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eLection '04
My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?
There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.
Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.
But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.
I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.
Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.
Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.
Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.
Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.
Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.
This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.
At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.
Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.
(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)
Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.
There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?
Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.
The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.
I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)
Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."
The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.
The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).
In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.
In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.
This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.
Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.
(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.
Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."
If you have more links or information, emailme.)
The obvious enhancement to a touch screen machine at the voting place would be for the touch screen device not to count your vote directly, but print it out. You then take your "receipt" and deposit that in the ballot box.
Pros
The first two properties solve most of the problems reported in Palm Beach. There would be no 19,000 spoiled ballots with two presidential candidates marked off, and people voting for Buchanan by mistake would see it (best print the ballots in large print!) before putting the ballot in the box, and have a chance to fix their ballot.
Cons
When you vote, you are issued a certificate that says that you voted, where you voted, when you voted, what official(s) were there to check you, what credentials you presented, and who you voted for. You keep this certificate.
To keep things anonymous, the voter's personal information and ballot choices could be encrypted on the certificate.
That way, if there is a recount, or some row over the assorted breeds of skullduggery that might occur at a voting location, you have an alternate way of proceeding. If a voter is ticked-off about their ballot, they have a certificate that shows how THEY voted. If there is a really big stink, like the one going on now in Florida, the election officials can ask everyone to bring their certificates back to be tallied.
To tally and confirm the votes from the certificates, you set up processing stations where election officials read the certificates into a computer to decrypt them, and the voter can review the information. A blind system could be set up so that the official can't actually see the plaintext of the certificate. If the voter sees a problem with the information, there could be some process to correct it.
The certificates could be printed with bar codes to make them machine readable, which would make things go quicker.
This would solve (mostly, anyway) the situation now. The problem now is that there was something wrong with the ballots, but they've already been cast. You can't exacly re-do the election, and you can't exactly fix the problem by looking at the submitted ballots. Because we have anonymous ballots, you can't match the angry voter with the botched ballot.
There should be some redress for this situation. Even if someone is completely inept, it is all-important that their will be expressed as a vote and that thier vote be counted in the relavant elections. Elections shouldn't be a gamble.
--
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Whatever electronic way to vote you come up with, always make a real time paper copy at the place the votes get recorded, with some matrix printer with chain paper. It doesn't only look cool, it is also readable without electricity.
;
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I heard today on some TV news show that Palm Beach county has a FIVE minute time limit! So much for taking your time.
In a **true** democratic society, no one can be persecuted for their political opinions, so why have secret ballots? Vote openly, and there is no way anyone can rig/alter/change your vote since you can check your vote at any time (on-line, of course). Even if you conduct old fashioned voting in polling stations, walk in, say your preference out loud, your vote gets registered in the book, no need to count millions of sheets when all votes are in a single book (or two, if you double the evidentation). Results can be counted faster, and everyone will be happier.
Revolution = Evolution
just like Gore wants a whole county in Florida to vote again because 19,000 don't know how to vote. (And, after the fact, probably shouldn't be voting either)
some of the people in that 19k weren't idiots, they were refused replacement ballots when they didn't punch correctly the first time around.
I'd love electronic just to verify that my vote counted. There'a always a nagging feeling in the back of my head everytime I vote anywhere where I don't feel like it actually counted. It would be great to receive some sort of response that my vote did count and I contributed.
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
Agreed - some people are doing it right. Down here
in Charleston, SC the ballot is electronic.
You push the name, and a light comes on next to
the name - very obvious. And there are blinking
lights to show you what you haven't voted for.
Surely if we can do this in SC everyone else can.
Maybe if we did it like Fla, we'd increase the odds of our buddy Strom Thurmond being Prez for a week or 2. The Dixie(crats) will rise again!
A response for each...
1) Develop an open source election system. I could think of some requirements...
The system must be completely encrypted in such a way to render it impossible to break the encryption on all the votes, even if it is broken on one vote.
The system must print a receipt that is given to the voter. On that receipt is a key, that can match a votor to a ballot, but in a way that only allows this if the government needs to, and the votor wants to. REMEMBER - secret ballots do not need to be anonymous, just impossible to determine what candidate the votor chose without the votor's consent.
The system must keep a guaranteed record of every vote.
The system must have a method to prove that the system itself is honest (no one has programmed vote changes into the system)
2) The system that I am speaking of could easilty be run on free software. This means that the voting machines could be bought for $399 at your local computer superstore.
On a side note: I am not an advocate of internet voting. I am an advocate of computer voting systems at polling places. This would cause the count to be more accurate, allow a user feedback as to who they voted for, and not allow users to mark two candidates.
Spoiled votes is self-imposed quality control against those who do not deserve to have an opinion -- there you go -- cruel, but fair.
I don't think it even needs to be this advanced to be helpful. Besides, this would be awfully expensive for all the polling places to implement. How about this... On "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", they vote on simple little boxes with four buttons. Lets say they cost a buck. Four options won't work, so lets beef that up to 12. Now it's three bucks. Now add an LCD screen at the top about the size of a Palm's. Any idea how much that would be? I have no clue, so let's guess $30. All of these boxes would be connected to a central computer run by the election official at the polling place. When you check in, the official enables one box which steps you through the voting process. Once you're done, the box is disabled until it's again enabled by the offical. For people with vision problems, they could have a "deluxe" model with a bigger screen. This wouldn't have to be a lot more expensive because you'd only have to have one or two of these and people with special needs could all use that booth.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
Don't assume that some of these people did not ask for help. Maybe they did, but didn't get it.
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"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Most people don't understand that the states have a great deal of discretion in how elections are held. There isn't a constitutional requirement that a state hold an election to select the electors for the electoral college. A state could give that power to the Governor or legislature. See McPherson v. Blacker.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The most obvious problem with your system is that it leaves no paper trail . In a rare situation like this one where a recount is needed, I would never trust a computer system alone. The database can be corrupted or compromised. The network connections, though relatively secure, are not invulnerable. Admittedly, traditional old or non tech methods are open to compromise too, of course, but they have the trump card of tangible evidence of the vote in the form of some paper ballot.
It leaves a paper trail if you make it leave a paper trail. It seems like a lot of people here are acting exactly like other cynics acted when people started using computers for things like record keeping and publishing. I've seen countless people say that is can never be done, that you can never do a recount if there are no little pieces of paper that physically record your vote.
Why do these people think that we can't have both? Why is it necessarily impossible for a computer to make an electronic and a physical copy of information. Does your computer delete your document as soon as you print it? Does your paper document disappear out of thin air when you scan it into your computer? Of course not!
And why is it impossible to do a recount with only electronic records? Do you think that because you can't see the people poring over big stacks of ballots or you can't hear the big, rumbling mechanical machine furiously counting votes that a recount isn't being done? You can spell check a document, and then spell check it again; isn't that a recount?
I don't see why some of us have to be so resistant to change that we make such foolish assumptions that data can only exist in one place. You sound like my grandparents, the ones who refuse to use computers at all because they've gotten along just fine without them.
Note: Not you, "you". Just those people that I was referring to above. I could have picked any of 20 messages to respond to, yours was just where the pot boiled over. --Xantho
this really should be modded up. the retard reply that you need a 'good reason' to vote absentee is stupid and untrue. just claim to travel for work if anybody asks. and then sell your ballot, and let them mail it in. this makes the entire anti-internet voting stance because of fraud and vote selling pure drivel.
I can't cite anything that says ALL of those people received new ballots. Nor can I cite anything that indicates some fraction did or did not. This, however, is the point. The main remedy being discussed (at least on the channels that I've watched) is this statistical distribution of those votes. My question is how do you determine how many of them to count? I think they need to remain invalidated.
Now, on to your other points - yes, the turnout is ridiculously low. It should be illegal to bitch if you don't vote...:)
Back on topic: could computer driven or assisted or based voting reduce the percentage of errors? I don't think so. A touch screen or something *will* eliminate the discarded (2 vote) ballots as it will, presumably, show you the picture of everyone who is running and you just touch the one you want. It will not, however, eliminate mistakes. The same error that people are bitching about now would apply even if there was a confirmation screen. How many "Submit" buttons on the web have "only click once" next to them.
"The only "general bias" a paper can have is in its editorials, because those are meant to be opinion pieces and have an intended slant. But getting the actual reporters to follow a distinct bias is like herding cats"
No, you can be biased simply be selecting which stories get to be on the front page and which not.
BTW. 70% of people involved in this business vote Democratic.
American system works well.
No it is not that funny.
BTW. How is your Euro doing ?
I shouldn't even be replying to this flamebait, but what the hell...
At least the media isn't a bunch of heartless Social-Darwinist libertarian assholes, no offense.
"GASP! People disagree with my views! They must be mentally incompetent!"
I can't speak for radio or TV news, but you obviously don't have much experience with newspaper reporters. The only "general bias" a paper can have is in its editorials, because those are meant to be opinion pieces and have an intended slant. But getting the actual reporters to follow a distinct bias is like herding cats.
You must not have been paying attention if you think that wasn't covered.
Good for you. Neither do I.
Funny how the Constitution doesn't say anything about there being a minimum intelligence required for the right to vote. Or how poor eyesight should disqualify you. Or that you shouldn't be allowed to request a new ballot if you know you've blown it, and the screwed-up ballot should be taken away and counted anyway.
On the other hand, I agree with you that the electoral college isn't a broken system.
I'd prefer Instant Runoff Voting to determine electors, but that's a state issue.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
You are assuming that the people who would have trouble with the ballot would be equally split between the candidates. That is not necessarily true.
Wrong.
Of course, you can rig the numbers pretty much any way you want when you're this close to the 50% mark. (I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, though.)
And, when you're in a genocidal situation, a democratic vote may not be your best option anyway. Hopefully it is an option, though. ;-)
Instead of using some kind of electronic ballot, simply turn over control of electing our next president to the WWF (Wrestling Federation, not Wildlife Fund). Just have a big 'ol tag-team cage match. In this particular case, we could make it even *more* interesting by having Nader be the referee.
'Course, I guess Jesse Ventura would pretty much take it in '04, but maybe that's just what this country needs/deserves.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
You're right -- you don't own your vote. And you can't sell it. And no one is extending the privlege to use it -- it is not yours to "use", or to transfer or sell or loan or otherwise dispose of as personal property. It is yours to vote with,
or not, as you see fit. But no other choice exists -- you vote, or not.
Again, false. You are allowed to contract for your vote, and it's done every day.
You just aren't allowed to have a direct transfer of goods in return for a verified vote.
It is perfectly kosher, however, to say "I'll vote for you if you'll vote to lift restrictions on encryption", followed by the candidate saying "ok, I'll do that, vote for me." It's even legal to follow that up by showing him your absentee ballot with his name on it, and letting him mail it for you, although that part of the exchange doesn't happen in practice.
It is in fact common practice to say "vote against Right to Work, and we'll recommend all our members vote for you", followed by thousands or millions of people voting as their union has requested. Few will go against their union's wishes in that situation, although again they don't yet take that extra step of verification. (Because they don't have to.)
I reiterate what I said; if I don't own my vote, and am not free to contract it in any way I choose, I am a slave, not a free man.
You can't see the forest because you're a tree.
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"Of course we can't count on Bush to do that, therefore a revote should be held in Palm Beach County, where over 19,000 Gore voters' ballots were thrown away. Bush's lead in Florida is less than 2,000 votes. "
What a bullshit. These 19000 are totals which include people who received new ballots and did vote.
"If the guy who got the most votes doesn't win, then IT ISN'T DEMOCRACY! "
Who said it is ?
Hey, no one had to mod it up in the first place... maybe it's a good post that provokes an interesting discussion... and perhaps we can discuss whatever the hell we want on slashdot, damn the moderators.
Yea, my post is off-topic, but it branched off into another discussion. So don't complain about the discussion on the side, and don't expect us all to talk about only what Slashdot decides to bring up.
My post has been moderated down since, and I assume that someone just as dickheaded as you is responsible. I have the karma to spare (I'm well above 25 to get my nice +1 bonus) but it angers me that a post moderated three times +1 Interesting gets a late -1 Offtopic just because there's a bored moderator out there with points to spare and a stick up his ass.
BTW, If I had mod points and no posts in this topic, I would NOT mod you down. Your post has merit in this discussion, even though I disagree with it.
I'm surprised no one accused me of karma whoring yet.
I really wish more people would remember how the US government was created. The fed was granted a specific, enumerated list of powers. Everything not specifically granted is denied (reserved to the states). Ironically, the biggest issues in this campaign have centered around who has the better plan to do $foo, where the fed has no legal authority to even do $foo in the first place.
What about Jews and others who observe a Sabbath on Saturday?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The number of electoral votes is based on the census results - which are ten years out of date (2000 EC #s based on 1990 census). My state (Washington) is horribly underrepresented population-wise in this. A lot has happened here in the last ten years.
As for moving power from the national level to the state level - why is this inherently a good thing? I think this argument is nonsense. State borders are artificial, and have little to do with individual communities' needs in the modern age. See one of my messages in this thread for more info on that point.
Also, as I've said before, the President represents us all, therefore should be elected by ALL, not by the States. Representation of the States is accomplished by our State Representatives & Senators.
aside from the other things pointing out the stupidity of this argument, theres also the fact that there is no law saying that people should vote based on research. most people vote on strict prarty lines anyway. and theres nothing saying it shouldn't be easier for the non-poor to vote. why shouldn't it be. i agree with the other guy who says its already a meaningless popularity contest/ad campaign based on deception and fud anyway. and if you think this will make voters stupider i don't think you can get stupider than the 3000 morons in florida who voted the wrong way.
It's flat trivial to invalidate a punch card by punching an extra hole in it. A good voting system should require a choice and accept only one choice.
Why not use technology and the old ballot system together. Have a touchscreen that is an interface to the punch card that way it you could not highjack the vote electronicly. And the only thing that has to change is the equipment at the polls. Just a thought
". If the tables were turned, he'd be doing the same thing Gore is doing, though aparnetly with a lot more petulance and a lot less class. "
How the fuck you know that ? Are you psychic ?
Class ? Fucking Daley is calling to DISREGARD current law simply because his man lost (yeah, saying that regardless of recount Florida should be awarded to Gore.)
How much worse you can get than that ?
Maybe Bush should bend over and just let Gore have it DESPITE the fact that according to current law , if recount does not change the results, he should be the next president.
I agree with this. We have these machines here in VA and they seem fool proof. You *can't* vote twice for the same position, short of damaging the machine, even if you want to. The names are in big print. The only downside to the machines we have in VA is that when you press a lever down, it exposes a small red "X" which is generally equated with something being wrong....
One word...braille.
It's not like a blind voter could use a touchscreen, after all.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Screw this computer voting crap...
Everything I hear about the Oregon mail-in ballot sounds great. It should be the model that all other states/counties follow. It would appear to solve many problems. It's more fair and it seems more likely to accurately reflect what people actually want. I'm having a hard time coming with arguments against that kind of voting system.
Hell, combine that with "approval" or a preferntial voting system like the Borda Count Method, get rid of the electoral college, and I'd be a lot happier with our election process.
Now, question is, how do we make any of that happen?
having the picture might cause some problems if the photos are not approved by the candidate (or someone w/ authority for candidate) to be used in the election, and could use that as a basis for complaining (i.e. it would be a bad idea to use a pic that someone doodle devil horns and a goatee on). all choices would have to be listed on the screen for each position, so that people won't complain that they were overlooked since they were on the second 'page'.
That is a very intellegent outlook on the situation, however, as seen in florida, most people couldn't even discern between two different opponents, how can we expect these people to operate a computer and vote intellegently. I think that our big effort would be to get the voters informed on all issues, not just crowding the television with the presidential debates, but informing people with information on local candidates, giving more than one little paragraph about them. And you can vote from home...absentee ballots, they're a good idea, you can give yourself time to make an informed decision and you don't even have to leave the house.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
I don't really assume that this happened but there's little I can do to rectify it. I guess that my best hope is that people now understand how important this stuff is and people stop sitting on their asses and vote.
Really, before you respond again think very long about a question. If they couldn't mark them correctly then do you really think giving them another method would increase voter accuracy?
Absolutely I do. Did you SEE the actual ballots being used? Voting should not be an exercise in puzzle-solving or an IQ test. Everyone who is a citizen has a right to vote. Just because you're IQ happens to be on the high end, don't forget that HALF the population (by defintion) has IQ's under 100. And that Palm Beach County ballot was a nightmare in terms of user-friendly user-interface design.
It's absolutely easy to design an interface that is far far less error prone than the one used in that particular county. And even easier to design one that uses electronic touch-screens and does instantaneous input validation. I used electronic voting booths in Ohio in 1996, and as you selected one person for a race, all the other selections went dark and couldn't be selected. How can you NOT see that this would be less error prone?
There have also been numerous reports of people being TOLD to punch twice, told that they were out of ballots, told that polling places were closed when they weren't, etc. There is LOTS of evidence of voting irregularities above and beyond the confusion in Palm Beach county.
I honestly think a hand-recount of the disputed ballots in that county is warrented. I even think it's fair to take all those ballots that have both Buchannan AND Gore punched and count them, and then divide the total equally between Buchannan and Gore (or in some statistical way).
The fact of the matter is, Bush is behind in both the popular and electoral votes right now, and Florida and Oregon are still up for grabs. The process should be allowed to run its course. Bush is acting very arrogant and like a selfish spoiled 'entitled' brat in going ahead as if he's already won. If the tables were turned, he'd be doing the same thing Gore is doing, though aparnetly with a lot more petulance and a lot less class.
I've lost a LOT of respect for Bush in the last few days. I live here in Austin, TX now, so I get to see his whiney "Gimme gimme gimme, I want the presidency NOW" routine up close and personal. It's thorougly disgusting.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Congratulations...you have first post. Explain relevance though to article?
"How Trite"
What are you talking about weird knobs? Oh, I get it, you must be from Palm Beach, Florida :)
-motardo
Given the aging population in Florida, it strikes me that a gratuitously tech solution would only serve to disenfranchise some of the wisest people in the community.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Shouldn't worry too much about the 2004 election. If we're _really_ lucky they'll have finished the final recount of all the Florida votes from THIS one!
O P E N___S O U R C E___H U M O R
great comedy company.
People have been able to do this for quite some time. It's called absentee voting. I did it in the last election (I was registered in Northern California, but going to school in Southern California).
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Whenever states and counties have tried to make it required for citizens to confirm that they are who they claim to be, the ACLU jumps in and says that it's harassment and a violation of our voting rights.
Ooooh... not the big bad ACLU! How about some links that support your dubious assertion? (and no, Rush Limburger's website doesn't count!)
NICE TROLL!!! I'd give it an 8.5 out of 10...
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Since most precincts would use Windows 9x rather than NT or 200X you can be sure that the ensuing chaos from machines locking up - losing votes, and in general crashing in flames would give the technical people of the world a massive - if silent - laugh. Then we could send the voting machines a virus and rig the election any way we wanted.
The future looks bright for techies.
I recall how in Chicago on some machines of this type votes for one candidate were registered before leaving the warehouse. The totals were inspected when the machines arrived at the polls, but fake paper zeroes were stuck over the counters. They fell off into the works when the first real votes came in. I forget how this scam was detected.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
There is no problem with the electorate college per say, but how the individual states implement it.
The problem I see is, that folks just assume that because things are done a certain way, this must be the right way of doing things.
Let's look at the source code of the electorate college:
Each State shall appoint, in such a manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:.....
Now in plain english this means, that the states may choose their electors in any way they want to. It does not even say that there have to be elections! In theory, if the state legislature (or the state constitution) prescribes that the electors are determined by pulling ping-pong balls out of a bingo machine, so be it.
That is why every state has a certain number of electors allocated to them.
Imagine if it were a popular vote, and the states are the ones to administer the election, what would stop the states from creating more voters by lowering the voting age, allowing women to vote, allowing slaves to vote? I know, women are allowed to vote now, and there are no more slaves, but one must see this in a historical context. Nowadays a state might allow migrant farm workers or foreigners to vote just to have more say so in who will be the next president.
The electorate college gives every state aproximately the same voting power, a little more for the less populous states. Therefore no state can abuse the system to give itself more power.
Also, if we went to direct voting, the states would lose even more of their sovereignty. They already lost a lot with the 17th ammendment allowing Senators to be elected directly.
If they can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars from the government to the major parties to get their people elected, they can SURELY spend a few bucks to update the circa 1899 voting machines. I mean, COME ON.
Yes, by law, we have "None of the Above" on the ballot for all statewide offices.
Years ago, I looked it up to see what happens. If memory serves, should none of the above win, a new election is held with all current candidates disqualified.
I don't think that could happen in a presidential election, however--the polls *must* close on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. I assume that if none won in the presidential election, the the governor would order the legislature (the old one, not the newly elected one which wouldn't take office for several months) into a special session and that the legislature would appoint electors--very likely a delegation led by the governor.
I was quite relieved in '96 to find that choice; it's much more clear
than a general protest vote for one of the third parties.
hawk, a Nevada lawyer among his many hats . . .
I'm a recent graduate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. *I* have no faith in computers either.
I want voting to have hard records. It's very easy for a software program to add 10,000 to a location in memory. Hard to create 10,000 fake ballots and harder to insert them into the system without them being noticed.
Secondly, you extend the complexity of the system. How do you know the software in the system has no traps or backdoors. (If it's based around windows, how do you know that windows has no special trapdoors for throwing elections?) Secondly, how do you know that the software, when installed, is the same as what was written?
ANother problem, for those who suggest having a printer printing reciepts: If it is computer-readible, how will the user know if what was printed equals what they voted? Why can't the machine count the vote as for candidate X, yet print a recipt as if for candidate Y?
Finally, you have a lot more problems on the client side: Can you imagine a version of Melissa Virus, that's very innocous and tries to stay hidden. It waits till you try to vote. It waits for you to type in your password, then it secretly votes for who IT wants, not who you want. Hell, Windows 2004 might have this feature built into the OS!!
The problem with computers is that a small group of people, or even a single person, can subvert an entire election. That's almost impossible with old-fashioned paper ballots.
These are critical issues. None of the explanation above says how you're supposed to be resistant to these types of fraud.
The opponent (and therefore threat-model) for an electronic voting system is a HELL OF A LOT worse than that for E-commerce. You're describing how to be resistant to credit-card fraud, where there are small transactions and subversion of the system is minimal. Voting is different. Countries are going to want to subvert the system (Russia, China, Iran, France, organized crime..) and THEY have the resources to bribe, blackmail, and subvert the system from within. They're also going to analyze the system for subtle flaws, and they will break it.
Do a search for 'electonic voting' on comp.risks.
Security is HARD. Hasn't Bruce Schiener said that a dozen times before? This is why I hope we do not have electronic voting until we do truly know how to make it secure, a system, standardized by NIST, that's had people trying to break it for 5-10 years. Voting is more critical than AES, it should have the requisit analysis.
Scott
I've been using this fall's elections as a civics lesson for our 7 yr old son, so he was in the voting booth with me asking questions. As a result, pretty much everyone there who cared to listen knows how I voted anyway.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
The Constitution defines and LIMITS the role of the federal government. Your rights are not enumerated in the constitution. I've heard somewhere or other that there was opposition to the Bill of Rights because it would cause exactly the false impression you seem to have: that the Constitution grants you rights. Your freedom of speech isn't guaranteed by the First Amendment, it's guaranteed by the fact that nowhere in the Constitution is the federal branch given the power to restrict your freedom of speech.
Besides which, there are two distinct issues here, electronic voting does not mean it needs to be online voting. I'd like to see the voting done at the polls on computer, but I don't trust internet security (is that an oxy moron?) enough for a web based voting system.
Got Apathy?
I've never heard of that, but
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
You are about the 5th or 6th person to bring up this article in the last week. For more discussion see, for example, "And The Winner Is... Nobody!" by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 08, @09:16AM EST ;-)
I particularly like my own views on this topic which you can find there, but I suppose everybody is entitled to their own stupid opinion
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
A president MUST... not bow down to the unwashed masses in the brainwashed liberal stronghold big city regions.
I guess you would rather have them kow-tow to the rural conservative pinheads instead, huh?
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
When I voted, the election judges asked for my name, looked it up in a big printout, and asked for my address and date of birth. Someone else could get that information, but they would have to spend time memorizing it well enough to repeat it on demand. They would also have to be the appropriate gender and age group.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You raise a lot of good points. I never said it was simple... although I may have simplified.
I'm kind of tired of arguing the whole point anyway. The electoral college isn't perfect, but somehow I don't think this is the time to discuss it anyway. I think we should discuss the faults of all the 2-party system + candidates + campaign + election + the media combined.
Someone said how living in Oregon usually means your vote doesn't count because a president is declared on the news before their polls close. That's the media's fault. The whole 19,000 invalidated votes is probably a fault of the election process, and basically a lot of the disgust among the American people is a result of the parties, the campaigns, and the media combined.
Again, I don't care who's elected. I think they're both qualified. And the electoral college isn't going to have a negative effect on the outcome of this election... but I just want it to be decided and for everyone to shut up and stop whining. People are getting killed in Israel, there's a US warship being towed back home with a 60x40ft hole in the side of it, and the stock market is dropping. We have better things to think about right now.
Here's a refresher:
Joe Hacker is analyzing a state election with 6,400,000 voters. The state has 64 counties with exactly 100,000 voters each, and the election candidates P and Q have almost exactly the same number of supporters. Joe reasons that the distribution is binomial, with p=q=0.5 and N=6,400,000. "Success" is defined as a vote for candidate P; but by symmetry who is who doesn't matter.
Joe reasons that each county has an independent and identically distributed normal distribution, so that taking 64 such samples will cause the distribution of summing the county vote to have a mean 3,200,000 and a variance of 6,000,000*p*q/8=6,400,000/32.
Taking the square root and applying the central limit theorem, Joe believes the null hypothesis should obey a distribution of 3,200,000 with one sigma equal to about 450 votes.
(a) Point out the obvious flaws in Joe's arguements.
(b) Correct and Generalize Joe's procedure for counties with different vote tallies
(c) Read _Cryptonomicon_ and discuss real world applications of this technique.
You have 2 weeks. :)
Paper ballots give you a paper trail. I want it to be as hard as possible to corrupt the voting process, and I think paper ballots are best if you have to do a recount.
That's not to say that I am a fan of those little hole-punch ballots. Washington state has gone to a new system I like better: your ballot is a simple printed piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's lightweight cardboard), and there are ovals next to the various names. To vote for Bush, you fill in the oval next to Bush's name. When you are done, you feed the ballot into a machine that tallies it instantly; if you filled in two bubbles, it beeps and kicks the ballot back out, and you get a fresh ballot and fill it out again. When the polls close, they take the machines, hook them up to a phone line, and the machines report the results.
I like this system a lot. Easy to vote, you get a second chance if you screw up, the results are reported quickly... and there is a paper trail.
P.S. I've used this system in two elections now. In the first election, they loaned out Sharpie permanent markers and that was the quickest I have ever voted in my life. This year they gave us ordinary black ballpoint pens, and it takes much longer to fill in the bubble with one of those. Next election I'm going to bring my own Sharpie.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The judge can decide whether or not to hold a re-vote in palm beach. It is believed that if a re-vote is allowed, Gore will get 10000 votes in palm beach florida giving him the state and their 25 electoral votes and ultimately the presidency. If a re-vote is not allowed, it looks like Bush will win florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency. And all this rests in the hands of a judge in florida who is looking to make a name for himself.
I'm not one of them but those "states rights" and "local control" freaks *do* derive their arguments from the constitution. Keep in mind that the authority that the federal government has is granted *explicitely* by the constitution. The rest devolves to the states. Do you really think that some sort of centralized authority will end this kinda bickering? Not likely. Each ballot would still wind up looking different as each municipality has it's own elections and initiatives to vote on.
voters register as normal, show up, show ID, get checked off or removed from one booklet of names, sign the sheet saying that you are aware that you are voting (so that people don't 'accidently' remove all the democrats from the booklet and claim they all voted already). next judge down the line takes the sheet you have signed from you, returns a 'receipt' from it to you, and hands you a ballot (not a paper one tho, keep reading). judge asks if you need instructions, blah... blah.. get into booth, slot in the ballot (approx 6" by 9" hard plastic sheath w/ components inside). booth terminal verifies that the ballot is still 'valid' and presents choices on elections to voters, w/ confirmation (and big font for the nearly blind people). once you get thru all of the choices, it lists them and asks again if these are 'your final answers' and then records the tallys internally to the booth, and 'inside' the ballot, and marks the ballot as having come from that booth/district and marks the ballot as used digitally in the ballot and PUNCHes a hole in a non vital area of the card (so its easy to see its a ballot that has been used.)
Besides technical issues, there is a simple reason why voting should remain as it is.
Should non-tech people trust a voting procedure whose reliability can be ensured only by engineers ?
If you answer yes, it means you forgot the basics of democracy.
democracy implies all citizens are equals, and therefore all must have the possibility to verify the vote isn't flawed in any way.
Electronic vote has no future in a so-called democracy.
came exnihilo, going back there soon
In a democratic system voter accessibility is essential to preserve freedom and equality. In acient greece, the origional democracies went through spells of democracy and oligarchy. This happened by the powerful calling meetings of the people at inconvinet times, and deciding with only a few people. Obviously it would be difficult to do, but over time it would be possible to wear down the abillity of certain groups to vote. Any major changes will have to take into account future patterns, and make sure that voter accessibility is universal.
I personally think that this years problems would look tame next to the first year of computer based voting, but over time would mature greatly and benifit everyone.
Perhaps in Canada where we select our PM indirectly, or in your congressional elections would be the best place it start. I would really have hated to see people complaining that Al Gore lost because of computer voting fraud.
I think that this attitude to get everything 'e-something' is not the way to solve those electoral problems. As you see, even now, with those pretty simple ballots, there are already confused people. The system we use here in Europe just works by using a simple sheet of paper with two columns on it: candidate name/space to make a 'X'. I've never heard of greater amounts of faulty votes with this. Even if your cross reached the wrong table row, you can still blacken out the field and get a new 'X' in there. What do you think about this?
So you are not one who believes that decentralized government is good. Interesting. What are you doing in America?
Yes, our melting pot is working it's way towards uniformity,
There is no such thing as a melting pot!!! That is just a idiotic metaphor that White conservatives like to trot out, which in reality is a code phrase telling minorities that they need to "whiten" themselves in order to be fully accepted by their White masters. White people that use the term "melting pot" don't have the balls to overtly say that they are for "White Power" so they use weasel words instead.
If you really need a metaphor, think mosaic. Each tile has its own properties and you can group tiles into communities, but you cannot auto-magically convert a white tile into a black one or vice-versa. If you break up two tiles and attempt to combine them you won't get a gray tile, just two piles of tile shards - one black and one white...
The electorial college prevents racists and radicals from being elected by enhancing the voting power of minorities..
HA HA HA HA!!! So that is why we haven't had a White president in the last 50 years!!! Good one -- have you considered a career in standup comedy?
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
A friend of mine from Texas told me a story about a county courthouse that conveniently burnt down the day after the votes had been counted, preventing any recounts or outside verification.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Rumour has it that MI5 used to (during the cold war) check up on those who voted communist, though this is all denied, of course...
Just my E 0.02,
Stephen
(I'm well above 25 to get my nice +1 bonus)
Hmmmm....
I'm surprised no one accused me of karma whoring yet.
You did a pretty good job of admitting that you ARE a karma whore all by your lonesome, so why do others have to point it out?
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Most states actually have a fine/jail time system built up for delegates who do not vote as they have been elected to.
Actually, according to Thursday's USA Today only four states have penalties, and the worst penalty is a $1,000 fine. There is also some question as to the constitutionality of laws restricting the electors...
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
BTW. 70% of people involved in this business vote Democratic.
:->
Do you have a source for this statistic? Judging from the Houston Comical my experience says otherwise.
You can find George Will, William Safire, and William Buckley but not native Texan (and über-liberal) Molly Ivins.
It seems that the Comical doesn't mind effete Eastern intellectuals as long as they are conservative effete Eastern intellectuals!!!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I have no problem with the state gov'ts appointing senators and voting for the president. IMHO, this would work just fine, and would have preserved the power of the states so that "President" wouldn't be such an important role. It would also cut down on the average citzen's democratic responsibilities so they could focus more on making the correct choice of state government.
However, since the so-called "states" have become little more than provinces of the Federal State of America, with no power to secede from or directly control the federal government, it is unrealistic to speak of going back to this older way of thinking (unless everybody suddenly wakes up and says, "Hey, we had a pretty good system, why did we change it?" - unlikely!).
There's a very simple way to cure the Electoral College problem: allow electoral votes to be split into percent votes (IOW, split each vote into a hundred votes). The states can then be coerced into splitting the votes along the lines of the popular vote in the same manner that the feds force all the changes that aren't strictly constitutionally kosher (I'm sure the public would be behind it, and the constitution has always lost out to public opinion in the past). This would prevent the abuses you mentioned, since the feds would still control the number of E.C. votes handed to each state, according to the census.
This would not be a substantial loss of state sovereignity (that took place long ago), just a superficial one.
--------
I myself voted in the Riverside County, ca. electronic election on Nov. 7. Though one may think that voting electronically would eliminate many of the problems (such as the confusion in Palm Beach County, Fl.), a lot of problems still are not eliminated. For example, at my polling place, which happened to be someone's garage, the people running the precinct were total morons. First of all, they decided to leave their large pool table in the middle of polling area, leaving no room to manuver. I could have looked at someone's ballot over their shoulder and vice versa. They were 10 to 15 minutes late in opening the polls (they couldn't plug in the machines correctly), but here's the most disturbing part, they weren't even asking for proof of ID when you signed in. They fucked it up so bad that the people waiting in line were literally laughing. Despite all this, the new touch-screen electronic ballot was easy to navigate, even for the elderly, electronically illiterate. Still, remember this, the bottom line is that even the new electronic voting can't elimate the fact that morons can still be involved in overseeing the voting process.
better bring the funk on a nasty dunk...have a take and don't suck!
I hear few things in the media to counteract all the press generated by Abu Muima Jamal supporters... even though there's a lot of solid facts that pretty much make him a cop killer.
:->
Actually I hear more from the dead cop's family, who wants to punish SOMEONE even if that someone is possibly innocent...
With the media, they're also slightly biased toward liberalism, and if you say they're not, then look at how right now Bush is pretty much the winner of the election
As of this moment Gore is ahead in electoral votes as well as the popular vote. If it wasn't for the "Banana Republic of Florida" Gore would win it outright. In a tight election controversy is inevitable; however, when the one state that has MAJOR problems with its electoral process happens to be governed by the brother of one of the candidates, the smell of corruption is unavoidable...
I don't like the focus on the post-election bickering... it's disgraceful and disgusting, and it's making me want to move to Canada even more...
Bye-bye! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!!!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Actually, that the EC is fair/unfair, good/not good is a moot point. It's the law of the land, and it can't be changed for this election. Maybe it's appropriate to change for the next election cycle in 2004, though I don't think so.
1. brianvan is correct -- the EC acts as a check/balance to keep the more populous states from electing a President by themselves. It's similar (in spirit, if not in action) to a weighted vote system with run-offs.
2. I think our Founding Fathers who designed this system were pretty smart guys, who thought about this carefully. They had a similar (if smaller in scale) setup then: some populous urban states and less populous rural states. I'm not ready to say that some AC yahoo posting to Slashdot (including my own self) is smarter than Jefferson and Co.
3. The EC system gives more data than a pure popular vote. You get one set of data from the popular vote and one set of data from a winner-take-all state EC vote (here's a map of the US -- these states went for Bush, these went for Gore), and an EC vote (similar to state-by-state, 300 for Gore, 240 for Bush).
4. It does give 3rd parties a chance to make an impact. The Libertarians could campain heavily in North & South Dakota and come up with 6 EC votes. That puts them in the spotlight, from which they can build on in the next election. In a close race like this years, it could be very significant -- and would at least drive the 2 parties to adopt some of the 3rd party's principles.
Is it perfect? Well, no. And any other solution we come up with will also be flawed. Since this solution was devised when there weren't any truly "established" parties (I'm talking 100 years of ingrained political hackery), I have a bit more faith in it than one re-designed from some ad-hockery dominated by two truly established parties.
And I'd like to add, the fact that Gore is screaming "Do over! Do over!" like a petulant 6-year-old does more to diminish him, in my mind. Sure he has documented lies and half-truths, just as Bush has documented verbal boners (God, I hope that doesn't become criminal -- I'd be doing 20-years-to-life). Both of them are so unpalatable to me -- which is why I voted Libertarian.
