Slashdot Mirror
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
;
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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
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.
-
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.
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.
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
One word...braille.
It's not like a blind voter could use a touchscreen, after all.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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.
--------
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.
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.)
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.
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
It's better than sitting at home and being counted as just another citizen who doesn't give a damn. A large number of spoiled ballots would at least get some attention. Lots of them would raise the question of whether votes were being counted properly (during the Quebec referrendum it was alleged that, in some "Non"-leaning regions, the vote counters were told to find any excuse they could to discard a ballot as spoiled). It could force a recount, which if done deliberately would be a real "fuck you" to the system.
AFAICS currently the only way to "abstain" is to stay at home. If you dislike all of the candidates, your only options are to vote for someone you don't want to vote for (implicit acceptance of the system), stay at home (abstaining by apathy), or you could spoil your ballot in protest.
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.
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
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
What's the difference between this & just adjusting the threshhold of a popular vote from 50% to some other value?
*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.
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?)
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
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
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?
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
... 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
/.
/. 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.
----------
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 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.
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.
"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
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.
--
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
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.
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
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.
-------
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.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
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
---- Hey Grrl Geeks! Your very own geek news site has arrived!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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%.
--
--
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)
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
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
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.
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
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
"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).
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
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
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!
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:
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
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!)
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
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 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.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
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.
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.
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?
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
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
...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...
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.
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
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.
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
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
Technology is not the solution to all problems. --locust
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
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
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
I agree with timothy on this one - the interface to current voting machines needs to go.
"Take off, you knob."
"No, you take off, you hoser."
BilldaCat
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 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
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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
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?
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 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.
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.
It's not a car for christ sake, it's the method by which we participate in society, and the underlying principle to this method is that each citizen has exactly ONE vote, no more no less, to be used by themselves and themselves only, no matter how rich or poor they may be.
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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...
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
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.
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
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
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
The punch-card system (which is used in *many* places around the country) is known to not be accurate.
Well, I wasn't really supporting the existing system.. In fact, I think paper cards are diplorable. By I tried to argue that there are better ways than computers to do simple incremental arithmetic.. My state of Delaware, for example, uses a big electronic shmorgasboard.. More expensive than a simple Kiosk, I'm sure, but it has fewer components than a computer (namely each line of code).
A touch-screen system would be much more accurate for many reasons. It could give feedback to the voter (confirming the voter's choices) which would have eliminated this whole mess in Palm Beach County.
Again, I sorry if I sounded like I was supporting the existing system.. Delaware's system provides flashing lights as feed-back as well.. Plus there are physical push-buttons, which tend to make people happier.
You also seem to be confusing the cost of the *campaigns* with the cost of the *election process*. These are two completely different things.
Yes and no.. I did make a seperate reference to government and state-run election processes. I was blending the opinions of political expenditures which probably didn't belong. In Delaware, we're pretty rich per capita, so we could afford to buy our [supposedly] expensive machines. A poorer state with a sigificant population might simply not be able to afford it.. Who's to say? THE TAXPAYING CITIZENS. I'm sure that the Delaware senate voted on our election system.. Likewise, Florida will most likely vote on a new system (after such negative controversy with the existing system). They'll figure out what's best for them.. And who knows.. Maybe the'll like touch screens.
Sure, each piece of paper costs very little, but you actually have to *print* on them which costs more. Plus, you have to print *millions* of them. All paper ballots are counted by machines already, and those machines are, in many places, *really* old. They need to be replaced. Those machines aren't cheap.
Well, you only need a handfull of printers and readers, where-as you need hundreds of computer terminals. I can't imagine that printed paper is more expensive than hardware though.. Look at Junkmail! I'm really just playign the Devil's advocate here.. I really don't want anyone to use a paper system.. I'm just saying that I highly doubt that an electronic system will be more cost effective... As you pointed out, Cost isn't always a factor, but as I tried to suggest, sometimes it is.
As these old systems are replaced, they shoudl be replaced with easier to use, more reliable systems. This seems like a no-brainer to me
I totally agree with increasing reliability and ease of use (voting should be idiot simple and fool proof.. This is the ot's man!!) However, as I tried to point out.. A superficial look into the situation isn't sufficient to declare what's best for everybody. And thankfully because of state jurisdiction, no single organization will be able to be an imposition. Each state, and then each district will decide for themselves what's the most cost effective way to prevent Palm beach from happening again.
Personally, I'm biased towards hardware.. Use as little software as possible.. Fewer chances for problems. A mechanical drive train only has a few possible problems.. An electric 4 wheel drive vehicle with computer control could have any number of problems... Especially when you leave the air-conditioned server room environment, and hit the mud slapping -30 to 120 degree, shock-UNobsorbed real world..
-Michael
-Michael
If I was an employer, I could fire anyone who exhibited political sympathies that I found to be objectionable, such as voting for a candidate who supported the labor or enviromental movement.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And I'm also not sure what leads you to believe that ink marks on paper are any more immune to fraud and tampering than cryptographically signed records on three redundant storage media.
--
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
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...
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.
--------
Should there be a price tag on the democratic system?
Um.. I'd say yes.. We spend entirely too much on the election system as it is.. 60Million to win a NJ seat... I'd be curious to see the costs of the states and Fed for the entire process. Anybody have any numbers?
Anyway, throwing money at a problem doesn't necessarily make it better. Just like internet access in the schools.. Just because you can do a thing.. It doesn't mean that you should. (famous quote from where? Star Trek I think?) The point is that computers are not the best solution to every problem. It's an engineering problem, and a thinking engineer will look at many possible solutions and weigh them.
A touch screen has many problems.. Scratches, breakages... (If I didn't like Bush, I could have totally scratched out his name on the screen so nobody else could vote for him). People's general distrust of something that looks like a computer.. These are very real concerns. I'm not saying that a computer system can't solve the problem (other countries seem to think it can). But would you really trust your life to software at this point? Would you let an software company like MS drive your car or fly your plane? Or how about picking your president. I love computers, but even I'd say no.
(Note, dispite popular flaming, MS isn't a BAD software company.. They're just so market driven that they have bloat-ware which lends itself to errors - by sheer volume. It's a testiment that they've made such complex systems actually workable. )
As for the apparent added "fair"ness in a computerized system. Read any of my other articles on this topic. Computers add many weak links to the chain. It's just bad engineering for a life-supporting real-world system. Yes it can be MADE to work, but it's a bad foundation. The only thing you really get from computers is added functionality - but doesn't that sound like MS's point of view?
Lastly, the issue of marginal cost.. A sheet of paper costs less than a penny. A reliable and secure server (with support) costs thousands of dollars. Kiosks probably cost the same as existing stations. We're no where near the fictitious paperless office, so it's really a moot point.
-Michael
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.
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....
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.
[
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!
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.
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
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?
But the electoral college substitutes the problem of 50.0001% of the electoral-college-vote-controllers (however one might say that) thinking something and the rest having to live with it. The electoral college doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority problem, it only obfuscates 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
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.
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.
That is completely false. What they (the Gore campaign did it this election, for instance) do currently is drive you down to pick up an absentee ballot, have you fill it out and give it to them for verification, then they mail it in for you.
It's just as verified as it would be in the scheme proposed here.
-