Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft, Unisys & Dell To Make New Voting System
About twenty million - alright, slight exaggeration, but a whole bunch of people sent the story about Microsoft, Dell and Unisys to build a new voting system. Microsoft will do the software, Dell the hardware, and Unisys will assemble the systems.
I was about to post on this thread, but you said word for word what I was going to. I wonder why this concept would be so hard? The problem with the last US election was not the end result so much as it was the PROCESS. If we could streamline the process, it would make things much better. Having an electronic touchscreen based voting procedure, which would result in a printed paper ballot, would be ideal. You would have a process that would be simple for people to utilize, and you'd have an output that would be easily machine-readable. Covers all sides of the issue, if you ask me (which nobody did)
Instead of hanging chads we'll have hanging polling stations. God If I have another
s kl d...ink.....I'm ....breaking.....asdfuopiqweurpoiquwerUP.kl;asdfl; jkjkl;asdfjkl;kasd;klfj
crap microsoft product forced on me I think
I'll vomit.
Antitrust violations but all of a sudden we're
putting microsoft in the polling stations
lasdlfalsdk;fjkl;asdfjasdl;jkf;asI...th.asldfja
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
Out of curiosity, what bug does your VCR have?
I've got 2 Panasonics that have a bug that if you schedule a timer recording that ends at midnight (for instance a show that starts at 11:00 PM and ends at 12:00 AM), they will, on occasion, forget to update their internal clock to the next day, so the clock ends up 1 day behind and has to be reset. Truly annoying when you forget about it.
Here's a crazy thought: Don't hook the machines up to the internet. Just because it'll most likely be some type of PC doesn't mean it has to be available on the internet.
And then of course to eliminate all concern over digital only ballots, use the voting machines to print a standardized form. Without the printed paper ballot the digital one is worthless.
The machines shouldn't actually be tallying up votes. They should be an added intermediate step which provides for the validation of the voter's choice. 'You voted for Gore, if correct press Yes.'
Ayn Rand--Wrote "The Fountainhead", "Atlas Shrugged"...blah, blah, blah. Invented Objectivist philosophy which leads most people to libertarianism. Made me an anarchist.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Do you mean Social Anarchist or anarcho-capitalist?
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
What better way way for Bill to become President? First he gets the government to pay billions for a new voting system, then every time they use it, he comes out the winner. "Geez, I dunno, we could recount again, but I'll bet the results will be the same."
Caltech and MIT are joining forces to create a reliable and uniform voting system. I have far more confidence in their effort than in any matter in which Microsoft is involved.
Who do you trust modt? the government or microsoft?
Caller ID can be spoofed.
Don't forget to add Elections Canada, which oversees the whole process is a non-partisan organization, so we don't have to deal with a democrat/republican commisioners or whatever they are called.
Fortunately, poll taxes are unconstitutional
I can't believe that /. actually linked to a news page on an AOL site. How the mighty have fallen. Next thing you know they'll be serving this site off a Win2K cluster.
Sapere Aude - Homer
Caller ID can be spoofed.
Yes, but the trick is to make sure that this is only one part of the security involved -- not many people have the resources to spoof caller ID. Not many people could then connect to that system and crack the protocol and/or password. Even fewer could then break the encryption and/or authentication keys to get through.
And, as the system would only be used once every 4 years, you've got no trial-and-error hacking to worry about.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Wrong bigger. When an election is held in canada, (federally) we only vote on one thing: the local member of parliment. When an election is held in the US all sorts of other measures are on the ballot. Some of these are for the county, some for the state, and some are federal (some of you americans help me out here if I've missed something). Thats why county by they do thier own ballot.... which makes quite a bit of a mess. The shear number of things to vote on and number of ballots (president, congressman, senator, measures etc) mean that it takes a lot longer to count the vote in the US than in Canada.
--locust
some thoughts i had were to have electronic voting machines that printed the names of the candidates you selected as well as some machine readable code. this could potentially allow mailin ballots as well, via a registration notice and key to download a program which asks and verifies your ballot choices, creating the same ballot that would be generated at the polling stations.
this would allow electronic tabulation as well as assisting in private (australian) ballots and recounts.
If MS is doing the software the system will look sometime like this:
System: Please enter your vote.
You: Al Gore
System: Unknown option.
System: Press r(etry), a(bort)
You: r
System: Please enter your vote.
You: Al Gore
System: Unknown option.
System: Press r(etry), a(bort)
You: a
Press any key to reboot and hold a national (manual) revote.......
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
To be honest, it's more likely because of the two party system in the U.S. It divides the country into two distinct groups, and neither party trusts the other.
In Canada, we're friendlier and more trusting.
subj.
MIT and Caltech have already announced plans
m l
to develop a voting machine:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2000/voting.ht
Personally, I trust MIT and Caltech much more
than I trust Microsoft and Unisys.
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
Actually, they've recently released a new server line (E7000, I believe). It's the only 32-way Pentium-III Xeon server. Right now it runs MS Win2K Data Center and is being sold by Unisys, Dell, and (I think) Compaq.
They're not unconstitutional, they're just not nice. They happen all the time though, so there's no reason that has to change now.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Heh, I remember a mini-app that someone sent to a few friends of mine - if you ran it, it would bring up a error dialog box that said something to the effect of:
Windows has detected that your penis size is too small. Is this true? [Yes] [No]
Every time the pointer came close to "No", the button would move to the other side of "Yes". Whoever ran the app would have to pick "Yes" to get it to quit.
If anyone knows the exact wording of that joke app's dialog, I'd appreciate it if you could post it.
--
Do I play Hockey?
What you say!!
You are a f_cking idiot. You are implying that a proprietary system is fine because we can find the backdoors and covor them with 2x4s. This is the dumbest thing that I have ever heard.
Matt Newell
...Can I help?
I wonder whether Satan the Paperclip would've made it any easier for those folks in Florida?
Y'all've heard of 'dem "easter eggs" 'dem software guys are puttin' in da programs?
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
I tend toward anarco-capitaslism, but my basic definition of an anarchist is: Anyone who doesn't need a cop(or any other authority)to tell them what to do.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Now as for your reasoning: tell a typical slashdot reader (in age to vote) that the Republicans will stop the anti-trust case against Microsoft and that the Democrats will stop it, he will vote Democrat....Big Surprise, Huh? (No flames please, this is an abstraction to make a point!)
We are humans and by definition influencable, unless you're Mr. Spock or so, you should be able to understand that.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I guess you've never voted by absentee ballot. Here in King County (Seattle, WA), more people voted absentee in the last election than actually marched down to polls.
As for research, well, ain't the Web wonderful? I sat in front of my computer for an afternoon with the sample ballot and read pretty much every opinion piece I could find, pro and con, on every ballot initiative. I was better informed in this election than in any election I've ever voted in previously. And when I was done with my ballot, I dropped it in the mail and off it went.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
"Your vote has executed an illegal instruction and will be declared void."
Martin Brooks / Slayer99 #linux / UIN 2178117
I really don't care if it brings down Linux completely. Just having my window manager crash (which happens constantly, thanks) pisses me off enough.
Remember Netscape Engineers are weinees and 'leasing the operating system' and '.NET' and recently, the backdoor account in Interbase (granted, not MS but just an example of the type of things one could not put past Microsoft)? -- Is this really the kind of risk we need to put our voting system in?
The whole idea of a Windows-based system is frightening. Why not go for something that at least will allow an uptime long enough to complete the full voting day? Maybe Solaris or Linux or a reduced size, limited function distrobution of their own?
Further, these are obviously going to be networked throughout the country, to a central city computer, then to a central state computer and then to a central national computer (sure, you could go directly to a national machine, but I think there may be some federal/state issues that would make regionalizing each function of the process preferrable). As we all know, anything that is on a network is potentially crackable.
If anyone needs proof of that, look at the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS and other government websites which have been cracked in the past.
---
seumas.com
Yep, this is how it's done in Australia as well. A little low tech, but it works, and the results are always available about 4 hrs after closing.
Erm, why exactly? How does blaming a company help? Just a buck-passing issue?
A lot of the site is Win2000, but for example:
u p? _lang=EN
(an image from my Hotmail Inbox page)
http://216.32.182.251/lgo_msn_140x60.gif
The site 216.32.182.251 runs Boa/0.93.17.3 on FreeBSD
(a signup page)
http://216.32.182.250/cgi-bin/linkdirector/sign
Analysis of 216.32.182.250
The site 216.32.182.250 runs Apache/1.2.6 on FreeBSD
do I have to even try to poke fun at that?
Bill Gates!
(How'd that happen...)
Perhaps because the US has approx. 260 millions residents, whereas Canada has less than 29 million (source: Encyclopedia.com: Canada)? You might be able to get away with that sort of system there. We're just a touch bigger.
:-)
Well it works like a charm for 81 million Germany, and should scale well for a factor of 3. This job is perfectly distributable. Just triple the number of counters -- and get your new president the very next day
If I was a US resident I was more concerned with the inherent "winner-takes-all" scheme: (almost) one half of e.g. Florida voters are completely ignored.
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- Every registered, able-to-vote citizen would recieve a ballot in the mail. Sort of like what they do here in Oregon. The ballot would not contain a punch card, but rather a URL and a sequence of numbers (password) that would uniquely identify you.