Last point -- the fact that we are so concerned about who/which party is in power troubles me. If Government was little more than a convenience to protect the borders and deliver the mail, and not the Fount of Everything Good and Holy (as it seems to be now), we'd be better off, and less likely to worry over who gets elected. We could just elect those people willing to suspend their normal lives for 4 years to keep the White House warm and termite-free, rather than power-hungry politicos who think their "vision" of the country's future is the best.
(in other words, would you rather have George Bush/Al Gore running 30% of the country's business, or that nice retired guy next door (ex-Army, who keeps his yard mowed and weeded) keeping watch over .01%?)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Strange. Up here, if you wanted privacy, you grabbed a trapezoidal envelope, open on the short end, and stuffed your ballot in that, leaving just the header exposed. You then stuffed the header into the machine, which would yank the ballot out of the envelope. If the machine spit it back out, they sent you back to the table to trade it for a new one.
See that "Preview" button?
Wouldn't it be possible to vote electronically and produce a log in paper format as a product, which is kept, counted and used as a proof of a proper procedure ?
:-).
And before you discuss paper/punch/pencil voting versus electronic voting and how it could be standardized, why not first standardize the much more important election laws as a whole ?
Put the election laws out of the hands of the states and under federal law. Each state should vote in the same way. If you have really to stick to the EC and I see no compelling reason why, it should be a federal law that electors MUST vote for the candidate the popular vote requires them to vote for.
The lack of standardized and equal election laws throughout the U.S. is the first thing which should be outlawed, because I believe they make not each vote be weighted and counted equally.(IANAL)
What is the whole discussion worth if the electors on December 18h are allowed to vote against the candidate the popular vote demands them to vote for ? That they are "supposed" to do that is not enough. Ethics are fine, but certainly not enough.
The arguments FOR the electorial college as to represent minorities or rural areas fairer seem that much skewed, outdated and unconvincing that I don't believe you could get any foreign country to understand why the U.S. population sticks to saying "the system works".
Well, may be it works, but how ? I mean the amount of denial to face your own flaws in the system is visible to any person watching this debacle. Just because your forefathers all came with traumatic experiences from their home countries they fled and because they had no counter pressure to design a system which suited their needs without much check and balance from parts of the population they didn't represent, doesn't mean, that the each and every part of your constitution is appropriate today.
If the EC is the wisest, fairest and system in the world, then DO discuss it publicly and let the population vote about its appropriateness. May be it turns out the the majority of U.S. citizens, after they have fully heard pros and cons and may have gotten some civic lessons about how other federal republics in the world structured their election laws and voting rights, might actually WANT to change their election laws. The emergency and danger of the current moment would be an excellent opportunity to make the whole world and the whole U.S. population aware of what might be the best voting system and how it could be changed legally and peacefully.
I really would love to see an emergency, nationwide discussion about the electorial college and suggestions how the system could be changed legally without jeopardizing anyone's voting rights and without going through a bunch of stupid recounts, law suits which don't address the real issues. Not the couple of hundred of votes inaccurately counted (will always happen everywhere) will change anything, but the change and standardization of the election laws.
The U.S. has already the mess at his hands, so why not concentrate to cure the system now instead of "gracefully" wash it away and continue to live with a system which can't be considered adaequate ? You know when all is said and done (however and whatever is said and done), there comes the sentence: "The system works".
I am not yet a citizen, but thought about becoming one for quite a while. I have already "given" one son to YOUR military forces". I just would like to be able to say one day:
"Yes, your system works, it can be adjusted where it fails and is stable enough to do so without
jeopardizing the country's peace and the population's civil rights."
Reminds me of software. It seems a bit as if your OS is only working, if you let any bug which is found to live forever, never touch it, never fix it and never uypgrade it. Sure, each and every bug fix might introduce some other bugs. But that's why we have OSS and CVS these days. That seems the best way of keeping a system stable and upgradeable, or not ?
I have to say as someone who lives in a country with an inherently crap voting system (and a parliament where the speaker is traditionally "dragged to the front" of the house) it's positively refreshing to see a voting system worse than the one in Britain. At least we know who's won the next day, even if it is grossly unfair. But what I don't get is that you are *only electing one person* so why don't you just count the votes and just see who got the most?
But why do I care, not my country that ends up looking silly.
Not too big of a problem, no.
It just means that the system could be processing a lot of votes, more than it needs to, and that there could be confusion.
If you got one net-vote, then you had to cast the correction vote at a polling station it'd be more secure.. If any number of votes were cast, you could cast one and I could theoretically cast a similar vote later from reconstructing your password (watching you type it, with a keyboard logger, etc) which overrides your vote. You may not have felt coerced and not bother to check the results or recast your vote, so I've got a free vote.
But, if all votes except the first took physical presence you would know if someone had already voted for you, and to override someone's vote you'd have to pretend to be them in person. (Not that this is hard, but it's beyond the scope of *computer* security.)
So, if you vote and it tells you that you already have, you jump in the car and go down to the polling station with ID and get the old vote cancelled and cast a new one. Theoretically this could be more secure because the attendant could check your password but also look at picture ID, etc.
But then, votes aren't terribly secure now. It could be argued that a system with a theoretical loophole is good enough as long as it's not repeatable on a system-wide level. (If I have to work to steal each vote, that's okay... if I can script it to steal as many as I want with a few keyclicks, that's bad.)
In Finland, where approx. 4-5 million people vote for a President, the counting of votes by hand takes one (1) hour.
A lot of people who punched two holes thought they had to vote for the president and vice president(based on news reports). They would not realize their error until it was to late.
I think the argument that people who don't know how to vote, shouldn't is elitist. I think about half of the country doesn't know how to vote(they voted for the wrong guy), but it is their right as citizens for their voices to be heard.
Clearly there was something wrong with the ballot in Palm Beach county. Too many ballots were invalidated to draw any other conclusion. The fact that a Democrat designed the ballot and the Democratic and Republican parties approved it is irrelevant, they were not injured by the error, the voters were.
Any remedy will be for the benefit of the voters, not for the benfit of the candidates. Voters deserve to have the candidate they support in office. Any other conclusion is an attack on the foundation of our democracy, and should be viewed as treasonous.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Al rides in his limo
To give a speech
On how everyone should take the bus
Again, false. You are allowed to contract for your vote, and it's done every day. You just aren't allowed to have a direct transfer of goods in return for a verified vote. It is perfectly kosher, however, to say "I'll vote for you if you'll vote to lift restrictions on encryption", followed by the candidate saying "ok, I'll do that, vote for me." It's even legal to follow that up by showing him your absentee ballot with his name on it, and letting him mail it for you, although that part of the exchange doesn't happen in practice
That is not selling a vote, that is voting based on an issue/campaign promise, etc. That is simply using your vote to achieve a goal that the person you are voting for can achieve while in office. Thats the entire point of voting -- to vote for those who will achieve your goals while in office. And frequently in a tit-for-tat fashion as in congress, you will vote one way on an issue to achieve cooperation on another issue -- essentially acieving a policy comprimise -- another purpose of voting, not a circumvention.
But by direct sale or transfer of a vote, you most definitely circumventing the purpose of voting, which is to represent the policy desires of the people.
I reiterate what I said; if I don't own my vote, and am not free to contract it in any way I choose, I am a slave, not a free man.
Please spare me the Ayn Rand hyperbole -- your vote is not a peiece of property. Your vote is a social contract, and forcing you to use it or not (without sale or transfer) is only a limitation in the influence others may have over you.
Votes DO NOT exist in a vaccuum -- if there was no society the entire concept of voting would be meaningless. Votes are a form of social perticipation, they do not arise "naturally" as a right of man like the ability to speak or move freely. They only have meaning in social groups that have agreed amongst all their members that voting will take place and be respected. therefore the value of the vote is only as great as the respect that all members of that group, and the group collectively place upon it.
You can't see the forest because you believe that your tree is a forest by itself, so you miss all the others...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
You're not the first one to think of these kind of ideas -- the people that set voting standards for their region are well aware of alternatives that are out there, including some very modern-looking ones with touch-screen LCDs and driver's licene ID verification. However, these systems cost money and when it comes down to a county replacing a voting system vs. replacing a road, the road almost always wins. I think this is a wake-up call at this point, but it's definitely been an issue.
Or how about just WAITING for the *certified* results of the various recounts before just assuming that he won? He can privately make all the plans he wants to and needs to, but doing so publically shows a huge lack of class. He SHOULD be saying publicly that he will honor the will of the people, and will patiently but eagerly await the results of the recounts. He should also be clearly stating that he wants to win fair and square, and is disturbed by the voting irregularities, and should be promising somthing such that these things are less likely to occur in the future.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Has anyone noticed the similarites between George W Bush and the Baron Vladimir Harkonen of Dune fame? Both oil barons, both act like spoiled children, both with boils... (make up your own)
Sig: joesmith666 is Slashdot user 253666
Not at all. If Bush were running against some freak from the left, or some extreme freak from the right, I'd vote for Bush. I *did* have some respect for him earlier -- admittedly not a lot (and I think I implied that) -- and it's all but gone now. I think he's an utter ass, who has completely lacked any sense of dignity, tact, or subtlety.
And if that report is true, then fine. Wonderful. I'm only saying that THESE THINGS SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED until there are no questions, and everyone can be satisified with the results. If Bush were elected under the cloud of too many questions and the appearance of impropriety, then he'd have virutally no power to govern, and that isn't good for ANYONE.
If the recounts determine that Bush wins, then fine. But I'm annoyed and offended with his arrogant presumptuousness.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I've read the article. It's still stupid. Given that the power involved is to elect the president, and it is divided among some given number of people, the method of dividing the power is completely incapable of increasing it. This is quite obvious.
The article does many things to hide this simple fact. Most notable is the bullshit regarding "uneven" elections, which argues that they give the voters less power to decide the election, while ignoring the fact that all elections start even, and it is only through the exercise of voter's power that they become uneven.
well, I have no proof of course that every voter who voted wrong requested a new ballot, however, the process of voting would have made this obvious. If you vote for multiple candidates the ballot in invalid. I'm not sure that any bells go off and a whistle blows, but if a user were to look at the ballot and see two holes, they would request a new one. And apparently, all of them did. This was reported almost immediately on election night and shortly thereafter, but for some reason it hasn't been reported since.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
is that there is no physical record to guarantee the machines are honest. I want something that we can go back and check; there's too many ways to hide things in a machine. In particualr, it should be possible to verify by eyeball before putting the card in--e.g., on the butterfly machines, if Bush is hole 3, I can make sure that chaff 3 is missing.
But physical ballots don't fully avoid the fraud: I've just put out an oped piece showing that there are two counties in which bush gained, and four in which gore gained, which are not even close to believable. It's at
http://www.personal.psu.edu/reh18
I've included the histogram as both jpeg and ps there. In a nutshell, almost everything should be within a couple of standard deviations, but bush has two counties at about 16 out, and gore has four that range from 20 to 50 . . .
hawk, wearing his statistician hat
Here in San Francisco, we voted on machine-readable cards, which were then stuffed into an envelope and delivered by hand to the poll workers. In other words, even if the machines did validity verification, you wouldn't have known about it if your vote was invalid. Not a chance.
And due to the anonymous nature of the vote, no one would ever be able to tell you about it, either.
This does not discount stupidity of people who punched two holes, nor does it discount the fact that those people may have tried to write on the ballot to distinguish one hole as the "right" one. Not everyone understands what "machine-readable" entails.
[|]
That is ironic. However, another issue is the president pro-tempe of the Senate being in the line of sucession in the event of a vacancy in the Presidency. Traditionally, the senior most member of the majority party is placed in that position. If that tradition isn't going to change, then that office should not be in the line of succession. Since the line of succession past the Vice President is established by statute, it would be easy to change.
That is not selling a vote, that is voting based on an issue/campaign promise, etc. That is simply using your vote to achieve a goal that the person you are voting for can achieve while in office. Thats the entire point of voting -- to vote for those who will achieve your goals while in office. And frequently in a tit-for-tat fashion as in congress, you will vote one way on an issue to achieve cooperation on another issue -- essentially acieving a policy comprimise -- another purpose of voting, not a circumvention.
But by direct sale or transfer of a vote, you most definitely circumventing the purpose of voting, which is to represent the policy desires of the people.
Oh, please; what if the policy you're voting for is welfare, and you're on it? Then you're exchanging your vote for thousands of dollars of somebody else's money.
In any event, show me where in the Constitution it says I can't sell my vote.
Please spare me the Ayn Rand hyperbole -- your vote is not a peiece of property.
Sorry, I'm Libertarian; you're thinking of Objectivism. That's two aisles over, next to "Anarchist" and "Patrio-psychotic Anarchomaterialist". I have never quoted Ayn Rand in my life, and wouldn't even if she happened to say the best example of something that proved a point I held dearly.
Your vote is a social contract, and forcing you to use it or not (without sale or transfer) is only a limitation in the influence others may have over you.
No, it's a limitation in what I can freely decide as an adult to do with my own freedom. Who asked you to protect me?
I don't need your protection in this case. If I do, I'll ask for it. Until then, stay out of my mind.
My vote is my basic inalienable right, not a "social contract" or privilege. That's why we got along just fine for 200 years without a law against selling it.
-
Check these out. Pretty funny 'cause it's true:
http://www.charred.net/extra/flo rid aballot1.asp
http://www.charred.net/extra/flo rid aballot2.asp
However: it all depends on the human factor! In my polling place, the machine didn't show up on time - so they had to stack the ballots in a big pile in the back of the room until it did arrive. I actually never saw my ballot go into the machine. Presumably my ballot counted. But there was a very contentious proposition on the ballot this year, Proposition L, which I opposed - and which is trailing at this count by seven votes. Is there a chance that the poll workers at my precinct screwed up one or more ballots, and that this may have made a difference, despite the fancy-pants new voting machines? I think so!
So the key to any new system is that it be idiot-proof and secure by design, of course, so the poll workers don't accidentally make a mistake that could compromise the election. Given the ICANN experience of lost passwords and so on, I definitely think that we have some work to do on the non-technological side of voting to make sure that any new system works.
sulli
RTFJ.
This is, I must agree, the best possible solution. The Lever Machines are the single greatest piece of Election technology to date, and most likely in the future.
1) They are IMPOSSIBLE to rig, except from the manufacturing process, and easy to test and confirm their working status.
2) You absolutely cannot vote for multiple candidates.
3) They are completely anonymous.
4) You can easily and immediately correct your votes.
and, most importantly:
5) They are nearly indestructible. Unless you shoot, run over, or drop them from tall buildings, these machines stand up to the test of time. Spare parts are almost never used, except in VERY rare cases. I'd not be surprised to find out that maintenance manuals don't even exist for them.
This signature does not exist. It has never existed. It is all a figment of your imagination.
No, it's a limitation in what I can freely decide as an adult to do with my own freedom. Who asked you to protect me?
:) But you just seem to be ignoring the fact that your vote does not existly solely for your sake -- it is something that affects hundreds of millions of other people.
Who said anything about protecting you? Why would I or society give a damn if you waste your vote? Society is protecting ITSELF against those who would undermine the function of voting -- in other words, when your vote selling means that wealthy people get to vote more frequently than those who cannot afford to buy votes, we as society have had our agreed-upon mechanism of decision-making abused.
My vote is my basic inalienable right, not a "social contract" or privilege.
Okay, please explain how a vote can exist without a society. What does a vote amongst one person signify? The only purpose of voting is as a participation in a society that uses it as a decision-making mechanism.
There are plenty of things you don't get to vote directly on, and several things you vote on directly, others indirectly. You seem to be claiming that your right to vote is inherent by virtue of existing -- we should therefore vote on when anyone gets to take a shit. But we don't because it's pointless. We, as a society, have decided that sometimes we get together and vote on topics, sometimes we don't. When we do get together to vote, we do so within specific rules -- you have to use a ballot (you can't just write "george bush" on a piece of paper and hand it in).
You can't vote unless you're a citizen -- but by your logic, even foreigners should get to vote in US elections, since it is a right by virtue of existence. True RIGHTS are rights of all people, so for example you do not have to be a citizen of the US to have free speech, the right to assemble, or freedom of religion. But you cannot serve on a jury or vote -- because those are SOCIAL actions by which we participate in SOCIETY.
You must have society for the existence of a jury or a vote to mean something, therefore the society has to agree on how that jury and vote may function -- being on a jury does not mean you can convict someone regardless of the law, and having a vote does not mean you can sell it or transfer it. Your right and responsibility to jury duty does NOT mean that you have ultimate authority over guilt or innocence -- you still must abide by the law and if you don't you WILL be removed from the jury and have your verdict overturned. if you do not vote according to the law, your vote WILL be thrown out, as the 27,000 improper ballots in Florida attest.
Don't get me wrong -- I know what you're saying -- it makes me feel weird to say that your vote isn't YOURS, but at the same time, it's not just something that you have to dispose of, it's more of a social responsibility than a posession. Our entire government functions on the presupposition that, regardless of how wealthy or poor you might be, when you come to the ballot box, you have exactly one vote to cast (of course, depending on your state it's worth a different amount
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
will not be determined by 300 votes. My extrapolations are that Bush will win by around 13,000 votes when the absentee votes are counted. Over 512,000 absentee ballots were sent out and all but 122,000 were returned by Nov. 6th. Most of the others will probably come in this week. They have until Friday. Most of them from military voters. See, the military is important. In all past Florida elections the absentee ballots are about 60% for the conservative candidate.
As an aside, I'm sure that the Cuban-Americans in Florida feel that they got their revenge in this election.
The Clinton-Gore Administration stole something earlier this year from South Florida. They are not going to be allowed to steal something again.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
What's the difference between this & just adjusting the threshhold of a popular vote from 50% to some other value?
is that the responsibility of voting belongs to the States as explicitly stated in the constitution. I cannot believe how ignorant Americans are of their most precious institution.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
there is no privacy. There is no way of having the privacy of not knowing who voted for who. If you don't know that, you don't have a secure system. And if you know that, you don't have a system with privacy. The two, privacy and secure, are mutually exclusive.
The secrecy of the Ballot Box is essential in modern governments to protect us from those who are mad for power. I dont' care if computes count the votes, in fact I prefer computers count the votes as they are impartial, but the actual voting cannot ever be controlled by computers if you want to maintain your freedom.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
*sigh* technophiles. Touch screens that print out punch ballots. Its really that simple and they can use the old punch readers over and over. No login, no eye-scan, no tokens (how i hate that word), etc. Computers and networks aren't the solution to everything, you can get amazing results by improving on traditional methods with technology without completely replacing it.
Maybe Jamie has a TV playing a video of a fire in his/her's fireplace. Naww, its a 3D simulation of a fireplace running off a remote server through a T3.
Forcing everyone to make a trip to the voting booth is an unneccessary obstacle. For example, we hold our elections the first week in November. By that time of the year, the weather can be severe in some parts of the country, which keeps people from voting. Not being able to get to the voting booth because you are stranded by severe weather is not a valid reason to take away someone's right to vote.
We need to do everything we can in this country to make it as convenient as possible for everyone to vote.
The Founders would have considered internet/webtv voting to be an instrument to promote "mob rule". Elections are already far more democratic than they were under the original Constitution. Let's not take it any further.
If the Democrats are too fucking stupid to vote with paper and a hole punch????
Oh, were you looking for unbiased news on the Clinton News Network? Is it any wonder that you got the "impression" which is most favorable to the Democrats? CNN is about as objective as Slashdot.
For a dose of real news check this out.
Your proposals, interesting as many of them are, are basically orthogonal to the process of voting itself. You can do most of the above using just about any technology for recording/counting the votes.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
back it up or back off. My source is NPR. When has Jessie said anything close...
3y3 hAx0r3d y0w3r e13ct10n. 3y3 0wnZ j00.
I guess no one else here works with computers on a frequesnt basis, but I do.
Guess what? They crash. That's what they do. I know that this supprises you, but that's ok. Just trust me. That's why I make the big bucks.
If you understand computers, and you understand how important the vote is. You will never mix the twain. Not for a LONG, LONG time, anyway.
Just think before you react, ok?
Thanks,
Eric
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ballot in Palm Beach was the same ballot administrated in St. Louis County, Missouri. I was wondering if anyone else here used that ballot? It sure did not seem confusing to anyone here.
Ian
For days we've heard about how there were 19,000 double-punched ballots that were thrown out in Palm Beach county. This story seems to come up right after mention of the confusing "butterfly ballot", with the implication that about 19,000 people:
... loop until they're happy with one), and
- got confused when trying to vote for Gore,
- punched the Buchannan hole
- realized they goofed and punched the Gore hole
- turned the ballot in, and
- the computer kicked it out as dobule-punched, so
- their vote didn't get counted, and
- Gore lost most of those 19,000 votes.
Well, it turns out that's NOT what happened.
It seems that Mary Matialin (a conservative commentator) got suspicious. So she actually CALLED the poll workers and ASKED what this was about.
It turns out that the 19,000 "spoiled ballots" were ACTUALLY people who:
- mispunched their ballot (in ANY way at all),
- realized they'd goofed,
- took the ballot to the election officials and said "I goofed. Please give me a replacement.",
- were told "Sure. Here",
- punched that one,
- (maybe screwed it up too
- turned it in.
So if any of these 19,000 ballots was a Gore supprter, Gore GOT the vote in question. (He might have missed some votes if the voter didn't realize until after they'd turned it in that they'd screwed up. But there aren't 19,000 worms in THAT can.)
You won't hear about this on the establishment media, of course. But Mary talked about it, and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, and put it on both his show and his web page. Here is the link.
(The page also makes an anaecdotal claim about Palm Beach county being a hotbed of Buchannan support, which could also explain its outlier status in the Buchannan count.)
(Again I'm not claiming to have checked any of this myself - just posting the reference for your perusal. Enjoy!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This whole thing just disgusts me... First, if it isn't a problem with people that just HAVE to conform...... i.e. (he's not gonna win anyway, so I'll just vote for the lesser of 2 evils....or, as I like to refer to them, people without the balls or brains to have an opinion) than it's the electoral college making sure that our votes don't matter anyway. And right now you have all these people moning and griping about them having to hand count the ballots, going on individual votes......Yeah, like that is a bad thing....heaven forbid your vote actually count for once, sorry it takes so long to count, but that is the price you pay for freedom of choice, you impatient, ungrateful scum..... And then we have the ballots themselves..... my voting station had 3 different color ballots, and the color I used has YET to be seen on national T.V. (Green Ballot) Kinda odd, don'cha think? Federal election = differing ballots nationwide.... As far as going tech goes though... have a touch-screen monitor on a netboot with a list of the candidates, and if you haven't heard of the person, than you can just click directly on him/her and get a detailed description of their stance on the issues..... each time a vote is cast, a 1byte packet is sent to a log file for the respective candidate on the voting location's server. these servers should NOT be networked. the log file size should be called in and confirmed by a proofing-group, a representative from each party that is running for presidency. then the nationwide totals are added up, and a winner is declared... either that, or segregate the votes.... Harry Browne votes here. Al Gore votes here. Bush votes here... sure people will be giving away who they vote for, but is that such a bad thing? I am sure as He|| proud to say that I voted for Harry Browne... Because I am actually proud of my candidate....
During this election, the military made a special effort to make sure those votes (mostly for Bush) got through from the military personnel overseas. Historically those votes have taken some time to get through, and any votes that take longer than a week to get to the US and counted, don't count.
Some military personnel, particularly on submarines, were allowed to vote electronically. It was not the internet we know and love that was used AFAIK, but the secure military network. Still it seems that the same technologies could be used for civilian voting and would make it easier for civilians to vote (god forbid that happens).
In Applied Cryptography, several methods of implementing electronic voting, with source code examples, are discussed. One of the important technologies utilized was electronic signatures, which have only recently been given the weight of paper signatures (as they are harder to fake). In a normal election, votes get thrown out all the time, dead people vote (in this election a dead man won the Senate race in Missouri) and there is a lot of fraud, so anyone trying to argue that electronic voting will just mean hackers stuffing ballots and votes lost in the ether is really right in line with the people who try to say that it is more secure to walk up to a $5 an hour clerk and have your credit card impressed into carbon paper (which is immediately thrown in the trash...) or to speak it into a cell or cordless phone than to enter it into a computer, encrypt it then send it over the wire to a computer. technophobes making excuses to maintain a status quo that prevents empowerment of individuals and keeping down the masses.
Rumour has it that MI5 used to (during the cold war) check up on those who voted communist, though this is all denied, of course...
:) Other possibilities are the mafia who simply want to assure that their corrupt leaders are re-elected.. Though they probabily take hits on the vocal supporters of opposing candidates.
I would venture to guess that US history has had incidents with bullying people who have voted opposing parties in the past.. THe simplest thing I can think of is the good ole' boys, who's members include the police officers that protect the ballot boxes.. And much like the Amish, I doubt that any good ol' boys are reading this, so I feel safe in saying that.
I am humbled buy our situation, but the problem, I think, would be likely no matter what voting system we had.. A race this close is impossible to resolve amicably - unless one side conceedes.. But I think Chivalry went out with Nixon; strangely enough.
As for the accuracy, In any analog system, you're going to have margins for error. paper-count measurement is based on the exact positioning of the card at the moment of reading.. Those partial punctures really make a difference (which is why I fully support the idea, that some senator brought up, in aboloshing paper voting in the US).
Sometimes you have to have something this severe to make a national change. You can bet that butterfly votes won't be seen here again (and possibly anywhere else in the world)
-Michael
HA HA HA HA!!! So that is why we haven't had a White president in the last 50 years!!!
Well, as confusing as this statement is, I'll assume that you're simply refuting my statement and saying that the electorial college has not prevented racists / radicals, and additionally has not allowed minorities to lead.
Well, let's use some emperical evidence.. IF the southern states had the majority of people in the country (thankfully they don't), and we didn't have an electorial college, then a former KKK person could actually be elected president. the north east corridor, however, would garuntee that such a thing could not happen (because they have a lot of people in NY and a lot of states overall). If you had a black radical who's primary goal was reperations for the mal treatment of blacks, then you'd have the entire south blocking them (even if there were 51% people represented by the liberal north). Likewise a religious zellot like Buchanan (poor guy.. with all his bad press, I almost feel sorry for him), should have little ability to win any state.. Though he may have 1 - 3% representation nation-wide, no single state is sufficiently right winged to carry him.. A similar case with Nader.
The one down side, is that it is unlikely that a totally new type of person could be elected.. So, for example, Jessie Jackson probably couldn't get elected.. BUT, colon Powwel might.. But for a different reason.. The president is supposed to be a national icon (similar to the Queen of England). The president is supposed to be our international representative, as well as making the most public descisions on which bills to pass, and selecting the types of people to run various government agencies. This president should be the conglomeration of all of it's citizens (the melding of a president). From this, war heros tend to be excelent choices.. They embody our pride and ideals, so other minor choices, such as issues are less important. Unless they strike nerves with different regions of the country.
As for the melting pot metaphore.. US citizens are not the only ones that coin that phrase.. Many famous Europeans have as well. If you were to go to my high school, you definately would have to agree that there is a merging of cultures. Yes there is still the ghetto, and the rich preppy development, but the middle class suburbia is becomming more and more diverse. The melting pot is like having different colored clumps meltable chocolate sitting on a frying pans slowly melting. The bulk of each piece is still solid and distinct from one another.. But over time, more and more of the liquid blends together to ultimately become indistinguishable.
You can not argue that there aren't elements of the middle class that are distinguishable.. I see this especially in high schools and colleges. Wealthy work along side the poor, black among the white... Granted, the extreme of the cultures (the eletists or the home-boys (of any race)) tend to keep to themselves, but there is a large growing group that sits happily in the middle.
Just think, not too long ago, the color of your hair or your european nationality was a big divider (Italians wouldnt mingle with the Irish, etc.). Now, I can barely notice someone's European nationality, though african/ asian is still obvious.. In another century or two, I predict that we'll be at a very uniform level (if we don't kill each other).
-Michael
-Michael
the method of dividing the power is completely incapable of increasing it. This is quite obvious.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying.. It isn't obvious to me at least. Perhaps instead of subjectively berating the system with unsophisticated language, you could provide evidence (you know.. being scientific and all).
The idea is that you want to reduce the power of the majority.. Geographically and ideologically. Power is a bi-stable system.. The minority has almost no power until just about the 50/50, then they suddenly are empowered almost instantaneously. After that, they grow exponentially until no-one else even has a say. This is not a fair system, and this is what the Federalist papers tried to prevent.. Mob rule.
NY and California are peeked.. Their voters will not achieve any more power, but that's fine.. The two of them alone carry a better part of the power required. NY is it's own little idiology (it's own melting pot), but California is rather liberal, while Texas is rather concervative. Should CA and NY alone determine the president, ignoring the Geographic differences in idiology? Granted, Texas has enough power to offset this, but then you have the remaining southern states, who population wise could not affect the presidential outcome much, but electorially they can.
Another issue of dividing power "increasing" it, is with his example of gerimandering(sp?). Ignoring the president for a moment, if you put all blacks in one district and gave them a black representative, then that senator would only have 1/5xxth of a voice. If, however, you spread those people out among several districts, then you could influence 5-30% of the vote for multiple districts (including sympathists), thereby having dozens of representatives in congress, a significantly greater margin.
Ahh.. I don't care to argue anymore.. If Hillary has her way, it'll be abolished anyway, and the math deficient among us will simply look at this election as all the proof they need.
-Michael
-Michael
Recounts tend to provide an additional margin for the candidate who one in that district/county/whatever--which is to be expected, if the errors are randomly distributed: if Sam has more votes than Paul, more were probably miscounted for Sam than for Paul.
I flatly don't believe the skew in Florida. Two counties show *way* to much gain for Bush, and four show even more than that for Gore.
And if this county is to be recounted by hand, what about the strongly republican counties with even bigger edges for Bush?
I have a longer piece on the statistical unbelievablity of the first recount at
http://www.personal.psu.edu/reh18
hawk
Also, it's worth noting that in the "sample hand recount" of four precincts conducted by Palm Beach yesterday, by far the largest number of double-punched ballots were punched in holes 4 and 5 -- namely, the Buchanan and Gore holes.
Clearly, a lot of things went wrong on Tuesday --almost all of which could have been avoided with a technologically superior balloting system. I think it's pretty obvious to most reasonable observers that a lot of people who tried to vote for Al Gore ended up having their votes either not counted, or counted for Buchanan; the issues of whether their complaints are legitimate or not, and if so, what to do about it, are obviously matters of law, but what we can say is that clearly, it's time for an upgrade.
P.S. I should also note that there's precedent for an election being overturned because of the inaccuracies of punch-card voting. In 1998 Massachusetts outlawed the use of punch card balloting because in 1996, a primary result was overturned when they went back and manually counted the "hanging chad" cards that hadn't been counted by the machine vote. (The vote count there, by the way, went from -250 to +100. Check the recent AP Wires for the full story.)
The problem with that is hardly anyone would get elected at that point. Make the vote required to be 70%. I don't know of too many presidential elections that would be won in that case. You'd just be setting up every single election to be decided by a vote in the House.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
But you just seem to be ignoring the fact that your vote does not existly solely for your sake -- it is something that affects hundreds of millions of other people.
And you are continuing to forget that rich people ALREADY can contract for my vote; the law just prohibits one particular arbitrary way of doing so.
They can and do (White House phone transcripts show Gore doing this in Clinton's name) promise multi-million dollar pork barrel projects in return for money that is then spent on anti-the-other-guy television commercials. Isn't that the same thing? Nobody's getting prosecuted over it.
They can and do promise "vote Democrat, and we'll keep taking 47% of the income of the rich and give it to the lower 40%, and if you give us Congress we'll extend that to the lower 60%". Isn't that contracting for a vote?
Cigarettes are a lot cheaper, and have the advantage (to Gore) that he makes money off their sale, since he's a tobacco grower.
-
And you are continuing to forget that rich people ALREADY can contract for my vote; the law just prohibits one particular arbitrary way of doing so.
Um, no -- spending money on advertising to try and persuade you is not "contracting" -- no matter how much money they blitz on you (as evidenced by this campaign where both spent tons of cash) you still don't guarantee anyone at all is going to vote for you.
The number of independently wealthy people spending 10x the amount of their competitors while running for congress rises every year, but they continually get smacked down for trying to "buy their way" into office.
But all of this is beside the point, which is that we as a society have the right, responsability, and ability to restrict voting for obvious reasons.
And it's worth noting that if your argument is simply "well, you can spend a shitload of money on campaigning", the VAST majority of people in the US are against that, as well -- indeed, we're unique in the world that we allow even that. That comes down to a matter of free speech, if it wasn't for our pesky first amendment we WOULD have limitations on that kind of fund-raising and spending. It's only inconsistent in that literally buying a vote could never be cnsidered political speech, but of course advertising (no matter how obnoxious or pricey) is still rightly considered speech.
And please, your transparent attempts to turn this into a partisan battle are sad, this has nothing to do with Gore or Bush or Clinton. You CAN'T buy or sell a vote, and buying advertising is not the same as buying votes no matter how hard you try to claim it is. Yes, giving someone cigarettes for a vote is illegal, and anyone doing it should be prosecuted for vote buying -- amazing you're no longer arguing that the homeless people are entitled to sell their votes for cigarettes, though. I guess people only should be allowed to sell them if they vote the same way you do?
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Another issue of dividing power "increasing" it, is with his example of gerimandering(sp?). Ignoring the president for a moment, if you put all blacks in one district and gave them a black representative, then that senator would only have 1/5xxth of a voice. If, however, you spread those people out among several districts, then you could influence 5-30% of the vote for multiple districts (including sympathists), thereby having dozens of representatives in congress, a significantly greater margin.
Yes, and the increase in the power of the blacks would be exactly counterbalanced by a decrease in power of the other people involved.
I'm assuming that the definition of average power of a group is (total power)/(number of people in group), the standard meaning for average. In both direct election and the electoral college the total power is the same: the power to elect a president. The number of total voters is the same. Therefore the average power of voters is the same. The only way you can change the average power is to change the total power or the number of voters, and changes to the distribution of power are completely irrelevant to total power.
I'm not arguing that average power of a voter is an important measure of how good a voting system is, just that the electoral does not and can not increase it. I support the electoral college and agree with most of what you said in your last message, but don't think it is relevant to the question of whether the electoral college increases the average power of voters.
The paper you've referred to was quite flawed mathematically. Most importantly, the definition of power is wrong. It doesn't argue that voters have more power, just that some voter is more likely to have power someday, as by its definition no voter in any presidential election in the history of the US has ever had any power. If it calculated in the fact that every election starts balanced, and that it is through votes that they become unbalanced, it maybe could give some useful info. It treats power as an all or nothing thing, where you either have the power to decide the election or no power at all. So in order to maximize power under his definition, rather than dividing into districts, we should just take everyone's vote for president, and pick one at random and make that person president, as that way there would be one person with power in every election, the best that can be done by his measure.
The baseball analogy was really good though.
... there's precedent for an election being overturned because of the inaccuracies of punch-card voting. In 1998 Massachusetts outlawed the use of punch card balloting because in 1996, a primary result was overturned when they went back and manually counted the "hanging chad" cards that hadn't been counted by the machine vote. (The vote count there, by the way, went from -250 to +100. Check the recent AP Wires for the full story.)
Given that the punched card system I'm familiar with (which appears to be the same as the one used in Florida):
- Makes the voter use a stylus to push out the chad - with the chad solidly attached to the card until it suddenly pops loose when the pressure reaches a certain point.
- Passes the card through a narrow slot, while bending it, to knock off any chads that are still clinging to their hole.
I find it difficult to believe that large numbers of cards with "hanging chads" could result from "voter error".
A more likely explanation for hanging chads would be poll workers either mishandling the ballots (to be charatible) or surreptitiously punching cards while handling them, without the aid of the "machine" to clean off the chads.
Regardless of whether these problems are the result of a defective design or cheating by poll workers, I agree that Massechusetts did the right thing by outlawing the machines. (Of course there IS the question of whether whatever replaced it was less, or more, susceptable to either error or cheating.)
But if the machines ARE subject to "hanging chad" error in normal use, this error would not be limited to Gore voters, but should occur with equal density to votes for Bush. So manually recounting ONLY a small number of heavily-Democratic precincts would have the same effect as cheating. Only the errors in THOSE precincts would be caught - and the errors in THOSE precincts would be mainly missing Gore votes.
If some precincts are going to be recounted by a different set of rules - one that recovers votes lost by mispunched ballots - then to get an accurate measure of the actual vote you must recount ALL of the precincts in the state - heavily Democratic and heavily Republican alike.
