.
The Ballot was created by a Democrat.
The ballot was approved by the Democratic party (and Republican too!)
The DNC/Gore Reps/Etc have managed call the county officials idiots, the person who drew up the ballot an idiot, and all the voters who screwed up idiots.
What do they all have in common?
THEY'RE DEMOCRATS.
Face the facts, the DNC is going to have as many recounts as possible until they can void enough non-Gore ballots to make him win. Repeated handling of ballots is a common tactic to institute fraud. They will simply accidently bend, twist, and tear ballots until they must be replaced with freshly punched ballots (which accidently appear to all be for their candidate)
Anyway you slice it, Gore and his cronies are trying to steal an election. You lay all your claims about Jeb Bush and such yet apparently you are very content that a hand-count is more accurate than a computer count.
Go away.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I must say that this time I am disappointed in the negativity coming out of so many smart people.
Computer based voting could be made a reality, hell the internet was someone's idea at first, and none of the technology was in place to unleash the daemon (ha ha) that the internet has become.
It was developed.
That's the whole point.
Don't bother flexing your brain to show us how hard it is, we can all figure that one out on our own.
Let's here about ideas, technologies, topographies, workarounds, etc, etc.
In the words of the master -- "Do, or do not, there is no try"
Flex your brain to show how it can be done, now that would be the most useful thing to come out of a Katz thread since, um, well, .....I'll get back to you on that one.
---------- You are not the contents of your sig.:-p
"Tampering with elections is a felony with serious jail time."
I'm told the punishment for murder in the state of Texas is rather severe. Yet murders still occur.
To suggest that these hypothetical systems would not be craked because the punishment would be severe is absurd. Of course it would be cracked. Particularly if it is networked. Say GE moves a few crakers to Christmas Island...then what?
- Dan I.
WASHINGTON D.C., Nov. 13, 2000 - Associated Press:
Following an emergency meeting Monday morning, Congress unanimously voted to excise Florida from the United States of America. The move was a reaction to the confusion and irregularities in the state's voting numbers that have totally disrupted the 2000 Presidential election. 'This is the last straw,' said Utah senator Orin Hatch. 'First Elian Gonzales, now this.' Several congressmen told reporters the decision has been a long time in coming. 'We're all pretty much sick of Florida,' said representative Barney Frank. 'They've been a constant embarrassment for too long now.' Added Frank, 'They had Dan Marino for a while, but what have they done lately? Oh that's right, screw up our entire democracy. I forgot'
In a speech on the Senate floor, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy commented that the loss of Florida's sizable elderly population will free up billions of dollars in social security funds. 'These are valuable funds which can now be redirected toward national defense. We can finally rebuild our demoralized, weakened military,' said the Senator to roaring applause.
Please email all complaints to root@127.0.0.1 and the issue will be dealt with in due time.
How about a small, detatched (existing only inside the polling place), dedicated network?
I think that we need to forget about using the Internet to vote, for at least the short term. There are many, many issues that are a long way off from being resolved with Internet voting.
What I propose is to simply move to electronic machines to tabulate votes. A box, with a paper voting book attached to it, with a row of lighted buttons down one side. The button lights up when a selection is made. When one is finished, one could press a "Cast vote" button. The vote is sent to a portable server, located on the premesis. You could make this server as fault tolerant as you wished, and voting tallies could be encrypted and digitally signed to preserve integrity. Put it on zip disk, jaz, floppy, CD-R, CompactFlash, whatever you want. The trick in preserving integrity that the polling place network isnt connected to anything else.
All the precincts could then send the data media to the commissioner, or wherever the ballots generally go.
This would give you the benefit of not having paper media to individually count (or dispute). No "chad" to deal with, no ballots to get mutilated in the card readers (sheesh, sounds like I'm talking about old minframes here).
An electronic on-site polling system would eliminate the need for recounts. If you vote, $CANDIDATE_TOTAL_VOTE gets incremented.
You wouldn't get the snazzy instant tabulation that some people want from the internet voting system, but you would get security, the removal of ambiguity, and less opporunity for ballot fraud.
Like I said in opening, perhaps one day we could manage a remote voting system over an open network like the Internet, but that time is yet far away, I believe. However, I think that electronic on-site voting is an idea whose time is long overdue.
This space for rent.