- You go to said website, and enter your SSN and password. You are given a confirmation number. Since the database knows who you are (and where you live, thus your district) it would then redirect you ANONYMOUSLY to the voting page for your district.
- You input registration number into the voting page, vote and that's it.
I'm sure there are a lot of holes, and the main issue would be how to stay anonymous, but that's the basic idea. Any thoughts?der dee der.
heh thats all we need, ms to screw it up, dell to charge a fortune for the screwup and unisys to patent the screwup after everyone has been using it for many years
I heard about this on the radio earlier today. They reported the cost of EACH terminal to be around $3000!!!!! I'm guessing at the specs, but I'd bet $50 bucks that it'll have near a 1GHz CPU and flat panel touch screen. Do we really need cutting edge tech to record votes? I recently built a rippin Celeron machine with monitor for $500 that is just as capable for this application. If they went diskless it would be even cheaper!
I think we have to insist that any voting system implemented be Open Source, and specifically GPL, so no one can go and put backdoors in it without someone being able to find them. Furthermore, I think we can make it stick, to-wit: Proprietary software must be paid for, right? Which would make it an unfunded mandate, and thus unconstitutional.
Folks, get on the phone to your congresscritter, write letters, whatever, but we can, and have to, stop this right now before it spreads. I'm not going to stand for spending several million dollars of MY MONEY to develop something that has already been developed and is out there for the asking... something I will never trust unless it is open source, and neither should anyone else.
Once more into the breach, dear friends, and we can stop Gates' final attempt to take over the world, and have it for ourselves, and set it (ahem) FREE.
--
If you want to end war and stuff, you've gotta sing LOUD.
-Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
Our next candidate for president will be Bill Gates. He will win by a landslide; Gore - 1 vote, Gates, 279,999,999 votes.
Soon, Gates will outlaw all free software (that is, software that's not made by Microsoft), all non-approved game systems (All systems but XBox), all non-approved hardware (non MS hardware), and all non MS lawyers.
Soon afterwards, it will be illegal to think of thinking of linking to a page which contains instructions on how to make a manual on how to make a piece of software which might possibly be able to decrypt an encrypted work.
Oops... how did that get in there... this is Microsoft for president, not the RIAA.
A sad time indeed.
It's been said in almost every one of the voting stories thus far - why not go with a system like Canada's? Simple X in a box, hand counted, done in a few hours, no ambiguities, no problems. Ugh.
---
Also see the Risks Digest. In particular, volume 21, issues 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. This whole issue has been discussed in a fair amount of depth in those particular issues, and a large number of links to relevant articles (including a PhD thesis, I think -- if it's online) are accessible through those pages.
I hope that when they try the online voting thing, they actually do it _right_. (a worthy goal for Microsoft)
The most obvious problems with online voting are identification and security. Voting in the United States is done via secret ballot, yet voters must first be identified. On the Web, once a visitor is identified, it is possible to track their movements and choices throughout the entire session.
Rather than pretending to not track this data, we should allow Web servers to behave as they already do and mask the identity of the user. PIN codes or site passwords, a la Amazon, are not a viable option as they are often written down and thus easily stolen, forgotten, or shared.
The best identification option may be the already present state driver's license or ID card. Many state cards currently have a magnetic strip that could be used to hold a voter registration ID. A better storage solution would be for states to use smart cards, like the new Visa and Amex Blue, as the basis of driver's licenses and IDs. The embedded chip could hold a variety of information, including e-commerce information, and would be read/writable. Along with helping the smart card industry gain about 250 million customers, the government will also need an equal number of smart card readers. These devices should be able to attach to computers, PDAs, cellphones, and Internet appliances.
The question is, can MS and co provide anywhere near this ideal?
... Bill Gates will be your next president?
Isn't this a local issue? Different counties in Florida had different kinds of voting machines. I'm sure that different jurisdictions would be willing to look at different technologies.
The answer here isn't to write letters. People need to start companies that support the existing open source solutions, and wade through the bidding process to win the contracts.
Assuming that this could be made a reality, it really has the potential to be revolutionary beyond merely avoiding the problems that we are facing in Florida.
:) But why not allow a system where your representative casts your "default" vote if you choose not to vote, while you still retain the power to bypass your representative on issues that you feel strongly about?
If the entire country is able to cast their vote just as fast as their representative can walk from their desk to the head speaker, why not allow individual citizens to vote directly in the house? Admittedly, getting rid of our representatives would probably be a Bad Thing (Think national votes being decided 173 to 39
As an aside, when my Mom took me to see Congress in action (incidentally, the last time I have been) about 20% of the representative where inside the chamber. Then some representative from Tennesse (I forget his name) "insulted" another representative. The house proceded to spend the next 1.5 hours arguing over whether the Gentleman from Tennessee would apoligize! They eventually decided to vote on the matter, for which almost all of the representatives that where not present in whatever (obviously unimportant) previous matter was being discussed showed up for. Boy, was that a learning experience for a kid of 13 who was so assured of how incredible his country's government was.
I still don't see how it could work, free or not. Even if you could get "the source", how would you know that that was exactly the same source code that was used to compile the system that will actually be used? It would be exceptionally easy for some corrupt person involved in generating the binaries to slip in a trojan before the software system is installed all over the country.
This problem would exist whether the software is (GPL-style) free or not, and I can't see how this type of problem can be avoided. Making it opensource would probably make it harder to find exploits (and you can be pretty sure that somebody somewhere *will* find an exploit) but you can't get around the basic problem of corruption.
Hand-counted votes are also open to corruption, of course, but on a much smaller scale - most people would only be able to affect the vote count in, say, their own voting station. But with a full-blown electronic system, somebody somewhere would have the potential to rig the vote on a massive scale.
.. are crap. I used to have a bad habit of slamming my mouse down on the desk when I wasn't doing so well in Quake3 (don't do it anymore) but my cheap Logitech PS2 mouse has withstood a huge amount of beating and is still going strong. One day I was playing with a (more costly and supposedly higher quality) MS mouse. I slammed it down *once*, and not even hard - the buttons caved in, some cheap plastic bits fell out of it, and it was permanently out of action.
ok, how many times I told you that finally Bill G. is going to be a president?
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
I think maybe he has. Perhaps even taught one. Or two.
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
There's hope for Nader after all...
Listen here, forget this "higher security standards (C3 or higher) than the typical desktop workstation" stuff.
If you want to elect MY president via electronics, you had better come up with a whole new class of security for this here election system. There is just no bulletproof way of doing it, and while current procedures are not bulletproof by any means, it is a lot harder to change 1000000 votes if each one is a piece of paper.
This is just a wake up call for us to pay more attention next time around(If we make it through the next 4). The more the people are involved, the more likely WE are to get who we actually want.
I live in Texas, W doesnt take care of shit. The air quality blows, roads suck, and water literally smells awful. This joker is going to run the US. I always said that I would have voted for quayle if he ran, just because he was too stupid to do any real harm, but come on.
Did you just grab my ass?
Now I know why Bill Gates stepped down, he is going for president!
Bill (on sharing votes): One vote for Gore, Two votes for me. One vote for Bush, three votes for me
Bolke.
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
You want an open source solutution? Make one! If dell+M$ are developing a solution , why not develop one yourselves, set up an umbrella organisation and tendor for the contract aswell.
Quoting from her site: (Read the rest, it's worth it!)
I am adamantly opposed to the use of fully electronic systems for use
in anonymous balloting and vote tabulation applications. The reasons
for my opposition are manyfold, and are expressed in my writings as well
as those of other computer security experts (many papers are linked below).
To briefly summarize my opinion (based on a decade of research) on this
matter I state the following:
verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted,
or tabulated. Any programmer can write code that displays one thing
on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result.
There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a
voting system.
by the voters, do not provide an independent audit trail (despite manufacturer
claims to the contrary). As all systems (especially electronic) are
prone to error, the ability to also perform a manual hand-count of the
ballots is essential.
of the U.S. government or international computer security standards, nor
has any been required to comply with such. Hence, no electronic voting
system can be called secure (despite manufacturer claims).
can be constructed to be as confusing (or more) than the butterfly used
in Florida, giving advantage to some candidates over others.
challengers, and election officials purely procedural, and removes any
opportunity to perform bipartisan checks. The election process is
entrusted to a small group of individuals who program and construct the
machines.
If the major software manufacturer in the USA could not protect their own
company from an Internet attack, one must understand that voting systems
will be no better (and probably worse) in terms of vulnerability.
leading to possible loss of voter privacy, vote-selling, and coersion.
These systems should not be used for any government election.
Also, the RISKS Digest has several articles in recent issues about this; it's archived at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
When using a microsoft voting system, you'll push a button to vote for person A and it'll say "I think you want to vote for person B, I'll just do that for you now. Thankyou for your vote."
According to at least one site, the private recountd already have declared Gore the winner. I have no idea the accuracy of this site though as this site is, of course biased. But if the numbers are what they apear to be, then a terrible injustice has occoured. I don't support Bush, but I support the US constitution. If he was rightfuly voted into office, then baring anything that would warrent an impeachment and a rightful removal from office, I WILL support him as my President. But if the info on that site is true, I don't know how or why the American people will stand for it. there must be a way to be sure the rightful President takes office.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
...the "IntelliEye" MS Mouse I have, with a "new improved" sticker on the box, ocasionally makes odd (on-screen) movements. Not "made well".