So which should it be? Assume the errors are fairly distributed and discard the manual recount, or assume the election is too close for that and recount them ALL?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not being american, I can watch the situation from a distance ;-)
From my viewpoint, isn't it the electoral college that gives this strange situation ?
Why is it not the guy who gets the most votes (that is, from the public) that is elected ?
Or maybe I should ask, why does the electoral college not select the candidate with the most votes (nationwide) ?
BTW: Where I live, we still use the good old paper and pencil method in our elections ;-)
Best regards Peter
First of all, I want to apologize for my harsh remark. Regional power is actually a Good Thing for many issues.
.
But: To execute regional power in unimportant things like details of ballots is confusing, unnecessary and probably expensive. If a Swedish-French conspiracy forces the EU to use ballots with elks wielding baguettes on it, I couldn't care less
So yes, the states have control, but they shouldn't and needn't.
Several of those tiny litle staties are bigger than your tiny little countries
Well, some states are bigger than some contries, but with 50 states sharing 275 Mio. people, even my Bundesland (if (state==country) Bundesland=county) has more than thrice the Population of the avarage state.
Censorship on Slashdot
BTW. How is your Euro doing ?
Actually, I don't care that much. The political implications are far more important to me.
Censorship on Slashdot
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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
Actually, Palm Beach had no edge for Bush; Gore won that county. He also won all of the counies he's demanding recounts in.
Just an observation of a very odd phenomenon.
----------
Regarding election technology...
- ---
The question becomes, do we prefer expediency over democracy,
or would we rather have an accurate count of votes and thus
uphold the "will" of the voters?
First of all, expediency is the only reason to connect the
polling stations over the Internet. It is not yet the case
that the Internet is mature enough that all things should
be done using it as the communication medium. The security
holes present in current Internet transactions are too
severe to warrant the risk in order to obtain a benefit,
vote count expediency, which is only somewhat important.
(It is important for foreign relations reasons to maintain
our image of strength and cohesion, but that could easily
be resolved if both campaigns simply stated that they are
in full support of accurate vote counting, are preparing
their transitions strategies, and will work with the other
party to maintain national unity since in a close election
it is clear that neither party has a strong mandate to
power - these issues are human issues, machines can not
fix them.)
Leaving the Internet out of it, things become easier.
First off, the interface:
I suggest a system somewhat similar to the one in
Riverside California.
To maintain privacy, voters should still sign in manually
in front of a polling station worker who will check their
signature against the one from their voter registration
card, and perhaps picture ID (though this is not done in
NY city where I vote unless, I suppose, your signature
has changed too much - though I am not certain... not
checking picture ID does mean that poor people who may
not have any use for a driver's license or passport can
vote more easily, but does increase chances of fraud).
Signing in manually leaves a book of signatures against
which the number of votes can be checked to make sure
there are not more or fewer votes in the system than in
the signature book - to help guard against poll workers
giving multiple votes to people.
The voter should then be given a card with a magnetic
stripe. These cards should be pre-"printed" and contain
no information about the voter. Since there is no way
to know the order in which voters will arrive, you can
trust your card is random if they just pull one off the
top of a stack for each voter. On the card should be
a code which releases the electronic voting station for
use by the voter - and nothing else. The code might
contain an encrypted string on information such as the
county, state, and polling center location, but need
also involve a unique integer which is the differentiator
for which vote is being made. The code should also be
printed on the card, so that humans can later read it if
needed. This would be computed using the public keys
of keypairs held by the state and federal election
commissions.
The pre-printed cards would be produced centrally, by
the state election commission.
(As an aside, to avoid "running out of ballots", there
should be enough cards at each polling station for 100%
voter turnout - and since the cards are reusable, unlike
most ballots, the cost over time should become minimal.)
Insertion of this card should cause it to be read, the
voting machine "unlocked" for use, and the card to be
deposited in a strongbox similar to those used in ATM
machines for money deposits. No card may be reused in
a single election, and the polling station workers
should NOT have the keys to the strongbox (only the
canvassing board memebers who verify votes should have
this access).
Once the card is read, a user interface should appear
which lists the candidates in the following manner:
Party Name Candidate 1 Name(s) Photo
Party Name Candidate 2 Name(s) Photo
...
The voter should be able to select a candidate by
touching (using a touch screen) the party name,
candidate name, or photo. A confirmation screen
should then appear saying
"You have selected so-and-so from the such-and-such
party"
With the photo of the candidate(s) below, and
"confirm" and "change my vote" icons to touch.
Confirm commits the vote and moves on to the
choices for the next office up for election, and
"change my vote" should clear the choice and return
to the selections for that office.
This should occur for each election in your district.
At the end of the process, a list should appear as
such:
Your Choices:
-----------------------------------------------
Office 1 Party Name Candidate Name(s) Photo
Office 2 Party Name Candidate Name(s) Photo
...
With "confirm" and "change my vote" icons to touch.
Touching "change my vote" will bring up a screen
with the list of offices to touch to change the
vote for that office, and then to bring the voter
back to the "your choices" list after each re-vote.
(An aside on photos, to respond to some cynicism
about this:
Contrary to arrogant belief of cynical intelligentsia,
illiterate people may actually be quite intelligent
otherwise and able to understand the issues involved in
electing a president. Oral communcation can transfer a
lot of information, and many people who can't read can
do a lot of other things. Photos of the candidates at
the polling station are only a benefit, even though
illiteracy to the point of being unable to read even a
name is now rather rare - except among immigrants whose
native languages are not roman alphabet based, and who
may have read about the candidates in their native
language. Finally, if people choose not to vote for a
candidate because they're unattractive - they deserve
the governance they get...)
Touching "confirm" commits all votes. The vote ID
from the card that was inserted is the key into the
DB where the votes are stored. This DB should be
written to more than one disk: either two or more
mirrored servers, or to HD and removable media, or
some combination thereof.
In confirming the votes, public keys corresponding
to private keys held by the state, federal, and
local election commissions should be used to
encrypt a copy of the vote which will be stored
in one or more DBs, one copy for each key, and
one copy superencrypted with all 3 keys.
However, now what should also happen is that, using
a stack of special paper (with a state hologram on
it or whatever one's favorite anti-counterfieting
device is) that is stored inside the ATM-like voting
machine, a "reciept" is printed which contains the
following:
The unique keycode
Human-readable candidate selections
A machine readable (barcode, perhaps) encoding of
this information
Date and Time
One copy of the receipt should go into a lockbox
inside the machine, just like the magnetic stripe
cards. Another could go to the voter, who can
immediately notify the staff if the machine "made
a mistake" and their vote needs to be invalidated
and they must vote again, but this brings up the
possiblity of fraudulent receipts and probably
should not occur. To guard against this, any
action triggered by a voter receipt would have to
start with insertion of the receipt into a reader
which would match the receipt against the ones
stored in the voting machines. This is the most
uncertain aspect of this system, other than the
unavoidable issues of voter coercion, and
unlikely issues like massive conspiracies.
The database of votes could be made public, with
each vote paired with the card number that was
used to make the vote. Privacy is ensured since
no one knows which card number corresponds with
which voter except for each voter knowing their
own number. Any voter could then check his or
her physical receipt against the entry in the
public database online (it would be provided by
copying the DB after the polling stations close,
and moving the drive with the copied info OFF
of the polling LAN to another, online system).
A mismatch would be indication of election
fraud or error. Counterfeit receipts could be
prevented if the encrypted version of the
information printed on the receipt is encrypted
with the 3 public keys corresponding to federal,
state, and local authorities. In this way, a
receipt could only be counterfeited with a
mass-conspiracy involving cooperation of
all three of these entities. Receipts submitted
could then be checked by all 3 entities. The
"public" keys for encrypting vote information
would only be inside the polling machines, and
the private keys only on the secure systems of
the agencies in question.
Now, the first pass of the vote count is quite
simple: count the # votes in the DB for each
candidate. However, there are avenues for
multiple recounts, which is necessary to
maintain a fair system:
count the votes on the backup DB(s)
take the receipts and run them through
a counter based on barcode scanning
manually recount using the information
printed on the receipts
The reporting of results to the central state
agency would occur as follows:
each voting machine would count the
votes in the DB AND confirm against cards and
receipts in its internal lockboxes, so a
triple-verified count is automatic
a report would be printed on special
paper, and encoded on to a magnetic stripe
card, and written to removable media along
with a copy of the original DB - all this
would be sent to the central state voting
office; this would occur on a station set up
just for this process, on the LAN, but also
ATM-like to prevent tampering
All voting machines and tabulators would be
alarmed, with a loud audible alarm, and only
auditors granted access under applicable
state law would have the keys.
For recounts, the state appointed auditors
(presumably under police escort) would go to
the polling stations, open the voting
machines, and retrieve the chambers
containing the cards, the receipts, and all
but one copy of the DB (one copy should
remain on a drive which can not easily be
removed from the machine, the others would
be on HDs in slide-out trays or removable
media disks). Once the auditor unlocked
the door, he or she would insert a special
card into a special reader inside the
machine. The internal computer system of
the polling station would write all it's
state logs to all disks, "print" the auditor
ID on all disks and in an EEPROM, shut-down
to protect the data, seal the slots through
which the cards and receipts drop into their
receptacles, and a light would come on
meaning "ok, take the data now". Only the
auditor's card could restart that station at
this point.
The preferable method of recounting is to
bring the retrieved media to the state
election offices and recount the votes on
a centralized system which performs the DB
counting, and verifies the votes by checking
the count in the DB, receipts, and encrypted
DB - and confirming against the mag cards
in the card cartridges. The state authorities
can also check the magnetic cards against the
entries in the issuance DB to make sure all
the inserted cards were indeed issued by the
state and are thus valid.
Local recounts could be done with a similar
setup locally - but could not check the
cards against the state DB. Of course, a
first recount locally could be just to
re-run the first verification in the
original voting machines, in case a n
on-repeating bug had occurred. A lot of
possible combinations of how to run the
recount exist, but it is best if machines
are used until the last recount to avoid
an extra chance of fraud.
To provide for hand-recounts, it may be that
a change in the process by which the printed
receipts are left in the machines unless
needed for hand-recount locally, is put in
place. This would make the state computers
rely on checking the DB against the encryped
DB, and making sure each key corresponds to
a mag stripe card, meaning only one rather
than two verifications against a physical
object.
To defraud the vote, you would need to do the
following:
change the entry in all copies of the DB
create a new magnetic stripe card with
a corresponding key, which could be difficult if
the keys are generated using a clever enough
algorithm
print a proper receipt
put your receipt and magnetic card into
the lockboxes (or introduce them during a manual
recount)
change the DB which tracks which magnetic
cards have been issued (which could be in a
central, offline, secure location at the state
printing office)
Clearly, trusted workers could defraud any system
with enough cooperation and concerted effort by
people in positions of authority over the process.
But this system is designed to require a lot of
effort to avoid the multiple verifications that
the machines can do before any humans even get
involved in the process. With a federal key for
encrypted votes, even the FEC could check votes.
Tampering with the machines to write votes for
one candidate to another, by altering the
software that controls all these processes, is
the most serious threat to the system. However,
in this way the system is no worse than the
ballot machines used in many states, and indeed
by having the federal and state election
commissions have digitally signed copies of
the system code in their secure storage centers
they can check against such alterations if it
becomes an issue.
Obviously this system leaves room for a lot of
oversight in a recount, including the fact that
the card keys are stored somewhere not accessible
to most people. And, in very extreme cases,
voters could be asked to bring in THEIR
receipts and votes which did not have a pair of
receipts associated with them could be more
carefully scrutinized in terms of attempting to
detect fraud.
Of course, the system has holes, any system does,
but this is a nice compromise between computer
convenience and accuracy, and oversight and
fairness.
Now, why not let people vote from home or work?
A few reasons:
minimal oversight and protection against
coercion by other people in the home or office
the authentication process could be more
easily compromised technologically, even if the
transmission process is relatively secure, since
users are notorious for bad security practices
like writing down passwords, leaving accounts
which host certificats and keys logged in, etc.
no witnesses if there is a problem, and
no reliable way to allow someone to invalidate
an entire vote if accidentially or through some
malicious attack, they confirm the wrong final
selection list
voting is a public activity, and going
out into public, joining a voting queue, and
casting your vote is a symbol of democracy,
plus you get to see other people supporting this
process and feel included
Of course, there is room for coercion at the
polling station, but this system does nothing
to increase or decrease that - and no technical
fix is available for this issue.
Finally...
Why so complicated? Many might think "hey, this
system is at least as complicated as the current
system, shouldn't it be simpler?" It is simpler
for the voter, actually, but more complex in
terms of ways to verify results because the
governmetn should spare no expense in such an
important issue. Democracy is at stake. At some
point, our society must value SOMETHING over
convenience and frugality. This process is not
intended to be trivially simple, it is intended
to be fair, secure, private, and accurate.
I would hope that our basic principles of fair
democracy are more valuable than convenience,
expediency, cost-cutting, and even the "cool
factor" of the Internet.
Of course, since I just came up with this system
today over lunch, with some input from my friend
Mike, it may have some things we overlooked, but
most major problems with previously proposed
systems seem to be addressed in this.
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Um, no -- spending money on advertising to try and persuade you is not "contracting" -- no matter how much money they blitz on you (as evidenced by this campaign where both spent tons of cash) you still don't guarantee anyone at all is going to vote for you.
There you go making assumptions again. I'm talking about the "contracting" that goes on face-to-face by the party organizations and at fund-raisers.
I am a relative nobody, but candidates and/or their organizations have made me promises to my face in return for my vote and support.
That's a contract. Because they didn't actually cut me a check, it was legal; but agreeing to fund a project is a lot worse than agreeing to fund my Counter-Strike habit, because the former uses everybody's tax money and the latter only uses campaign money freely given.
And please, your transparent attempts to turn this into a partisan battle are sad, this has nothing to do with Gore or Bush or Clinton.
Documenting a recent example of a specific campaign isn't partisan, it's news.
If I had had an example of another party doing it floating around in the forefront of my brain, I'd have included it.
Yes, giving someone cigarettes for a vote is illegal, and anyone doing it should be prosecuted for vote buying -- amazing you're no longer arguing that the homeless people are entitled to
sell their votes for cigarettes, though.
You're evidently not reading what I'm writing; I'm arguing that it should *NOT* be illegal, and that the law that says what Gore did is illegal is itself an unConstitutional law, and it should be abolished.
I feel that what he did was immoral (taking advantage of people who don't have the mental ability to make a rational decision because they're starving and mentally unstable), but I absolutely do *NOT* think anybody should be prosecuted over it, contrary to your assertions.
-
I agree that the obvious answer is to do a hand count in all of the counties where the punch-card system was used. This would eliminate the bias of only recounting selected counties, while also getting the real result of the election. Only 26 of Florida's 67 counties use punch cards. (I don't know whether the aggregate of those 26 counties leans D or R, but based on Jim Baker's refusal even to consider hand counting as a legitimate means of recount -- despite the overwhelming empirical evidence -- I could take an educated guess ...)
Ok, computerized voting is cool.. but why?
In Dallas County, TX we voted with a black permanent ink marker filling in ovals on a form. Previous years, we used the punch the hole method.
In FL the problem was not the punch method, but a stupid ballot layout. (allegidly approved by party officials.) Humans did that... if we had a computer interface, some idiot could design a confusing interface too.
The black marker is cheap, easy to understand, easy to count (optically automated) and easy to recount. If your precient doesn't have the volume to justify an optical scanner, all you have to do is carry the ballots to someplace that does. If all the ballot machines are knocked out by a EMP, you could still count them by hand.
What's the benefit of electronic voting at a polling place? A machine already tabulates them. If you want faster results, network the tabulating machines. Electronic voting seems like a huge investment for little gain.
Offiste voting is another issue. Personnaly, I don't the think the fraud potential outweighs the convience factor. Is it that big a deal to go to a polling place a few times a year? If you're out of town, methods already exist to deal with that.
You can have the benifits of automation without automating the whole process.
---
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
I like the idea of using a touch-screen, computer based ballot at the voting booths. I envision the system storing the vote encrypted to the drive as well as a barcoded printout for backup.
Rather than use the wide open Internet (which opens risk from foriegn attacks), I would suggest a private network much like the banking industry uses.
I feel an electronic ballot system would solve the problems of entering multiple values for a single choice item and a confirmation screen would insure that the correct vote is being sent.
My concern with this type of system would be cost, adoption of technology (do we have enough skilled people throughout the country to keep the system running), and what to do about absentee ballots.
Oh, you're quite right, paper-based voting systems are completely immune to any kind of untoward influence. How fortunate then that we are blessed with a system that is free from any taint of corruption. I imagine you are speaking with some expertise; you are probably a security consultant for a major organization.
---
I think the biggest benefit by using screens is that the type can be made REALLY BIG for the people who have bad eyesight (ie. the people in Palm Beach FLA). I don't know how blind people vote now unless they've got braille ballots (which would be odd sized anyways, so they'd still have to do something special for them)
Now, I don't think absentee voting should be the only way to vote. I think we should keep the local polling locations for just the reasons you mentioned. But I think using the internet or some digital replacement for paper absentee ballots would be great. A lot faster, more effecient, and no worries about lining up the booklet with your voting card :) In fact, you could even include a confirmation screen to make SURE you meant what you said.
I like that "abstain" feature idea. Another way to make sure people don't mess things up.
It would also be interesting to see not just how many votes people got, but how many voters abstained from the vote for whatever reason. That could have some interesting ramifications.
----------
My greatest fear in the move to a more modern method is that the possibility of a recount will be lost.
The old system in the old days took a month or more to count the votes with many hands.
I almost prefer this because it makes the election harder to rig, and harder to coverup evidence of a rig.
If we move to electronic methods then we must ensure beyond 5 nines of reliability that one person (living) gets only one vote, and that said vote is inviolable, unchangeable, and that no more votes may be added or altered. That's the security issue.
How do you perform a recount when there's no paper trail to start fresh from?
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
...is that the vote of someone who lives in a less-populated state is WORTH MORE than someone who lives in a more-populated state. How is this fair?
The States get their increased representation via two Senators for every state, no matter how large or small. The Presidential election is _national_, and should have nothing to do with the invididual states - only the population.
The easy (and likely) compromise - allow all states to split their electoral votes according to the popular vote.
The cause of the problem are the electoral delegates. If you count the total votes you get 48,889,821 for Bush and 49,108,420 for Gore. Hence, Gore should be the winner. Now there are some 10'000 votes in question in Florida. This is much less than the difference in total votes. So given a sane counting system, people could dismiss that problem and declare Gore the winner of the election.
That said, I agree with the problems that many people have brought up here about voting from home. I think computerizing the voting is a _great_ idea, but I think that doing it over a network could create huge headaches for the Registrar of Voters. Also, the best way to guarentee the whole "secret ballot" idea, in my opinion, is to maintain the polling places.
On the other hand, Oregon just held it's first mail-in-only election, so maybe the vote-from-home trend is going to take off. Who knows?
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
The Electoral College does not convene until December 19th to cast the state votes. January 20th is the official Inauguration of the new President.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
It is easy to envision another reality. We can open all schools and libraries, in which we have put computers and secure networks, to voting. A person can go to any school or library, show their voter registration card, and get a sealed envelope. Let's say the envelope has two large computer readable random unique numbers, one on the outside, one sealed. The precinct worker would activate the outside number and deactivate the voter registration number for that election, without linking the two. The voter could then use the two unique numbers to vote. The issue is making the system secure enough, and anonymous enough, to allow people to vote only once and vote secretly. Naturally, we would have to secure the data stream and the counting computer to make sure that the IT people cannot change or filter votes. Can it be done? I think we can match the current levels of security and surpass the levels of access.
Of course, the real benefit of computer voting will be the possibility of new voting methods. For instance, the limitation of being able to vote for only one candidate, which is the best we can do with paper voting, imposes the will of the elites on the masses. Our election system has clearly reacted to universal suffrage by limiting the official candidates. It was ordained from the beginning of the primaries that we would have either Bush or Gore for president. It was highly unlikely that in casting a single vote anyone could change that. If we could cast a set of choices things might be different. If Republicans could have said my first choice is McCain and my second choice is Bush, or the reverse, and then a weighted sum was created for all candidates, McCain might have won. Likewise, if in the general election the far left could vote for Nader first and Gore second, and the far right could vote for Buchanan first and Bush second, the will of the people might be better represented.
The system we have is not the only system there is. As anyone who does serious coding knows, there is more than one way to sort a list. The best way depends not only on the kind of list, but also the overall process, and, as in voting, if we want a certain result at the end.
Tracability, if there is any question about the vote with a physical piece of paper you CAN recount.
And with an online system there runs into the problem of data integrity, in online FPS games there is "proxy" systems used to aim for someone who is cheating, who's to say that when the stakes are higher a similar thing wouldn't result where people would have thier votes changed without them knowing it?
As much as I am for tech stuff, hardcopy does have it's place.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
"Um, sure, sir."
"Good. Show me your receipt."
This may be extreme, but I'm just trying to get across the point that in a way, it flies in the face of the anonymous nature of voting to issue receipts. And if you had them, it would make coercing people to vote a given way much, much easier, because there would actually be a method of proving how they voted.
Perhaps you mean a 'completely observable process', however I get your point and I totally agree with it. The only problem is that for the most part none of our elections are like this. The concept of having anonymous voting coupled with the sheer number of voters prompted people to design new systems with which to perform votes.
In moving from a system where everyone yells a 'yea' or a 'nay' to the ballot method we left out the ability for the community as a whole to observe what the actual vote was first hand - our current system leaves it up to someone else to count the votes and as such you automatically lose the sense of personal security in knowing that your vote was properly included.
By using a computer controlled method to register votes we are not losing or gaining any functionality over the ballot system from a voters point of view. If you can write an X and not click a button then you definately must have an interesting situation. What we are gaining however is the ability to open up the counting method so that there is no single point where it can break down. With people counting votes you have to ensure that the vote counters are sincere and you depend on their ability to perform their jobs perfectly. Now I don't know about most people, but I would think that the more people counting the better, since independant errors will decrease. By implementing a purely digital system, we would have exactly that in that the developers of the system would be able to see where the others made flaws - we have programs that can calculate launch trajectories to Pluto, I'm sure we can make vote counting systems properly. Also, since many places use automated counters now, what would the difference be? If many people work on the digital voting system there will be no opportunity for it to become flawed from a design point of view.
As for hacking, etc. one must be aware that the opportunities exist to maliciously affect ballot systems as well. 'Rigging the vote' immediately comes to mind. The security of a digital system would probably be easier to monitor than the ballot system anyways - it's a lot easier to determine that you have altered results from a digital source than from a bag of ballots. And as for punishment, well, you can just imagine what would happen if you were involved in a federal vote scandel of any sort.
I guess in the end I'm advocating the use of technology to make things easier for everyone and more stable. A punchcard never lies, true enough, but a computer only does what you tell it to.
UBU
That maybe a popular mantra in American media, and I'm sure a lot of American people buy it (not all, thank God). Let me assure you though that the rest of the world really doesn't think the USA as prime example of democracy (nor does anyone think the US is the poster boy of human rights, a claim that is often made by American politicans).
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Here in Brazil our elections are all done on computers now. This is a massive step forward from the previous paper ballot and canvas bag from 8, my 1st election. The computers - hardware wise - are very redundant, 2 HDs (redundant), some EM shielding, heavy duty LCD screen behind a few mm of acrylic, large, tough and clickity numerical buttons (with braile on them) and 3 other buttons (vote blank, correct and accept) - the CPU is an AMD (at least the one I saw). The software is a totally different matter that I won't go into since it would have to vary in an election in another country...
This is a perfect solution (with the exception of the software that really does need a better public auditing) to our election system 'cause we are obliged to vote - it's a law here, you must vote or loose a sliver of your citizenship. Being as such we are all given a 'Voters License' that is specific to a voting booth so all we do is show up at the correct location, someone specified types up our license and the booth is opened for voting.
Anyway, the whole software problem from up above is that this process allows vote auditing by someone. You can corelate (sp?) the voter's license and the vote cast. The brazilian government branch responsible for electoral transparency and privacy doesn't release the software's source code or present a valid working machine for reverse engineering even though they are obligated by our constitution.
Anyway, that works for our electoral system - at least in theory, I'd love to participate in a hack-a-booth contest. It's feasable but I don't know if it's practical for everybody.
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All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
Everyone is complaining that voting in your home is bad. why then is no one challenging Oregon's 100% mail in ballots? Or the fact that many states of absentee ballots as a default? I got my ballot in the mail, and that's just as dangerous as a password of some kind.
-aaron
As someone said about the 80's "We listen to our comedians for politics, and our politicians for comedy."
I guess its insights like this that we have to thank for that. Your really Gallagher aren't you.
I'm against having people voting from their homes via computer, but I fully believe that each polling place needs to be fully computerized. The idea of waiting hours or even days for results to be counted is absolutely ridiculous with the technology that is available today. Each polling place needs a database server to provide authentication and to compile votes, a few computerized voting terminals, and a modem to transmit these results to the central county or state office when the polls close. The database server could be eliminated at each location if a dedicated connection were available, but that's unlikely in the fire departments and churches that are typcially hosting elections.
Er...you have no understanding of cryptography, do you? Only an idiot would give serial passwords like you have on any system. Instead, you'd use a real random source to generate the passwords. The passwords might look like:
Adams, Doug: mbB1wW32JfDS
Adams, Dougie: Mphi7pcR0CMb
Adams, Douglas: 8aTrXKTtjia6
Those passwords have 72 bits of entropy in them. You could expect to guess the password of one of those people after about 70 billion tries. Think that'll go unnoticed? Try one a second--a reasonable latency for a 'Net-based attacker--and you'll still be trying in the year 4100.
Of course, most people have trouble with twelve-character random strings, so instead they'd use some sort of mapping to words, like AOL's famous CD keys. (Imagine one of them: "VOTE FOR SHRUB.")
b&All but God can prove this sentence true.
I like the idea that if someone is going to stuff a ballot box, they somehow need to slip a few thousand pieces of paper into a box one by one while a room full of people fails to notice. It makes cheating extremely conspicuous. This is a good thing. By contrast, voting from my armchair seems like a really, really bad thing.
I'll disagree with you there. How many times did a candidate campaign in Alaska, Hawaii or Wyoming? A state has 3 out of 540 EV's or 600k out of 100 million voters, either way, the state is not that important in the overall scheme.
Also, the Electorial College made my vote useless in Georgia. As predicted, Bush won by some 400k votes. My vote actually made more difference in the nationwide tally (200k difference).
Everything in this post is false.
remember, the blue hairs are going to be 4 years older, have vision worse than a cow, and more shakes than Janet Reno. These voting kiosks will also have the SAME MISTAKES that happen now. Yet, if the sw is well written, the mistakes could be corrected immediately, unlike the mess now.
I can see it now. You punch in your vote and cause an error. The screen displays your selection and an 'Are You Sure (Y/N)' dialog. If you fail to correct your error a crazy flashing light sequence ala Pokemon ensues and causes the voter to suffer a seizure.
So can my mail-delivered PC Banking ID's, my credit card statements, and a lot of other sensitive documents with important numbers. what's the going price for your latest CC statement?
I think the (at least mildly) disturbing thing is that most people would be far more willing to sell their vote than to sell their CC statement. No one would sell their CC statement because they value their money. But, a large number of people do not believe that their votes matter and therefore they don't feel like selling their vote is a big deal. Since the vote is worth nothing, anything you get in exchange for it would be worth the trade.
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The case against computerized elections can be summed up in one word: Fraud. With paper ballots, there is no question who voted for what, unless the voter is simply clueless (say, not picking who they intended because it was confusing.) In those cases, especially for the elderly, there are plenty of people who can assist them. With knob ballots, it's vairly easy for anyone with basic mechanical knowledge to tell if the machine is working correctly. ;)
With computers, I would never suggest using anything moe than a ColecoVision ADAM, runnin BASIC on top of it. There are too many loopholes and security vulnerabilities to make computerized elections at the polling stations to work. As computers get flashier and more powerful, the measures that the state and county governments (who run the elections) have to go to get more extreme.
Maybe voting can be handled online, using public and private key encoding to ensure that the ballots are sent only once and are valid, but the overhead would be a nightmare compared to the "everyday" polling methods.
I simply don't think anyone is ready for real computer voting, but counting votes by computerized devices is fine by me
Even with something as simple as a touchscreen, I'm sure people will manage to get completely confused.
The good thing with this is that no ballots can get "lost" (How the hell do you *lose* ballots???)
Additional issues come up, however. Suppose the computer crashes. Suppose the hard drive dies? Suppose someone manages to 'hack' the computer? I'm sure that someone could figure out a way... What happens if you touch multiple places at once? Try dragging both hands across the screen... Eventually, someone will at least _claim_ to have hacked the election computer. Elections will take years of recounts...
But if this can eliminate some of the problems we're facing now - people losing ballots, not being able to "figure out" how to vote, getting barricaded inside a building by a bear (?!?!), etc... Then go for it.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Here in Denver, Colorado, we DO use computerized voting booths. You press the buttons of your choice, which all light up. You complete your vote by presing the "cast vote" button at the bottom. You can check and change any choice you make up until then.
I was surprised to learn that there are many places that use paper.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
--locust
Everyone wants some kind of national push to develop 21st century voting systems, for everyone to 'get with the program' and get away from the punchcards, the scantron forms, or whetever else.
However, the United States of America is still just that - a Republic of United States. Voting is a right guaranteed under the Federal constitution, but exercised and controlled at the state level. In this sense, there are effectively 50 little countries voting here.
Imagine the European Union trying to pick a President/King/Queen/Prime Minister/whatever. Do you think Germany really gives a rat's ass how Sweden runs their voting? Or that France wants to be forced to adopt England's voting methods? Not on their life. They are individual countries with a common, uniting regulating body. That's essentially what the US is, with significantly more regulation coming to the states than an EU commission would have over the countries of Europe.
There will never be Federal Voting Standards. If you want your local voting standards changed, call your local election board and get things moving.
Oh, and here in Jacksonville, Florida (Duval County), we used punchcards this year, but there are already plans underway to move into computerized voting by 2004.
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Egads, you mean we haven't wiped them off the face of the earth yet?
This is the most callous thing I've heard regarding nature in a long time. Regarding bears (or other animals) as unnatural inhabitants of the planet makes me ill, especially in referring to states in the great north that still have pristine areas of land that haven't been cleared of other animal life to make them suitable for human consumption.
Just last night as my friend and I were leaving his office, a skunk ran under his car in the parking lot. We had to stand back for 5 minutes before it decided to move on. Guess which one of the three of us held the most power at that moment. The assumption that humans are the be-all end-all of evolution flies in the face of the fact that other animals are bigger, faster, and stronger and that we humans are only _sometimes_ smarter than them.
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"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
A voting scheme that does the opposite of what the majority of voters want can not be called representative, even if it's idiot proof, and technologically perfect.
To avoid repetition, I scrolled through all the posts to see if anyone else had mentioned this... and I've come to the conclusion that either: 1) nobody from california reads slashdot or 2) nobody from california that reads slashdot voted. This year, california implemented electronic voting. The story is H ere
Electronic voting powered by Java...taking place at the normal polling place, not over the web, using a pseudo-smart card technology. Great Stuff.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I actually participated in the LA County experiment with touchscreen voting. The system I tried is actually the same system that San Bernadino County is using.
When I wrote up this article, I was unaware that the machine does not submit its results via the Internet or some sort of VPN, but each machine is taken back to the Registrar-Recorder and manually read out. So the security issues I raised in the original article may not actually be valid.
The thing that I must stress about the new touchscreen system is this:
If this touchscreen system existed in Palm Beach County, FL, you wouldn't see the kind of confusion that was rife there.
The punchcard ballot is what we have in Los Angeles County currently. It's archaic. It's time to bid it farewell, as it is time to say bye-bye to the Electoral College.
The touchscreen system I used at the test station in Van Nuys could be a great way to prevent debacles like in Florida from happening again.
Again, the link is http://www.msgeek.org/html/article .ph p?sid=15
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Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Microsoft Vote (TM)
Sorry to be a math nazi, but just for the record:
...with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes)
40,000 / 1,000,000 = 0.04, or 4%, not 0.4%.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This election is Election double zero, which sums it up nicely. (OK so I'm bored at work)
Here's my idea for a voting system:
No voting on the Internet (I'd like to, it'd be very handy, but bear with me).
When one gets to the polling place, he/she is checked for proper ID (driver's license, etc.), which is entered into a computer for logging. The voter is given a smartcard-like device and a paper ballot. When the voter enters the booth, he/she sticks the ballot and the smartcard into a machine, the computer in the booth displays a message (you are responsible for making sure your ballot is correct, by continuing, you agree that you take all responsibility for a vote mistakenly cast for another candidate, etc.), and, for the candidates, displays names and faces. When the voter chooses from a list who he/she wants to vote for, the computer shows the names/faces of the candidates and asks if these are the right people. Assuming the voter chooses "yes," the machine automatically punches the ballot. The computer then spits out the ballot and asks for the voter to check to make sure all the holes are punched correctly (showing a picture of what the ballot should look like with the holes punched). If it isn't, the voter is asked to put it back into the machine, at which time another hole is punched in an "invalid" space, or some such thing, after which it spits the smart card back out. If the vote is correct, it keeps the smart card, logs the vote for reporting to the state, and the voter goes to put the paper ballot in the box. If any challenges as to the validity of the ballots are made, the paper ballots are there for records.
I hate to say this, but IMHO we need paper ballots at some level, so here's what I propose. Vote with a nice pretty touch screen, confirm your votes, and bam - electro gee whizzery does it's thing. A paper ballot is ALSO printed out, which is stored in a ballot box for manual counting _IF NEEDED_ after the election.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
User interface legend has an article on how this is another example of why you must user test your interfaces.
http://www.asktog.com
Good point. But therin lies the snag. How can you keep telling American Citizens that "We're the leader of the free world," and "Our way is the best," when they start questioning just how badly the election was botched.
I mean, didn't we just threaten to overthrow a president in another country that had a *wider* margin than what we have here? Didn't their whole voting system and results come under such scrutiny that said president ran away?
Leader of the free world? Sure. Laughing stock leader of the free world. First Clinton's indiscresions, and now this... ::sigh::
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Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.
Oh please, wrong President. I don't think so. But since you are going that direction. Let's open Pandora's Box.
Do you have any idea how many votes are thrown out? Are you sure that those votes would make a difference (Absolutely Sure)? If Florida gets a new election, I want it country wide! I'm sure we would see who is the "right" president then. Give me a break. There are rules. You break the rules, can't follow the rules. You need to be responsible for your actions. Stop crying about the "wrong" president. There are problems nation wide and not with just this type of ballot. They are all different. If the people of Palm Beach didn't ask for a new ballot when they messed up (double punched), it's there own fault. We can talk about 3000 votes for wrong candidate. It may well be a moot point after the over-seas votes come in.
I don't know about where you live, but having a Driver's license is not required here to vote. All you need is some form of photo ID. There are about 15 of them listed on our local election board web page, including things like Passports, Military ID's, and various other things.
There's too many acceptable forms of ID to make it a requirement to have a specific one to vote. In fact, I wa worried I wasn't going to be able to vote because we moved in May from one house to another right down the street, but we can't find which box our Voter Cards are in. Tying things to a single piece of paper/plastic/whatever is not a good idea.
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Hell, I wasn't even asked to provide an ID when I voted. They simple asked for my last name (coward), and then said my first name "(anonymous) is that you?" This was in Seattle - fraud would have been trivially easy.
XML causes global warming.
The significant problem in doing a public electronic vote is to find a way to gaurentee that each person can vote no more than once while at the same time making sure that the vote is really anonymous.
Split it up into two sections. Give everyone a card with a bit of flash memory on it. Have everyone register for a vote sometime before election day. This will put an id on the card. The id will not be tracked per voter, just that it was assigned. On election day let everyone vote in an authorized place on authorized machines, and record the id and the vote.
For the meantime, they could still use paper and do the election the sdame way, except that the computer will punch the holes or whatever it is. The computer can read the values and display it to the user. That should rid confusion and keep at least the same security of secrecy that we have now.
Have you read my journal today?
I do think that requiring an Abstain/NotA choice for EVERY ballot question, and then requiring that every ballot question be answered in order to validate the ballot *before the voter hands it in*.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
There will always be a margin of error. While electronic voting may be able to reduce the margin of error, we will still make a likely margin of error at least one tenth of one percent. In this vote in Florida, the decisive margin is about half of one hundredth of a percent of the vote. Even with an electronic system, we would still have a statistical tie in Florida.