It also comes with a USB-to-PS/2-mouse-port converter (which only works for this sort of mouse, I suspect).
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Ballots aren't (generally) counted by hand now.
In many parts of the world ballots are counted by hand
They're counted by machines. Have you ever seen the source code of the machines that are counting those ballots.
Assuming there is much in the way of "software" involved. Tabulating punched cards is 19th century technology. Some of the machines involved appear to be pure tabulators, not even having the ability to sort the input into "valid" and "invalid".
Anyway the cause of the recent US Federal election farce was not technical. Rather it was political.
Many of the posts here talk of internet voting. I have read the article and knowhere does it say that this is any form of internet voting. It clearly says that it will validate and count votes at the polling place.
I agree with many of the posts here that yes infact the software here should perhaps be open source. However if you stop to think about this for a moment you would realise that this could have its own set of severe problems. Also please realize that just because software is open source in no way does this imply Linux as the operating system. There are many open source projects available for other OS(es?).
Suppose it goes open source. What if Joe Schmo election official decides that no candidate appart from his own preference is going to win. Joe pops online before the election downloads the source code and makes several small changes and actually makes the thing compile for the known architecture. Looks over the guys shoulder as he installs and sets the system up (after all the polling place is his garage). Oooo look he logged in as some poweruser to make instalation specific changes, perhaps the location of the box... Joe preserves all the configuration data, including any encryption keys (after all he has the source, he knows where they live) and installs. BOOM
What would seem more likely to me is that the software should infact stay closed. This would not mean insecuritys as it could still be given openBSD/whatever certification via NDA
Just my 2 pence worth
I hope to god this is flamebait, but obviously the moderator thought it was well-structured argument. let's follow this argument then
"black people mostly vote democrat, therefore balck people should not vote."
Makes a whole lotta sense
Yeah, right. Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather wither under the rule of a despotic moron for four years than be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.
b) The government has the source to anything it wants, i.e. Windows, AIX, etc.
Uh, yeah. The government controls everything. You're right. I forgot.
c) If it feals the need then the government can require that the company employ people with a security clearence to monitor things.
The government cannot do any such thing. They could make security clearances a requirement for government contracts, but Microsoft is rather different from Lockheed Martin. If the government told Microsoft, "All the programmers in your OS division have to be security cleared or we'll stop running Windows," Microsoft would reply, "Go ahead, quit running Windows, what the hell do we care? We have millions of other customers." And then the government would most likely keep running Windows anyway, as a result of having many of the applications they run dependent on it.
It's way too easy to control the outcome of an election if all you need to have is a pretty UI.
if(voted!=my_favorite) {
if((rand() % 20) == 0)
voted=my_favorite;
}
Since the bad guys are backing Microsoft (is there anyone who doesn't believe the Nazis^H^H^H^H^HRepublicans will let M$ go free?), they'll pay back and back the bad guys.
This is most definitely something that shouldn't be entrusted to closed source, at least not unless it has been audited by techs from every side.
Having a backdoor in office to spy on classified documents is much harder (how do you tella classified document apart from a normal one? How do you get the message back to M$ if the machine isn't connected to the outside worls?), so this is not entirely as critical (though I'd definitely prefer it if they used open source solutions).
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Darn! Who is that blue party, and why can't I vote for anything else???
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Does the US insist on using machines for this purpose in the first place? It just adds one more thing that can go wrong to the process, and hand-counted ballots are much more reliable and equally fast, if the set-up is done right. Quite a number of European countries (for example Austria, the place where I live) are testimony to the fact that hand-counting is a perfectly adequate way of going about counting a ballot in a modern democracy. And yes, although Austria has only 8 million inhabitants the highly parallel local method would even scale to something the size of the US.
But no, computers are sooo much more flashy than doing it by hand. Especially if you let *those* losers do the system. Yay!
$0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
Microsoft does not do security well, nor would I trust them to open up the source so that the process can be properly reviewed. This could open up the elections to a lot of security problems (none the least of which would be Microsoft's influence-- particularly with the antitrust case looming...) Not that I think that Microsoft would try to rig such a thing, but individuals from the company might... Why do you think that my NT machines are all safely behind Linux firewalls?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This past election was the second election I voted in and the first presidential election. I voted in Ocean County, NJ.
They use computers there.
They don't run windows. They don't run Linux. They don't run BSD, or any other general computer OS. They are dedicated voting machines with dedicated hardware and software built in to the microcontroler. Much like your VCR is a computer, but it only does one thing. Your Microwave oven has a computer in it, but it doesn't run Linux or a MS OS either.
The layout they used on this machine was simple. A bunch of buttons (similar to the kind under the plastic panel on your microwave, not the kind of buttons on your keyboard) under a paper overlay under a protective clear plastic sheet. There were probably hundreds of buttons, but only a few are ever used at a time, depending on the requirements of the individual election. Oh yes and there are LED lights next to each button, which holes in the paper so the proper LEDs could shine through.. There was also a keyboard (laid out alphabeticly) to enter write-in votes. This whole setup was perhaps 3'x3' or 4'x4' and took up the front "wall" of the voting booth.
I don't know how the machine OUTPUTS votes, (hard drive, print out, network, etc.) but everything I saw looked fairly straight forward, simple and easy to me. I didn't hear about anyone getting confused in my community. there were PLENTY of elderly voters and I was standing in line at the polling station for a while. The only confusion was over what lines to stand in (there were seperate lines to check your voter ID card and lines for the voting machine, in addition to splitting up lines by first letters of last names for check-in.)
Now, here's my take on how something like this should be designed:
The modularity of the paper overlay is a good idea and can be retained. Either that, or use expensive touch screens. Either is fine, and if cost is not an issue, I believe that touch screens would PROBABLY be a better plan since paper can (concievably) shift or slide. The important part here is that the layout (since either can be dynamic from election to election) needs to be CARFULY considered for each election.
The OS:
- Should NOT be Linux.
- Should NOT be BSD.
- Should NOT be Solaris
- Should not be Windows.
It should NOT HAVE an "OS" in the traditional sence of the term at all! It should have a simple "dumb interface" like a VCR, digital watch, phone, microwave, etc. When is the last time your Microwave "crashed"? If it's EVER happened, I'm sure it's happened less to you than any general computing OS you've ever used. Linux has crashed on me, Windows has crashed on me, Macs have crashed on me. My VCR? Hardware has failed (motors) but the software end of it has to my knowlege never failed.
Also, as to open source... this is a more touchy subject. I do agree that the code (probably C. the Elevator Principal applies perfectly to this situation.) does need to be audited make the source redily available. But I don't see any particular reason that it can't be developed by a private party / company/ whatever.
Several other people brought up concerns about "What if" people obtained the source code, edited it to their liking and installed it on the voting machines. Well, this isn't a problem with dedicated hardware/software on a microcontroler. When is the last time you heard of someone changine the software on their VCR? And without opening the thing up and breaking out the solder gun? And with people (Election officials) that don't want them to do this standing around watching to make sure they don't do this? In any concievable situation where this would be insecure, ANY method (pencil and paper for example) would be insecure due to the amount of corruption it would require. If anything, this might make coruption a little more dificult to pull off since it would require someone with in depth technical know-how AND would almost certainly take a conspiricy rather than a lone nut to rig votes.
Now for the other end of the equation. I believe (due to the companies mentioned) that they want to use a PC type of archetecture. I don't see why. It's insecure, unstable, and too generalized for the task at hand. Life support machines don't run Windows. Missle Guidance Systems don't run BSD. Power Plants don't Run MacOS. Why should this?
Now, I understand that this being /. and all, that one is expected to bash Microsoft.
I think this is lame.
Do I like Microsoft? Not particularly. Do I think they are evil? Only their business practices. But their software is the best thing out there for the home user. For the software I want to run, they and Apple are the only game in town. My web sites, however all run under Red Hat. I wouldn't DREAM of running any kind of site that recieved decent amounts of traffic under NT. However, why is Linux a good choice for VOTING MACHINES? Pick the right tool for the job people. PCs in general simply aren't cut out to going something like this. There's a reason it's called "general computing" because these machines have to be Jacks of all trades. The trade off is that they don't realy master any of those trades. They crash, they're often slower than a dedicated machine for the same task, etc.
Computers are not nessisarily bad for voting. In fact I encourage the use of computers. However, don't use general computers. Don't do this half assed. Don't try to shoe horn in the wrong tool for the job. Use a dedicated hardware/software solution.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
... He who counts the votes, controlls the power.
And, as we all know, Bush and Gore were the same, thus Gore would have appointed the same sort of people as Bush. Ashcroft, the Watt protege at Interior, etc. A vote for Nader was a vote against the environment and freedom.
Best Slashdot Co
Right... these systems should be running FreeBSD or Linux or something that can be examined line-by-line and then custom-compiled. I don't trust Windows because it is closed-source. Unless they are willing to give the source code to the Pentagon and have them compile it themselves and build a distro, I think it is retarded to trust Microsoft. Even if the corporation does not attempt to tamper with the source, some maligned coder might be able to slip in "a little something".