The problem is that in a two party system, you have one winner and one loser, and a bunch of people who don't matter. In a winner take all system where the candidates of the two major parties are not substantially different, a tie is inevitable. Nader (and other small party candidates) have been arguing that the political system needs to empower third parties somehow. I think that this whole situation clearly demonstrates their point.
Other countries don't have this problem because smaller parties can throw their support behind major parties to form coalition governments. Not only does this eliminate the possibility of a tie -- or worse yet a statistical tie that leaves one person a "winner" but without any clear mandate -- it also injects new ideas into the political process.
I'm not necessarily advocating the elimination of the existing political system, but it would be nice if Nader could trade his votes in Florida with Gore or Bush in exchange for a promise or two that his agenda will move forward. Not only does that make all of the votes for Nader count in a really substantial way, it also gives Bush or Gore a margin of victory well beyond the statistical margin of error.
While I agree that electronic voting is a good idea, we can't expect technology to wipe clean the systemic flaws of the polical process. We need to recognize there are serious problems and start proposing real changes.
Here is a decent page on Electronic Democracy.
And even though I'm a geek, I hope we don't change it. The system is simple to understand, transparent, and has public confidence. Recounts can be done when necessary. (Close constituencies are recounted several times). Oh, and we still manage to count the votes in almost all constituencies by about 5 or 6 hours after the close of polls.
On the other hand, can you imagine the conspiracy theorists if votes were done by computer? Can you imagine the complaints from people who panic whenever they encounter technology?
No, in my opinion, the Florida ballot wasn't too low-tech, it was too high-tech.
Besides, if the results came in near-instantly, we'd lose all the excitement of election night! :)
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
I heard some guy on the news saying that in 1996 over 14,000 votes were thrown out for double voting in Palm Beach county. Anyone know of a link to stats on that?
The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States.
No, it's probably going to give us the candidate YOU don't want as president. I voted for Bush, because he wasn't part of the administration to give us DMCA and UCITA. Nor is he squarely in the pockets of the entertainment industry (MPAA/RIAA). Granted, Bush's big "war on drugs" push bothered me, but drugs are illegal now. Have been illegal for awhile. Clinton/Gore got pretty tough on drugs. And I can still make two fone calls and get 10 hits of LSD. *shrug*
So Bush didn't get the popular vote. The electoral college was set up so that states with lower populations could still play a major role in national elections. Both candidates agreed to play by these rules when they started their campaigns, and for Gore's people to now be screaming "but he got the popular vote, he should be president" is juvenile and petty. If you're going to complain, complain before you lose. c.
That, and I remember reading about a case where some candidate got a hold of a copy of the ballot ahead of time, had about 100 extra copies made (it was for a small town vote) and when he cast his vote, he dropped in the other hundred - all coincidentally voting for him.
It got caught when the vote counter realized that 60 more people had voted than were registered.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Check it out here. Polling places use computers and a private network to relay vote tallys. I also heard that they use a touch screen computer display to actually cast their ballots, but I havn't seen any reports confirming this.
Also, California is apparently running non-binding on-line voting demonstrations.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
This type of system is already in place in Texas.
OK, I've voted in PA, MA, and CA. So I've seen at least 5 different voting methods, and can comment on what I think is the best way...
Electronic voting sounds wonderful, but if you pick up a copy of Applied Crypto, you'll understand why it's not my favorite form, regardless of how you do it. Electronic Voting is a hard problem - there are lots of very tricky pitfalls, and I'm sorry, as someone who deals with computers professionally, I'm not going to trust that we get it right.
For those of you bitching about how stupid people are that can't use punchcard systems, I seriously doubt you've ever used one. The best analogy I can make for using punchcards to vote with is the SAT (or other standardized test). Imagine taking the SAT - all the questions are in a booklet, and you have a seperate answer sheet that only has row numbers and lettered circles. Now image that you have to take it in INK. That's how bad punchcards are. Here in CA, I had to vote on about 30 different races/propositions. Believe me, it's not simple at all to get it error-free.
Me, I'm for using the system I first used in PA: the good old mechanical voting booth. You step into it, pull a lever to close the drapes, and you have all the choices in neat rows in front of you. The booth can be set up so that you can't make mistakes (only allowing you to vote ONCE for a given office, for instance), and you can go back and change your mind up until you pull the main lever to exit the booth. The row sizes can be adjusted (I think most of the print was in at least 36 point when I last used on), so you can accomodate the elderly and disabled easily.
Also, mechanical voting booths have several advantages over both paper and electronic ballots:
All in all, I'm strongly in favor of mechanical voting throughout the nation. Hopefully, we can take this debatacle and make some improvements.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
19000 ballots were thrown away because both Buchanan and Gore were punched in an overwhelmingly democratic destrict. Why is the media reporting a Bush victory, anyway? Maybe its that extra money he raised for them...
why can't people just stand in front of a terminal at the polling station, slide in some ID card (i don't know if you have them in the US but its about time) and touch the name of the guy they want. takes all of 5 seconds. discuss.
...shouldn't that be: e-Lection?
Kudos to Wired for waking us up.
Blog,Twitter
While person and paper might be simple, it is far from unmolestable. Were you asked for identification when you voted? I wasn't. I could have found all the info I needed to vote in my name in the phone book. Some consider it to be a legal problem to require anything to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were (rightly) thrown out. In at least some areas, this has be taken to mean that requiring identification is also wrong. So in quite a few areas, voter fraud is trivial.
Take a look at FL, and all the anomolies that are popping up there. Now they are saying that with nearly 6 million votes cast, the difference is less than 400 votes. I'm supposed to believe that Gore got 99.99% as many votes as Bush? I don't think that that's realistic at all without some outside influence pushing the totals together. It's just a little disturbing that this election might be decided by a few hundred "votes" when tens of thousands of votes have been thrown out for being double-punched (something which is easy to to do a ballot _after_ it's been cast.)
The simple fact is that this system is easily tampered with, and the amount of power and money that is at stake is capable of corruping a lot of people into being dishonest. We need a system which both allows people to verify that there votes were correctly included in the final tally, and also allows some random percentage of the votes to be audited after the fact to check for fraud. While secret ballots have advantages, one big disadvantage is that fraud is almost impossible to detect after the fact.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Reminds me of that episode of Sliders where something like 90% of the us population has a law degree, and you have to have a briefcase of paperwork to buy a hamburger. I honestly don't know how it got this bad, but it is. Heck, you can't even critisize a corporation anymore without being sued. What ever happened to free speech?
I think this brings everything to light, though. The more this gets blown up, the more people rail against having a president that squeeked into office against popular opinion and by only a 1/10000th of a percentage point, the better. Strangely enough, this is GOOD for everyone here. The best way to get reform is to get definitive proof that the current system doesn't work. Didn't we just do that? Heh.
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Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Everyone is assuming we're talking about hooking up modems to your local Baby Bell internet provider and broadcasting packets back to the master server which is on someone's DSL or Cable link.
I have one word for that: Duh. If we go to a computerized system, we're going to need point-to-point, non-open communications lines for all of these clients and servers. Systems that dial into each other directly. It won't be possible for Johnny to sit at home and man-in-the-middle hte tally packets, because there won't be a middle for him to be in. You wn't be able to DDoS the servers, because you will never see them poke their heads onto the net at large.
Come on people that's just common sense...
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The most obvious problem with your system is that it leaves no paper trail . In a rare situation like this one where a recount is needed, I would never trust a computer system alone. The database can be corrupted or compromised. The network connections, though relatively secure, are not invulnerable. Admittedly, traditional old or non tech methods are open to compromise too, of course, but they have the trump card of tangible evidence of the vote in the form of some paper ballot.
I'm not against applying technological measures on top of the old ones -- scan in the ballot & process it however you would like, for example. But I have not been so seduced by technology as to believe that it is some kind of pixie dust that, when generously applied, would make all the problems we're dealing with this year would go away.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
2) As well, because the mail-delivered passwords are the only identifying feature, they could be bought, sold, traded, etc. Maybe not by me, but what if you are low-income, no HMO, little daughter is sick, etc. How much is the going price for a vote?
Why is that a problem? That can be done now, and if I own my vote, how can anyone else prevent me from entering into contracts regarding it?
If you can dictate under what terms I can contract my vote, then I don't own it, you own it and are just extending me a privilege to use it.
Votes are a right, not a privilege, ergo it cannot be illegal to trade them.
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But optical mark recognition, where you check boxes on paper, seems like a good compromise. It's easy to use (pencil and paper), keeps a permanent record that humans can recount if necessary, can be evaluated easily, it's cheap, and it can easily be used inside polling booths.
The only other change I would like to see is the adoption of a universal format for ballots: one column, candidates (or propositions) listed in 12 pt font on the left with big check boxes on the right. Candidates would be separated from one another by thick lines. Different ballots may have different sets of candidates and propositions, but they would be handled just by adding more pages.
With Internet or computer-based voting, there are all sorts of security problems. You can't just go back later and reexamine the original votes. And if you can vote over the Internet, unlike the voting you do in the privacy of the booth, you can be coerced by someone to vote the way they want.
Why should the election rules be changed? First, it will be very expensive to have all that equipment and necessary security precautions for the elections. Also by the time of the next election a lot of software and hardware could be outdated. What are the advantages? There is no reason to assume it will be any more fair. Maybe a little faster, but even that is not certain. It seems that changing the election system just for the sole reason that you can vote from the comfort of you home is short-sighted.
In my decade of voting, I've only ever used a pencil once while voting - in Oregon. Well, okay, and the time I used an absentee ballot.
Every other year, I've voted in New Jersey.
It used to be I had a panel with names on it, with little levers next to the names. I pulled down levers next to my selection, then pulled one honking big lever to the side (which also opened the booth curtains to let me out - it was so cool!). You could get a little slip of paper to use for write-ins. (I remember one year handing out write-in-slip-shaped stickers with the name of a candidate who'd just missed the ballot to anyone who'd take them.)
These were the same machines I remember seeing from my childhood. I have font memories of playing with the little practice-lever machine they had. (Yes, my parents took me with them when they voted when I was little.)
This (and last) year I went into a booth and saw a panel with names on them. Pressing a name caused a green X to appear beneath the name (pressing a second time cleared the X, and you could only select as many persons per office as there were openings). The ballot issued worked the same - with X's under the Yes or No options. There was a little keyboard at the bottom of the panel to allow write-ins.
I know the lever machine made punchcards, and I suspect the green-X machine either makes punchcards or some other computer-readable slip. Still, there are advances in technology slowly creeping in.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
Just out of curiosity, where is your sig from?
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
I don't know about you, but my receipt did not show who I voted for, just that I voted.
lukas
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
What I see is two problems.
;-).
:-)
1) Voting on the internet is still 10-20 years away. It won't happen because the gov't will not accept a system that is 100% secured from the outside world. The internet as it currently exists cannot guarantee that, so it should not be pushed by this generation.
2) Many people will not have the internet. Just because numbers from '96-'00 have grown tremendously, doesn't mean the rate will continue. Internet growth charts resemble a bell curve than an exponential climb, so there is a point where everything will level off. That point is not 100%. There will always be someone that wants to vote, but does not have internet access (or possibly a computer). People in the low income bracket will not get a computer simply because nearly everyone in the middle income bracket has one, they will get one when they have enough money to buy a computer and their necessities.
What I've thought of for a couple years now is a system that works with computers in the polling places. Design a simple piece of software that displays the ballot vote by vote. You have a radio button by each choice. You pick your candidate (or the No Vote choice) and hit Next. After you're done, it'll present you with a confirmation screen with a Change option next to each choice. Or, hit the VOTE! button. If you hit VOTE!, your votes are sent to a local server in the polling place. So what you would have is 20 dumb terminals with one server on a LAN, not connected to the internet. When the polls close, a designated official comes by and signs off on the harddrive of the server. Unlock it, take the drive, go to the counting place. At the same time, you would have a second harddrive in the server secured in a lock box which is a perfect mirror of the one counted. This ensures that the harddrive they count votes from is the same one they picked up at the polling place.
Personally, I see this has the first step, and a system can be had for under $10,000 per polling place. Use something simple and stable, and you'd even see Windows not crash for an entire day (blasphemy, to be sure...but even Windows can handle a series of pages with radio choices
Anyone think I'm full of it?
Slashdot aside, there are still large numbers of Americans who have little or no faith in computer systems - especially after this years' number of DOS attacks. The conspiracy theories regarding the "real winner" of a computer tabulated race would abound.
You're absolutely correct. Last night on CNN they had a group of voters from west palm beach discussing the situation at hand. One women stated that she now trusts computers/technology less than before, even though in theory some sort of fully computerized system would make the situation that occurred nearly impossible (ie if you had a display telling you who you're about to vote for).
The point is that most Americans can't keep pace with all the technological changes ocurring in the world. People see the word technology and try to assess it in a vacuum. People don't seem to understand that technology is designed and implemented by other people, and as such is limited by how well those two tasks are accomplished. The complexity level doesn't allow the average person to see it as anything more than the "black box", they only know what goes in, and not always what comes out. In the voting world, that is especially unacceptable to most Americans.
I think Jamie is forgetting this as well. Technology can't solve everything. It certainly can't solve this issue much better than anything else.
I was surprised to see the relative complexity of the ballots used in parts of Florida. Where I voted, inside the booth was a big laminated board, with the names/parties in columns for each particular race. Press a box next to a candidate's name and a red LED lights up next to that name. Change your mind? Press another button and the light changes. When finished, press the big green "VOTE" button and the lights go off and you're done. Simple, and I can't imagine such a system is terribly expensive. The light of day is finally reaching some parts of our voting process that clearly need to be re-thought and re-implemented.
An aside: Part of the 'problem' of media's probable influence on voting in western time zones could be dealt with by having the polls open and close at the same time, nationwide. (e.g. 10am - 10pm EST, 7am - 7pm PST) Then make National Election Day a federal/national holiday, which gives everyone all day to vote, and might further increase voter turnout. If only the media won't report until the polls have closed...
My Goodness.. How much money do you think these polling places have anyway? Remember, a given state that implements this may have hundreds of districts, each with 5 - 20 such interfaces. Plus you'd have all the complexity and insecurity of a computer kiosk.
Delaware have a electric type-writer type technology with basically a board with lots of buttons everwhere.. We have a matrix where rows are the offices and columns are the parties.. You can't possibly screw it up.. Look for your favorite O'Reilly animal and punch down the column.
There are no electronic registers (just turn dials on the back). Simple, clean, and chepear than a touch-screen system I'd imagine.
-Michael
-Michael
Here's something that would never happen...
Cast your votes on your tax return. We already touch on that now with the "Election Fund" checkbox.
It would no doubt have more far reaching effects than just fully automating what we have now.
Anyone notice that Tax Day is as far away on the calendar from Election Day as is possible?
--
It is compulsory to vote if your 18 and over
What are the penalties for not voting?
What happens if you're sick and can't get out to vote?
What happens if you're out of the country for a personal emergency ("Oh, I can't come to Dad's funeral, I have to vote!")?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Um. There are any number of ways to prevent the sort of problem which plagues the ballots with the punch holes, which is precisely this: more than one hole may be punched, which invalidates that ballot. The extra hole may be the result of misaligning the card in the machine. The extra hole may be the result of mistakenly punching one hole and then mistakenly punching another one (which has the positive effect of nullifying your original mistaken vote, but does not allow you to vote in the affirmative for your actual choice -- and from what I understand the FL voters who punched twice were not offered replacement ballots). The extra hole may be punched after the fact by unethical persons wishing to invalidate your vote for whatever reason. There is no way to prove when or by whom the extra hole was punched or as a result of which error unless no ballots are accepted that have this issue (i.e. a machine reader will not let you leave the polling place without submitting a correctly completed ballot). It is my understanding that there was no such validation of ballots for persons leaving the FL polls, or if the ballots were obviously invalid that they were not replaced.
The best method for combining machine and analog certainties involves using a machine that only allows you one selection, and allows you to change that selection until you press a final "OK" button, which then prints a machine readable receipt, which you then submit to a collection box. The first machine can submit tabulations for instant counting. If there are errors in this process, the receipts can be machine read to quickly replace those results. And if there are severe concerns, or some sort of handcount is needed, there are pieces of paper which humans can look at and verify. This provides anonymity, error correction, and verifiability, nor can I think of a single way to tamper with this type of ballot. Anything less can always be looked at with suspicion.
I do not have a signature
Oregon puts a barcode on the back of your license, perhaps using that and your ss # for identification, it would be possible to have 'Terminals' at different places, swipe your license, pick a # according to whom you want to elect... and be done with it. That seems very viable as well.
Hmmm...must be a Marion County thing. UniGov blew the voting dumb terminal $$ on a big pretty new STADIUM. Whooooo-hoooo!
OK, no more Indiana specifics. But it is interesting to notice the correlation of posts to the poster's level of available voting (low)technology at home...
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
--Stolen & Unat
"How much worse could a digital system really be?"
:)
I believe this comment is somewhat naive. A user interface will not be improved just because a computer is used. Rather, I'd argue that most likely the interface created with a computer would be worse rather than better, given the current interface designs and those from the past 20 years (give or take).
Re: the bear blocking people in the voting location. Having computers in that polling place would not have helped them get past the bear earlier (unless the bear could have been placated by a Q3A session
Seriously, I think tele-voting is a step in the wrong direction. Voting in a public place within our community reminds us that our private, personal decisions have social and non-private impact -- we are part of "We the people" and rubbing shoulders with strangers helps us keep in mind the reality of what voting is about, IMHO. Tele-voting in isolation is a step in the wrong direction.
(note: of course, there are valid reasons for absentee voting, but that should remain the exception, and not become the norm).
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
The ballot I used was the type where you fill in a circle by your candidate with a marker and then feed the ballot into a voting machine. Having done some reading recently about election fraud I was curious about how the machine worked. So I asked the lady sitting by the machine if she had looked inside the machine and/or new how it worked. She said "Oh no - its just automatic!"
How comforting. There was no indication that the machine counted my ballot, or that I had filled everything out correctly. There is also no way to be assured that the totals inside the machine are correct or that they are transferred onto the next step in the process correctly.
After thinking about it I came up with the following:
1. In the booth you make your selections and then press a button.
2. The machine would print out a sheet with your selections and a random unique ID, all duplicated in two columns. If in reveiwing your selections you realize that you have made an error you are free to discard the selections and go back to step one.
3. You leave the booth and put your selections into the counting machine. It would read your votes and physically seperate the duplicated columns. The machine keeps one and you keep one. You now have a receipt and your random ID.
4. After the election you could identify your vote among all the other votes by your ID and be assured that it was properly counted in the totals.
The only problem that occurs to me is that this would enable the buying of votes as you now have a way to prove how you voted....
-N
One thing I think everyone is missing about Internet-based voting in a national election is the possibility of DoS or similar attacks by terrorist organisations in order to delay or thwart the election process. Not an issue, you say? I disagree. There are many groups out there interested in thwarting just about any governmental process, as evidenced by the rampant voter fraud and denial of access issues that seem to crop up in every election (even local). Endless attacks on US military computers also speak volumes to me.
No matter how secure you make a system, there are always the possibility for an attack method that nobody counted on. Unfortunately, this is a harsh fact of life on the Net these days. I think it's pretty sad when teenagers can hack even the most high-profile and secure sites out there. What does this say about the possibility of making a relatively safe Internet voting system? Again, there are many groups out there that obviously will do just about anything to achieve their goals...
Privacy issues are another concern altogether. IPv6 will undoubtedly be making a strong appearance by 2004. I doubt I have to say more on that subject :-). Also, it seems that everyone hates the government to have information about them or to even have the possibility of having that info. Frankly, I'm surprised that nobody has popped up saying that the FBI might use electronic voting log files as a way to track people. I'm not a privacy zealot, so I don't think that the info would be abused or even kept beyond what is currently kept (basic voter records), but the possibility is there. So, what the argument for electronic voting is saying to me about privacy concerns is that "we all vigorously protect our private information from possible abuse by the government/third parties UNLESS giving it up makes things more convenient for us".
I, personally, like the idea of Internet voting, but any information relay between the voting locations and any central location should be verified in triplicate, complete with supporting evidence being hand-carried (eventually). Basically, they could transmit the locations' voting records to the county offices via a closed network, verify the results by phone, and hand-carry printouts and media to the offices (in due time). Relaying this information further up the chain (to the state offices, etc) should be conducted in the same manner. Proper checksums and encryption should be used on any media being hand-carried to prevent any tampering which may cause irregularities, but that goes without saying :-)
As for the voting process itself and interface, that should be determined through studies and testing. I doubt that the "more senior, but less tech-savvy" Americans would really be receptive towards electronic voting, but times have changed before in their lifetime and I think that they would adapt (they would bitch, but adapt).
One other advantage of having to go to the polling station, rather than voting at home, is that voting is always done in secret, secrecy which is enforced by officials. It is then much harder for someone to bully or coerce you into voting for someone you didn't want to.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
"Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know. "
I think the homeless would have some difficulty voting from their homes. And if I'm not mistaken, they have some trouble registerning to vote as it is. Perhaps we should provide temporary homes for the homeless so they can vote. We'd only need this housing once every two years, so it could be used by the wealthy the rest of the time.
Primarily: allowing people to log in and vote from home creates a situation that further favors the affluent and educated. I don't know what the current statistics are, but I do know that internet penetration into low-income regions is much less than that of middle-to-upper class neighborhoods. We already have a situation in this country where the "economically challenged" and less educated (often the same group) turn out in lower numbers than those with money or schooling; allowing online vote-from-home would further widen this gap, a direct conflict with the ideals of the system.
Second, (and probably somewhat contrary to my first point), I, personally am unconvinced that we want to make it easy for _everyone_ to vote. I do NOT believe it should be difficult to vote, and I certainly oppose anything that makes it harder for any group to vote than for another, but I do think that voting should be proactive, not just something you can do by firing up your WebTV and clicking on "unresearched politician #2."
The current system of requiring voters to either file for an absentee ballot or go to a polling place to vote requires that the voter demostrate some desire to do so.
As a result, (I believe) what you get with the current system, is a voting constituency that cares enough about the issues (or candidates) to vote, is much more likely to have researched their issues, and, in all likelihood, votes in a manner representative of whatever neighborhood/demographic/group you want to pile them in.
If voting took no effort, I think you'd get a whole lot more of the "vote for the best looking candidate" or "whichever tag line sounds more promising," and that could completely nullify the actual issues.
TV has "dumbed down" the political process for the least common denominator already... if we increase the effect of the LCD anymore, won't that just make it more of a popularity contest and make political positioning mean absolutely nothing?
Maybe I just don't have enough faith in the average constituent. Damn Jerry Springer!
Anonymity further complicates this. How are we to be sure that you aren't able to vote in both the online and physical polling place? Also, this would definately make vote fraud much easier! I don't want my password.. would you like it? (Just a theoretical situation). Sure, we could maintain a list of those who have voted online and those who have voted at the polling place, but this would definately require a massive revision and technological update to most states' polling systems -- a very expensive task!
The main problem with this is that investigating voter fraud is much more difficult. Care would need to be taken when devising such a system and certain things MUST be logged!
I don't want to seem like an idiot. But a touchscreen has its own issues. You must understand that we have oils on our hands and everything we touch wips off some of those oils in the form of a fingerprint. I notice that you were just at the polling boot and, for some reason, I have a copy of your fingerprint. I can dust and identify your votes. This can even be investigated as some sort of fraud, but how do we investigate this without compromising the privacy of the voter? This definately would need to be solved! While this theoretical situation is far out in left-field, it is something that must be addressed, particularly with the Slashdot folk as security-concious as they are.
If there is even the slightest chance that a voting system might be attacked anonymously, it would be a more difficult task to track them on the Internet than at a physical polling place. We must accept that not everything must be completely digital! It was just today, I was listening to an NPR broadcast about film preservation becoming a lost art to systems which simplify and dumb-down the process giving the user less control and experience needed to correct certain things. My point is that there are certain qualities of non-digital methods that will never be replaced by the digital world! They may be reimplemented, but it's not the same!
The initial capitol needed for this would be high, but the keosks would be upgradeable and programmable from one central location in each region. The person would vote, the vote would go out over the private network and votes would be tallied immediately at breaknet speeds. Because this is so quick and easy it would allow for very inexpensive referendums... the keosks could be used for regional/citywide elections as well, thus saving each city several hundred thousand + dollars per year. Not to mention the trees that get to live..
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
The largest problem with a computerized voting system is the potential for hacking, tweaking, and other dirty tactics of old carried over to a computerized voting system. Also, there's no way to do a recount by hand; however, radio buttons will hopefully eliminate the need for one.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I think it would be better if the user does not get the token back. Instead, the machine writes the vote into the card and keeps it in some storage area inside. That way, a manual count is still possible...
the people that want electronic voting, aren't interesdted in this. They would like it, so there is one less time to get off their ass. Voting right from their computer. I think, to avoid major fraud, we should stay with what we have.
McMicrophone: Retinal identification confirmed... May I take your vote?
Voter: Hmmm... What are the specials today?
McMicrophone: We've got three new parties available... the Darwinist Party Pack, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger Junior... the Posthumanist Party, starring Max Moore... and Martian Party, starring the head of Leonard Nimoy.
Voter: Uh, just gimme a large Green, a medium Democrat, and a Libertarian and NaturalLaw in small.
McMicrophone: Here's your ticket *bwop* , please pull forward to the next window.
You pull forward, and insert your ticket which contains your anonymous voting data. The Display comes up and shows:
You have ordered:
1 small Hagelin
1 small Browne
1 medium REFORM CANDIDATE
and 1 Large SOCIALIST
Hey! That isn't what I ordered!! Gimme the manager!
The Manager apologetically straightens it all out, with a complimentary order of fries.
1) How would absentee voting work? Ballots by mail would be encoded exactly how?
2) I can easily forsee some nice obfuscated C somewhere that in essence says if vote == gore and numvotes%65343==0 then vote = bush....
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Most people know about the distance rule, that it is illegal to campaign within (100 yrds?) of a voting center. This helps to protect the secret ballot, in addition to other obvious problems. Certainly, someone standing far enough away could hand you $5 and say to vote for Candidate X; you can take the $5, but you are not bound to vote for X, as your ballot is your ballot and the results of the individual ballot are secret.
Switch now to internet voting. Now, you have someone giving you $5 to do the same as above, but now, since there's no "no politicing zone" around your computer, they can stand over your shoulder and watch how you vote. The secret ballot is no longer secret.
The same problems can occur with mail-in ballots, like OR tried to use this year. However, I believe the arguement that the experts were in favor of these for was that unlike an eLection, which would be held on a specific day (and thus campaigners would be able to target that day), mail ins have much longer period in which the votes can be cast, and it would take too much effort for campaigners to cover all ground during that timeframe.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Ballots are secret. No one can legally pressure you to vote in front of them. If your boss tries this, call a lawyer. If your marriage can't survive an argument over a political difference, maybe you should think about why you got married. My wife and I don't exactly agree on everything, but we can always agree to disagree.
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Addlepated - punk & metal
Technophile that I am, I still have to admit that recent events in Florida make it clear that making people cast their votes in a way that's convenient for machines rather than voters is a failure. 20,000 people just in one county may be disenfranchised for the sin of being unable to communicate with a vote counting machine.
Voting via computer would be fine for me, second generation programmer and uber-geek that I am; but there are plenty of people, otherwise intelligent, who have great difficulty in communicating with technology. You've seen them in front of you at ATMs, no doubt, holding up the line.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
What part of Indiana are YOU voiting in? I'm in the freakin' CAPITOL of the state, and we still have those funny little levers you pull to the right (no, wait, is it the left?) of the candidates name. The last modern thing we did here in the Hoosier state was touch screen driving tests - are you sure you didn't just elect a stop sign for president?
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
--Stolen & Unat
At first I couldn't beleive that it wasn't already being done. The problem I discovered is that each state and/or locality has their own rules regarding the usability specifications. For instance, a voting machine in Florida may require slightly different specs than a voting machine in Michigan. Each one will need to be approved by each local election committee on a case by case basis. There is no way that every locality has enough $$ to design, develop, and test something as complex as an electronic voting system..Hence, they are waiting for a vendor to supply one to them....However, due to the practical reasons - no vendor is going to try and make 1001 different voting machines...so it ain't gonna happen for awhile.
Before electronic voting can happen...there needs to be some federal guidlines that mandate one set of usability specs - then all the states will have to adopt those specs. Good idea, but this WON'T happen in 4 short years. Maybe by 2008...but probably 2012 until its nation-wide.
_DM
Actually, one could consider that a good thing. A heterogeneous system is -- in general -- harder to subvert than a homogeneous one. Problems tend to be localized, too. (If we had all used the Palm Beach system, Buchanan might be president-elect!)
If it means billions and it stops another Florida incident.. I think the gov. could justify the $$ for it, dontcha think?
Oh foo. How likely is that? Your boss calls you into her office, demands that you fill out your ballot, sign and seal it, all in her presence? First of all, you can just refuse, and if you get fired, then you didn't want to work for that person anyway. Second, if your boss or anyone does this with more than one person, I bet it wouldn't be too hard to take them to task on it. Depending on what the law is in your state, you could even live the American dream and prosecute your boss on a felony charge.
I voted at my kitcen table, alone. No fuss, no muss. A friend of mine voted sitting in the computer lab, with a handful of us all standing around making suggestions. For president he flipped a coin to decide between Nader and Gore. The system works.
--
share and enjoy
We've already got such a system. It's called "double checking". After I marked my ballot, but before I fed it to the counter, I checked all my marks again, just to make sure I had marked them right.
See that "Preview" button?
See this funny and on-target analysis by Lauren Weinstein.
So, to me, what we need is error correction. Some way of having the vote confirmed as being countable. Either the voter has the ability to run the card through a machine which shows the person who the punchcard says they voted for, and then they have the option to go and get a new ballot if they don't like it. This could also check for 'double punched' ballots, so people have a chance to fix it.
This would at least solve the most glaring issues of this whole butterfly ballot thing. It would also fix the problem of incorrectly filled out ballots.
If you have gotten off your butt to go to the polls and vote, it should count. Period. It should be the job of the election officials to make sure that your vote counts. Currently, they are doing a lousy job. And adding something like this could be so simple. It's a shame it isn't yet available.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
You do know that what you just described is coersion, is voter fraud, is a felony crime, and is punishable by massive fines and long jail time, right?
Your boss, your party, and your Aunt Matilda all could go to jail for making you not vote in the way you want to, or even making the situation uncomfortable for you when yo do actually cast your vote. In fact, this issue is oging to come up down in Dade County in Miami, where it was apparently decided last Friday afternoon that the local Police Force would use Tuesday to check insurance and driver's licenses. Oh, did we forget to tell you that? Oh, is Dade County a primarily ethnic and Democratic community in a state run by Republicans?
If you can't vote the way you want, call your election board. My company told us we should vote against a measure that was proposed here in FL (the Monorail proposition, BTW). I voted for it, and decided they could suck it up. I don't take part in the PAC here at work, I don't vote party line because I'm a hard-core Democrat, I vote whoever I think should be there.
If you're unable to do that, then you need to get rid of the people that are causing you to be unable to exercise your most fundamental right here in the US.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
"Why no I didn't. But thank you for asking that question directly into my Sharper Image microphone tie. Would you like to just give me your ass now, or should we let a jury decide whether I get your head on a platter as well?"
Duh. Why would you assume that if the government uses new technologies, then old rights automatically disappear? Although this may disappoint you, we are not living in the world of Blade Runner.
Lastly, I'm guessing that the Regen was thinking about a simple confirmation receipt -- "you have voted" -- not an itemized receipt -- "you have voted for FOO and BAR". Vote confirmation is not a privacy issue, it's a public record.
I don't know why you don't recall their visits; they certainly made them -- more than once. Gore certainly made an appearance in Louisville, and Bush showed up in Lexington.
In the beginning of the campaign we got enormous attention; it was only after it became clear that Bush was going to carry the state easily that they quit coming.
You'll have to find another poster child for your "small states get ignored" theory...
Jeff
I read that in Florida you must have a legimiate execuse to use an absantee ballot, such as being out of state at the time or being physically unable to attend a voting booth.
Besides, the rarity of the situation makes it a fairly useless as a form of blackmail. Your boss is likely to go to jail, you are only likely to lose your job. The risk to him is not worth a single vote.
If everyone could vote from their office, however, the risk/payoff ratio begins to change. And if online voting becomes the norm, it will be much harder to prove coercion is involved.
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Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Which is exactly why the Electorial College is not perfect.
When a state leans heavily to one party, it is a waste for the other party to campaign there. The original poster said "Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored". My homestate of Georgia was ignored. Texas was ignored. The E.C. focuses the campaigning to the states where the E.V. is up for grabs. Why should the residents of Texas (and other states) be ignored because the Electorial Vote in that state is a forgone conclusion?
In a Popular Vote election, Gore might campaign in Texas, hoping to gain 500k votes (while having no shot at the Texas Electorial Vote).
Everything in this post is false.
Note, you have to wonder how such would skew results in the future. If we accept for the moment the possibility that low-income people may be more likely to vote Democrat, would they be more likely to sell their votes, presumably to the Republicans ? Would net Democratic votes be lost if such were allowed ?
Small states aren't ignored. Hmm... I wonder how come I don't recall seeing Bush or Gore in Kentucky this election. Oh, they spent plenty of time across the river in Ohio or in Tennessee, but I don't think either of them came to the Bluegrass state at all...
Could it have been our piddly 8 electors as opposed to Ohio (21) and Tennessee (11)? Why yes, that could be it.
Get real. You need 12 states to be president. California (54), Texas (32), New York (33), Flordia (25), Ohio (21), Pennsylvania (23), Illinois (22), Michigan(18), North Carolina (14) and almost any other 3 states. What candidate in their right mind would spend ANY time in a state with less than 10 electoral votes?
It works out great for California and other states like it, but don't pretend that "Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored".
Abolish the electoral system? Maybe, but if you keep it, keep it for real reasons.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Not only the technology gotta change. It's your whole voting system. It's ancient.
There is a much simpler and more reliable middle ground that can be achieved. Instead of trying to make the entire process electronic, just make the counting at the polling places both immediate and infallible. What this would require would be specific devices (or pared-down PCs running an open system with some extra equipment) to do the following when a voter has made their choices using a traditional system: 1) Upon insertion into a reader, examine a voter's punch card and verify their choices on a screen. Highlight any reason the ballot would be rejected (two votes for one office, for example). 2) Upon approval of the ballot according to voting rules and the voter's verification of their choices, seal the ballot in a locked box while adding the votes to an internal electronic count. 3) At the end of the polling day, an election official could 'unlock' the machine, with both a key to get to the ballots and a password for the electronics, and the vote total would be immediately available. Ta da! This has several advantages, the most important of which are instant, error-free vote counting, and the retention of physical records of the votes themselves. This also avoids the potential hazard of communication problems and equipment failures inherent to a totally electronic system. The cost probably wouldn't be too bad either.
I voted in this election in Fairfax County VA. Our voting booths were a board with all the canidates and you would press the name of the candidate(s) you want and it would light up. Then you would hit a big green "VOTE" button and it would be registered. There was a pencil on a string for write-in's.
This was aparently 'high-tech' as voting goes, but I'm not sure I prefer it. From a personal standpoint, this was my first election. It was all kind of anti-climatic because it didn't feel real just pressing a few buttons and leaving. I think that if I had used more physical methods, that it would have felt more realistic.
I think that perhaps if I had used an electronic system that prints me an 'election recipt' of sorts, that would make me feel better.
Just my two cents.
responses to shaunj@esi-intl.com please.
That there would be some type of confirmation screen where the user would see the list of candidates for which their vote was about to be cast. They could then either place their vote or they could go back and correct any mistakes.
This would also be useful for verifying that someone doesn't double-vote because it could prevent their vote from even being cast if it was not valid.
--
Well I would hope that the passwords aren't that trivial and also if you were to vote over the net all it would have to do is simply store a 1 under your name as having voted. Then when that second vote comes in and it sees you already voted it tosses it and alerts an official that you tried to vote twice. Now maybe you'd also store an IP of where the vote came from to prosecute fraud or whatever.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
Let's just hope censorware doesn't accidently prevent people from voting at public schools and libraries.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Use touch screens computers at the voting booths. People can still be verified the same old way they have been for years but the counting process would be a snap. Plus each button will have the canidate's name on it so when they press the name of the canidate they just voted. It seems pretty simple. Then again I am a geek.
I had to use fill-in-the-bubble like on the ACT/SAT tests but with a marker instead of a pencil. Weird!
Scott
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Brazil has been a democracy for, what less than half a century? Less if you count the hunta/dictator cycle endemic to South America.
It's old, yes. It works, yes. It comes to a matter of *TRUST* - you can trust paper and pen/pencil marks. You can't trust computers and web sites.
Display some adaptability.
Step 1: Install MS Vote Tool on your PC.............. Step 2: Reboot............. Step 3: Reboot again..................... Step 4: Vote for your nations leader................... Step 5: Upload your vote. (this may take some time as the Internet has been knon to be less than stable on Vote Day).............. Step 6: Trust the admins .............
"I know that the current system has elected presidents for over 200 years but not we have these toys called computers, we cant do anything without them" Good Idea .. NOT !! I just hope they hurry up and build those Internet ready Refrigerators before I starve to death.. I need ONE CLICK EATING !
"I know where you wanted to go today, But we decided to stop here instead!"
Whats completely relevant is that what happened did follow the legal process. Every law was kept to the letter. So what is irrelevant is the accusaion that their votes were taken away. No valid vote was taken away. No invalid process insued to malign or misinform the voters.
I don't see a good reason for going whole-hog right away. Start with voting kiosks and local networks, isolated from other networks. Then we only have to worry about electromagnetic attacks.
Once we can do this well, then consider moving to larger networks. We'll then need a standard protocol, but not a standard implementation. This will help maintain diversity.
-Paul Komarek
Nope, the original poster is right. I live in Hamilton County, IN, and voted the same way the poster described. Granted, much of Hamilton County is higher-income suburbs of Indianapolis.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Well, apart from Wyoming, those states are out of the way. What I'm saying is that without the electoral college, it would be really easy for all the candidates to hit Boston -New York - Philadelphia - DC - Orlando - Miami - Dallas - Houston - Phoenix - San Diego - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Seattle - Denver - St. Louis - Chicago - Indianapolis - Cleveland - Cincinatti - Pittsburgh - Buffalo on one nationwide loop, and then leave the national media to fill in the blanks. But essentially, the campaigns would have to heavily favor cities - since more popular votes are there.
:)
That said, the Electoral College isn't foolproof in preventing that... but I think the candidates spent a lot of time in out-of-the-way areas and not entirely in big cities, which is always a positive thing.
BTW your vote was more useful in the electoral college than in the nationwide tally anyway... because the nationwide tally doesn't count.
Not only did they not ask for it when I voted (Minneapolis, MN), but turned my driver's license away when I offered it. I was first in line to vote and had my license out. When they opened the polls, I stepped up and held it out. She waved it away and asked my name.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Only a few dollars at best, because otherwise it would be too difficult to steal elections. In Oakland, the local Democratic machine (the old one, not Jerry Brown's) promised voters a chicken dinner, and delivered a coupon for a $4 premade dinner at Safeway.
when you vote at a brick and mortar polling place, they should use a computer registration system that first recognizes that you are registered, and then requires you to sign a digital pad. this cross-references your signature and tells the central state computer that you are no longer eligible to vote online. if you try to come back to a polling place to vote again, it won't work because of the registration system, and if you go home and try to vote online, the state system won't let you do it because the polling placed locked out your online vote.
You need to add a couple more things to this e-voting picture...
You need anonimity, so nobody can check on how you voted. Then you need confirmation, where you can check the official logs and see if your vote was counted properly. To avoid coercion you also need the ability to cancel your vote after you make it.
So, you vote. Nobody can look it up by any piece of ID that is connected to you, it's merely indexed by an MD5 hash, or something. Then you can use this hash at a later date at any public terminal to see if your vote is tallied for the right side. And once the results are announced, you can check to see if you vote is for the right candidate.
Then, if you let someone who can form the MD5 hash (someone with the original information) cancel an existing vote, the idea of coercion is mostly gone. You could vote at work (with the boss watching) then drive by a polling booth later and cancel your old vote and place a new one.
This means people could waffle and recast their votes, but if you made them do it at a voting station and they only got one chance, it wouldn't be too big of a deal. And if those voting stations offered anonimity in the form of private booths, etc, people could be safe from coercion while casting the real vote.
Whoa -- the Palm Beach system was indeed using validity-checking equipment? Ballots were checked for validity by a machine when the voter turned in their ballot?
As a Canadian, used to a very simple, accountable, understandable, trustable, forensic, boring ballot system, I have to admit the past couple of days have been a real comic relief. Thanx! =)
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I realize some effort would have to go into preventing anyone else from being able to look up your vote. You would need to know an id number that couldn't be tied to you by anyone else, but I think you couldn't beat this for preventing fraud.
You would also need a way for people who do the check and find out their vote was recorded incorrectly to be able to prove that their id number was their own if they wanted to calim their vote was stolen. If enough people claim their vote is stolen, that would constitute evidence that could kick off an investigation.
Even if you couldn't make this work for individual votes, if votes were tallied at the voting station level, people could at least make sure their write-ins and third party votes (which might only amount to 5 or 6 per voting station) did not go uncounted.
Nah, no need to keep a log. Just wipe out the person's password when their voting transaction goes through.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
I can just picture elections in the year 2040, George W. H. Bush and Al Gore III are standing around an elderly clerk at a computer terminal.
CLERK: "Well let's see here. It says Bush wins by three thousand, two hundred and sixty-five votes."
BUSH [pumping his fist]: "Yes!"
AL: "What?! I demand a recount!"
CLERK: "Okie doke." [taps a few keys, then clicks with the mouse] "Oh sorry, my mistake. Three thousand, two hundred and sixty-*four*.
--
share and enjoy
If everything goes through electric lines and is accumulated on some cpu somewhere, if one can't see the stacks and stacks of votes or the machines counting them, then it becomes harder for many people to palpably trust everything is going in an orderly fashion.
- It's hard to loose a palpable vote ballot.
- It's easy to hold up a vote ballot and say: this is my vote!
- It's easy to check, see and understand how the possiblity of vote fraud is reduced to a minimum. Everybody has an eye on the ballots and boxes. Counting is done under observation.
Now look at electronic votes. Being a complex system that has to ensure authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security, the chances of failure are high.Failure means votes that disappear. Only a small percentage of the population will actually phantom what the technical details are that ensure authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security. The rest won't know what's going on.
If I don't know how it's garanteed that my vote doesn't get deleted or the other guys vote duplicated then the system scares me. People will start believing in reality of fictional stories like The Net.
Hello disentchantment, ambiguity and loss of trust.
If you think Florida is bad then try to imagine the conspiracy theories that would arise each time there was a neck to neck election and the winner won by fractions of a percent.
People would say the computers were rigged, files were deleted, hackers broke in.
It doesn't matter if the system is technologically set up to make it impossible.
Nobody except the upper digeratti will understand and so believe that. Everybody else will highly doubt it.
I suppose you're a tech-adept person. Then you should know that the solution should always be of maximum simplicity under the condition of fully and satifactorially solving the problem. The method should solve the problem - no more and no less - as often as possible and the induced overhead is minimal.
Efficiency, fault tolerance and simplicity.
what you're suggesting in a way increases efficiency (no more bears, no leaving the house) if you leave out the extreme costs and overhead of such a system, but it utterly stamps fault tolerance (which mean trust worthiness of the results) and simplicity into the ground.
tom
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Technology is why things usually get screwed up. With pens and paper, no one can seriously say they screwed up. It's when we let loose idiots with machines that things go wrong. Idiots, after all, don't deal well with technology- electronic, mechanical, or otherwise.
Totally electronic voting is especially dangerous. What's to stop someone from deleting votes just like I delete files on my PC? Nothing, that's what. Physical paper ballots are much harder to get rid of without leaving behind evidence.
I'm glad my district still uses paper and pencil to conduct elections. It might be slow, but it's accurate and it discourages fraud. Technology has it's place, but the voting booth isn't one of them!
klinkTom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I suspect that if web based voting ever did get approved, what we'd see is that the server setups will (mostly) suck. Trying to get almost any organization now to stick with standards is an uphill battle; I can easily picture what you'd get on one of these sites.
(Typos gratuitously simulated.)
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
T. M. Pederson
"Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentation"
I am sick of hearing about people complain about everything about the election process.
Why do we have the electoral College.
Why don't we use the internet
Its so embarrassing seeing our election go so bad
Reality check people, if other countries went for 2 days without a leader, there would be bloodshed. Most countries change their leader via revolution. 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.. etc.. Some backcountry town in Alabama isn't ready for electronic voter submission.
Okay enough ranting and raving, my point is, its not perfect but is a hell of a lot better than most other countries could do, if you don't like it, then go change it and stop whining
Distributing the load of more than 10^4 users would seem to me to be the largest issue. That and the everpresent security risk seem to be the largest. Given that the U.S. military seems to have the best computer security ever, maybe they could share... Of course, at that point a military coup could happen without a single bullet being fired...
Clearly the majority of the wired U.S. does not want our Bush to be president elect, but nevertheless, he probably will be. In the two years before the congress gets flipped back to a democratic majority, things could get a little scary. Who wants to have their hearts blackened by voting on the internet?
One of the main reasons for the massive decline in the voter turnout between the 1800s and 1900s was because of the implementation of the australian ballot. Around 1890 the states began adopting the australian ballot. This was a government printed ballot of uniform shape and size that was cast in secret to replace the old party-printed ballot that was cast in PUBLIC!! What happened with the old ballots? MASSIVE voter fraud. Candidates would have ghost voters and floaters (repeaters). These voters would vote hundreds of times, they inflated the voter turnout and decided who became president. Certain states and dictricts had 105% voter turnout beacuse of the fraud. In Virginia there was 147,408 people eligable to vote, but mysteriously 159,440 votes were casted...108% voter turnout. The parties often controlled the counting of votes, and some party leaders would soak their ballots in perfume so they knew that their voters put the right ballots in the right box. There was even a dispute over voter fraud in illinois during the JFK vs NIXON election. Nixon didnt say anything because he had commited fraud there too.... Whats my point?!? my point is, if we establish internet voting or more electronic meathods of voting. people have less of an interaction and regulation of what happens in the voting booth! who knows what kind of fraud could possibly happen, who is going to program the software? who is going to watch the network? its questions like these that worry me. maybe the best way to vote is a slight modification and standardization of the current voting means.. just my 2cents
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
Actually, in an area where bear live, most of the people should have had a gun in their car. One of them could have driven the fire truck out to fetch a gun -- assuming the fire truck wasn't equipped with one for dealing with dangers during brush/forest fires. [If you heard the story, you know there was a fire truck in the adjoining garage -- people were going to retreat to it if the bear got into the building.]
Ah, the question of money. One question back at you: how would the touch screen/electronic system fare, cost-wise, compared with the paper method, over the course of a couple of elections?
One more question: to make the democratic process in this republic more fair and easier to use, is cost really an issue? Should there be a price tag on the democratic system?
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
The ACLU must not get down to Georgia often...I had to testify that I was legally entitled to vote and show ID. No ID, no problem: you can swear to your ID.
Here's why electronic voting is a bad idea. Quite frankly, I prefer a paper ballot trail that can be audited by hand, either scantron or punchcards even if it means I have to drive to a polling place for a half hour once every 365 days. It's more of a bother to get my hair cut than to vote.
This
I believe the voting system should work something like this:
Registering
A person registers to vote, and receives their voter card in the mail. This is a sort of smart-card containing encrypted information like a unique ID number.
Local Voting Center
The voter then attends a voting center near them on election day. The registration letter that comes with the card would tell the person which center to attend (the one nearest them). Folks would be encouraged to turn their houses and/or other properties into voting centers and could be paid for this service.
The voting center would consist of an enterance line, several booths (more or less depending on the size of the center) a confirmation zone, and a place for witnesses in the confirmation zone.
The voter waits in line to enter the voting center. Once the beginning of the line is reached, they present their ID and show their smart-card and their name is checked off a list. They then sign their name where it is checked off, to confirm that they have checked-in. They are then sent to a voting booth.
The Voting Booth
The booth contains a touch-screen display, smart-card reader, and dot-matrix printer. The voter inserts the card into the machine and proceeds to vote, and then confirm their vote. The voter is then given a unique vote reference number. The votes are immediately saved on the local machine and printed out on the local dot-matrix printer as they watch, beside the same reference number. The votes are also immediately sent across a local network to a main computer in the voting center which mirrors the information saved by all the individual machines and prints all the results on its own dot-matrix printer, beside the same reference number.
Final Confirmation
The voter then exits the booth and goes to the confirmation area. Votes are displayed with their reference number on a large display, with a random delay of up to several minutes. Voters watch as their votes are displayed (anonymously, of course) to a group of witnesses who tally the votes manually as they are displayed. This way, the results are tallyed by computers and by people being witnessed, and the voters know their votes are being tallyed and not tampered with. The voter then leaves the voting center.
Tallying Results
After a voting center closes, the total results from each center are sent (electronically or otherwise) to the city tallying center. The tallying center receives total results from all voting centers in the city. They list those total results and compute a larger total from those. This information (the list and the totals) is then sent back to the individual voting centers. The voting centers then confirm that their totals were not tampered with on the way to the city tallying center. This could be done manually and by computer so results can be double-checked.
The city tallying center then sends its totals to the county tallying center, which performs the same function, sending the results back for confirmation. The county then sends its results to the statewide tallying center which in turn performs the same function, and sends its totals to the nationwide tallying center. In other words, tallying centers compute the totals of all tallying centers "under" them, send the results back for confirmation, and send the results upward to a higher tallying center, and each tallying center deals only with the totals of those tallying centers beneath it. Breaking the tallying down this way will make it much more efficient than counting ballots by hand or by machine.
Voters don't vote only for president. They also vote on city, county, and state officials, propositions, etc. The city tallying center would only send "upward" to the county center those results which are relevant to the county. The results for city mayor, for example, wouldn't go to the county. And so on, until the nationwide results arrive at the nationwide tallying center.
Voters get to watch as their individual votes are tallyed right before their eyes. The system of sending totals with an itemized list back to the source ensures that votes and totals are not tampered with in transit. And because the tallying is broken up into a hierarchy, results are available almost immediately after voting centers close. It would only take minutes for a tallying center to compute totals once they arrive and send the results onward. Use of open-source software to perform all the processing ensures that identification isn't saved with votes, though you'll need proof that the binaries running on the machine are built from untampered source; those doing the system builds will need to be videotaped and perhaps a signature of the binary (or the binary itself) will be made publically available so that anyone who wishes can do their own build and compare the results.
I'm sure I forgot some details but overall, I think this system of voting would be more reliable, more secure, and definitely more efficient than the system in place today. All results are confirmed by their source with witnesses, printouts, etc. Perhaps all printouts could be publicly accessible (you could order a copy or download one to verify that what you voted actually appears next to your voting reference number generated at the voting booth).
Just my two cents worth,
Nathaniel G H
Pencils and punch cards were not present at my voting booth. I pressed on the names of who I wanted to vote for, which was then lit up with a big red "X". After making sure I had properly chosen my candidates, I pressed a big green "Vote" button, the "X"'s all disappeared, and I walked out...
Oh, I agree completely. I was just explaining that it's not that states are small that is the reason they are ignored. Indiana, being heavily Republican in presidential elections, was also ignored, despite having more electoral votes than Tennessee, where both candidates campaigned heavily.
However, regardless of whether we ought to get rid of the EC or not (and I think we should), it's not going to happen. Here's my earlier post on why not.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Nothing is as indisputable as a completely real process. Not infallible in a man to the moon sence, but indisputable in a legal sence. No worries of hackings, miswirings, and other imperseptable anomolies. Just person and paper. The simplest, unmolestable process there is.
Nope, a good ol' punchcard never lies.
Alaska, Hawaii, and Wyoming are ignored not because they are small, but because they lean heavily to one party--Alaska and Wyoming are heavily Republican, and Hawaii is heavily democrat. No amount of campaigning will change that. Give me a small state with a close vote, and you'll see some campaigning done there.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Not to say that the process couldn't be improved.
For example, split up the Electoral vote in each state; if a state has more than three votes, have each elector represent a piece of the state corresponding to a House member. The 'Senator' electors go to whoever wins the popular vote.
For states with only three Electoral votes, split up the votes by 'Senator' chunks, and give the 'Representative' seat to whoever wins the state.
This would preserve the Electoral Collage, but lead to a greater measure of 'popular' control.
Of course, it would require some redesign of local elections, as some counties are likely split by certain Reps...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Having been fairly closely involved with elections for some time now, I can tell you that almost every situation you've described is a federal crime.
-There can be no campagning or 'electioneering' withing 100' of the polling place. (look around next time you go vote, there should be distance markers 100' from the door)
-Your boss could end up in federal prison
-and you're *already* required to vote at a specific polling place, anyway
-the harrassers can't be any closer than 100', so it's kind of hard to see who's voting for what (and regardless, if you're being harrassed, i'm sure there's some other federal law you can slap them with)
Electronic voting will never be fully trusted. Much of the confusion in the current election is simply because computers tabulate paper ballots.
Do the opposite. Go to paper balloting with big print and boxes that have to be marked with a big 'X'. Then, these ballots need to be counted by hand in each ward. This is what is done in the overwhelming majority of countries.
An even better reform: stop holding elections for everything on the same day. It's not genuinely convenient to anyone. Compel state and local government to hold elections on a day other than the second Tuesday in November of even numbered years. This would shrink the size of the ballot enough to make paper balloting and manual counting easier. In Federal elections, there would never be more than 3 offices to vote for: a Presdient, a Senator and a Rep.
Even better, have three different election days, all at different times during the 2-year election cycle. One for the feds, one for states, one for local government. That way, there are only three things to vote for in Federal election, three in state election (except for Nebraska) plus state referenda, if any, and one day for local government, which usually means one or two candidates in county races, one or two in municipal races, a school board election, in some places a hospital and/or public transit board election plus county and municipal referenda.
Furthermore, make the FEC final arbiter of all elections. Take local government out of the process of deciding on voting methods. I think this would minimise corruption rather than make it more likely.
And, if you really want to bring American voting into the modern world, use Condorcet voting and/or proportional representation.
Here would be my reform - if I had the dictatorial power to impose it:
1) Austrailian-style manditory voting. No more griping about people who didn't register, or registered but didn't vote. It costs more, but it's worth it.
2) A paid half day off on election day. Give everyone a chance to get to the polls.
3) Condorcet voting for Presdents, Senators and Governors.
4) Allocate seats in the House to each state rather than drawing districts. If a state has only one House Rep, use Condorcet voting. If it has two, divide the state into two electoral districts and use Condorcet voting. For more than that, use party proportional representation to allocate seats, but also guarantee that any party or independent that gets at least the fraction of votes in the state equal to the number of votes divided by the number of seats in the House gets one seat.
That way, all Reps still represent a state, rather than being 'at-large' national Reps as the Germans have, but the number of seats in the House is still apportioned more reasonably according to voters demands.
5) Move all states to unicameral legislatures like Nebraska. There is no need for state government to replicate the silliness of the Federal government. This way, state elections are for a Governor, one Rep and whatever referenda are going on, and judges in those states where state judges are elected. Also, make state legislatures mixed district/proportional voting on the German model. States are small enough to support 'at-large' representation.
6) Elect a single board for county government by at-large voting for multiple candidates. This means your ballot lists all the qualified candidates and asks you to vote for as many as their are seats on the county board. County supervisors are chosen by the elected board.
7) Do the same for school boards, hospital boards and public transit boards, where such things are elected.
8) Do the same for municipal governments, unless they are elected on the "New Plan", where city commissioners are elected instead of appointed by the municipal government and there is no city council. In that case, go back to Condorcet voting.
9) Stop electing every damn office under the sun, especially judges!!! Elections for judges force judges to be biased. It is a travesty of law to do it this way. In California, we elect offices like state treasurer and insurance commissioner and this is stupid. These offices were less corrupt when they were appointed. I haven't seen anything brilliant come out of elected hospital boards or public transit boards either, and the first thing I would do to reform education is get rid of local school boards.
These reforms would bring the US in line with - in fact ahead of - most other countries in terms of sane, modern, reliable, unambiguous voting systems.
Just because you have to punch your ballot or mark a paper ballot doesn't mean that there are no computers in the loop.
Computers (counting machines in some cases) count and tally the votes. If each precinct cannot afford this type of machine such that all ballots are counted locally and then reported to the central authority, what makes you think that they can afford computers to actually be the ballot/ballot counter/total reporting system?
Also, would it REALLY be much faster? I' not convinced it would be.
Could it be that Gore knew that no matter how much campaigning he did there, he would never win Kentucky? And Bush knew that no matter how little campaigning he did there, he would never lose it? Why yes, that could be it.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Please put in a computer voting system. I will then end up the next president with over 500 electoral votes and all on "write in" votes.
I will be a great president. I can do many things with computers. Want a raise? I can help you.
A computer system is only fair. People already know that I am the best there is and it only takes a computer system for voting to let them vote for me properly.
--
this is satire, but will be true if we do it on computers... maybe not me.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
No, my understanding of cryptography is very limited. I would say, offhand, that I have about a little more knowledge on the topic as, oh I don't know, say, the managers in charge of implementing this crazy scheme (ha ha, only serious).
:)
>Only an idiot would give
You mean, like a civil servant?
And while I can't argue with your math (it sounds good to me), social engineering is still a problem.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
>Why is that a problem? That can be done now,
The difference is that now, you can certainly contract to sell your vote (though such may not be legal), but if I pay you for your vote, I have no way of verifying that you have voted as I directed, and therefore that I have 'received' the vote I paid for. Hence, at present, any vote-buying scheme is fraught with uncertainty.
Under a scheme where votes are made electronically, with only information such as passcodes and driver's licenses used for authentication, I can verify that I have received the vote I bought for, since I can register the vote myself, or at least know that the vote has already been made.
Besides the obvious redundancy requirements, though, there will need to be legislation passed which will prevent delaying the election process via legal tactics (lawsuits, court orders, etc.) in the event all independent sources don't match up. After all, anything saved to a physical medium is prone to corruption during the actual transfer of data. So if three independent data repositories are used, agreement between two of them should be legally binding and not subject to dispute in any court.
Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win. I don't understand why everyone is making a big stink about the 19,000 some odd votes being thrown out. Yes, I understand that those votes could make or break either canidate, but in the last election ('96) there were 15,000-16,000 votes thrown out then with considerably less people voting. The amount of votes being voided is actually pretty normal. It always happens. If people had problems with the ballot before, why did they not complain before?
Now think of all of the new failure scenarios that arrive due to a more technologically-advanced voting scheme. Backhoes breaking cables? Power outages? Perhaps even a bear in the room with the secure voting server?
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I have no idea how you get people to use the help that's available to them...
is that nothing is completely unhackable. Especially something connected to _the entire internet._ By making it so accessible, you open up the possibility for foreign governments, large corporations, and other powerful entities to try and "crack" into said systems.
The idea, while good and clean in principle, is susceptible to all sorts of non-sense ranging from DoS attacks on the host machines recording the election, to people stealing other's identities and voting multiple times.
I mean, currently you have to know what, D.O.B., S.S.N, and only a few other trivial things in order to transact certain types of business online with the government. (I know that I registered for federal financial aid this way!) How do you prevent people form stealing this info from others by, oh say, breaking into a poorly protected company, or perhaps a job-search engine site, and then using said information?
Point being, while the idea is nice, the execution is a long ways off.
Yeah, it *really* pisses me off to see liberals like George Will, John Sununu, Brit Hume and Tony Snow etc. spout their leftist dogma... </cheap shot>
Seriously, it seems to me there's a case to be made that even though many members of the media are (for lack of ability to come up with a better word at the moment) liberal-leaning, the reporting tends to go the *other* way. Recall that this is the media that said "Gore was too aggressive in debate #1", then "Gore wasn't aggressive enough in debate #2" and "Gore was too aggressive in debate #3" and basically said "Bush held his own" through all three. I don't think Bush is *dumb*, but he lacks curiosity, intellectual drive. He never rose far above the level of slogans. (Maybe he could, but he didn't in the debates, and everywhere where he did come up with something, it was clearly scripted)
Where'd your "Gore-as-pathological-liar" meme come from? I didn't see "the media" as a whole (there are exceptions of course) falling all over themselves to straighten the record out about (e.g.) Gore having been the model for the main male character in "Love Story" (for the record: Gore said something false, that he and Tipper were the model for the couple; and Erich Segal *has* said that Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were his inspiration for that character). The 'I invented the internet' thing, which *arguably is the one that started it all* was based on some pretty slipshod reporting (it takes a certain shade of glasses to see Gore as having lied outright on that one -- I'd call it poor word choice; had Gore said " ... in the creation of the Internet" instead of "in creating the Internet", would there be that much dispute? Not according to Vint Cerf, author of the TCP/IP protocol); the original reporter even tried to take that story back -- did you hear about *that*? Cheney, IMO, lied when he denied the government had any role in his prosperity. Did you hear about that? What about Bush's pride in those Texas laws he never signed? Did you hear about those? (FWIW, I'm inclined to see all of this as not siginificantly worse than Gore's exaggerations and misstatements)
The problem is that the media are looking for a *story that will sell* ... actually digging up the legislative record and showing it doesn't *sell*. Talking to Vint Cerf doesn't *sell*. But they also don't want to be *perceived* as "pointy-headed liberals" and, if you asked a serious lefty like me, they go too far in that.
I'm sorry if this is off topic, but I know why there's a manual recount going on in Palm county right now. It has nothing to do with fairness or legalities. It has everything to do with mathematicss and mechanics.
A number of facts:
1) The mechanical punch card voting system has been shown to occasionally miss poorly punched holes (CNN, others)
2) Palm county is HUGE. Around 300,000 voters.
3) Palm county voted primarily for Gore, perhaps 7 votes for gore for every 3 for Bush.
If even 3 tenths of one percent of all ballots are spoiled because of poor punching, Gore will get the 400 votes he needs to push him over the top. The Gore group is trying to increase the sample bias toward a county mostly on his side.
Computerized voting is a bad idea. Yes, there is enough hardware and software available to create a voting system that is secure and reliable. These things have been tried and there have always been problems and glitches that falsified the result. Just search RISKS for computer and voting ...
;-)
After all, the result will be the same anyway: Today, ballots are invalid because people punch the wrong hole. Tomorrow, my voting record will go down the drain when the database server crashes.
I probably don't know enough about your voting system in the US, but over here in Germany, people have to take a pencil and mark their candidate with a cross (1 line on paper = 1 candidate). The pencil will sometimes break, but that won't invalidate your vote and you can always etch your selection until you leave the voting booth
Two quick notes. You have to keep track of who voted (so people don't vote twice). This doesn't mean keeping full logs of every transaction, but it isn't possible to not keep any logs at all as the article initially states.
I'm increasingly disturbed with government and other agencies assuming that they can put critical information and services on the internet and expect that information to be reliably available. For example, my college insists on a 100% on-line course registration system. If your net connection goes down, you're screwed-- the registration day will be over before you can sort through the beauracracy or fix the connection. Any kind of electronic voting system needs to have a completely failsafe backup (like punch cards). A simple DoS attack on a voting machine shouldn't disenfranchise hundreds of voters.
-m
Getting everyone to agree on a single standard might help, or might not. Instilling the notion in voters that they need to doublecheck things and ask questions if they're having problems would probably help more...
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
Well, it's not so fancy as a touch screen (though both major candidates are about as interesting as a stop sign) but in Monroe county (and perhaps in Vigo, though I can't really recall) I've voted with the electronic balloting `box'. From what I can tell, it looks a bit like a briefcase and unfolds into a pseudo-booth (no curtain, though!) and plugs into the main `briefcase' to record the votes. There're buttons that will advance the pages for you (kind of like a jukebox, except that these pages are on rollers and just get rolled one way or the other) and then a big red button that finalizes your vote. It's very easy.
Whether the decision is made to vote electornicly or the old fashioned way, I think what we've seen these last few days should make us change the whole ballot system. I think we should make all ballots in essay form. People will have to write (or type) the name of the canidate, so there will be no disputes on who they voted for, and they'll have to write why they are voting for who they are voting for. This will get rid of the whole "I think he just looks trustworthy" or "I think he's cute/ugly" thing that goes on today. In a recent survey, seventeen percent of people polled said they would vote according to celebrity endorsments. After Al Gore shoved his tounge down Tipper's throat at the Democratic Convention, his ratings in the polls went way up! People who vote because of dumb reasons shouldn't be able to vote!!
daed si luap
What century is this, where we can't tolerate a two-hour delay in learning the voting results, let alone one of several days??!! There's absolutely no reason, save the public's insatiable and irrational thirst for news, why we need to have voting results right away.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Aren't we supposed to be the very ICON of Democracy at work?
No, no, no. You're confused. We are the very ICON of "litigation to solve every problem." If you're unhappy about anything, that means you are a victim and should sue the pants off the person who wronged you. Take for example the people who were "confused" by the ballots in Florida. They are suing to get to vote again. Most people would be too embarassed to say that they couldn't figure out how to follow an arrow, but these people insist that their right to vote was taken away.
Heck, even the next President of the United States could be determined by a judge in a courtroom. Does anybody else see anything wrong here?!
I apologize for the rant, but it's at times like these that I am embarassed to say I am an American.
Whenever states and counties have tried to make it required for citizens to confirm that they are who they claim to be, the ACLU jumps in and says that it's harassment and a violation of our voting rights.
Huh?
I don't get it, why would I have to tell the authoroties in advance that I'm going to vote? Could anybody explain the reasons behind this archaic system? Here (Iceland) I walk in to the voting 'office' (usually a scool or something with lot of space) Give a proof who I am (ID) and vote. Could it be more simpler? And I get to vote my president directly, not all this represenitve sillyness. I'm not sure if I want high tech voting system. Yes, it would make it easier to count the votes, but would it make it easier for me? I want to be 100% sure that I can vote, we all know how reliable computers are, at least my 2 feet are pretty darn 100% reliable (yet) and I'm quite comfortable of scribbling 'X' on a piece of paper. I'm sorry, I'm a tech/gadget geek, but I do think that some things should be kept as simple as possible... USA voting system is problematic enough, as if we need to make it even harder/more complex...
Actually, it is a federal offense to sell or buy a vote.
Any system for recording votes has a number of goals. Accuracy, robustness, privacy, voters' immunity from coercion, convenience, speed in determining the results all come to mind. Some of the goals might be contradictory. For example, the convenience of voting from home is somewhat offset by the risk of coercion which can more easily takes place in private space. Furthermore, those goals are note equally weighted. Accuracy is far more important than sheer speed of determining the results, provided the speed is reasonable.
When I arrived here in Ann Arbor, MI over a decade ago, they still used those mechanical booths. One would step in, swing a lever which closed the curtain, and then twist a series of small levers indicating one's votes. When finished, one would swing the initial lever back accomplishing three things: registering the votes, returning the voting levers to their neutral positions, opening the curtain. These mechanical booths were really old, and I wondered how the votes were recorded. Was the recording simply a set of odometer like wheels? Was information recorded on a paper tape? I think this system suffered from a number of problems. Because these old mechanical devices were opaque as to their inner workings, there was essentially a separation between the printed ballot information (attached to the front of the machine) and the recording mechanism (inside the machine), and this undermines the goal of robustness. One had to trust that a system that relied so heavily on friction between metal parts wouldn't wear out and mis-record information. Undoubtedly there was a testing regimen to minimize this risk.
The system apparently used in Palm Beach county is a system I've used or seen used in both Los Angeles county and Salt Lake county. Again, robustness is lost due to the separation of the printed ballot information and the recording method. The punch card itself, without the voting device it is inserted into, does not indicate how one voted. One has to correlate people and positions with holes in a given column and row. Re-examining and verifying one's ballot just prior to dropping it into the box is a difficult at best.
The system we now have in Ann Arbor is the best I've seen. The ballots are huge pieces of this paperboard with candidates and issues listed on both sides. To register a vote one simply fills in the missing portion of a line using a marker. One can read the ballot by eye or with a high-speed optical machine. Furthermore, the ballot box is a machine which verifies that the ballot is correct -- that one didn't vote for too many candidates or on multiple sides of a position -- as it is inserted. If there is a problem with a particular ballot, it's spit back out. There's an LED display which I suppose gives an indication of the problem, so the voter can void that particular ballot and fill out a new one. A ballot could be filled out easily from home and sent in by mail. If there is ever a question with a mechanically determined result, the paper ballots can be read and sorted by people. All in all it seems to meet the above-listed criteria very well.
The most "high tech" solution is not always the best. Ann Arbor's system seems to combine high tech, high speed counting with the robustness of an easy-to-read paper ballot that leaves a paper trail.
Think it through, folks. Go read the RISKS digests or the comp.risks newsgroup. Pay special attention to issues 21.10 and 21.11 . For balance, you can also read a term paper about using computers in voting; he recommendes a touch-screen type system.
The advantage of physical ballots are many and clear, especially when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong, even without having to deal with corruption. My big problem with all of these electronic voting schemes is that I have no way to assure myself that my vote is actually being cast the way I want it. If the software is corrupted to change my (actual) vote, how would I know? How could I check?
Remember, KISS. Computers ain't simple.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
I think most other furriners will agree with with me that it wasn't Clinton's sexual escapades that made American politics the laughing stock of the world, but the obsession about it demonstrated by the Republican opposition and the mainstream media.
--
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
They should also have the same people on every ballot. Why is it up to the individual states to decide who can be on the ballot to run the country.
As for the electronic voting, I don't think that there is a feasible way to provide adequate voting online. You either mail in your vote, or physically go there and submit it. I do think that at the polling places, they should verify the validity of your ballot before it is locked away.
I don't know exactly how the system should work, but if you are dealing with computers, then I think that every transaction should be printed to paper. Computers just aren't reliable enough to be trusted with no hard copy. Why does everyone think a HDD, a Floppy, and Smart Media are enough? What happens if lightning strikes the building and everything gets fried, or scrambled?\
Questions? Comments? Smart Remarks?
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
...well, the main one is assuring anonymity while also taking out any chance of fraud.
In addition to the suggestions you recommend, I would add this:
A voter comes up to the front of the line. They provide the necessary ID, and the electoral official marks their name off of the list (computerized, of course). Then the official gives the user some kind of token, perhaps a cheap smartcard-like device, with no identifying information.
This done, the user steps into the voting booth. The first thing they have to do is insert the token into a reader. This is why I prefer the smartcard approach; the reader can take the token completely into the machine, where the user cannot get it back by force without attracting a great deal of attention.
The user then punches in their vote and confirms it, like you said. Once they confirm, the token is rendered invalid (for example, a magnetic signature could be wiped) and then given back to the user. Because the token is now invalid, it cannot be used to vote again. And because you must get the token from an electoral official, who knows whether or not you've already gotten one, this prevents people from sneaking into the booth for another vote while preserving the secret ballot.
As an addition, the user can cancel their vote at any time before confirming it. In this case, the token is not rendered invalid. This gives the user the opportunity to request help from an official, perhaps because the "ballot" is not offered in any language the user can understand. Once you've confirmed the vote, though, there are no second chances.
----------
Well, from how you see it, it was certainly fair that the media DIDN'T give a lot of attention to these mistakes that Gore made... rather than call attention to them on a constant basis and demand that they need correcting (time spent correcting piddly mistakes and not addressing the issues).
I called Gore a pathological liar because he tells little lies so much it's not even funny. There's a lot more examples than the Internet thing... even though I think that it wasn't a slip up that he used that choice of words to describe his role in it (he probably thought he could get away with a fast one while still pretty much telling the truth, from one perspective). I heard the whole Vint Cerf thing... it confirmed what I already knew about Gore. As a politician, I think Gore is pretty good. I just wish he didn't lie so much.
Anyway, the press doesn't lean the other way like you're saying they do... they give a lot of negative attention to Republicans, and they rarely put them in a good light. Granted, most media outlets are a lot more objective than I'm giving them credit for, so it's not as bad as I originally made it look. But it's easy to ignore all the bad attention that you could give to Democrats too... and that's where the subtle bias is...
The 19,000 number is nothing but a liberal fuzzy spin designed to generate controversy.
According to election officials in Florida, the number represents the total number of discarded ballots during the election; including ballots that were discarded because voters realized they screwed up and requested a new one.
So the number does not represent 19,000 voters that wanted to vote for Gore and got screwed. The vast majority of those discarded ballots had valid replacements that were counted.
--CPThe best discussion of secure online voting algorithms I've ever read is in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. He's got a great discussion on all of the potential problems, and how to solve them with a cryptographical system. It's a great book to read anyway... I highly reccomend it.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. -AC
In most states it's up to the county to pay for the voting system. In many places, large counties are able to afford real time electronic election systems. But there systems cost millions of dollars. And it's money from the county that pays for it. That's great if you're a large urban center. But for small counties 100K that's a lot of hard cash.
If you want to get this done you'll have to have a billion dollars come from a federal level to buy the stuff.