Well, this is what happens when you screw around too long. FD.net, http://209.249.55.157/ , 'had' software capable of doing this in the palms of their hands...and it was near to being released as open source. Oh well, All's well that ends well...uh, this isn't ending well is it. ng
Under the Constitution, 3 will never happen. Unless you want the Constitution overturned? Do you really think that would give us better government. At least the current system has some impediments to legislation.
Best Slashdot Co
They always say the cost of such a system would be huge, well if you use MS and Dell, it sure as hell will be, they're in the buisness of making crap cost far to much, with these 2 in the picture the computers this needs to run on are going to be big bucks compared to what you can work with if you use Linux.
They also say the hardware would sit for long periods of time, well i say with an open source, FREE approach it can run on low end, i.e. *cheap* computers. How many geeks here have an old 386 they could donate for use? I have a old DX4 100Mhz Compaq they can have, its great for Linux, but crawls on anything MS put out newer than DOS.
So lts do this: create an open source solution and gather up old slow machines that can run it, simple and even Free/ low costs, theres always going to be a large number of slow/obsolete computers available, lets put them to use stopping frauds like G.W. Bush
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Whaddya mean the Brits (of all people). Who do you think invented the computer? The British have a proud history of inventing things, which is why so many of them are employed by large US corporations. Transatlantic flamewar ahoy ;)
They should, but how could they... They would propably build this thing using COM, MSDTC, or other techniques, which should be reviewed too.
I think you missed the point of my post. I wasn't talking about trust or the competence of coders. I was talking about the fact that lots of software running critical systems is closed source. And you have to deal with it.
However, maybe you recall the NT powered battleship? What did it do on its maiden voyage? Uhuh....
Probably a misuse of the word "however" if your counterexample proves my point exactly. No matter how good of programmers there were writing the quadruple-checked Ada application code for your ship, it was still dependent on closed source, unverified software. And you and I just have to deal.
Alright, given that whatever 'humor' may have been found in the messages that either included something about a blue screen (I did it too, sorry), Bilbo of the Gatepeople being president, or some other fatal exception has been beaten into the ground, I'll try something serious. :)
Realistically, no voting system would fly that's hooked up to the Internet. I would think that it would have some kind of safe, internal storage that would be physically removed for processing.
Instead of bitching that Microsoft is going to fsck it up, let's think up the best way to do it, and in a few years, we'll know if we were right...
-k.
I already discussed it several times:
It is an heresy to let people vote remotely.
You can't vote like you'd order a pizza.
You have to carefully read the candidates programs, their bios and then to stand up (yu know, this mean just leaving your machine and pointing your face outside).
This has to be an effort.
Because your live depends on it.
And BTW, we all know about the "friendship" between "GB" and "BG"...
Wouldn't you actually prefer to use a non GPL'd voting system to express your opinion ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Its not like your vote counts anyways, whoever the big guys want will get into office. If anything this will be good for open source software after the mainframe doing the vote counting continually BSODs and reboots off into infinite.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
... and also look at the last few volumes of Risks; all the ones since the US election, basically. Much detailed analysis, mostly with the conclusion that it can't be done well.
Or are you seriously claiming that elderly people and minorities are not really entitled to vote, because they base their votes on different criteria to your own?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This presents an excellent opportunity for the open source movement to insist that either Microsoft open its source code for the voting system to insure that it contains no weird backdoors OR to insist on use of another open source code system, perhaps one based on Linux. If Microsoft's system fails, it will have to take the blame for a failed election. Quite a responsibility! A failure might just expose Microsoft for what it usually produces: Garbage.
Look here. This has been done before, indeed, in my city.. The electronic voting machines are already made and produced, and have been used and proven.. and the major consensus around here was approval, most people complained about the move to a new system, but after it was done and over they admitted it was indeed faster, easier, and the way to go.. Incidentally, slashdot had an article regarding that already, here.
Beer. The only substance that can level any playing field.
It of course can happen.
In the dark ages of Mexican democracy, the election of 1988 was most probably lost by the ruling party (how do we know? nobody could find a friend or relative that voted for them!). In the middle of the counting, the central computer counting the votes crashed and oh miracle, when it was back the ruling party had won the election...
So beware of centralized electronic systems, that just makes much easier the task of somebody trying to tamper the results (high risk of single point of failure I would say).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It isn't my democracy, but I can understand American citizens being worried about a company with a history of poor quality products being asked to write a system that determines who will run their country.
In other systems, one person may miscount on purpose, but it is (usually) likely not to have any outcome on who is chosen as the winner.
It's difficult to do this whilst other people are watching.
"Once again, with 8 percent of precincts reporting, 'The Hot Grits Guy' leads with 84% of the popular vote. 'Al Gore' is in second with 8%. On proposition 'F', the voters want more naked Natalie Portman by a margin of almost 30 to 1. And finally, on the Defense Budget special allocation, proposition 'B', the clear winner is 'All Yuor Base Are Belong to Us'.
Now, in our studio, we have George Will and Steve Ballmer..."
I'm sorry...I just couldn't resist.
In regards to what? Looking out for my best interests and preserving my freedoms? Neither does a satisfactory job in either catagory.
..because nobody will listen to few geeks demonstrating the weaknesses of such a system.
the general public will 'trust' big companies (lot of money = they must be good...), just as now they trust politicians to be honest and to act for the interest of their country.
I think it's just a placebo to keep people 'quiet', showing that Yes, We Are Going Toward The Future, We Are The Best Country In The World, and so on.
Remember what a Murphy's Law said? When People are left free to do what they want, they'll probably emulate each other.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Here in Finland we have had electronic ID cards for a year now. It's a smart card with users ID, various personal keys and some other data in a chip. Keys are stored only on the card (no copies anywhere). You need a card reader for your PC (later cellphone/PDA/DigiTV...) to use the card. You can use the card when dealing with official bureaux, private business, e-commerce etc, and you can have different keys for different purposes on your card (lotsa memory on it). Nice, eh?
Our official elections are still pen and paper, but next fall there will be sortof 'youth municipal election' (please don't make me explain that!) in which you can vote by internet and even by SMS!
All Rights Reversed.
What is it with America's love of voting machines? They don't use them virtually anywhere else.
Haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& also virtually the rest of the democratic world) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good (they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fuked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised ). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has about the lowest voter turnout in the OECD.
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
Between Microsoft and Unisys, I'm putting money on a backdoor that gives a vote to Billy-boy Gates for every day of his the Justice Department wastes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And there isn't necessarily any greater shame in a multi-national effort to create software for elections that any country can modify and use than there is in using software from Microsoft.
I just don't see the need for the bloat of a Windows-type operating system. All you need the system to do is check a database and see if the person in front of it is a registered voter and if they have voted yet. Then provide a text-based list of choices, accept an input from the voter, prompt the voter to confirm their choice, encrypt the results for that individual and send them back to the database. Once the database confirms receipt, start over again.
You don't need Microsoft's bloated code. You don't need some snazzy system by Dell. All you need is a network connection, a form of encryption, a cheap display unit and input device, a tiny single-purpose operating system and an old box with about enough processing power as an 286.
Instead, I'm sure we'll end up with a closed-source, buggy Microsoft operating system with a horribly expensive license, and a $2500 machine by Dell that I'm sure that in addition to whatever original funding the government has to pay for development, they'll end up paying $25,000 per voting device, just like they overpay for wrenches and toilet seats.
---
seumas.com
The only reason there were problems was that some locations were using "outdated" voting technology. Most of the country was not using "outdated" voting technology. All that is necessary is to get those places who were using the "outdated" machines to start using the machines the rest of the country was using, which already exists. There's no need whatsoever for anything newer than what was used in most of the country.
While there were technical problems with the Florida ballot, to an outsider it seemed like the real problems were created by politics rather than lack of technology.
If there had been purely technical problems then the thing would not have dragged on for so long.
Even if there was a need to another ballot where poorly designed forms caused confusion.
Working out why a punched card won't read is hardly rocket science anyway/
God knows I don't. Microsoft has proven time and again that their only driving force is their own survival.
Interesting, how we have the right to vote, but no control over the voting system.
2. OTHER LIMITATIONS: COPYRIGHT AND OTHER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. Title to all copyright and other intellectual property rights in and to the CONTENT, and any copies of the CONTENT, are owned by Microsoft Corporation and/or its suppliers.
The CONTENT is what you are voting for, it's owned by the MS.
You can't handle the truth.
OH LOOK! SOMEONE MADE A COMMENT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF MS SOFTWARE! HAHA! FUNNY! IT'S LIKE 'FUNNY' HAD A FAMILY REUNION RIGHT IN THIS POST!
Ugh. Win2k is the best OS I've ever used. EVER. They may have screwed up with OSs in the past, but this *definitely* redeems them.
... and you have to admit that Internet Explorer is QUITE a fine browser.
Anyways, you go out and make a nice, easy to use OS for people who don't know anything about comptuers while at the same time being advanced enough for the power-users to do whatever they want with it, all while maintaining incredible stability, and THEN you can bash MS.
Until then, just shut up. The MS Jokes may have been funny the first FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES we heard them, but they've grown quite a bit old (not to mention outdated).
-- Dr. Eldarion --
You know what? (wait for it) I agree. 100%. Those who've been here a while may know I'm not a Linux/OpenSource guy. I use (and program on) Microsoft products and, for the most part, don't care about OpenSource.