This bring up (as an aside) an important problem that internet voting would bring about... What if someone chooses to DOS the voting server in a 90% Rep/Dem/whatever county? "Oops, nobody voted before the polls closed, sorry."
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Easy, printout a receipt after you vote. Drop receipt into ballot box. Ballot box is never used unless recount is required.
As far as a security goes: Slot machines are pretty much all networked these days. I haven't heard about any hacking done on these yet. Just get the same people to work on the voting machines.
Q.
I don't think you're fully understanding the evils that can be commited by such a system.
:), means that an intelligent individual or organization can abuse the system or individual(s). Abuse cancome from a domineering spouse, a biased organzation (that provides internet services), or even a devious political party (but we don't know of any that would stoop so low do we? I've never heard of the dead rising for one last vote. :).
.gov web has possibilities, but we can't neglect the hundreds of years of experience that says we can't trust people to be good on their own.
First and foremost, elections are purely up to the states.. If they so chose, they could elect to not let their citizens vote. The only thing the constitution says is that each state chooses.. So there can be no nationally mandated voting system - and I absolutely agree with this. Let each state try it's own system.. Some will work, some will fail.
Delaware, for example, uses electronic counting machines with push buttons instead of punch cards.. It's electronic, anonymous, and fast albeit expensive. I personally like the system.. You have a lock and key box which is secure up to the point that you don't have a corrupt hacker / technitian.. But with security guards around them all the time, the likelyhood of being hacked is slight.. But since other states do things different, if there was a hack one day, only Delaware (and like states) would be affected.
Given that you want a web system so that you don't have to leave your home: First, as you pointed out, there must be a fallback for those that either don't understand computers (yes they still exist) or can't afford the web. Some military computers aren't allowed to use the computer, so those over-seas military votes wouldn't be able to count anyway (unless they mangaed some sort of secured Kiosk).
Next, the transaction can not be anonymous. You must provide your social or voter registration nubmer (depending on your state I suppose). An obvious security solution is a password, but I highly doubt the entirety of a country can be trusted with passwords.. A simple cracking program could probably successfully determine a good number of voter's passwords (user-id, user-name, real name, etc ).. A phone book might be all that's needed to hack the system.
The randomly generated password might be better, BUT, as you said, it would have required a snail mail.. This is totally unacceptible.. Consider this VERY real case.. You have Chuck {political-party} wife beater. In current elections, the wife is allowed to vote in complete anonymity so that Chuck never can truely know who his wife voted for (and thus not bring down his firey reign). But now, Chuck has everything he needs to know in order to VOTE FOR HIS WIFE as soon as the mail comes. Likewise, any intercepted mail by anyone can allow an anonymous vote in place of that person. There are no signatures, no traced records, no nothing, and potentially millions of people can be cheated out of their votes.. This is not likely to affect the outcome of an election, but it definately takes away the rights of several people. The public (myself included) will not be tolarent.
The best I can imagine is to have the voter attain a password at the time of registration.. The means of registration can vary.. Either requiring to be in person. The key is that you have months to register, so you can do it at your convinience.. Then on voting day, you can do it anywhere and everywhere given appropriate access.
Next problem, how to secure the server.. In tallied votes, or mechanical ones (like in Delaware) physical number dials are used which can be designed to only allow incremental operations.. Meaning that a vote can physically only affect a single turn of the dial, as opposed to updating an internal state register to any new value. It's like the physical write-protect tab on your floppy drive. In this way electronic hacking is nearly impossible.. And the $20/hr security guard can faithfully prevent corruption.
A system is only as strong as it's weakest link, and computers are highly fallible. The software could be hacked, the data could be hacked, the interfaces for transmittion of the data could be hacked, and the network itself could be hacked.. Someone organization could hack ANY point along he path to thward the system (DNS faking, for example, at a company, school or what-have-you). This in addition to the inexperience of casual users (notice I didn't say stupididy.
The best form of security is centralization. Put the server in a locked room with no external IO.. Give people with valid access keys and authentication (a like Mission Impossible). The worst you can do is over-extend yourself, like allow anonymous telnet access from the web. Somewhere in between is a happy compromise.
The
-Michael
-Michael
Technology has already started to bridge the gap, anyway... at my polling place, everyone used Scantron ballots (fill in the bubble completely, please!), but the scan machine that you feed the ballot into counts every vote, rejects ballots with multiple votes and dials up at the end of the day to report the results to the state election commission.
No need for setup. No need for PC admins to run the polling place (or be needed nearby for maintenance). Open a box of paper, plug the scanner into the phone line, and go.
--
Never knock on Death's door.
Ring the doorbell and run
(He hates that).
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
The problem with eliminating physical ballots is that it leaves us with no recourse when an error occurs.
Which brings us back to the need for hard copy. This can be done by something as trivial as printing each vote cast out as a matrix which could be scanned by a bulk reader in the event of a recount or major system failure. Hey - you could even have it punch holes in card if you feel nostalgic :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
It is surprising that US doesn't use Electronic Voting on wide scale. Given the abundance of resources and general tech savvy people in that country, one would expect this.
Even India is experimenting with Electronic Voting Booths. In the last general election in 98 there were some places where they implemented that successfully.
The moment polling time is over the election officer presses a button and you have the result. No ballots, no counting and no recounting.
The voting is simple too. The voter just goes to the polling station verifies his/her ID and then proceeds to voting booth and presses a button for his candidate. no holes to punch, no arrows to follow.
why can't US do that?
Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. -Dennis Ritchie
Oh yeah, receive passwords by snail mail? Are we not forgetting the problems with the ICANN elections?
Honestly, we need to keep the physical booths around for quite a while longer. Perhaps absentee balots can have an option of being web-based,... but let's not go too far.
Also, there is the issue of election laws. Specifically, the "no campaigning within 100 feet of the polls". So if this is all web-based, can we outlaw door-to-door campaigning?
They're very good ideas, but let's be honest. Convenience is not a primary issue with elections.
In an effort to keep government costs down, I volenteer to write FL's new voting software:
#/usr/bin/perl
print "Please enter 1 for Bush, 2 for Buchanian, or 3 for Gore:";
$vote=;
if ($vote=="1") {$bushvotes=$bushvotes+1;}
else
{$buchanianvotes=$buchanianvotes+1;}
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
However, I think some caution should be shown. I would consider it a Bad Idea (TM) to suddenly boot up a few hundred thousand PC clones with Win ME and eVote v1.1 in 2004 using touchscreens. Why? Duh - why do a lot of slashdotters use *nix? Let's talk instability and insecurity. Not only that, but my Palm III has enough trouble keeping its tiny touchscreen calibrated... I could just imagine people screaming all across the country that they touched the DEMOCRAT button, but the GREEN PARTY button right beside it was registered instead (as an example).
No, we need to go old-school on this. I'm talking a combination of Radio Shack and networking. The voting device itself should be pretty much a non-computer, but instead simply a peripheral of the polling station's server. To vote, you push a button, or stick a contact into a hole - something positive and physical - and that info gets sent back to the server. Heck, add a few :Cue:Cats to read the voter's voter card bar code, to ensure they can't vote twice. Dead simple, cheap, and HACK PROOF.
Otherwise, those currently-14-year-olds will get into the voting booth, blink, smile, and hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
Yes, but what of the unintended consequences? Picture a thoughtful, middle-aged voter in the voter booth.
VOTER: "Hmm... I've heard some good things about that Nader feller. Maybe I should vote for him."
[Presses the Nader button, Ralph's mug gets flashed on the screen]
VOTER: "AIGH! Get it off... get it off!"
[Blindly stabs at the buttons. Nader's face is replaced by Bush's.]
VOTER: "Ahhh... much better. This feller looks like a good choice."
--
share and enjoy
What happens if you refuse to vote? You're imprisoned? Are you allowed to vote without picking anyone? How exactly does that work?
Amidst all the shouting of opinion, a modicum of fact and reason would be appreciated. To wit:
If it were the other way around, would there be a commotion this big. YES. The day before the electiion, when a Bush popular win and a Gore electoral win look possible, a high-ranking Bush officical (I forget which one) vowed to lobby the electoral college directly to get the outcome to reflect the popular vote.
areas with low population density are not ignored . Why is this "good"? I thought the underlying principal was "one citizen, one vote." Why should my vote count more just because I live in a rural area?
it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it. This is reasonable, but a scathing indictment of the current system with it's (legally mandated) recounts. A better system would be how San Juan de Opoa, Honduras, settled its 1997 mayor's race: soccer penalty kicks.
You strongly feel that representation by state, rather than by person, is inherently better. Why? What, other than political custom, makes a state the natural unit of polity? Remember: the current system, with it's empahsis on states and state's rights, is a direct result of historical compromises done to protect slavery. Southern landowners knew that in a straight popular vote, slavery would soon be abolished. Since slave owners controlled the politics of many _states_, they got us the current system. Unless you're committed to slavery, why do you favor a state-centric political system?
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
And how do you measure that? An IQ test or something? (well...you people do believe in the "lie detector"...)
And where do you put the border between being allowed to vote and not?
Anyway - it's only about money in the USA, why not pick the richest one as president??
Purely electronic balloting would only work if there was a truly secure way of making sure that the votes cast were the votes counted, and the binary that did the counting was the binary compiled by the published source. It is just too easy to slip in a patch that alters the vote "just a bit". The source would have to be open, the binary digitally signed, and the operational binary's signature checked frequently. In other words, the election process would have to be run by geeks. Good luck.
We haven't seen the results of the hand count yet, but I for one won't be surprised if there is a very large delta between what the machines counted and what the humans count - and I would not blame human error for the difference.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
You mean like console game controllers, remote controls and Palm pilots.
Coming soon to the Nintendo 512 and the PS5, Final Fantasy XXVIII: Nader's Revenge...
Technology is not the solution to all problems. --locust
Personally, I think the country would greatly benifit from a standard method of voting. I mean, we use markers to fill in a line, some people punch holes or turn knobs, others use the computerized method. Now we see a problem with the method used in Florida (which was a serious case of user error IMHO) Some well designed standards would forgo much of the confusion they we experienced this year...
-capt.
Maybe, instead of voting from home, just have a touch-screen system at the polls. It would be secure and much easier to use than a butterfly ballot. Using an open encryption protocol (RSA 2048 bit, anyone?), it would be all but impossible to crack and tamper with the votes. Also, pictures are nice but if someone in power really wanted one candidate to win over the other one, then they could just have a really flattering picture of their favorite, and an awful picture of the person they want to have lose.
I don't think creating another federal agency is the solution. Perhaps the whole problem isn't the government taking the election seriously, maybe it's the people that didn't take the time to thoroughly check and double-check that they knew how to fill out the ballot. If someone feels it is important for them to vote, than it should also be important enough that they understand what or who they are voting for before they cast their vote.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You've basically described down to the letter the system I voted on in Riverside, California.
You enter the building and sign in (I wasn't required to show ID, which bothers me). After you sign in they encode a cheap card (probably magnetic, I didn't look real closely). You then walk up to one of the touch-screen voting stations and insert your card, which the machine ingests and won't give back until you're done. On the screen you're presented with a layout identical to the sample ballot you recieved in the mail several weeks before. You touch the 'Yes' or 'No', the machine puts a green check mark on your selection and removes the other options removing the posibility of double voting.
When you're all done, the machine makes an audible tone and ejects the card which you hand back to the poll worker. It was all very slick and smooth.
The thing that concerns me is the inherrant insecurity of electronic systems. I know from personal experience that if someone designs a security measure, someone else can bypass it.
I tend to think that these touch-screen terminals are just about as secure as the punchcards, but I have very little faith in internet voting. Even if you couldn't crack the security and alter the vote count, what would stop someone from launching a massive DDoS attack against the vote server and keeping it offline. We've seen the effectivness of DDoS attacks against eBay and other major sites, and the ammount of time required to inact counter measures aginst the attack.
In my opinion, the electronic touch-screen voting is a good thing, internet voting is a bad thing.
_______
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
I think, more than anything, that insert from Brazil should really hit us hard. I wonder what the media would do with something like that? I can just imagine the headlines...
Brazil: Better Technology, Voter Turnout!
Aren't we supposed to be the very ICON of Democracy at work? I guess that just shows what happens when you just sit around and pat yourself on the back.
I'm actually glad all of this has happened, though. The more controversy, the more likely things will change. I actually hope Congress has to decide our president, and nobody actually gets what they want. Serves us right for: being apathetic, sitting on our laurels, not changing our laws to fit the times/situations, etc.
Ever feel that we're starting to backslide?
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Where I reside in Guilford county North Carolina, The election booths were different in the fact that it was all a touch screen with box being to the left of who you wanted to vote for. This also provided the ability to make sure your vote was correct, none of this multiple line thing, you see exactly who it was for and that it was the correct line. Plus you can go back and forward and it is only counted when you push the red button. I think that this was an intelligent way to use computers. It assure anonimity by the fact that they ran off their own battiers and had no external connections, such as phone lines or anything. They were then pulled onto some device that the regulators carried which I would assume were then feed into the main regulation office. Something along these lines I believe is what is needed.
An armed society is a polite Society
Maybe you could use Geographic Authentication stuff thought up earlier to authenticate voters only in that area?
1) Given a identifying password
Just means I can go to X computers, and type X different passwords, and vote. Guess passwords would not be very hard; either they would be like a CD-Key/serial-number, and be generated, or they would even be simpler to guess:
Adams, Doug: abcdefg
Adams, Dougie: abcdegh
Adams, Douglas: abcdefi
2) As well, because the mail-delivered passwords are the only identifying feature, they could be bought, sold, traded, etc. Maybe not by me, but what if you are low-income, no HMO, little daughter is sick, etc. How much is the going price for a vote?
3) After voting electronically, going to a voting station, and saying, "I lost my password, ring me in!".
The best way would be the electronic touch-screens at the voting booths. That way, you don't need even to be literate to vote, just touch the picture of the candidate, and voila - you're too stupid to read, but now you have voted in an election. Voting still has to be done at a voting booth regardless of the electronic security you could put together, simply because of the ease of social engineering attacks.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
It seems to me it is necessary that people shuld still physically visit the polls.
I was trying to keep my mouth closed a bit with all this... but this is the type of comment that sets me off. Who are you to tell me that I 'should' still visit the polling station? I agree it should be an option, but not required. It isn't required now.
Even though I am fully capable to make it to the polling stations, I have chosen to vote exclusively via absentee balot. I don't have to worry about getting places on time, and am able to make my decisions while reading the voters papmlets or the Internet. I don't have to memorize positions on obscure reforendums.
ANd a couple other things about absentee balots, etc.: I have never even needed to provide ID to request absentee ballots... I simply registered to vote and then filled out a form at the back of the voter pamphlet and mailed it in. I have always voted via absentee and let me tell you that there is a lot of room in the traditional system for fraud, etc. Authentication is one problem. Another is interception--they come in a obvious envelope and go out in one... tampering and elimination of absentee ballots is a trivial matter. I also never receive confirmation of receipt (except the time I forgot to send one without signing it, and they mailed me a photocopy to sign for their records). So who the hell knows. Using cryptography, digital signatures, etc. would be vastly superior to the micky mouse, po-dunk systems we use now.
Its funny how when things go digital, people start getting 'serious' about security, regardless of the current method. Credit card # are transmitted in plain text over phone, mail, yet as soon as it is the Internet, nothing weaker than 128 bit is acceptable. Yet when on the Internet the data actually flows through probably less people than the traditional methods. Same with the votign system. The double standard should stop--and I tend to lean in favor of the stricter requirements that Internet seems to require.
-k
The same way you deal with it if counting by hand. They CHOSE the wrong candidate, recounting is just going to count the wrong candidate again.
Even worse, how would you deal with a hacked voting station? Security only goes so far; eventually a precinct would be hacked.
Little pieces of paper you can color in with pencil is so much more hack-proof than a computer? The real issue here would be good technological security (not perfect of course but better than a piece of paper) and good physical security. Don't you think it'd be easy to detect someone tampering with a machine when they should only be making three button presses? Typing makes noise and takes time. If you setup a touchscreen system and lock away the keyboard/CPU (or better yet store them in another secured room) then any simple, well-written program is simple enough to protect against any malicious touch-screen entries.
With e-voting, there'd be no way to recount the ballots, no way to sort "good" ballots from "bad" ones, no way to identify which votes were bogus
With e-voting there would be no "bad" ballots per-say, they system would only allow one choice (not none and not two or more). The only "bad" ballot there would be would be making the wrong choice. Ballots with the wrong selection can't be weeded out with the current system (wich is part of the problem we're having now).
-- because there wouldn't be votes, just data.
Votes are data. Wether on paper or in the computer. It's easier to loose that data in a computer than on paper but it's just as easy to setup a technological solution that immediately prints out your vote (as well as stores it electronically) in an easy to count/read format in case a recount is needed.
Please don't blame technology for your lack of innovation.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
http://www.proxyvote.com/ has been doing this for a while now on stockholder voting issues, seems to have been used pretty succesfully..... just get a card in the mail or an email with a code number on it, hit the web site and go.
Where I voted they use computer readable form, you darken the circle for the candiate you want. You then take the ballot to a machine which scans the ballot. This machine could very easily be modified to check that the ballot was valid (no double votes) and print out a receipt that you can check to make sure that the ballot indicates that you voted for the candiate you wanted.
The Economics of Website Security
A bear! What century is this?
Oh my God ! You mean in this century, with all this high technology, we haven't found a way to eradicate every animal that could possibly delay our rat race society ! The Electoral College and paper ballots are the least of our worries !!
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I agree with timothy on this one - the interface to current voting machines needs to go.
I wholeheartedly agree that the US isn't ready for on-line voting.
But, what I *do* wonder is why the rest of the US doesn't follow Oregon's lead. Why don't we start to move toward a vote-by-mail system? Sure, it makes it difficult for those without an address or those who are moving all the time, but the current system isn't very nice to those people either. The benefits of vote-by-mail are numerous:
- Higher voter turnout
- No long lines at the polls
- No time pressure to complete voting form quickly
- No need to round up tons of volunteers on election day
It wouldn't be a perfect system, but I think it would introduce fewer bugs than it fixes. The fact that Oregon actually uses such a system means that it works to some degree. Also, mail is the primary method of data collection for the US Census. I'm sure there is some amount of fraud that goes on there, but it's no where near enough to cause major problems.I do not know about you but the only real problem with using more technology is the people on this web site are going to be the ones that can crack it and change the data. They make it...we will crack it. That will just give polititions more reason to say the voting was not fair. If someone says the election was hacked...that will just scare the hell out of everyone. It is like conjuring up the boogy man. People are afraid and in a way they should be.
No I don't think it's Americans not keeping up the pace, it's the trust factor.
Why should we trust the computers to behave correctly? How do we know that the manufacturer didn't put a trojan horse in the boot chips? What if it crashes? What if it doesn't add 2+2 correctly?
Voting is considered one of the great rights of America. We don't want to change it too fast. Certainly not sending data over the Internet, there's way too much risk of interception.
I can't see an advantage of using a computer based system, beyond increasing the complexity of the processes and opening up new grounds for hackers to play in.
is what to do when they get hacked. Not if, when. Anybody who understands internet security in the least knows that for any sufficiently attractive target, no measure of security will keep a malicious genius from meddling.
In this particular election, it has happened that less than 1% of the results of one county has taken on an enormous significance, making the natural margin of error in physical methods a problem. And, of course, the normal margin of error for electronic systems would be nearer to zero (not quite zero--packets are dropped all the time, you know). But such systems raise the real possibility that cannot be discounted of massive and systemic error.
This is not to say that I oppose your general point that more error-free balloting methods are desireable. I just don't think that the internet is a viable means, certainly not now and probably not in the near future.
Respondeo dicendum quod . . .
> Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored You mean people from small states and areas with low density get counted disproportionately, right?
Did anyone else notice a similarity between Jamie's vision of voting in the year 2004 and the news blurb "Man Builds House He Designed When He Was Eight Years Old" in this week's Onion?
The memebers of House of Representatives can vote by "electronic device". Every representative has a voting card and there are machines in the hall. It would probably be a good idea to start implementing that for the common vote as well.
Have you read my journal today?
Why? All the trouble of the last days had nothing to do with the non-electronic nature of the elections.
Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?
TWO HOURS! ALMIGHTY GOD! THE END IS NIGH!
Honestly, you really don't want to let CNN decide that the elections have to be finished at Prime Time, do you?
Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years.
Yep, do it, plot ahead. I doubt that the trend will continue. Prove me wrong with scientific data, but don't just say so. There will remain some people forced to fight bears or arbitrary closing times.
In Germany we use a piece of paper and a large pencil. There are many advantages with this approach:
1. Everyone is instantly and completely aware what to do.
2. Everyone is instantly and completely comfortable with it. You can see and touch not only your own vote, but every vote from your region. No place for conspiracy theories.
3. No core dumps. Maybe a totally bugfree software could be written (and anything less is not enough), but it would be very expensive.
Technology is not good in itself. Take care of the problems.
Censorship on Slashdot
I'm amazed at those who are so nearsighted as to call for changes to the Constitution. How many who call for changing it have actually read/studied it? It is remarkable how much foresight and wisdom the framers of the Constitution had when writing it. It has been used by countries around the world as a model for their constitutions, with few having come near to it. It has served us for over 200 years and is still beyond the wisdom of today.
Most realize that the legislative branch of government, Congress, is designed to balance representation between small and large states. Each state has equal representation in the Senate, and the representation in the House of Representatives is distributed according to population. Did the framers of the Constitution also desire the executive branch to exhibit a similar balance between the states?
I think it is a very knee-jerk reaction for so many to call for a change to the electoral process. Prior to this election the reverse scenario was being postulated, that Bush would win the popular vote and Gore the Electoral College vote. Think long term, not short term.
Why shouldn't we all be forced to go to a protestant Church, eat at McD's, buy MicroSoft, surf with AOL, and buy Intel Chips, or shop at the Gap?
Offset the balance in the name of diversity. Life will thank you for it later.
In answer to your question however. That the same minority in Rhode Island has a greater percentage vote than a minority in NY is circumstantial. We've shuffled the population around the country so much that the original boundries no longer accurately represent the same geographical idiologies. But the point is less that a minority will help pick the election, and more that a minority that consists of 10% of some (but not all) districts, means that appeasing them has a greater effect than if they only counted as 3% of the total population. The electoral process ONLY fails when you have 100% purely distributed population. If _every_ state had an equal percentage of each race and idiology, then a general election would be more fair. But We don't have many Cuban farmers in Kentucky that I'm aware of.
-Michael
George W. Bush apparently has had a long involvement with problem drinking. The duration of his past
behavior was somewhat obscured by his failing to mention his DWI arrest. Governor Bush verified his arrest in a
recent TV interview. (DWI is Driving While Intoxicated.)
He has admitted drinking while he was in college. He was arrested for DWI when he was a grown man of 30.
He has said that he stopped drinking in 1986, when he was 40. He therefore apparently had problems with
alcohol for over 10 years, and perhaps as many as 18 years, in any case a large part of his adult life. According
to alcohol recovery groups, ten years of problem drinking certainly qualifies a person as an alcoholic. At the
very least, habitual abuse of alcohol is a manner of living that is the opposite of preparing for leadership.
Many times I have heard recovered alcoholics say, "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." Alcoholics have
told me they can never, even after 20 years, risk drinking alcohol again, for fear of a complete relapse. My
experience with acquaintances who have relapsed indicates that this is true.
People who have had no involvement with alcoholism often find it difficult to understand this sickness. Part of
the difficulty non-drinkers have in understanding alcoholism is caused by the huge effort alcoholics typically
expend to hide their activities. If you have any doubts about how to decide if someone is an alcoholic, call your
local AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), or other alcohol recovery program. Among other facts, they will tell you
that alcoholics are often extremely skillful, habitual liars.
One symptom of problem drinking is a lack of mental involvement. Lax mental habits often continue even when
an alcoholic is not an active drinker. This lack was easily seen in George W. Bush's statements about U.S. foreign
policy, until he was coached. It is also seen in his lack of intellectual curiosity and his poor use of the English
language.
Considering that alcoholics often relapse when under stress, and considering that alcoholics have histories of
bad judgment and causing pain in other people's lives, should George W. Bush be elected to one of the most
stressful jobs in the world, the presidency of the United States?
George Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, has also been arrested for DWI.
Read an interesting and humorous dissenting reply below.
Michael Jennings
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: M_Jennings@USA.com
November 5, 2000
You have my permission to print this.
I am not associated with any political group or campaign. This message is my personal opinion and was not
authorized or coordinated with anyone else. Although the information in this message comes from my
pre-existing knowledge and experience, I did verify it by discussing the finished message with a friend who is at
present enjoying his second recovery from active alcoholism.
When the message above was finished, I sent it to friends. One of them replied three times almost immediately,
disagreeing with what I said. His replies are instructive and humorous. He is not an American citizen, and
English is not his native language. His replies are copied below without change, and with his permission. His
telephone number was replaced with Xs, and his name removed.
_________
MESSAGE 1, 3:13 AM:
Mike! Sorry about that. One of the bests american presidents (Abraham Lincoln) was also an alcoholic! What
he drinks.... smokes.... whatever... does not make any difference.... As long as he is (will he be?) a good leader
and cares for his nation.... THAT'S WHAT IT MATTERS!!!! I don't care how much he drinks.... I don't even vote
here.... As long as this country keeps growing, it's ok for me!
Bye
[signed]
MESSAGE 2, 3:16 AM:
By the way, being the president of the richest country in the world (USA) is not very stressfull! Imagine yourself
being president of Afeganistan... Or other countries where they don't even have what to eat! Here is very, but
very easy do administrate!!!!!
[not signed]
MESSAGE 3, 3:17 AM:
It's even easier if you're drunk! hehehehehehehe! Call me! My phone # is xxx-xxx-xxxx
[not signed]
_________
By now you may have guessed that the friend who wrote the three messages above has problems with alcohol.
What is so interesting about these three messages is that they demonstrate the lack of mental engagement of a problem drinker.
Basically, most current security methodologies have, at their base, the following algorithm:
That's not good enough for a voting system: aborting means you just disenfranchised a voter!You've proposed that the current system be kept in place as a backup. That's not sufficient either. For a voting system to be valid, every effort must be taken so that all voters are treated equally and follow the same voting procedure. A system that makes voting more convenient for those with recent PCs and reliable net connections is illegal by voting laws.
The popular vote should be how our president is elected. Let our leaders know that we want a direct democracy!
Join the PROTEST in your area on Saturday.
Is this a joke? I thought it was funny, until I saw the "+5 insightful" and the serious replies. It seemed like fairly amusing mockery of the braindead illogic surrounding the American election.
... In an election this close, between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory, it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
How so? Electoral college votes are still directly proportional to population, they just lump the whole state together when one candidate gets ahead of the others. The electoral college makes the state of residence of each voter relevant, so the candidates campaign on a state-by-state basis, rather than a voter-by-voter basis.
Unless the race for electoral college votes is very close, the small states are virtually ignored. More importantly, once a candidate gets over 50% of the vote in one state, he can ignore all the other voters in that state; they can neither harm him nor help him.
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
There is only a short span of time between the popular vote and the electoral vote. Electors are carefully selected for their party loyalty. The electors never have and never will change their votes when it makes a difference. In the case that something truly awful happens (the president starts committing crimes), the Congress will kick the president out.
Besides, valid or not, this argument amounts to "Thanks to the wonders of the electoral college system, the votes of an entire state may be completely ignored when a relatively minor functionary disagrees with their choice! Isn't that great?"
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
Nice doublethink. The total power of all votes is constant: they select a President. The only way for a vote to become more powerful is for it to take power from another vote. So, you're arguing that unequal distribution of the value of votes is a good thing?
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
Wow, this is almost profound in its utterbaselessness. What on Earth makes an electoral college system less about popularity?
Folks, the success of the Electoral College is PROVEN by this election
If serious, this is quite possibly the most moronic political comment I've ever read. The Electoral College strongly contributed to the two-party lock-in that forces you to choose "between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory" (remember "A vote for Nader is a vote against Gore!"?). This was a freak election, for both the popular and electoral votes to be so close. With so many states at 48%-52%, it could easily have turned out that one side had a strong majority (over 60% or even 70%) of electoral college votes, though the other had a slight majority in the popular vote.
If nothing else, consider that even with a "two party" system, a candidate can be elected with just over a quarter of the popular vote: just over half of the population in only those states needed to get just over half the E.C. votes.
Such strong pressure to keep to a 2-party system is natural because it gets so much worse with more parties. The formula for the fraction of the popular vote just less than what is needed to win (where V is the votes needed and N is the number of parties) is: V = 1/(2N)
So if there were 4 strong parties (let's say that Green and Libertarian came forward), one could win with only an eighth of the voting population behind him, if his supporters are well-distributed. If a dozen parties were seriously considered and everyone "votes their conscience", some crackpot with a well-distributed 5% of the population behind him could get a clear electoral vote majority, even though another candidate gets over 50% of the popular vote.
So if the majority of any state chose anything but support of the 2-party system, they are giving up a decent probability of having the electoral vote reflect the popular vote in favor of a completely random result based on distribution, not quantity, of support.
Now try and tell me that the Electoral College isn't at the root of the 2-party system, and the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils.
--------
The ballot papers in Australia would give the average Palm Springs resident a total brain meltdown. The instructions are: "Number every box on the green piece of paper. On the white piece of paper, either place the number '1' in a single box above the line, or number every box below the line."
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
That is really what is being proposed in this article, anyway. At least that's the example that was given. This is definitely a moment where we need to make our voices heard, and try to be coherent about it.
What we are seeing in the presidential election is the fact that the sloppiness and trickery that usually goes on (and that gets ignored when it doesn't seem to have any real effect on the outcome..) needs to be stopped and stopped quickly.
This will be a difficult problem to solve in the United States.
One principle problem will be that voting and elections are the responsibility of very localized governmental units -- counties, or their local equivalent -- and this means that any general solution will be stymied by the "states rights" and "local control" freaks.
It's very hard to imagine, if not impossible to imagine, a *nationwide* voting system that is uniform everywhere across the land, so you're going to end up with some variation on the same hodge-podge you've got now, for a long time.
As for digital voting: expect massive resistance from all those who don't use/understand computers anyway.
I suspect what we'll see more of is vote-by-mail -- what is now called an "absentee ballot" is really vote-by-mail right now: most people who use them are *not* on vacation, they just don't want to drive to a polling place, struggle to find a parking place, and wait in line with a bunch of strangers just to vote.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
While you immediately see open source as a solution to this one, something tells me that the election officials in places like Nye County Nevada aren't going to be nearly so receptive to such an obvious communist plot. If there is a move to e-democracy, the open source long haired *nix geek will have to sell his system town by town against hot new startups and MS Vote. People will try to make money off of this by selling package systems and promising upgrades and support. And non-tech savvy officals will buy it. The result will be a range of systems, with a corresponding range of problems and complaints.
I think you may also be underestimating the data integrity concerns. Florida is using punch card readers, a well understood and frankly antique technology to count the votes. And there was still a difference of something like 1400 votes between the tallies. If we're seeing this kind of variability on a stand alone system that we've been using for years, I worry about the rollout of a range of voting applications rushing to be the first to market.
While I believe an electronic voting system could be made to work, I think it's going to take well beyond 2004 to gain acceptance. You and I grew up with this technology, and we probably both still double check to make sure travelocity hasn't booked us a flight via Prague to Cleveland. How will your grandparents feel about voting online?
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
I understand your point... but you're missing something. Candidates DO spend time in states with less than 10 electoral votes.
I'm in Oregon. We have a piddly 7 VOTES, even less than you.
But the republicans came here over 12 times in the last month or two. 12 TIMES! They were even in eastern oregon multiple times... do you have any idea of what kind of backwater that is? But they were there, stumping their hearts out.
The dems were out here a lot too... I just don't know the numbers. And you know Nader spends a lot of time out this way. It was unreal. All of these polititians fretting over my little (well, vote-wise) state. And last I heard, along with FL, we're too close to call.
Also... we had a mail-in ballot. It was great. I actually didn't mail it, I went to the courthouse and dropped it in a ballotbox myself, since I didn't fill it out till late. (After a certain day, you aren't supposed to mail it, since it might not get in on time.)
The ballot itself is very clear, has tons of info, and almost no opportunity for mix ups. And I was able to sit in my own living room and go over the whole thing (referencing all kinds of material) and even look up some things that I'd never heard of, so that I would actually know what I was marking in.
Everything is in columns, and clearly separated. The place to mark in your vote is on the right-hand side of each column. The "vote" column has big bold arrows that have a large gap in the middle, like this:
(Oh, hell... slashdot won't give me the tags I need to draw it out... darn.)
All you do is very clearly fill in the gap in the arrow that points to your choice. It's hard to explain well, but it's so easy, and so obvious. The way things should be, regardless of method.
Anyway, I was really happy with the way the mail-in vote worked, especially considering that this was the first one. What troubles they had (like getting them all in on time, etc) Are sure to be worked out. I also liked the ballot itself, and the method for marking your vote.
On the other hand, I DIDN'T like sorting through our 3 billion #$@&*ing measures! (Or 30, or whatever. Good thing we could do it at home, or we still wouldn't be done.)
Of course that would not be fair! You shouldn't even have to think twice.
I think it's especially fitting on Veterans Day (here in the States) to remember that men and women have given their lives to make sure all citizens are equally enfranchised.
Let's not take a step backwards, OK?
The Shoupmatic system, with the huge stiff paper ballots marked with a heavy line in black pen, is a good system in principle. It's easy to understand, easy to check, and the scanner on top of the ballot box gives a fast preliminary count. The reading and counting software, though, needs to be more transparent. It's proprietary now, which is not good.
I'm not at all happy with either Internet voting or electronic voting machines. There's no good way to audit them to tell if they've been tampered with.
There's a privacy risk with some voting systems. If the ballot isn't secret, there's a risk of retailiation if you vote "wrong". We don't see much of that in the US today, because few areas have effective party organizations, but in, say, Alabama or Chicago in 1960, there was a good chance of trouble if you didn't vote the party line.
remember, the blue hairs are going to be 4 years older, have vision worse than a cow, and more shakes than Janet Reno. These voting kiosks will also have the SAME MISTAKES that happen now. Yet, if the sw is well written, the mistakes could be corrected immediately, unlike the mess now.
This also does not solve the reading and comprehension problem that I honestly suspect is at fault for most of the voting noise now. If voters were told to 'vote for the second name' and check the box without reading, so be it.
We get the government we deserve, and it appears we whinny americans do not deserve much.
Hey, leave comments about my mother out of this!
Well, apart from easy manipulating with results (there will be one central deposit, right? :-), the protocol for electronic voting is very difficult, with many almost contracictory requirements (like, only registered voters can vote, nobody can vote twice, yet nobody must know how each individual voted).
For example, in the scheme proposed by jamie, I can vote as many times I want to, because the logs are erased.
Bruce Schneier has whole chapter on electronic voting protocols in Applied Cryptography.
I believe the problem here is not our system of voting. Granted it has its problems, but it was never designed to settle elections with such precision. The problem is that our parties have put forward two candidates that nobody really cares about. I think most voted for their candidate because of their party or they simply flipped a coin. Of course the election is going to be this close. If we had some candidates of substance, I believe the voter's would have been more decisive, and the question of accuracy would not have been an issue.
As for digitizing our voting system, I'm all for making things electronic, but I think voting is one place where the pen and paper still work out better. The paper ballot provides a physical record of what happened on Election Day. I know it has its problems, but personally, I trust this much more then I would trust a binary digit in the memory of some server somewhere.
Using computers also adds complexity. I know that anyone reading slashdot would have no problem at all using an electronic system, but there are some people out there who have never even touched a Computer. Look how confused people get with the butterfly ballot.
Perhaps someday we'll be ready for an electronic system, but in this day it is not yet necessary or practical.
However. the real problem is not technical but social. Elections are carried by conties with county budgets. This is a reflection of the low priority that the democratic process is accorded in the US and is the / of all evil.
First, there needs to be a Federal Election Oversight agency that will set standards ( like emission standards) For example: Maximum acceptable spoilt ballots. Maximum time to wait for vote. Maximum distance/time to get from home to vote. etc.. There should also be a federal coordinating agency with a budget that will allow the modernization of election technology that you suggest.
Second, I would ask for some consideration of using a more sophisticated encryption system that will protect ballot secrecy while allowing to cancel fraudulent votes ( e.g. dead people) post facto.