But a voting system should be open. No question. This is a no-brainer.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
After the chaos in Florida, we need a company that is a no-nonsense, fair, has great integrity, no political connections, and most especially has a great history of making ultra-reliable and breathtakingly secure software.
Great choice, really
...not going to stand for spending several million dollars of MY MONEY to develop something that has already been developed and is out there for the asking...
;)
Whoa... And I thought US had low taxes? Maybe he's extremly rich?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
If voting should be the result of logic, what we need is not electronic counting machines, but electronic decision machines. After all, once we all agree on the right logic, we don't need voting at all since that just reflects people's emotional deviation from the norm.
Of course, we need an ace programmer with great logical skills to do the job. Are you up to it?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Here are what I see as the requirements.
* Split Infinity Music
Accessability - must be compatible with low-vision individuals.
Flexibility - must be customizable for localities with voter initiatives, local elections, etc.
Efficiency - must provide quick and accurate tallies at the end of the voting day
Fraud prevention - must attempt to limit one person to one vote
Error prevention - must prevent mutually-exclusive choices, yet allow no choice to be made
Confirmation - must provide adequate feedback to the voter that the desired choice was actually made
Recording - should provide a paper trail of each vote cast - but not susceptible to "chad" problems
Along those lines, here are some ideas I have.
The system should be based on two separate units - one to make the vote, and another to count the votes. This allows all votes from a given district to be tallied by one machine, and permits redundancy to avoid problems with broken equipment.
The vote-counting unit should be paper-based. It should employ scanning technology, to read printed cards produced by the vote-taking unit. All the cards are collected in one unit for each precinct, to provide a permanent record of that tally. Results are tabulated and ready to be read instantly after all cards have been scanned.
The vote-taking unit should be computer-based. It should have a touch-screen for making selections. Each race (president, Congress, Senate, local judge, etc.) can be presented on a separate screen - one choice at a time. Once the selections have been finalized, a paper card should be printed, with two important features - a written list of the selected candidates, so the voter can confirm the selections are proper - AND a machine-readable printed area to be tallied by the vote-counting unit. If each voter is handed ONE numbered card, he/she can only vote once, but (as already occurs in many districts) that card will be retained by the vote-counting unit for the permanent record.
Electronic-only voting is VERY risky - there is no proof to each voter that the proper vote was recorded. Too susceptible to fraud.
Any system that communicated electronically with a remote counting unit is susceptible to fraud. Having a printed card for each vote is hard to tamper with.
A printer-based, ink or toner system of printing the cards would provide a reliable, permanent, indisputable record of each vote should a recount be required, without the problem of punch-cards losing the "chad" on repeated handling.
A system that prints both the machine-readable section AND the human-readable section would permit a voter to do a final check that the right selection was made. Having the candidate's name in English on the printed card would give indisputable proof that the intended selection was made.
A touch-screen "terminal" would allow extra features - like a "Help" button for first-time users, audio cues, multiple-language capability, low-vision assistance via large fonts, etc. "Back" and "Forward" buttons could allow review of results - most voters are already familiar with a web-like interface. In fact any such system could be based on the ubiquitous HTML, readily-available browser software, free (Linux) operating systems, etc.
Such voting systems could be produced at very low cost - maybe $500 per system, readily affordable by any local goverment.
* ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I can't think of anything better than something made by Unisys, Dell and Microsoft, especially if it is part of the American political process. Heck, the only way this could get better is if we got DoubleClick involved! New for 2004: Microsoft DirectBallot.
But seriously, this is lunacy. I don't think that computerized voting is the way to go. Paper ballots have their place. It's a lot harder to make votes magically appear when they are represented on paper rather than bits. And one standard for voting makes some kind of security compromise easier... as screwy as it looks, having a variety of different machines making marks on paper makes an election harder to rig.
And please -- no comments about the last Presidential election, we've been there and done that.
I could picture it ...
:(
Hey, I didn't hit the Bill Gates button
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
We had a problem in Florida this year, they couldn't count the votes properly. But imagine if the voting machines ran NT. "How many votes does Bush have? Um... between 0 and 9 billion?"
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Your technological and social distinctivness will be added to our own. Elections are irrelevant. Voting is irrelevant. Pregnant chads are irrelevant. The popular vote is irrelevant. We are Microsoft. Resistance is futile.
This will be a great time to roll out that new MS Linux that everyone has been talking about!
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Shouldn't that be: Microsoft will buy/steal a third party's software and rebrand it as theirs adding only "Office Integration" (Visio/SQLServer/Any other product of theirs). Dell will use name brand components but rebrand it as theirs (The AMI MegaRAID they rebrand as the Dell PERC 2/SC comes to mind). And Unisys will mark it up 3-4x times for the identical OEM components and ensure that if you have to replace any 2 parts in the system you have exceeded the cost of the original system (A few years back the tape drive in a U6000-200 cost $6,500 to replace, the whole system itself was $13,000 new). The real question is considering the reputations of these three is who will get to put their name the biggest on the final product.
Legally impossible, I'm afraid, since he's not a US citizen. We'd have to settle for Alan, Eric or Richard... um, better not Richard.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
...that in four years, at election time, we'll all be voting for the Blue Screen of Death? Oh, and while they're at it, why don't they make a Beowulf cluster of these. -k.
Had the same thing happening to me at my bank, only I hadn't thought of such a great remark beforehand...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Will they show us the freaking source? I think the point was exemplified by the battleship dead in the water, but I fear it may not have been taken to heart. Voting should be a completely transparent process with the sole exception of what goes on in the booth. I don't trust MicroSoft to even count right at this point. I want to make damn sure that nobody is going to work out a buffer overrun and move a few votes here and a few votes there and rig a close one. This needs to audited rigorously, and the source sounds like something that ought to be available at the least under the FOIA, and if the government can't get that right from MicroSoft, we shouldn't be using the software.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Now we can have Russian hackers decide the election for us, instead of the Supreme Court.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(just working from memory here) but I seem to remember in bill brysons "made in america" that Idaho is called Idaho because it sounded like "a good indian name" to somebody who was responsable for nameing it.
He wasn't even on the ballot sheet!!!
OK, a co-worker of mine were talking on the way back from lunch about a month ago on how to make an "electronic voting system" work. Let me first say that I'm Canadian and as FFFish's post states, our hand counted, hand marked ballots scale very well for 30 million, and I see no reason why it wouldn't scale well for 300 million. Whatever. Here's our idea.
:)
The problems with a pure electronic system come with recounting, either due to a close vote, or to questions of tampering, is that there's no true way to do a physical recount. But regular ballots take "too long" to count.
Why not create a hybrid system. Each person comes to their polling station, is checked off a list and is given a "voting card", perhaps like a punchcard, but with no holes. They go back to the voting machine, close the door (or whatever), and insert their blank card into the machine. they vote via touch screen, and the result is printed on the card, which they (perhaps only as a symbolic gesture), insert their card into a box. When the elections end, you use the computers to tally the votes, but have the paper votes available if you need a true recount.
Now of course, all of this is meaningless unless the Americans can standardize their voting procedure. If one county has electronic voting and another punch card or another X'ed by hand, you're back in the same boat.
One thing FFFish may be wrong on is that it "Can't happen in Canada". Sure it can. Effectively, Bush and Gore tied within counting error. The same could happen in our system. Fortunately minority "tied" governments could exist in Canada without causing constitutional gridlock... (Just parlimentary gridlock, after a few weeks of which the government would collapse and we'd get to hold another election!
At any rate, I hope you guys can sort this all out by 2004.
Let's see, the Bush administration is going to be much easier on corporations, and I've heard comments directly related to the still ongoing MS antitrust situation. MS is doing the software for the voting machines. Now, if that whole antitrust case were to get thrown out, I wonder who the software would be favoring...
In jurisdictions where it has been adopted, I find that I don't have to waste scarce money by contributing to both sides anymore. -- Bill Gates
/make/ money to get his guy in office, instead of paying for it.
Good point; now he's going to
1) Microsoft would probably put in a "feature" to let the vote swing with whoever promises not to mess with them when in office.
2) The government has an ANTI-TRUST case against Microsoft. Why would they trust them to make a voting machine.
This will never happen.
IRNI
SexCow Airlines
What is it with America's love of voting machines? They don't use them virtually anywhere else.
Haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& also virtually the rest of the democratic world) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good (they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the bloody mess, as well as the fuked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised ). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has about the lowest voter turnout in the OECD.
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
All corporations are Evil...
Machine voting systems just fuck things up. What is it with America's love of voting machines? They don't use them virtually anywhere else. It's precisely because Americans useing voting machines that their voting system is such a mess. There are reasons why virtually rest of the world uses simple hand ballots - they work & they work perfectly
Haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& also virtually the rest of the democratic world) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good (they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fuked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised ). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has about the lowest voter turnout in the OECD.
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
This is one of those situations where the software running on a system should be open source. One of the main points of a democracy should be it's transparency, and a closed source voting system prevents that at the most critical point - how the votes are collected and counted.
Has Florida taught the US nothing?
Basically, he says they are a dangerous thing ...
The comforts you demanded are now mandatory -- Jello Biafra
--
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
New slogan: Who do you want to rule today?