Sorry to be partisan, but this isn't about Al Gore at all. The Republican attitude towards the current crisis ( the voters screwed? tough luck) sends the wrong message and exemplifies the kind of attitude that make the US voting system archaic. It would be nice and surprising if Bush pledged to modernize the election system in a fair and comprehensive system. Absent that, the GOP position today is committed to not seeing the evil of the present system. That is very unfortunate.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
People don't trust ballots that can be counted by hand. Do you think Hal900 will fare any better?
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
That's just stupid. It doesn't matter how you elect the president, the average power of every person involved is exactly the same. The power to elect the president divided by the number of people involved. Direct election, the electoral college, or randomly picking one person and having him pick the president, it doesn't matter. Same amount of power.
I hadn't realized that Hillary had been homecoming queen. But -- the homecoming queen sould be dating the quarterback. Who was a high school quartback? AL GORE! Won't Tipper be bummed!
As for the Kansas Tie-breaker, Gore was a quarterback, by Bush was head cheerleaed -- also an athletic job. So that could be real interesting.
Me - I'm pulling for the Russian solution. TV cameras, scantily clad women, a smoky room, and a case of Stoli. Last one under the table wins. This would be a great contest: George would have won easily 20 years ago, but his liver hasn't gotten a workout in 17 years. Al was a toker,not a drinker, so it'd be pretty even!
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
It was not the Electoral College as such that made your vote useless, it was your state's choice of "winner takes all" as the method by which it allocates its electoral votes.
Jeff
Why can't they build something that operates like an ATM machine - think about it. First everyone is assigned a voting card that expires after use (no fraud). All candidates could be selected from a touch-screen kiosk. At the end it shows you who you voted for and you can have a chance to change your vote. At the end you get a reciept that has all of your selections (just in case stuff fsck up). Whatever...I'm moving to Amsterdam
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Authentication Issues
Passwords are one of the flimsiest forms available. At least with a signature there is a little real-time originality. It seems to me it is necessary that people shuld still physically visit the polls:
1. There is the opportunity to eye-witness the actions of the voter as (s)he presents ID, signs hte book, and proceeds to the booth.
2. There is no question as to what transpired at the poll, whereas a vote from the privacy of your own home invites the danger of mistakes (or accusations of mistakes) where no eye witnesses can verify anything.
3. Issues of equipment failure, verification of choices, answers for questions, are all kept public. Likewise, any imposters or similar frauds would have played out their actions before witnesses, making detection and reaction easier.
Computers used Right ;-)
1. Photo-confirmation of the Presidential-pick is a great idea. Those punchholes in Palm Beach couldn't be an issue, even if the choices exceed the ten that Florida dealt with.
2. Weighted Votes would be great: Rank the picks from top to bottom. The Computer could summarize your top pick, but also distribute the weighted results of the popular vote (i.e. Checking Nader, then Gore, then telling the others to smegg off).
3. We could view the web results not only by county, but by district. If a district htinks they have been misrepresented, they could check with their neighbors and contest the results.
That last one has a funny tie-in with this Florida thang... Even though two-thirds of America would like to disban the Electoral College, it was the very thing that drew the attention to Florida's irregularities. Ironic. Yet, we can only guess how much of this goes on in the other 49 states and D.C.
I voted with a Touch Screen system. At my polling place there was system of about 8 touch screen lcds connected to a main box where the volunteers could press "next voter". On the screen it was completely obvious, press the name, click next screen, and click "end voting" when done. At any time, you could go back screens and change what you have selected before.
Seems a lot of what this post is describing. Were there any other people that voted this way, or was Westland, Michigan some weird test-bed for new systems?
Steve.
There seems to be alot of concern about, well, ALOT of things. From validation, to voting twice, to security. What if we went to touch screen systems?
You go into the booth, you don't need a ballot. You close the curtain behind you, touch the screen with the candidate you want. It shows you the picture of the candidate and REALLY BIG yes/no buttons. Also, maybe even a "back" button to go back and review your picks (or a top-level menu to let you go to any particular race?)
there would seem to be several advantages to this:
1. no significant immediate changes to the current voting system. you still have to go to the voting centers to use the machine.
2. the validation here is still as good or better than what we had before. You have to figure out a way to make sure the person doesn;t vote twice while in the booth, but's that's a relatively trivial issue and easily solved (someone mentioned the use of smartcards....)
3. The problems that were highlighted by the bad ballot in florida go away (with both the confirmation screen and the ability to go back and change any of your votes before you leave).
4. Transiting from this system to an internet-optional system would be relatively trivial compared to what it is now. You'd still have to keep the booths for non-internet users, but this would be a stepping stone towards being able to vote on the internet.
some issues:
How do you record the vote? oh wait, there have been several comments on this one, so I won;t go into it.
Any other problems I'm not thinking of? And please don't mention cost, I understand that's a BIG one, but it's an issue I'm not in any way experienced with and therefor not qalified to discuss (I had a full scholarship through college due to my academic standing in high school and performance in class, and I JUST graduated into grad school with the same thing :-)
just my 10b cents t14m4t aka Weylin Piegorsch
weylin@no.yahoo.spam.com
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
What's with the perceived urgency of tallying votes and having an official national result, anyway? As time goes on and computers press further into our lives, people seem more and more anxious about shaving seconds off the latency between polls closing and final results appearing on teevee. Why?
One of the benefits of a computerized election seems to be the instantaneous delivery of results (no bears barricading in volunteers). I fail to understand the urgency.
After all, you guys won't know definitively and with official pronouncement whom your new president is anyway until what, January 20 or something? That's two and a half months. Big deal if a bear wasted a couple of hours.
-ph
myselfmusic
--
The shareholder is always right.
Listen doofus, you keep parotting this mantra about there being 19,000 botched votes like everyone else in the media. This is a misrepresentation. Every single one of these voters that made an error (they accidentally voted for >1 candidate at once) requested a brand new ballot at runtime and revoted on the spot. Daley (Gore's campaign manager) has been having a field day with this but in essence he's been lying to the public.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
"The electoral college is a good thing, because without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA, and TX matters."
I've heard this too many times. WTF are my Congresswoman and my Senators doing in Washington if not representing me? I don't count on the Pres to represent my domestic interests. I depend on my Congressional representations for that. They are my voice.
When they abolish Congress, then talk to me about not mattering.
- Dan I.
Good point. Political infighting is never good. But that's what I meant anyway. The fact that it was made public was minorly embarassing. The fact that we spent millions investigating, prosecuting, and eventually giving up on it is really sick.
But what can I say, gotta have them moral values.
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Ok, I'm getting tired of repeating myself, but I know not everyone will read the entire article.
0 223&mode=nested
Read the following:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/09/135
I had some bad luck posting it as a link, so I gave up.
It says that a popular election is only more fair if you have perfectly random people.. Or if they are biased (as is always the case), then only if they are perfectly distributed throughout the country.
Yes, our melting pot is working it's way towards uniformity, but it's not quite there yet.. The opposite extreme is Serbia. If one religious faction was the dominant, then their candidates would ALWAYS win, irrespective of the other religions.. In an electorial system, only candidates that appeal to a majority of RELIGIONS (not voters) will win. (especially since it's unlikely that the population is 100% evenly mixed throughout all districts)
Unfortunately, candidates in the US have learned that being moderate and accepting the popular opinions on a majority of issues will get them the most votes.. BUT THIS IS NOT BAD. If you have two candidates that are garunteed not to be radical (for fear of being de-elected), then you're less likely to have disasters. A libertarian would never be elected, because he is too radical (even if 51% of the people liked the idea of no taxation). The electorial college prevents racists and radicals from being elected by enhancing the voting power of minorities..
Again, the effect dimishes as you randomize the location of the population. But there are natural grouping forces that should resist this.. (such as the proxity of immagrant entry points, wealth clustering areas, or farming areas, etc).
-Michael
-Michael
I see this all through the article and the comments. Talk about speed. If we did this, counting would be faster. Or this, slower. Election in Brazil known within two hours.
Who the *#@$* cares?
What does it matter that we know who will be President within three hours? He won't actually be President for three months. So what if it takes a week, or three weeks, or two months to fully count the ballot. I personally don't see why it's so important, unless you've grown up so much on instant gratification that now you can't handle waiting a few days to see who wins the election.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
From today's Wall Street Journal:
A tied 1997 mayoral race in Honduras was settled by a law allowing ties to be broken by games of chance. The two candidates in San Juan de Opoa settled on soccer penalty kicks.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
For something this important...why are forcing people to leave work and vote or vote after work and dealing with long lines? Why not vote on Saturday? I heard this mentioned on CNN i think and this struck me as one of the best ideas I have heard in a long time.
If the electoral college were disbanded, it would be highly unlikely that a candidate would visit NM. However, the same would be true if our state heavily leaned one way or another. There was no reason for Bush or Gore to visit Utah, for example(same # of electoral votes) - that state was going to Bush, and no amount of campaigning would change that.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
What about write-in canidates?
Anyway, I have no idea why states still use those idiotic punchcards when there's so many better options. Washington state (where I live) used scantron-type sheets, you know, fill in the box beside the candidate you want. _This_ is a technology that everyone has grown up with.
Switching to an electronic voting system because of those dumb punchcards is a severe case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because one method of paper-voting sucks doesn't mean the concept of voting on paper is itself suspect.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
My question is, how does a post get a rating of 5 when it's unrelated to the story it's posted under? Saying "At least you're not complaining about the Electoral College." at the start of the message didn't magically make this post on-topic.
Of course, I realize that THIS post will be moderated down as well. It should, it's just as off-topic. I just feel more noble NOT posting this complaint as an anonymous coward.
This is the biggest problem with the moderation system. Modding up isn't used to say "this is a good post". Instead, it seems to be a way of saying "I agree with you". All I'm trying to point out here is that (5, insightful) is an enormously unreasonable score for an off-topic post. Moderators should take more care.
Well cost also have something to do with it. Voting machines are expensive. The advantage of the bubble sheets or the punch cards is that the main cost is printing up the sheets or the cards. You only need a handful of scanners or punch card readers in any one district to read the ballots.
There are other machines. One machine is the AVC Edge (http://www.spve.com/products/avc_edge.html) that has a touch screen panel. It's light, easy to carry around, programmable, can do stuff in several languages, clear, can upload election data instantaneously, but costs about $5000 per box. One scanner that can scan a ward of bubble sheets in two hours costs less than one of those machines.
I live in Franklin County, Ohio (Columbus) and we have these big Shouptronic electronic voting machines, introduced in 1996. There is a plastic membrane on which the ballot is printed and a bunch of flashing lights next to each candidates name. You press a candidates button, and the flashing lights go out and only that candidates light is illuminated. It's straightforward, easy, and you don't have to piss about bubbling circles or punching in holes.
However they are expensive, in fact, other Ohio counties have talked about going to a touch screen or electronic voting machine system, but they needed to ask to voters to pass a property tax levy in order to buy the new machines. Furthermore, not only are they expensive,but they sit in warehouses 363 days of the year. What a racket the voting machine companies have...making an expensive machine that the government needs to buy in large quantities which only has one purpose once or twice a year, at best.
And finally, the Shouptronics used here in Franklin County are really big. Someone with a truck needs to move them to the polling place. The touch screen models are smaller and lighter, but ballots and sheets for one precinct can be brought in on election day by one poll worker in their Honda.
- No feedback on who or what you voted for
- inability to change vote(sure you can ask for a new ballot, but when you see that line waiting, you kind of want to get done as soon as possible, plus you have to re-vote on everything else)
- tampering-prone(I found the pre-cut holes flimsy on my ballot), who knows if those double-punched holes were due to voter mistake or worker-tampering?
- complicated setup - having to insert in a specific orientation and then making sure it fits properly in the 2 red buttons is more painful than it should be.
I think these problems were overlooked due to wider margins in the past and statistical techniques that trivialize the importance of any single one vote. This election cycle will undoubtedly be a Good Thing in bringing about election process reform.But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
On ABC this morning they asked roughly the same question "Why don't we have a national standard for voting?".
The election official cited gave two reasons:
1) Different systems in different states and counties ensures that the vote cannot be tampered with at a national level. A single system runs into the possibility of a single means to affect the vote by tampering with the single system.
2) Money. As stated, local governments have to pay for the systems themselves. They do the best they can with the money they have but even well off large areas (such as NYC) as still using 40 year old voting booths because nobody wants to spend the money.
Slashdot aside, there are still large numbers of Americans who have little or no faith in computer systems - especially after this years' number of DOS attacks. The conspiracy theories regarding the "real winner" of a computer tabulated race would abound. Consider this: the punch card system, such as used in Florida, was first used in the US in 1892; the voting machine, (push the handle to the right of the candidate), was first used in 1896. We obviously adapt to new technology slowly in the world of elections.
True, true... I am biased myself, although I don't claim affiliation to any party.
I'm just sick of the press in general. They always have the wrong angle on everything.
The only thing that I disagree with you on... we did NOT see as much crap about Gore as we did about Bush. Yea, we saw just as many incidents... but not nearly as often from Gore than from Bush. In other words, the media tends to dwell on certain things... and they stuck with making Bush look incompetent a little more than they did with Gore. While Gore was very much blasted for being boring for 8 years now, that's hardly something to convince anyone not to vote for him... and the press has forgotten that recently. (or maybe he loosened up a little, I dunno)
Of course, there's conservative press too. I'm not denying that. But at the same time, I think fact needs to be separated from opinion a little bit more. That's just overall with the press... kinda like how the media makes OJ look like a murderer even though he was never convicted (I won't dare make a call on that one, but it's obvious where the slant is with the media on that). Similarly, I hear few things in the media to counteract all the press generated by Abu Muima Jamal supporters... even though there's a lot of solid facts that pretty much make him a cop killer. I don't think it's about people being biased outright... I think they're just biased toward sensationalism. With the media, they're also slightly biased toward liberalism, and if you say they're not, then look at how right now Bush is pretty much the winner of the election but the big story is how Gore is challenging it... not that Bush won. Gore won't disappear from the news as a presidential candidate until every vote is counted... which is a shame, because I don't like the focus on the post-election bickering... it's disgraceful and disgusting, and it's making me want to move to Canada even more...
Why?
>sloppiness and trickery that usually goes on (and
>that gets ignored when it doesn't seem to have
>any real effect on the outcome..)
And rightly so!
Perfection is impossible in any real world system, what you need is quality that's good enough. We have that - there's only a problem when an election is so ridiclously close that we might as well settle it with a coin flip.
The other thing we need is a predefined recovery method for when an error does happen. We have that too - if FL doesn't get its act together and pick some electors by Dec 18th, the House gets to pick the new prez. They'll most likely pick some compromise candidate, which is actually fairer than picking either of the guys who got less than half the popular vote.
Why does this remind me of the aggie joke about finding whiteout all over your monitor...
Of course this is not going to get read, since there are already 400 comments, but what the hell!
I think the biggest reason to vote electronically, not over the internet, but atleast not with dead trees, is that everyone will get a say. Homeless people, for example, can't vote because the have no place to have their voter registration card sent to. If all ovtes were based on fingerprints, for example, then everyone would get a vote.
Course, I also think we shoudl do away with the electoral college system as well.
What's that got to do with anything. This differs because:
- This is run by a state-level organization
- You could ONLY vote online for ICANN. You can still go to a polling place for this
- The local government already sends hundreds of thousands of smaple ballots and other crap for the election, why wouldn't they be able to run off a postcard, too?
ICANN voting online was a good idea with not enough thought behind it. The infrastructure already esists to implement this.This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
What if they replace the voting booths with, say, boothed computers, which can be used either by touchscreen or by mouse, and which have keyboards (for write-in votes). The people go into the booth and close the curtain thing, which turns on the screen, they vote however they want (without any stupid mistakes like voting for more than one candidate), and when they open the curtain, their votes are entered. Now, why wouldn't that work?
Quoth the zombie, braaaaaaaains
sample quote "In a relatively democratic system like our own, it's perhaps better if change happens slowly, after much debate. As pointed out to me by the computer scientist David Rosenthal, in governance "slowness is a feature, not a bug."
Display some adaptability.
Didn't a vote go up for sale on EBay a while back? What's to prevent me from selling my vote now? Send in for an absentee ballot, there you go, it's all yours.
I'm only 22, but I've voted in at least 3 elections (2 local and one national) and I've never used a paper ballot. And I've been voting in this backwards state of Indiana. You just press the button for candidate you would like to vote for; a little LED lights up reminding you who you voted for; then you press a big red button and a few electrons later your ballot is counted. Granted, those ballots then have to be transfered to the local headquarters, but the fact remains that I've never used paper to vote. -- Clayton
Here in Story County, Iowa we have what I would consider to be the minimum standard for voting equipment.
You get a sheet of names (in large print) with an oval right next to the name which you darken with a marker. But more importantly, as I found out from the guy right in front of me, if you mismark your ballot (say by marking 2 presidential slates) the machine will not accept the ballot. The election official voided his ballot and gave him a new one.
I would add one additional feature by adding 'abstain' as an option for each contest/question -- this would prevent people missing one or more votes (for example, by forgetting to turn it over and mark the back).
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
The electoral college was set up so that the entire country wasn't controlled by small area of people (highly dense and like minded).
Its a protection against majority rule. If we did follow majority rule, we could have a situation were 50.0001% of the population thought was bad and the remaining portion of people would just have accept whatever laws that majority chose.
Not everyone believes that we should look out for the little guy, the minority.
-Vel
> The electoral college is a good thing, because
:)
> without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA,
> and TX matters.
You mean, as opposed to no one outside Florida mattering?
I think the easiest way to assure a legitimate vote is to make each ballot unique. This of course raises very serious privacy issues. The ballot would obviously not have the voter's name on it, but something that could be somehow verified as corresponding to that voter. The system would need to be able to transform only in one direction. Now, IANA Cryptographer, but I strongly suspect there would be some way to implement such a verification system using cryptographic hashes. The system could still be susceptable to attack, like insecure key transmission, but it would get rid of the lion's share of fraud potential.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
This principle applies to vote accounting systems just as much as it applies to money accounting systems. Otherwise, just as with money accounting systems, the computer records could be (deliberately or otherwise) corrupted with no way to detect the situation. This sort of curruption has occurred many times with the old mechanical 'lever' voting machines, which similarly left no paper trail... those machines were beloved in places like Louisiana and Dade County (Fla.) because you could easily rig them (e.g., fiddle with the innards so that a vote for Bush turned into a vote for Gore, etc.) and there was no paper trail to conduct a recount upon.
Thus I very much support a system where ballots are paper and must be manually marked by voters, but the ballot box (a specialized machine) won't accept invalid ballots (voter has to get that ballot cancelled there, in realtime, and get another one). At a minimum, if we go to the touch-screen type systems, there should be a printer and roll of paper inside the machine that prints the votes as they're confirmed. These rolls of paper could then be used to check whether the computer got glitched or not. But from a checks and balances point of view, the paper ballots are far superior, since they're easier to re-count.
There is a reason why cash registers still have a roll of paper in them tallying things.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
So, people in a small state deserve more say in who gets to be the president than those in larger states?
And what happens if the President turns out to be a psycho after the Electoral College? His handlers just have to keep him in line for another couple of months. There is no more safety here than having the election later.
Impossible. All of the votes put together have exactly the same amount of "power": they choose the next president. What the electoral college does is make the votes in the "swing" states more powerful, at the expense of those in the stronghold states.
I'm note sure I understand this assertion. It's simply a state-by-state popularity contest instead of an overall popularity contest.
Anyway, it's not like our electoral system in Canada sucks less--just differently.
Greg
Think about it also, if whatever entity had primaries in September (before the general) then the finalized ballots probably weren't even ready to go to voters until mid-Sept.
These ballots have to be POSTMARKED on election day though.
This is another view of the world.
Many states now have laws saying that the electors have to vote for the candidate they are "supposed" to vote for, sometimes on penalty of criminal charges.
How about a middle ground? A computer in the poll, 'activated' in some way by a registered voter coming to the polling location. They use a nice, simple GUI to choose the candidate and issues, and it spits out a punchcard with the proper holes bunched and the voters info barcoded onto it. Those ballots are collected and counted using the current machine counters.
Make the actual voting part up-to-date, and leave the rest the same? For now at least?
PUHLEEEZ! Do the words "universal sufferage" mean ANYTHING to you?
(B.)
----
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(B.)
----
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
--Stolen & Unat
So we get an eLection. OpenBSD with TrustedBSD patches installed, audited, monitored with network and host-idses, realtime log watching by real humans, firewalls, virus scanners, the whole 9 yards and then some. All the t's are crossed, all the i's dotted. All goes well.
. html) to see more about local-level fraud.
Joe Cracker, in an act of political martyrdom, says, "I hacked the vote"
The folks running the vote say "No, all is well"
Joe responds, "yeah? prove it."
(this example stolen graciously from Bruce Schneier--he'll prolly talk about this in the next Crypto-gram).
The advantage of the current system is that fraud is limited strongly to the local level, and therefore to numbers which are statistically insignificant to national--and even statewide--elections (including this one. we're so below statistical significance in florida it's not funny). Do a google search on "Landslide Lyndon" and "Box 13" (or read http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/1999/dec/politics
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Before you all go out rushing to push internet voting, I strongly recommend you read Bruce Schneier's new book "Secret and Lies". We are at least 20-100 years away from internet voting being up to snuff.
As a first-time presidential voter, I was hoping for more advanced voting technology than what I was shown. The punch machines are slow and outdated, and as shown in a Florida county this year, potentially confusing. The next four years should be spent developing an Internet-based (or, if they don't like that idea, at least a local, secure, voting-booth intranet) voting ballot. This would allow easy creation/changing of ballots, not to mention saving oodles and oodles on paper! ;)
Well, that's what I think, anyway...
r
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
i stopped reading after the bear thing, that was fucking hilarious,.. nothing else in that little article could possibly compete..
....dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Paperless voting (except that dot-matrix printer) done by digital equipment would be a good idea--if expensive. How many counties would decide they "didnt need" to upgrade?
.not. the 'net]
Voting from home is also a non-starter. Let's say I'm a fringe-candidate supporter. 7:01 AM we all cast our votes. 7:02 AM the DDoS attack starts. At 8 PM, the announced loser claims to have evidence that those evil hackers have rooted the webserver. [and probably at least *one* of those sore losers would be right] And so on...
The best security--and what would be called for--is no wires at all. Save the results to multiple media, certainly, then hand-carry (single box needed, not a bazillion anymore) that media to the county HQ. [Alternately a dedicated line could be used for transmission, but
----
----
It is often easer to gain forgiveness than permission
Compare the ease to getting an absentee ballot to the above system. Good point, though.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Replace every voting booth with a thin client that is connected to one server at the polling location. You can use a fully redundent backup of the server's database to preserve the data. Each thin client can run off of a flash hard drive. My perfect example would be the iopener. I think that would be the perfect device for this. You could probably create a cheaper device if you so choose by making it with a smaller screen. As all you need to do is display a few names at a time it shouldn't be a problem. The entry wouldn't be from a keyboard but just a modified input device with say 10-15 keys depending on what UI functionality you wish to include. The process of voting would be much quicker so you might not even need as many "booths" as before but it would require a relatively large investment in materials. It would then be easy to close the polls and immediately know the result. The database from each polling station would report to a main county server every X minutes to add some more redundancy and security to the system. At the end you have fully verified accurate count of the vote. Everyone would still be forced to come out to the polls, but thats how it should be. Its not the way you have to vote that should change just the method of the ballots and ballot collection that should. Btw all these servers would NOT be connected to the internet to protect against any kind of hack.
The problem isn't technical... we have workable systems now (Didn't Arizona recently allow Internet voting in a primary?). The problem is with the culture.
Who appeared first on the presidential ballot in your state, Gore or Bush? It's different from state to state because different states have different rules about how ballots are constructed. One of the significant aspects of the upcoming court cases in Florida is whether the presidential ballot was even _legal_. People spend weeks arguing over how the ballots will appear, imagining that putting Bush over Gore or Gore over Bush will give one candidate some imagined advantage.
Now imagine these folks having to deal with a computerized solution. Massive Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on their own parts. These people barely understand paper in the first place. Now you're going to have to deal with arguing who appears first in the list, "what about those teenage hackers?", "I don't trust anything I can't see," phsyical ballot security, etc.
I agree that it would be nice if today's 14 year olds could vote the way they are used to doing everything else. But that's not going to happen until today's 14 year old is 50 and a pillar of the community and can basically dictate that it's time to move on to electronic voting. It won't happen before then.
Given the number of years he's served in the Senate without being Prez, I say give it to him.
It beats the hell out of a gold watch for retirement! ;-)
A huge national game of King of the Hill.
Whichever side can take the Capitol, and hold it, wins.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Assuming some form of computerized online voting, it shouldn't be difficult to detect something like votes for multiple candidates to a single office, but how to detect that a voter really wanted candidate A but accidentally marked for B instead? Typing in a name, or even a few intials, instead of simply making a mark would give the system something checkable - but that could be discriminatory against illiterates and morons, (a block much courted by most politicians).
One idea that occurs to me is that if the candidates involved give prior approval they could be recorded in the system as being in certain ideological categories strongly at odds with certain other ideological categories. Then a voter in NY, for example, could be warned that his voting for Bush for President and Hillary Clinton for Senator is a possible error.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Don't forget that anonymity is a crucial element that has to be taken into account in any voting scheme. I don't trust my bank to ignore it when I vote for a candidate that wants banking reform... And any poll tax would be extremely regressive and would be nailed to the wall by your basic (classical)liberal faster than you can say "Maggie Thatcher". As a Libertarian, I love the idea of paying the cost of elections this way, but I just can't imagine it working.
How, exactly, would you implement a third party vote checker? There is only *one* person that is responsible for your ballot - you. If you poke 2 holes by accident and upon reflection you see the mistake, you get a new ballot. If you think you voted for the wrong guy, you can get a new ballot. If you are so careless as to not double check and fully understand your ballot before casting it, don't vote.
Your points:
Let's break this down:
1. Small states are not ignored. True. However, the population of those states would not be ignored in a direct democracy, so the difference to me seems to be that the states per se are what are protected by this: that is, the state government, its affect on the state's residents, and perhaps psychological factors like the populace's identity as a resident of a particular state. Depending upon your feelings about "state's rights", this may be important to you.
2. Areas with low population density are not ignored. For me, this raises the question, "should the government represent the people or both the people and the land?". If it just represents the people, then once again the people would be represented in a direct democracy; the "area" (region, number of square miles, or however you define this) is unimportant, regardless of its population density. There are probably counter-arguments, however, that the "area" is important because the people who live there know more about its resources and possible uses (national parks, logging, etc).
It is also, I think, a danger in normal elections: if an Elector goes nuts or members of the college are bribed, they can vote against the populace and it's completely Constitutional. Most states have laws which guard against this: for example, the electors may be chosen by the political party of the candidate that wins the most votes. However, the danger exists in normal years as much as the "safety" exists in abnormal years.
I've read (skimmed, technically -- Discover has a lot of fluff) the article reference on Slashdot a few days about this, and I don't think I agree with the conclusions. The basic facts are valid, of course: you do have a bigger say in something that is noticeable, since each state is individually noticeable rather than just the entire coutnry being noticeable.
But does this make your vote more important? On average, I don't think it does. True, every voter in a swing state is more important, but the rest of us are LESS important. I live in Texas; why should I vote, since I knew the state was going to go to Bush? Whereas if we had a direct democracy, my vote would contribute to the final total for a given candidate and would have some importance. Granted, it would be less important than the votes of Floridians this year, but it would still be more important than it was in Texas: not important at all.
You may say that there is always the chance that Texas would not go to Bush, so my vote is important. That may (or may not) be, but the psychological affect of thinking that my vote is unimportant is itself important. I suspect this is one of the reasons why voter turn-out is so low.
I disagree that the election would be any more of a popularity contest than it is now.
Why is a popularity contest with rounding error better than one without? Why is a popularity contest for one state better than a popularity contest for the entire country? Why should we have a popularity contest in states that are important (because they are known to be swing states) while the rest of the country is ignored (and possibly left to make a slightly more rational choice)?
There are, however, possible additional arguments in favor of the Electoral College:
1. It discourages people from voting, so voters tend to be people who care more strongly than most. Hopefully this helps weed out apathetic voters who are just following whims or party affiliation.
2. If swing states are ones which are somehow representative of shifts in American culture (or at least are representative more often than other states), then decisions made by swing states represent early responses to coming issues. For example, Florida has a lot of retirees and first- and second-generation Hispanic Americans. Is that not a preview of America 20 years from now?
If both candidates are basically presenting a centrist message, swing states may represent a magnification of the small differences between candidates.
The counter-counter-argument is that the candidates appear centrist only because we are looking at sound bites, charisma and party affiliation, not actual policy. If we were looking more at policy, the decision might not be so evenly split.
I don't mean to argue strongly either for or against the Electoral College (though, personally, I think we would be happier without it). My primary point in this article is that the issue is not as clear-cut as you (or many anti-EC people) have presented it.
As an aside, I personally would like a system with formal "abstain" votes for when you don't like any candidate, and prefferential voting: for example, people could vote for Nader then Gore; if Nader doesn't win, their vote goes to Gore.
Florida Ballot
pronoblem
Any electronic system is only as good as the database behind it. Voter roles in the US are hopelessly screwed up. If we are serious about cleaning up our elections, the first step is cleaning up our voter roles. The Electronic system on top of a garbage database will still yield garbage. I've read in some articles how some Miami districts had 90% turnouts in the first hour. And there are more than a few examples of districts having turnouts in excess of 100%, in elections past.
Don't get me wrong. I support electronic balloting. I would in particular like an "open source" solution. But I think it is more important to clean up the voter rolls to clean up the corruption in our system.
My Weblog
Uh...one half of the population didn't vote! So only one quarter of the population will be pissed off by the election results. Oh wait, what % of our population is under 18?
There hasn't been a clear (read: popular majority) mandate to rule in the cuntry for more than a quarter of a century.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
--Stolen & Unat
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0011/nader_wins.sht ml
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Here is a link to a simulation of the voting booth used in brazil
The election can't be run by the Federal government because it would be against the law. To change that law would require that Congress pass a special kind of law called a constitutional amendment, which must then be passed again by 38 of the state legislatures. As the states are probably not interested in giving up that power for nothing, such a change is unlikely to happen.
Yes, we know how parliamentary systems work. They existed already when the US government was given its current form. Those who fashioned our form of government felt that the parliamentary form put too much unchecked power in the hands of one entity, which they felt would lead too easily to oppression. Talk to a Briton who didn't like living under Margaret Thatcher and you'll see why.
It may be that we will someday, like you, adopt a preference voting system; there is no legal bar to doing so. The problem is that those who make the laws tend to be members of the two parties that benefit from our current "first past the post" system.
Jeff
I have no idea how you get people to use the help that's available to them...
Perhaps their participation in a very close national election, coupled with the realization that their own vote was not counted due to their own carelessness/incompetence, will drive home the point that they need to seek out such help next time around.
But probably not...
I didn't see anyone comment about this, but votehere.net already has a plan in place that would phase in the process of electronic voting. It can work for home voting as well as at precincts (allowing people to go to the precinct of their choice), which could help eliminate traffic problems as well as not require people to have internet connectivity. They did some testing for this election.
In the election here in central NJ, we had these new machines in which a paper ballot was layed on top of the machine. You would push a little square to the left of the candidate's name that you chose and then a little green "X" would show up in that box. When you were done selecting all the candidates, you would press a big orange "CAST VOTE" button in the bottom right hand corner of the machine. It was all electronic.
This has occurred to me, too, at times, and it always reminds me of some article I read here sometime back about preventing cheating in online game networks. It seems to me there should be a way for all computers in the vote-recording-and-tallying network to periodically run checksums on each others' files (e.g., every time one tallying computer submits a batch of votes); I'd imagine these verifications could also be posted publicly. Of course, my security knowledge is practically nil, so I'd like to know what sort of problems a scheme like that would present.
-- (if I were a bug, I would want to be a true Renaissance Bug)
I don't ask that we don't elect criminals to office. We can't. Everyone at that level is corrupt in one way or another.
All I ask is that we elect competent crooks. And is that really so much?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
barricaded by a bear? oh no, maybe we big strong humans should use our big strong guns and shoot a bear from quite a distance. yes, it's our humanity that makes us humans.
if your voting record is available to anyone (and that was true even before it was available on the web) then anonymity isn't a factor, is it?
a vote is botched, it should be thrown out. but if the voter saw that they fucked it up and ask for a new ballot, they should be given a new ballot! how hard is that?
one of my professors, arnold urkin (seems to get quoted regularly these days), said that whenever he was watching computers used to simplify voting, the systems were always horribly insecure and unreliable. i dunno if that'll improve but seriously, all the advances in open source software haven't made software overall more reliable, can we entrust our nation to software when we have a tried and true system? this has nothing to do with the candidates or the system, it was random chance. trust the system, it worked for our forefathers, it'll work for us.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
There is simple a reader available so the voter can decide to drop the ballet in the box or destory it and try again. At the very least have a reader to detect double punch errors.
If only this simple system was in place all these punch card problems would not have occured.
Just because we automate and bring the voting technology up to date doesn't mean we have to do voting remotely, sacrificing the manual identity verification process that takes place at the polling stations.
I've been thinking about this for a few years, on and off, and remote voting is too open to attack - connected to anything means connected to everything - so there's no reason for the voting computers to be ONLINE. They just need to be computers, and able to connect securely (DIRECT DIALUP still works in this age of broadband to the home) to a central server that can tally the totals.
This way we can implement some of the more reliable aspects of computing tech, but without having to wait on secure identity verification systems to come along (yeah, right, that'll be soon, too...)
Thoughts?
Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.
Hmmm... I wasn't aware of that. I thought that the terminals had to be phisically moved to the counting locations to process the data.
One more thing that was not pointed out: I'm not sure (I read somewhere during the elections), but the data stored in the booths is encripted using common public/private key pairs, so that only the electoral authorities can decrypt them.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
One basic demand for a fair voting system is that it's observable. Any interested citizen should be able to go to the voting place and watch every step, and be able to see that it's done the correct way.
When some steps take place inside computer software or hardware, it's hard to see how that can be accomplished. Nobody can see what is actually going on.
Remember that the system cannot rely on honest election officials.
...until the movie of the week comes out!
Y'all are missing a big problem, and it's not technological or sociological: rather, it's legal and Constitutional.
The Constitution gives electoral control to the states. The states (I'm not aware of any exceptions) pass that control on to the counties, usually with restrictions.
Without a Constitutional amendemnt, there's no way we'll ever have a uniform national ballot, electronic or otherwise. And I just can't see the states giving up that much power to the federal government.
This is why some people in Florida had screwed-up punch cards; some of you pressed a button on an electronic device; and I, in Maricopa County, Arizona, drew lines on a piece of paper.
Nice dreamings, but it ain't gonna happen.
Having said that, the Arizona Democratic primary election that was held both traditionally and over the 'Net went rather well, for the most part.
If you want to see something like this for yourselves, you'll have to work for it locally.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I 100% agree with electronic voting, and the way Belgium does this is even better. Everyone is dismissing e-voting because it is "unsecure." I've seen more what-if's than in a NASA brainstorming session. Well here are a few for yah against the current voting system...
What if people vote under the alias of a dead man?
Oh wait that happened in Chicago during the Kennedy-Nixon election
What if the precinct happened to lose a ballot box in transit?
Oh wait that happened in Florida this year
What if the election officials swap ballots or change results?
Oh wait that probably happens every year somewhere
My advice? Adapt... Electronic voting is safer, more convient and a hell of a lot more accurate.
"Madness and Genius are separated solely by Degrees of Success." -Unknown
Yet, if the sw is well written, the mistakes could be corrected immediately, unlike the mess now.
I'm not sure from your post. Are you suggesting that problems could be rapidly corrected before the election? As in the case of removing dead candidates from Senate races? Or are you suggesting that the user interface of the ballot could be redesigned on the fly during the polling?
While the first would be an important improvement, the second would be disastrous. I can't think of anything that would undermine voter confidence more than ballots that changed mid-election.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
The five states you mentioned have together 167 electoral votes (54 + 33 + 25 + 23 + 32), or about 31% of all the 538 electoral votes.
They also list 32.8 million voters (9.6 + 6.1 + 6.0 + 4.8 + 6.3) or about 32% of the total voting population.
I really can't see where's the huge difference (and unfairness) between the electoral and the popular vote system.
Also, what most people don't like about the electoral college is the "winner takes it all"-rule!
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Okay, instead of fully networked, etc., why don't we transition into that while solving the problems at hand? (namely user interface and accuracy)
;) and of course asked to review and confirm his/her choices at the end.
What I suggest is yes, some sort of dummy-gui electronic terminal, but still retain the punched ballots. Every ballot would have a unique ID number (not in any way tied to the individual, though). When placed in the polling booth, the booth would read the ID of the ballot and associate any choices made with that ID.
The voter would be presented with choices, given navigation options, etc. etc. (ability to increase font size?
When the last "submit" button is pressed, the booth (which is on a lan at the polling place, but not otherwise networked... yet...) would send the results along with the ID to a "server" - perhaps noting the results (w/ ID) on local media as well - but this would not be official.
The official ballot would be PRINTED OUT at the booth - perhaps it could just be "punched" like today's ballots are. The voter would take the punched ballot, fold it, and drop it in the voting box.
Results could be tallied as normal, but there's far less of a chance for mistakes - no chance of double-punching, far less room for fraud (because there's a way to double-check things w/ the digital information)
This would be (IMHO) a reasonable compromise at this juncture... hehe...
... you're not complaining about the Electoral College.
:-P ), there's a lot of other places to concentrate on. And just to show you how effective Bush was in spreading his campaign, he stole Gore's own homestate... if you're an uncontroversial, well-liked former senator and current vice president with a good track record politically, and you can't win your own homestate... that makes you a fuckup.
The media has been making a BIG deal about this now, and they're adding confusion to the situation... I don't understand how EVERY FRIGGEN GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENT now learns about the Electoral College at least 5 times in a normal academic career, and yet no one knows what the hell it's about. I'm guessing all the people complaining are the same people that don't know how to program a VCR, but anyway...
It turns out that the Electoral College is a fabulous method of electing a president, for a couple of reasons:
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to. Remember, a candidate needs 50% of the electoral college to win, or else it goes to the House of Representatives - so in the case of a close election, a few defecting electors can change the process drastically. Not what we want to happen in a normal election, but it's there as a safety.
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way. You vote for a small portion of the big vote, but you have a much bigger contribution to your portion of the vote compared to if you just had a general popular election.
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest. Basically, if we go to a direct-election system, we might as well change the position's title from "president" to "homecoming king".
Of course, even though it's not that hard to understand, no one in this country even has the sense of civic duty to remember how it works after they've been told ninety times. Now, in this election, there's been more talk than ever about getting rid of it...
Well, actually it just seems that way... because the media is really hyping that up now. Why? Because Gore won the popular vote and may not win the election! If it were the other way around, would there be a commotion this big? No. The media, no offense to Democrats, are a bunch of stupid liberals who insert craploads of bias into news reports and try to get the American public to think on the side of the Democrats. I don't want to get into it (it would make a great IRC session in the future to discuss this), but there's a lot of "coincidences" in major media reports that show a subtle but nauseating bias... Hence how Dubya looks like a complete moron but no one thinks it's a big deal that Gore is a pathological liar. (Disclaimer: I prefer neither candidate nor party in terms of the election... I think they both suck) Anyway, the Electoral College didn't swing in their favor, and the media now wants to cry foul over the whole system after 200 years... just like Gore wants a whole county in Florida to vote again because 19,000 don't know how to vote. (And, after the fact, probably shouldn't be voting either) It's convenient to make a big scene over something when you didn't get your way.
Folks, the success of the Electoral College is PROVEN by this election. Gore won the popular vote by less than 200,000 votes overall - when almost 100,000,000 people voted. That's a 0.2% margin. Meanwhile, Bush got 29 states to Gore's 20 - almost a 20% lead. But Gore has more Electoral Votes (leaving Florida) - just not enough to win the election. In an election this close, between two candidates that are both unsatisfactory, it's probably best that something random and meaningless decides it - that is, the recount of the votes in Florida. Bush could have gotten another 200,000 votes easily had he campaigned strongly in New York and California... however, the country doesn't revolve around New York and California (maybe New York, perhaps
Oh, the Electoral College, in this case, is making up for the fact that our nightly newscasts and talk shows were filled with video clips of mispronounced words, unsubstantiated reports about heavy drug use, and jokes about "being led around by daddy" referencing our Republican candidate. In an election this close, it's proper payback to assume that the 200,000 vote gap might have swung the other way because of the disgraceful slanderous media coverage.
Then again, if this were Bush vs. Bradley, I'd probably be outraged right now. But Bradley was another one that the media viciously killed right away, so badly and obviously that Bush should consider himself lucky. But hey, that's what you get when you aren't a party puppet like Gore is.
McCain learned the same lesson in the other party, as well...
I see a couple problems with this:
1) security: Very difficult to have an audit on a system such as this.
2) States Rights: Some states may adopt a system such as this, but remember even votes for Federal positions are state votes. Systems decisions are made on the state or local level, not on the federal level.
3) Cost: Most states won't shell out the bucks to put in a system like this. There are a lot of polling places in the US.
But the point is well taken: Someone should invent a better mousetrap.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
I think the whole point of armchair evaluation of user interface ( conputer or non, off/online) is wrongheaded. Any user interface will confuse the odd person. When designing a user interface, to say "anyone who fails to get it is a moron" is counterproductive. What should be done is take a preliminary decision about what percentage of user mistakes is acceptable relative to the cost of prevention. Then you test your design by measuring actual users in action. IMHO, a ballot that confuses 4% of the voters is way unacceptable, even though it may look to you or me that anyone who got confused is totally dumb.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
And we need someone to head the program. Someone really popular and smart. Someone universally recognized. I nominate Bill Gates.
No, they are not. Wyoming has less than 450,000 people and gets 3 electors, while California has over 30,000,000 people and gets 54 electors. I leave the math as an exercise to the reader because I'm too lazy.
Yes, each state gets an extra 2 votes, which does make smaller states more important. I forgot that. Nonetheless, the electoral college system makes whole regions irrelevant in the larger states, if they are in the minority: their vote is cast with the majority whether they like it or not. At the very least it would make more sense for every state to split up their votes at the congressional district level.
So by this system, at times the smaller states have influence far out of proportion to their populations, and at other times they are made completely irrelevant because one candidate can get over 50% support in a small number of populous states.
If anything, this just makes the results more random and unfair.
Arguably, the Electorial college is made up of well educated, intelligent people who can comprehend the instructions on a ballot.
But they are selected for loyalty by the party they are supposed to be voting for. Who they are voting for is a foregone conclusion, and in reality they are nothing more than minor functionaries in a vote-pooling system. Any argument for this system based on them changing their votes against what they promised is ridiculous and should be ignored.
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OK, if you're ready for some analysis on why the electoral college is good, look at http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm.
Excerpts:
A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. "If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote," Natapoff says, "in 100,000 votes he's almost sure to win. And that's bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn't make any difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house."
Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we'll have an electoral "anomaly"--a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. "We were blinded by its minor vices," he says. "All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected," temporarily. What doesn't happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn't celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn't find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.
America still has a rather large problem with people over 50 being technilogicaly illiterate. With the brief work I've had showing computers to the elderly, a entirely electronic system is a great way to keep track of the ballots, but it isolates part of the population...
Time to imagine a short scenario, imagine you've just turned 71, the 20XX elections have rolled around. They're asking you to vote on that toy that your grandson plays with, the one with all the keys, and the lights. This doesn't seem to good, I mean what if you break it, they're worth alot of money right? And don't people say they're hard to learn, when the people that say its easy never teach. Ah! wait, they say its only a touch screen, with very large buttons (this one goes one of two ways normaly, in my limited experience) (Way one)Well, I don't know, the buttons are easy for me to see and all that, but I don't know if I can use this touch-screen... it has to be more complicated than this, I'll go home, read up on it a bit, and wait until the next local election to practice. Then next presidential election I can do it.(Note:this pattern of thoughts never gets broken without some help on the part of other, help most of these poor souls never recieve), (Way two) So, the buttons are big enough for my bad eyes, the layout is simple enough for my feeble comprehension, its no a ballot, its a large joke to insult my intelligence.
Answer one simple question to yourself when you debate technilogical advances that border on rewriting a part of american living, is it simple and non-frightening enough for everyone, yet not dumbed down to the point of being insulting.
--And the penguin looked towards me and said: "Slide!"
The proposal in Slashdot's story has major flaws. The biggest flaw is there's no proof of how people voted. So the machine says it got 739 votes for Mr. Smith. How do voters know that's true? We trust the programmer? Nobody snuck a new PROM into the machine?
Paper ballots can be counted and recounted. You can go at the beginning of the day and see the box starts empty. You can watch during the day and see that only ballots given at the registration desk are put into it. You can watch them open up and count it at the end of the day.
Those machines with the levers are a little more difficult to authenticate, but, because they are mechanical, they are also hard to alter in ways that cannot be detected. They don't have a complicated invisible program that only the engineers understand.
Bottom line: The voting system has to include a method of proving that as many people voted for Mr. Smith as the system says. Touch screens don't do it.
Electronic solutions are still possible. The voter registrar could give each voter a cryptographic token. The cryptographic token can be anonymized without interfering with its authentification. (E.g., Chaum's digital money which can still be authenticated as issued by a particular bank without any sign of which customer it was given to.) That token can then be given, anonymously, not to central machine but to a candidate or their agent. Then the candidate can register the token with the government agent who counts votes.
Because the candidate receives vote tokens from the voters, the candidate knows, and can prove, how many votes they got. The government agent should publish the list of vote tokens, so anybody who wants to can verify each one bears the authentication of the voter registrar, proving there were no extra votes. Every voter knows their vote counted because they gave it to the candidate they chose.
There must still be control of how the registrar gives out tokens. This corresponds not to the voter registration process at the town hall, but to the registration desk at the voting place. Any person who chooses must be allowed to watch all the tokens being given out -- they must be allowed to see each token is given to a person who proves their eligibility to vote (residence, et cetera).
When this is done right, the public will know only people who were entitled to vote voted, that every vote cast was counted, and that no votes not cast by an eligible voter were counted.
I'm sure I'm missing a few points, but that only demonstrates how difficult proper voting is.
here is a link to a simulation of the voting booth use in Brazil. www.eleicoes2000.gov.br/urna/simulacao/Tela.html
The U.S. process of democracy is working fine the way it is! No need to bring in entirely digital ballots. Let's not lose focus here. Everyone has fair access to the voting process, every vote is fairly counted--even if it takes a long time to count, if by-hand. The problem is people want everything here and now and are not patient. Be patient people, we will have a President-elect, no need to have that instant gratification. I'd rather that we prudently wait and meticulously count than have an electronic process that is less than perfect. The process is not broken! No need to fix it!
Linux at home
And, as was the case this Sept in the School Board election in which I was in, if 'write-in' appears to have won a position then the write-in's need to be looked at by hand to determine who got exactly how many write-in votes -- and in fact, someone did win via write-in.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
First, no miscounts. Every ballot gets counted, every ballot gets counted correctly. A recount would be meaningless.
Second, spoiled ballots would be obvious. Spoiling a ballot is a political choice, and would have to be supported by any electronic system. The difference? No chance of miscounting spoiled ballots, and less chance of accidentally spoiling a ballot.
As for Florida, we're no better off. A poorly designed electronic ballot could be confusing. We know what the votes said, but there's nothing we can do about it. We can't recount to get the right answer, because the ballots are good, they just don't say what the people who voted want them to say. A revote wouldn't work either, because voting demographics would change drastically if it was suddenly up to one county to determine the next president. The only plus is that with electronic ballots, it would be easier to make and maintain national standards.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
You're missing the key point. Cost. You want to jump from pen and paper (or punch cards) straight to computerized tallies. I agree with all the points made regarding security, feasability, etc. but it would just be too expensive for many parts of the country.
I remember when I was a little kid years ago and my mother or father would drag me along when they went to vote. They had the booth with the sliding curtain and levers to move in order to select your candidates. Then when you pulled the Big Red Lever to open the curtain, your choices were recorded and the levers reset themselves. I thought ALL places voted like this using similar machines. I was SHOCKED when I discovered that in many parts of the country people actually were still using paper and depositing their ballots in actual *boxes*. That struck me as absurdly backwards.
Then I came to realize that those machines cost money and since elections are basically state-by-state, county-by-county affairs that not every county could afford those machines. Levels of government above the county level don't just buy them for you. I guess the real question is how much would a computerized system cost? Could they be produced for less than the cost of a mechanical booth with levers? Even if they could, and it might be possible, you would still have to convince the local election boards to buy them. They've avoided the "standard" voting booths because of cost issues. What makes you think they'll spring for computerized systems?
The county of Riverside, CA is already using computers. They have touch screens that people use in the booth. No paper, no puch-cards. Just a computer touch screen. :) Here is the article on the machines.
I don't see how a system can be designed that would not be challenged by the DNC/NAACP (to me they are the same)
THIS VERY DAY these people are now DEMANDING A HAND COUNTING!
If computer counting is not good enough today, what makes you think that these groups will allow for an automated system as proposed. That system takes too much control out of their hands, let alone the fact its secure. Being secure means less chance of a court allowing a challenge on esoteric claims.
I would love to have a system whereby each every citizen can vote. I would also propose that votes be spread out across 3 days without ANY hint of the current outcome. Basically the fault with our system is that results are being reported, and those results are broadcast to the areas still voting.
The ideas expressed are all very good (especially like that Brazil idea), but honestly it won't fly because it would be the DNC that would not sanction it. (btw - I voted mixed, but no Democrat got my vote)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
However voting over the internet from home, even if it can be made 100% fraud- and glitch-proof, cannot be proved trustworthy to the majority of citizens, at least not yet. Why not switch over to a fully electronic system at the polling place.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
You sound like an idiot, claiming the DNC and the NAACP but not the RNC want a flawed voting system.
The biggest flaw in your logic is that you seem to equate an automated system with security. The fact is that any automated system can be tampered with, if you are allowed physical access to the equipment. The history of "machine" politics gives plenty of examples. Computerized systems could be reprogrammed to alter votes however one would like, and (in theory) erase evidence of the rogue code. Mechanical systems can simply arrive in "hostile" districts DOA. Other weaknesses are legion.
(Go visit the RISKS archives and get an education on the subject.)
To be blunt, paper ballots, either punched or marked, is probably the most secure and reliable voting system available. As long as the ballots are physically available, the voters can vote the way they want. And, it leaves a physical record for later examination, which an automated system would not.
Now, what's going on in Florida does show that there needs to be some work done on usability standards for paper ballots. Some people have been whining that if people are too stupid to know which hole to punch, we shouldn't care how they've voted. Given the number of invalidated ballots from both this and previous elections I suspect that a major problem might simply be that the vision of the elderly voters has degraded to the point where they couldn't see the correct place to punch, no matter how lucid they might be.
Here's a proposal: Standarize the size of every entry on the ballot AND the relative location of the spot to mark/punch. This would allow voters to use a common "guide", with a window to highlight a single entry, with a smaller notch for those requiring a yes/no decision, and a single hole for marking/punching.
I agree, voting should take place on more than one day. Keep the polls open later, too. That would reduce problems with the polls closing while people are still in line waiting to vote.
But be honest, if it were Al Gore who was ahead by a few hundred votes, wouldn't the republicans be making exactly the same challenges?
There are other ways than cards or computers- In NJ we have had voting machines with levers since I was a kid. I didn't even know that anyone used cards until this election.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Seriously.
Try to think about this one-it's actually pretty simple (unless it's done by hand). We need to be able to RANK our votes. Mine would go like this - 1. Nader, 2. Gore, 3. Harry Browne. This way, if my #1 pick doesn't win, my vote goes to Gore instead, since I would really prefer him over Bush any day. In this system, no one would have the excuse of being afraid of wasting their vote, thereby solving the 2 party monopoly on our gov't.
If this happened, in the present circumstances, Nader would've gotten well over 5%, and Gore would be acknowledged for what he is - by far, the popular winner!
Search for Instant Runoff Vote or IRV to find others who agree with this.
Forget about voting from home, let's just modernize the process at the voting centers.
The perfect solution would be some big, color, touchscreen LCDs. These would display in large fonts the candidates names and pictures, seperated into big blocks (senior citizen friendly).
When you selected a candidate, you'd get a new screen with Al Gore's beautiful face and a "Are you sure you want to vote for Al Gore?" prompt , plus two huge YES/NO buttons (green for YES, red for NO).
This would end this rediculous scene of counting paper ballots by hand. There would be NO mistaking who you want to vote for, and the votes could be INSTANTLY counted in real-time. Recounts would never be necessary.
Just my two cents, for what its worth.
Other excerpts:
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
This year we had continuous polls for several months before the election, announcing changes that were not statistically significant on the front page of each day's newspaper. ISTM that this turned the election into a sport, and caused voters not strongly affiliated with a party to choose sides too quickly. Politicians, who were also watching the polls, refused to take serious stands on many issues because they were only worried about the centrists' reactions to what they say, and reactions to the changes in poll numbers.
Then we had exit polls and instant results on Tuesday. Of course the TV networks did it: each network got more viewers, and the election came out so close partly as a result of people watching the count and then deciding whether to vote, or whether to vote for Nader.
Now we have a tense situation where one half or the other of the population is going to be really pissed no matter it is resolved.
--
The shareholder is always right.
- Hash the password agains a sequence of numbers - your SSN, Driver's License, something personal. Treate it like a PGP block, create a string 80 characters long that requires other information from you.
- So can my mail-delivered PC Banking ID's, my credit card statements, and a lot of other sensitive documents with important numbers. what's the going price for your latest CC statement?
- The set up SSH/SHTTP/whatever endrypted connections that talk to a bank of central computers that check off people as they vote. Trivial, once the voter ID hash is calculated, only the original number needs be registered back at "home base".
The social engineering attacks on voter ID cards are the same attachs that you can use to get almost ANY personal information.This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
http://www.tecsoc.org/govpol/focus net vote.htm
Also, I have created a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" game on my personal Web site that lets users explore the possibilities for what will happen next to resolve this year's election -- including a decision in the House of Representatives, and "faithless" electors in the Electoral College.
http://ortelius.cartographe r.c om/elect2000/elect.htm
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
I'm not going to argue scemantics, here. I know we're a republic, it's been said so many times that I think I'll be dreaming about it for weeks. It's irrelevant. We call ourselves the leaders of the free world, and here we are squabbling over 300 votes out of MILLIONS.
The US is being laughed at heartily, make no mistake. My point is still valid. We need to start putting our money where our mouth is. After, of course, we pull our pants back up.
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Look at the mess in Florida, and imagine that the voting there had been done 100% by electronic means. How would you deal with people who claim to have voted for the wrong candidate because the ballot was confusing?
Even worse, how would you deal with a hacked voting station? Security only goes so far; eventually a precinct would be hacked. With e-voting, there'd be no way to recount the ballots, no way to sort "good" ballots from "bad" ones, no way to identify which votes were bogus -- because there wouldn't be votes, just data.
Now, look at the precincts in Florida who finished their recounts within a few hours. What did they use? Good old fill-it-out-with-a-#2-pencil OPSCAN forms, just like you use with the SATs. Sure, the ballots are counted by machine, but there are ballots to be counted.
Food for thought.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
It is possible that I've spoken too soon, but...
1) CNN seems to have taken considerable care not to say that any of those 19,000 mispunched ballots resulted in that person's vote being lost, nor have I seen anyone else make that claim.
2) I've asked almost literally everyone I know, and none have ever seen a voting maching that didn't instantly give an indication of a misvote. In particular where I voted, the machine spit invalid ballots out if you try to insert a bad one.
See that "Preview" button?
Just as an aside on the conecept of anonymity of the people that vote:
We don't have that today. In most every state I know of, the specific voter's name and address can be traced from their ballot.. For example, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where I am), this is what I did when I voted:
1) fill out a voter application form (small) with my name and address
2) have the election people look at my application and cross my name off the list of registered voters
3) they gave me a ballot, with an ID number, and wrote that ID number on my application
4) I voted (by filling in lines with a marker, in case you care)
5) I handed my ballot (and application, with the ballot ID written on it) to the election people, who scanned it into a computer and filed it away
Moral is, they can trace my completed ballot back to my name, if they want to. I believe that most every state works this way. Moreover, I think every state SHOULD work this way.
Personally, I think that anonymity from most other people is all that is required for an election. I think it is fairly important for the election officials to be able to trace individual votes down to the individuals who cast them. This is very useful in the classic case of ballot stuffing, where someone votes for someone who died in between registering to vote and the actual election.
Anyway, just my 2 cents on the anonimity issue that is being brought up by folks..
The best ideas I've heard so far are:
In summary, an all electronic solution is completely stupid and will ruin this country. Thank you for your time.
----------------------------------------------
There are three basic requirements for elections:
1. Inability for an observer to determine the vote of a particular voter.
2. Inability of the *voter* to prove his vote to an observer (special case of 1).
3. Ability of the voter to verify that his vote was included in the total.
4. Ability to prove that no non-voters were included in the total.
Current physical election systems give us 1 and 2, and to a lesser degree 4. (Compare voter rolls with totals). Electronic systems can (with strong cryptography) give us all four properties, *but* physical security of the voting place is still required to enforce 1 and 2 -- otherwise someone can look over the voter's shoulder. Failure of properties 1 and 2 opens the system up to vote buying and other fraud. Not a good thing.
So, I'd against "vote at home" scheme. But I would like to see electronic voting sceheme, because it would allow property 3. Every Florida voter would *love* to be able to verify that *their* vote was cast and counted, but in the current system this is impossible.
[
For the same reason we have an electoral college: the founding fathers wanted the states to be more autonomous. They were afraid of a totally centralized guvmint. I agree with you, I think it's somewhat wasteful to have 50 different ways of doing everything (driver's licenses, voting methods, etc.), but to quote Bruce Hornsby: "That's just the way it is, some things will never change"
I am not nearly into the details of hacking/cracking methods as many /.ers seem to be, but couldn't one senerio go like this:
A DNS server is cracked and made to direct at home voters to a phoney site, (perhaps in some 3rd world country), where an apparently genuine ballot is displayed. The voter supplies his correct pw, marks the ballot and hits submit. The fake system now logs into the real vote server and uses the voter's authentic pw to cast an entirely different vote. Later the logs on the DNS server are doctored and that machine restored to normal operation. Where is the evidence of the fraud to be found?
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
That depends on how you look at it. By using the electoral college, the outcome from my state is the same if I stay home as it is when I vote.
I live in a state that would vote for a rock if it ran as a republican. No democratic candidate has a chance. Registered republicans outnumber registered democrats 3 to 1.
I knew when I went to the booth my vote meant nothing.
If it were popular vote however, my vote would have added one more to the total instead of 0 to the total.
Popular vote would also increase voter turnout. I know people who don't even vote anymore because they're outnumbered so badly.
If we take anything into the new century it should be respect for nature.
Anyways, with an electronic election system you would probably not need to worry about bears disrupting the system (unless one bites through a power cable or something) but what about the lowly bug. What confidence do we have that even a minute bug wouldn't mess up the election results?
I think it should always be possible to count votes by hand as a final backup otherwise you give the system too much power and that leaves it open for abuse. And with the money that goes around in elections ($3 billion this year) there should be plenty of people with motives to tamper with it.
Perhaps digital signatures such as in PGP could be incorporated somehow with the webform. People could be e-mailed their government identification key, and snail mailed their password. If a system was decided on, it could be used for many more things than voting.
Just a thought...
Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
Damn right - I mean, look what the monorail has done for Ogdenville, Brockway, and North Haverbrook. It put them on the map!
(singing) Monorail, Monorail, Monorail!
Mono-D'oh!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?
Not all 14 year olds have grown up with computers.
Of course, then people who don't have bank cards can't vote there.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
You just needed a Number 2 or appropriate pencil and a hole puncher. To vote: Fill in the appropriate hole (standardized test style) and punch the other hole. All the ballots are then scanned into the computer where a program will read the scanned documents and tally the results. If there is a power outage or a quesioning of the computer, the paper ballots may still be hand counted. The county in question did not have any discrepancy in vote count.
The current system, for all its flaws, is a lot safer than anything running over the net.
I would love to see punchcard ballots replaced, but we want to be sure we replace them with something *actually* more reliable, not just something that might well be more reliable.
On the other "modernization" issue: The electoral college is a good thing, because without it, no one outside of CA, NY, FL, PA, and TX matters.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
A few people have pointed out the equality question already. Those with computers would have an easier time voting in the nude than those without. (Unless they wanted to walk into the polling place naked, in which case they would probably be arrested for public indecency.) That is certainly a valid issue, but I would take it a step further. Voting should require effort.
If you care enough about your country and who the President/Senator/Congressman/Mayor/whoever is up for election this time is, walking or driving 2 blocks to the polling place is not a huge favor to ask. If you don't have the mental fortitude or interest to stand up, put on clothing other than your pajamas, and travel a whole 5 minutes (very often considerably less, about 30 seconds for me) to the polling place, then I don't want you voting. If you are that disinterested, then go away.
Yes, some people are unable to get to the polling place. People who are crippled, in the hospital, or otherwise incapacitated can't do that. Currently, they arrange to have an election judge come to their house and take their vote there. There's nothing wrong with that, as there aren't a huge number of people in that category. (And in the case of a hospital, they're all in the same place so they're easy to get to.) We can just continue doing that.
I do support a move to computerized voting, but not remotely. You should still have to come into a polling place. What computerized voting offers us is the ability to go to ANY polling place, not just the one that is next to your house but 50 miles from your place of work. Specifically:
All polling places have a series of terminals (booths) setup, all connected to a dedicated, private, county- or state-wide network (preferably state-wide). Someone above suggested using a token or disposeable smart card issued by the election judge at the polling place to grant access, and that works fine. You can then go to ANY polling place in your county/state, and present the election judge with your voter registration card. The judge then checks in the computer that you are a registered voter in the precinct that your card says you are, and if so hands you your smart card, which is automatically coded for your precinct. You then take that card to the booth/terminal, insert it, and the system displays the appropriate ballot for your area. (Remember, every ward had a slightly different ballot for more local elections like mayor, alderman, etc.) You select the candidates of your choice from the very well designed touch-screen interface, and it also confirms your choices for you. When you click submit, your vote is recorded back to the local server. The card is blanked, and you can even use it as your voting receipt.
The advantage is that since the ballot is targeted to you based on your precinct, you can vote from any precinct in the voting area. So you can vote from the polling place down the street from your house, OR the one next to the place where you have lunch downtown by your office, OR downstairs at the post office, OR at any polling place in the state. That makes it easier for those who DO WANT to vote to do so. It's also then equally accessible to any economic level, because no matter who you are, you have to walk at least/only 1-5 blocks to go vote.
Electronic voting would also get rid of the "double-punch" issue. There's one big button for each candidate that you select, and the software makes double-selecting impossible. (Except for those ballots where you are supposed to select X number, such as school board or park board.)
As long as you use a closed, prioprietary network, it would be no less secure than paper balloting. Yes, you could potentially steal some smart cards and code them yourself, but you can also steal punch cards. Yes, you could hack the network, if you could somehow get physical access to it (it's not connected to the Internet, the same way that the bank network is not connected), but you can also drill a hole in the wooden box and stick cards through. There is no 100% secure method, but it would be no less secure that what we do now, and if done right would be more secure.
As to the question of candidate pictures, I'd have to say no. Elections are enough of a popularity contest as is. Do you really want some backwoods hick from Podunk to refuse to vote for this "Colin Powel" person just because he's black? (Or a black racist refuse to vote for someone just because he's white? Both are equally a problem.) Yeah, you already have a problem with the name itself to an extent, but let's not make it any worse than it is already.
IF we do it right, computerized balloting can be extremely advantageous. Of course, that's a big if. That goes for any application of technology. It can be done right and make life easier for everyone, or can be done wrong and screw everyone over. That's why you have to be careful.
--GrouchoMarx
My other account is CmdrTaco
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
You go to the poll, they hand you a card with a magnetic strip on the back. You scan it through the machine, make your vote (electronically) and then the card is useless (preventing people from using them more than once.) And, in order to get a card, you must have been registered to vote. Oh yeah -- and it asks you three times:
Are you sure?
Are you really sure?
Are you sure you're sure?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Let's ask the audience. Who wants to be a millionaire electronic voting seems fairly straightforward. Let's use their system!
Anyway, whatever happenned to the simplest solution is the best one? At my voting precinct it was a bubble ballot and a #2 pencil. Anyone who is unable to comprehend the simplicity of that needs serious help. And of course they are tallied by an electronic scanner that counts them (gasp) like a computer.
I sorta like
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I've wanted something like that for years. (Actually, I wanted the raw punchcard data to go onto the net as a downloadable file.) Just raw card images in the order the cards hit the reader. Then you could:
- check that a ballot voted exactly your way appeared.
- get together with other supporters of your candidate and check that you all got counted
- check that the software crunching up the official tally followed the rules
- look for anomalies that might suggest voter fraud (such as a long run of identical ballots)
- look for anomalies that might suggest handling error (such as a repeated run of cards, suggesting that one deck went in the reader twice and another was missed)
and so on.
I have heard that there may be legal problems with getting this data published. Apparently this has been blocked by courts or legislation in the past, in an attempt to impeed vote-buying. (The raw data can be used by vote buyers to check that the sellers kept their part of the bargain.)
But it seems to me that concerned citizens wishing to determine that computer-aided vote fraud is absent would have an overriding interest in the open publication of the data. And that argument might be used to overturn any previous impediments.
FOIA, anyone? B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
End the political charade. Replace government with warriors insurance.
Seastead this.
Check the informations on Brasilian election. No one, and when I say no one I mean it, contested the results of our last election and it was 100% electronic.
The electorial justice suplied enough information about the software used to make all the partys confident that fraud is impossible. The data stored in the electonic booth is strong encripted and saved in three medias: floppy disk, hard drive and flash memory. When the election is finished the booths are removed to the office of the electoral justice by the chief of the electoral with police escort and one or more volunteer of the parties involved, to ensure the booth will remain intact.
At the electoral justice only the floppy disk is removed and loaded into the mainframe for counting. In caso of problems with the disk another one can be created from the data stored in the booth's flash memory.
We've been testing this system for several years now, and no one found a way to fraud it.
What ? Me, worry ?
The ballot box was a Pentium PC with an LCD display, a numeric keypad, flashcard, and battery backup power. The voter punched the candidate's number and the name appeared on the screen, along with the candidate's picture and party name. Then the voter pressed a green key to confirm the vote or orange to erase and start again. There was also a white key for a blank vote. The "section president" (me) enabled the computer for each vote using a separate keypad.
Votes were stored to the flashcard immediately. After the voting closed, the PC printed in a built-in thermal printer the results, and print-outs were given to any party representatives who were present. Another copy of the result was pasted to the precinct door. I then delivered the PC, with the flash card containing the result, to a Justice officer from the electoral court.
Spare PCs were available for cases of hardware failure, and old fashioned paper ballots were also available, for cases of prolonged power outages.
This method was used in all Brazil this year. In some places the ballot boxes were delivered to the voting precincts carried in dug-out canoes.
Perhaps the system in USA would be more advanced if they hadn't been the first to adopt electronic counting. Seeing those people carrying punched cards in the TV brought me some deja-vu feelings. Last time I saw a punched card being used for computer input was in 1979.
My main concern for this method of voting is is that the ammount of fraudulant voting would skyrocket. You can't have two voting systems (internet/ballot). You must use one. Imagine this scenario:
Old lady isn't compitent to vote. Caretaker (presumably family member) gets her password and casts the vote 'for' the old lady.
or
Vote twice! Get your password, log on and vote. Then head to the polls to vote too. After all, whos going to be able to know if you voted twice.
or
Mail does get tampered with, or passwords are cracked, and votes just come roaring in. By who? Are they citizens? Are they even from 18+ year olds?
Face it, it's going to be a long time before we can vote from our own living rooms--excluding absentee voteing of course. The system as it is isn't very secure, but lets face it, you're not as inclined to fraudulently vote if you have to show up in person at the polls to do it.
NMG
Why couldn't the same sort of confusion created on the Palm Beach County ballot be done just as easily on a computer?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I've been trying to decide how I feel about this whole electoral college thing too. Here are a couple of reasons why I think that we should keep it:
Correspondingly, rural citizens tend to have very similar biases, and considering that some of those rural citizens do important things like feeding the rest of us, should we really just be ignoring them?
Not everything in this nation is decided by a simple majority. We try to consider the rights of minority groups so that no group's voice is drowned out by the majority. Sure, it's a balance - since the minority groups shouldn't be leading us either - but that balance is important to maintain.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
This year's election has been won by the LAWYERS.
Another argument for a better system for 2004.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
In the early 1990's, I moved to California, so now I vote with the Untrusty Punchcard System, which has always seemed incredibly primitive and inaccurate to me. (I'm always afraid I'm going to screw up voting on the last proposition and will have to get a new ballot and start over. Even worse, it's really hard to verify visually that you have punched your card correctly at all, which is of course part of what bit the Florida Buchanan voters.)
With all the discussion in this thread about:
Punchcards - primitive and error-prone
Computer voting - hi-tech and error/fraud-prone
Should we consider a middleground - mechanical technology?
This whole idea of the Electoral college changing their vote has got to be the craziest idea I have ever heard. Most states actually have a fine/jail time system built up for delegates who do not vote as they have been elected to. Besides, if anyone found out that the delegates had not voted as they should, we would probably see a series of stonings. The delegates are usually intelligent people who realize that they wouldn't survive very long after casting their ballots.
In a country where technology and communication have outgrown anything that our founding fathers could have dreamed of in their wildest dreams, I find it funny that we are using such an archaic and obsolete system as the Electoral College. It has outlived its day, the founding father's realized it would, and that is why they built in a system that allows us to make changes to the constitution. As long as we're talking about making changes to the actual ballot, I really think it's time to rethink the entire process. If you're going to fix one thing, you might as well fix it all while you're at it.
Based on my experience as the following things:
1. A mechanic who worked on control equipment in the Navy
2. A computer programmer.
3. A poll watcher for a major political party
I think the best choice is the mechanical voting machine. A relative of the mechanical adding it works this way for those unfamiliar with it:
1. You pull the lever that closes the curtain and at the same time reset the counting machinery.
2. You pull down levers for each race for the candidate of your choice...you can change your mind.
3. When done you pull the lever and your is added to each candidate selected (mechanical interlocks limit you to one choice per race) and the levers are raised.
Esentally each candidate has a mechanical adding machine which only has a one key but all the machines use the same cylinder.
When it is time to count the vote, the machine is 'locked down' where a bar is locked on place to stop the cylinder from rotating, the back of the machine opened and each individual candidates adding machine read...
In my opinion it is simpler and more reliable than a similarly designed computer system would be, is less prone to mistakes than paper ballots and probably harder to defraud them both.
Sometimes electronics is not the best choice.
Herb
Herb
Again, feel free to sentence me to death if my questions annoy you. I'll come back in 5 minutes anyway. -Sythi
First of all, what are you even doing on Slashdot saying this? Everytime you go to the bank, do want to fill out a deposit/withdrawal slip, wait in line, & then have somebody process it. NO, YOU WANT TO USE THE FUCKING ATM. Scantrons!--You are smoking some good pot there, aren't you?
While I agree that there are things wrong with the system we have, 2004 seems an awfully long time to wait to find out if Dubya really won Florida. Even recounting the ballots by hand shouldn't take that long ... should it?
</sarcasm>
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Dear Florida Lottery Commissioner:
I am writing to protest the results of the recent lottery drawing. The winning numbers were 07-12-23-29-36-42.
Of course, these were the numbers I intended to play, however your lottery card was so confusing that I accidentally filled in circles for 02-09-16-27-35-49.
As you can imagine, I was quite surprised when the numbers I meant to play won, but I was told that the numbers in my possession were not winning numbers. This is completely unacceptable and I ask that you immediately declare me a winner and send me a check for my winnings. I believe that being the sole winner, I am entitled to the full 63 million dollars in this drawing.
My attorney feels that there is an excellent precedent (set by your election commissioner) for me to file a claim for damages since your card is not easy to understand.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(B.)
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The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
--Stolen & Unat
Let's take fraud out of the equation for a moment, and answer this question, do you know whom you voted for this year. If you voted, the answer is no. What you do know is whom you think you voted for.
After you fill in your ballot, the only person who checks your work is you. If you don't fully realize the potential for error, you are not likely to realize you made a mistake. If there had been some way for people in Palm Beach County to verify their ballots before they put them in the ballot box, there probably wouldn't be 19,000 invalid ballots for president.
Just as an analogy, when writing if you misspell a word that you are certain you know how to spell, do you look the word up in the dictionary? Of course not, which is one reason we have spell-checkers.
Given that a misspelled word is generally much more trivial than a miscast vote. Doesn't it make sense to have some sort of vote checker?
My other sig is extremely clever...
That's a mechanism for recording who has voted. (everyone who is registered and can no longer vote)
a joke right?