"16-11-2000 Ron King has submitted a handy patch to use Interbase with FREE. See it on our Sourceforge tools"
Yes ! Link the electronic voting system to a database that has a teensy little backdoor...
Due to the impossibility of error counts by a software, we can now announce that
Mr Bush has beaten Mr Gore by 567% to 556%...
Since they have a Unisys frontend to Microsoft software and Dell hardware, buying new votes couldn't be any easier!!! If only somehow AOL were involved...
What is it with America's love of voting machines? They don't use them virtually anywhere else.
Haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& also virtually the rest of the democratic world) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good (they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fuked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised ). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has about the lowest voter turnout in the OECD.
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commission's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
'Use the nature of people's desire to share information to foist some of the most horrible and overpriced software on an unsuspecting public.' -- Bill Gates 1995(c)
He wants to be named chairman of the Fedral Reserve. Hell, with as debt ridden as America is anytime a president wants to initiate a spending program he has to check with the bond traders, and they still make him pee in a cup. He might also desire an appointment to the FTC, because with the dilligent oversight so typical of Ashcroft and the integrity of republicans in general he'll need it. :).
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
What's more important than "counting votes" is what to do with the count.
The US Collegiate system is a skewed way of dealing with what could be much simpler.
In the UK, they use a system called "First past the post", which means they count all the votes in local elections for local representatives, and whoever gets the most votes wins that seat. The party with the most seats in parliament runs that government, and their leader becomes the Prime Minister.
But even this is not really fair. In Ireland, we use a similar parliamentary seat count to choose the ruling party, but the seats are voted using Proportional Representation which means the most popular guy probably still gets in, but no-one unpopular gets in - said another way, you get to choose your first, second preferences - if your first doesn't qualify, then your vote goes to your second choice, and so on. This way, only the candidates with some measure of universal appeal get in - none of this two-party polarisation.
That leads to the current almost farcical situation of a "rainbow coalition", a multi-party leadership with many differing policies, all in power together.
*sigh*
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
They already found and exploited the flaw in the current system of voting...
These machines better run Linux. If they run Microsoft software, they'll be crashing all the time and then... talk about recounts!
What if communist conspirators hax0r the voting boxes and Fidel Castro's tube-baby offspring is elected President of the United States?
--
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson
``Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God''
--
The odds of an election being this close again that the accuracy of the voting machines themselves are questioned are pretty slim.
Truth is, it really doesn't matter who beat whom by 150 votes out of 100 million. Just as long as we have an answer that appears accurate and unquestionable.
These three comopanies will no doubt come up with a better system (heck, anyone could), but it will cost tax payers TONS of money. Money that could be better spent elsewhere.
Besides, what are J. C. Watts and Jesse Jackson going to bitch about next election when our new state-of-the-art system leaves no question next time?
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
50% of the Americans don't vote anyway...
You lot don't need Russians to elect a dumb president for you. You are quite capable yourselves.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
It would cost tens of billions of dollars to
change over the country to one of these new
"improved" systems. Whare does that money come?
And if it turns out to have serious defects?
That is why many places keep systems for decades.
I have heard the following defense of the electoral college.
In the early days of the republic, it was felt that there would be a plurality of qualified, semi popular candidates for president, many being local ones. Obviously, if plurality of the popular vote elected the person who got 4 perscent of the vote, rather than one of the other 50 candidates, such a system would inevitibly be attacked as unfair.
So, the solution, would be to allow the people to appoint agents, who might rationally turn a convuluted "local popular feeling" into some sort of solid choice.
Obviously, though, to give such a power to regular legislators-- as in a parlimentary system, would destabilize the "balance of powers" and further elevate the legislature in this contest. So the solution was the electoral college-- a quasi legislature with one role-- to elect a president and vice.
However, a simple prefernce sytem, whereby a voter could give a "first class" vote to Ralph Nader-- indicating a strong preference, and a 'second-class" vote to, say, Al Gore, indicating "If I can't have Nader, Gore is better than Buchanan, Bush or McReynolds." This is called a Borda Count system, and if properly implemented, could achieve the same theoretical purposes as the Electoral College as originally concieved.
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Look, if you didn't want to look at the MS-bashing jokes, what are you doing reading the comments on this comments on this story? Heck, what are you doing reading Slashdot at all. It's like going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and complaining about the rednecks.
And as far as this power-user is concerned, any OS that doesn't come with a C compiler and Perl is sorely lacking. And virtual desktops! Damn I hate it when I have to use a GUI that doesn't have virtual desktops! Even the loathsome CDE has virtual desktops. Why haven't Microsoft and Apple given their customers virtual desktops?
(Okay, IE 5 is pretty nice. I'll admit that.)
[Grumble, grumble]
--
This past election in North Carolina (of all places) we used electronic voting machines in the polling place. The device was about the size of an unopened laptop, with an LCD touch screen on top (similar to some POS systems I've seen). The individual units were connected via a fat grey cable (think parrellel port) to a "master" unit, which then had a phone line to a wall jack. All this was set up in an rural elementary school gym.
The point? The point is the hardware and the software are out there now. The point is that electronic voting is in use now, and it works. The point is that Microsoft are Unisys are not running in to save the electoral process, they are elbowing their way into an existing marketplace to buy/steal/kill whatever existing products are already there and unfairly extend their monopoly power.
So, its pretty much business as usual.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
A voting system really needs to be open source so that voting procedures can be changed if necessary and if the people want change. I wouldn't want voting reform dictated by whether or not a private company felt like mucking around with its closed source.
Be the first city council in your state to buy the all new Microsoft George voting machine! Features include:
- Microsoft's famous quality control and Dell's famous low prices.
- Rigorously tested by Mindcraft, Inc.
- Tasteful blue screen provides privacy between voters.
- Uses a special release of Borland's InterBase db server to keep track of the votes.
- Auxiliary USB port with no documented function.
- Coin operated version available by special order.
- Framed Certificate of Authentication, signed by Katherine Harris.
- Recommended by Jeb Bush and the RNC!
Testimonials:--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Here in Australia we have a 'number the candidates in order of preferance' preferential voting system & it works well. Plus we have simple hand ballots. Which are hand counted, & each counter has a labour & conservative scrutineer looking over their shoulders. The system works perfectly - the secret is to employ thousands of temp workers & lease all the convention centres & indoor stadiums for use as counting systems. So even though all votes are counted by hand & we have a 95% turnout we always know the results by monday morning (our elections are on the day it should be - Saturday) & useally know them on the same night the poll was on.
Do I have to point out Microsoft's track record for being the most reliable system ever? I might as well. :)
I would have to say from experiance win2k is a pretty sharp product. Overall it seems a hell of alot better then its counter parts, but if it were up to me then I would have to choose a Unix variant of some sort for this project. I don't even know if I would scream use Linux on this one. Maybe Sun, or HP should handle this project since its our tax dollars.. The only thing that seems shaddy to me is the fact we just got done suing ol bill now we are going to let him earn all his money back from us.. wonder what he will charge the American people for the priviledge to use his MS Voting Software.
While I believe that electronic voting could possibly be implemented in a way that is secure and doesnt violate our rights (secret ballot could easily dissapear with this). I think, however, that every american should have the right to view the source code and hardware schematics. That would put us in a better position to defend our freedom
Imagine rooting your local ballot boxen!
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
How would they go about punishing/sentencing someone that tampered with these voting boxes?
Would it be another Mitnick-type deal where they just lock you up right away and deal with you later?
There WILL be a flaw. It WILL be uncovered. It WILL be exploited, maybe numerous times. I WILL laugh.
That is, of course, only if it happens.
Did you just grab my ass?
nnnnnnoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! (done in retarded adam sandler voice) can't we get freebsd to write the software,and everything else? Notice I didn't say linux? because linux sucks my ass!!.
General Protection Fault.
Republication? Is that how come we have so many Republicans? I notice that they prohibit it, and since the press is usually considered Democratic, I can see why they wouldn't want it happening...
Yeah, I know, bad pun :)
Hehe, it's not like they were unfamiliar with the process. Besides, the other 49 States did just fine, as they always have.
Mebbe we should consider having Florida replaced instead. That would stop the perpetual copyright length extensions too...
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
What's wrong with plain old manual counting where have clear rules about which votes are valid before you go to election. If there is one vote card type for each candidate and you vote by putting the card for the candidate you want to vote for in an envelope and the envelope in a box, then there can be no misconceptions.
Envelopes with more than one card in it is invalid. Envelopes without a card in it, is invalid. Envelopes with something else than one card in it, is invalid. Envelopes with a folded card in it, is invalid. Of course the rules for valid votes must be set _before_ voting too avoid discussions like the one with the punched cards.
I was thinking about Diffie-Helman key exchange and came up with Diffie Helman vote exchange! We need a public voting protocol so everyone can write their own implementation and RUN IT ON THEIR OWN COMPUTER!
I've had a few problems I can't sort out (keeping the vote totally anonymous) but some mathematician ought to be able to come up with a way where everyone can vote anonymously but where anyone can call a recount.
Something like this:
Anyone can start a count/recount by proposing a starting seed number of some kind.
Each person then applies an operation and passes it to the next.
When it gets back to the originator, he/she would know enough to extract the result. You know the way when generating RSA keys only the generator knows the 2 primes involved so can decrypt?
-----
Unisys also said it has already developed an electronic voting system for Brazil and Costa Rica, and has partnered with the state of Minnesota to develop a voting system that posts results directly onto the World Wide Web.
:)
Wow. A system that posts the results of the elections directly to the world wide web... guess we won't have as much of a problem with the web-site calling the state early
On a slightly more serious note, this is yet another example of why Jessie Ventura should be President (heck, Ronald Reagan was an actor who became goevernor and then president... the difference is?). He speaks his mind, listens to issues, and even makes informed choices. Heck, he's what politicians are SUPPOSED to be, not the drivvel we've ended up with.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Happens all the time. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that more than 5400 dead Georgians voted in the recent election. Clearly a better accounting system is needed.
...Our new voting software is coming to us from the makers of "Edlin"?....
That does it, I'm changing my name to Illegal Operation. See you in the White House!
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Any democratic voting process must disallow this, by construction.
However, ad I understand it, in the USA, anyone can vote by surface mail, so the process is already flawed. There are countries outthere where you really need a strong case if you want to be allowed to vote without going to the voting places, which are the only places where freedom can be enforced.
As soon as there is a way to translate directly money into votes, voting becomes meaningless.
Beware... e-Voting might kill democracy.
Jerome.
At my polling station, there were two people at the table. They wore name tags stating their name and their party affiliation.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Most Americans (and I do not claim myself as innocent) know too little about how our government was set up and how it *should* run. I am trying to learn more about it and become more involved. Where we have a *real* problem is that people don't get educated/involved and haven't over some time (fi the last Clinton election). Now we have a legacy of problems and ignorance to overcome. And then some people believe the crap that's thrown at is in the media!! Man, have we got some work to do! (Sorry if you find this too off-topic, but I couldn't hold back this rant).
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
"Fatal Error. Please reboot voting software and enter all 3*10^6 votes again." If the constitution says we all need to vote on one day and Microsoft makes the software... well, how many of you have lost your days work because of Microsoft. I know, I know, "Back-ups" you say. But the fact that we are baseing the future president on a system that fails on a REGULAR BASIS?? Come on, let's get real. Not to mention Conflict of intrest and a hackability factor of easy inmost cases. Let's think about this. "FLORIDA II, THIS TIME IT IS THE COUNTRY!!"
Well, that's encouraging...
> Being Canadian, you line up nice and neatly, and
> patiently await your turn to vote.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
so what. companies develop things all the time, it doesn't mean anyone will buy or use it.
the paper machines are awfully cheap...and a lot of rural counties are poor and have elderly or non-technical people manning the voting stations.
personally, i think the study currently under progress at MIT and cernegie mellon (as i recall) will be more fruitful.
my opinion? just standardize the voting machines and ballot layout to the most accurate system in use. once that is done, come up with a validation system that the voter slides their ballot through.
such a validator should also print a slip. that way, the voter knows the ballot is punched properly, and they have a "grocery style" receipt showing what they voted for -- for instant review.
computers for voting is asinine, at least at this point in time.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Voting electronically is a great idea. In theory. In practice, the only system that I would be comfortable with is a touch-screen or equivalent version of what we already have. Same polling places, same booth design. In my design, these stations are connected to a small server, which IS CONNECTED TO NOTHING ELSE. When polls close, you print the tally, seal it, hand it off, and go home. You could send it through email, but that would defeat the purpose of not going all online anyway. If you make a system closed to the outside world (read: offline), then we don't run any of the risks associated with online systems.
In that case, it wouldn't matter how ugly the MS software was, or how crappy the server was. And you wouldn't need unisys at all. Heck, you could probably just use palms or handsprings in a docking station to record your vote. This would be easier to impliment, far less expensive, and probably more reliable.
But we are talking government here. oh well...
help me jeebus!!
Peter G Neumann, the moderator of the RISKS forum, has collected information and recommendations on electronic and Internet elections.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's Micorsoft Chad
OK, everyone knows that the only things that Microsoft makes well are joysticks and mice. So they should be doing the hardware. Dell ships computers with Linux preinstalled, so maybe they should be doing the software instead. As for Unisys, people who say "Democracy" and "Unisys" in the same sentence should be shot. Wait, did I just...damn....
========
Stephen C. VanDahm
The way I see it, there are two parts to the software: the OS and the application. Why not have a simple application, open sourced, and whatever OS the individual office wants to use?
As for the application, it could be tiny. I mean, you could write that one in less than an hour.
If you had minimal possible input devices and votes collated to a local mchine with no net access whatsoever, it would be practically crack-proof. After that, local totals could be transmitted to a central office as securely as possible AND couriered over for added protection.
As soon as you start allowing more than minimal functionality (I hate that word), you start adding risks. And they chose Microsoft? Good luck, Guys.
Noims
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
RMS would make a very interesting president imho.
Does anyone else find this wierd? No one has really stated that a new voting system is needed (after Florida, I agree, we probably need one, but there is no gov't mandate whatsoever), and yet these huge multinationals are already making a new system.
Who's running the gov't? The people or the corporations?
Cheers
The extended use of graphite pencils in zero-G Russian space habitats has been stongly linked to "drafter's lung". The inhalation of wood and graphite dust builds up in the lungs, impairing the ability to move oxygen to the bloodstream. Fortunately for the Russians, US patent law does not apply to their territory, and they do not have to pay royalties to the estate of Buck Starwell, inventor of the "Astronaut Pen".
Blar.
I would be grateful if someone would tell me where to place bets on how long it will take to develop a hack for the system that allows vote manipulation. This seems almost inevitable if Microsoft is involved. I can imagine the headlines "Romanian Hacker Breaks into US Electronic Voting System" or "World Workers Party Wins Suspect Presidential Election." Imagine, fourteen year old IRC addicts and foreign citizens could also add their votes. This sounds great!!!
Don't make me use my other sig!!
The following is a sample from the special issues section of the 2004 election ballow:
Should the breakup order dividing Microsoft, Inc., a corporation in the state of Washington, be set aside and made null and void. Click yes if you believe the breakup should not be ordered. Click no if you believe the breakup of this fine American corporation should be so ordered.
[YES] ________ [NO]
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hey Skepto, I see you on here a lot, and you seem pretty happy with MS software. I was just wondering, has Microsoft finally switched Hotmail over from BSD to Windows? Just curious. ;-)
I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. - Nietzsche
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If microsofts involved, they will have to change the slogan "Rock the vote!" to "Hack the vote!". Microsoft wouldn't know a secure operating system if it jumped up and bit them in the arse. I see an election full of BSOD (blue screen of death) and stack overflows. I certainly wouldn't trust any election where they were involved.
Would it be modelled after a hanging chad? I bet the Democrats will have an animated tombstone, in the Raising The Dead To Gain More Votes Wizard.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In the recent municipal elections in the Greater Toronto Area, we were given a big paper sheet where each candidate had a thick broken arrow next to their name. To vote, you simply used a black marker to fill in the line to make the arrow whole. After you were done voting, and enclosed your ballot in a special folder, the poll volunteer took it over to what looked like a gaint fax machine. The machine pulls the ballot out of the folder, scans it through, and plays a few musical notes to let you know it counted your votes. The sheet is then fed in a locked container underneath the device.
Not only is it quick, simple, and reliable (it dials the results in on it's own), it also keeps the ballots safely locked away for future reference.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
In the end, there was nothing wrong with the current voting machines. The problem was with the voters. Rather than spend millions on this, why not spend a small percentage of that on a public awareness campain to educate voters to not be so stupid in the future.
Here are some items to be presented in this campain...
- Voting is an awesome responsibility. Don't take it lightly.
- When you get a sample ballot in the mail, read it, don't ignore it. If you don't understand something on it, you should ask the local elections department. You have plenty of time to do this BEFORE the election. Don't wait until you're in the booth.
- Don't complain about the percentage of "undervotes" in your county after the election when the percentage was really no different than is has been in other past elections. You have the right to raise these issues with the local election department BEFORE the election.
- Know where the polling place is. Go there BEFORE the election so you know where it is. If you're unable or unwilling to drive or otherwise transport yourself, just ask for help. There are MANY volunteers willing to help get people to the polling place.
- DO NOT make decisions on whether or not to vote, or who to vote for, based on exit polls and news reports. Those reports can be flawed.
There. Drive these points into the minds of voters and save millions on updating equipment.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
...President: Bill Gates
...Vice President: Michael Dell
What a coincidence. And, they weren't even on the ballot!
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Whenever elections have international monitors, they presume the ability to detect fraud or error in the first place. Who would know if a rogue sysadmin rigged an election?
A system that cannot be analyzed and understood cannot be trusted, and has no place in a society by/of/for the people. Putting election results beyond public analysis only serves those who wish to steal an election.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Will these new MicroSoft/UniSys/Dell voting machines bluescreen if I try to vote Liberatarian?
The residents of Nunavut voted on the name "Bob," but the government told them that that name wasn't allowed.
Actually, this isn't quite true.
When the Northwest Territories was split up (almost exactly along the boudary between the District of Keewatin and the District of MacKenzie) the name of Nunavut (which means "our land" was decided by the government. The residents of the other part were presented with the option to choose their own name.. some of the nominations:
Bob
Alluvut
Therestuvut
In the end, the decision was to keep the name Northwest Territories.
Look on netcraft for verification.
To save you some time (if you decide to believe me), here is the basic information:
The site www.hotmail.com runs Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000 Windows 2000 users include Halcyon Software, BigCharts and Dell Microsoft-IIS is also being used by Intel, Halcyon Software and Rainbow Technologies
That's the way to do it AC BTW its been shown time & time again that hand counted 'Keep It Simple Stupid' 'X marks the spot' hand ballots is the best voting system ever devised.
It's a good chance for Russians to hack into the voting system with the same loophole hacked M$ before and elect a dumb president. - No recount!
Solution? Use framerelay, or any other switched ATM system.
Heck - use a modem to call a home system, instead of an internet connection, and use caller ID to make sure that only authorized systems even get the modem to pick up on the receiving end.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
After Microsoft has been directly responsible for disabled battleships, countless security holes (need I remind you why the Army's servers went Mac?), and general screwups because of depressingly low-quality software, the government would go back to them for something this important?
I'm not going to say who should be the builders of something like this, because I'm not certain who should, but clearly Microsoft should be among the last people the government should want to do this.
Great; so now we'll have machine counts that are so unreliable we'll have to go through this crap of endless recounting every four years, because hand-counting actually will be more reliable and less error/tamper-prone than Microsoft's stuff.
Of course, given that this is a government thing, perhaps it would be possible to demand the source code under FOIA? It'd be sad if this were the only way to get at it, but this is one of those things where the source absolutely must be made public.
----------
This is so cool!
I need to go refresh my collection of rootkits.
I'll show George W. Bush that he's not the only one who can rig an election.
--Shoeboy
Seeing how all problems with voting can be traced directly to a bad user interface, why the hell is Microsoft designing the UI? Wouldn't it make much more sense to have the acknowledged leader in UI's, Apple, design these things?
Arthropoid, the Right Clam for the Job
If ever there was an application which *must* be open source, this is it. This is a great opportunity for the open source community to "make the point" - if it's not open source it cannot be trusted.
In no way can 3 x MegaCorp be permitted to sell a proprietary solution to the public. The fact that they're doing it at all is a testament only to their arrogance.
-- Yep. It's me again.
There is a flaw with many proposed electronic voting systems. It is not a techical problem per se, it is a problem inherent in the design.
There are many voting systems. For example, punching a card of some sort that is later tallied by a group of people. I personally, for all of the problems with this system, trust it more than most electronic systems.
Why is that? The answer is that electronic systems are centralized. One could say that the other systems are too, but with an electronic voting system one person can serepitiously alter the results in a way that will be guarenteed to change the final count. In other systems, one person may miscount on purpose, but it is (usually) likely not to have any outcome on who is chosen as the winner.
On the other hand, one crafty person on the inside of an electronic tallying system could simply press a few buttons and automatically have every fifth vote for person X go to person Y.
Could it happen?
Conspiracy theory time!
Will Microsoft Software be able to count better than the people of Florida?
Microsoft's involved? In 2004 they'll have something other to blame for voting errors than punchcard ballots!
- Amon CMB
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
They tried to charge us to use the .GIF file format on commercial endeavours. I can see them trying to charge us per vote now too! Can't we make this an open-source project? =P
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Well, here's my letter...before I fire it off, anything obviously wrong or stupid?
Dear sir,
I am a software engineer employed in New York state. This morning, I
read on Reuters a report that Unisys Corp., Dell Computer Corp., and
Microsoft Corp., are teaming up to develop an electronic voting system.
Dell Computer Corp. is the number two PC manufacturer in the United States,
and Microsoft produces the de facto standard computer operating system
software, "Windows", used worldwide, and is currently in hot water with the
DOJ. I suggest that proprietary computer and software companies which
have large shares, if not monopolies, in their sector, may not be the
best entities to entrust with inventing a secure, fair, open, and
accountable electronic voting system.
In my opinion, both professional and personal, such a system is best
developed under a Free Software/Open Source model. I refer you to
descriptions of Free Software,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, and Open Source,
http://www.opensource.org/osd.html.
Loosely, Free/Open-Source software is distributed under a license
which guarantees the freedom of people to obtain and inspect the source
code of such software. I believe only with this freedom of inspection
can we ever trust that software does what its originators claims it does.
Obviously this would be of utmost importance in an electronic voting
system. Furthermore, Free/Open-Source software has the additional
benefit of allowing many people to verify that the software is free of
bugs and performs as expected. This has the side effect of producing
software which is frequently more reliable and robust than software which
is developed behind proprietary curtains. Much of the infrastructure of
the internet is based on such Free/Open-Source software. Recently the
operating system Linux, also developed under this model, has been
receiving a good amount of attention and accolades.
Lastly I would like to point out that such a Free/Open-Source software
system for electronic voting already exists: FREE, "Free Referenda and
Elections Electronically": http://www.thecouch.org/free/. I am sure
there are other such Free/Open-Source projects.
As a professional, the practical benefits of Free/Open-Source software
are apparent to me. But as a citizen, I believe the social and ethical
benefits to state operated systems are paramount, and I could never
entirely trust with my vote, software whose source code I, or a trusted
party, cannot inspect. I kindly suggest that research into electronic
voting systems explore Free/Open-Source software possibilities.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
check here for information about becoming an IEEE Certfified Software Engineering Professional...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Ok, so I take it shortly we will see M$ Vote 1.0. It will work fine in all tests but then when we go to use it to vote, it will BSOD 80% of the time while during normal use, and will loose votes for particular canidates.
:-)
Then M$ Vote 2.0 will come out. Featuring a totally redesigned interface (which will confuse even the most seasoned computer users and requires going through 10 confirmation dialogs just to vote for the president), new built in Internet Exploder 6.0 for instant vote information. It will also cost 10k per machine to upgrade the hardware and software necessary because M$ is no longer supporting 1.0 and is not compatible with 2.0 at all.
Funny, sounds like Windows almost
Brielle
'The same people whom the DOJ is opening a can of woopass on?'
.. we vote them right back in !
Governments don't understand stuff like this - they only understand bids and tenders, not trust and competence. If they did understand, they wouldn't bother standing for reelection after they've screwed the electors. But guess what
A few years ago, EDS (Ross Perot's company) was hauled before the courts in the UK for knowingly employing illegal immigrants. 2 years later, EDS got major contracts for some government jobs (including the passport office, I think !)
The open source movement would be called upon to make an open source voting machine system. The source code, widely available, would be highly scrutinized for fairness and elmination of protential fraud.
This software would then be placed on certified hard disks (which may have to be bought new) and placed into any suitable PC. It would assume nothing more than a low-memoried, slow pentium with VGA.
The public would then be asked to donate old PCs, and they would get a tax deduction for it. I think there would be a flood of donations. A quick check to assure the donated parts are standard, and you would be able to get all the voting machines at close to zero cost (mostly just the $50 new hard drive, since allowing a donated hard drive provides a slight risk of fraud by very clever people who recode the firmware on the drive.)
People would get a thrill out of donating their old PC to help an electoral system in crisis.
The machines would not be internet connected. They would just have a screen and printer. They would conduct the voter through their ballot and then both record the ballot and print out a paper ballot which is both human and machine readable -- with the machine reading what the human reads, not some bar code or other non human readable info. When the person confirms their paper ballot is correct, they end the process and take the paper ballot to a ballot box.
At close of voting, the machines immediately report a tally of the votes to the returning officers. However, randomly, or in case of a recount, the paper ballots are counted by hand or with a scanner, as they are the true record.
An alternative scheme would be to get donated scanners on a 2nd machine. On the 2nd machine, the voter would take their ballot and insert it into the sheetfed scanner. The machine would display their vote as read off the paper ballot, and they would confirm it is correct, then place the paper ballot in the ballot box. The machine with scanner would retain the tally, and could rescan the ballots at any time. Again, the machine would do some form of OCR on a ballot designed to make it reliable, it would not rely on anything a human can't easily read. In this system, voters could, in theory, prepare their ballots ahead of time running the software on their own machines, and just bring them in and present them to the scanner machine, confirm them and put them in the box. If the scanner did not confirm what they want, they could go to a machine at the polling station and re-vote.
Such machines would provide a quick accurate count, with confirmation to each voter that their vote is recorded as they wish.
They would also allow more "complex" votes, in particular, they would allow the use of the "australian" or "preference" ballot, where you get to list the candidates you like, in order, rather than just picking one, and a mini-runoff is done, eliminating the bottom candidate and transferring the votes of those who had that candidate as first choice to their next choice. Such ballots, used in Australia, Ireland and many private elections in the USA, totally avoide the "nader effect" seen this year, as Nader voters could vote "Nader, Gore" if they wanted, and once Nader was eliminated, their votes would switch to Gore.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
badly built hardware, windows, and gifs... this is supposed to *help* the voting system?
--
I predict a 102.9% Republican landslide in the next US election.
I used to work for the company and believe me, their services arm isn't even remotely up for a challenge and is suspect at best... even for implimentation at a state level. They have had several contracts internationally for implementing voter systems but Unisys international personnel have always been superior to domestic employees. Plus, you don't even want to know about the skeletons in that companies closet... (Re: Problem contracts)
:)
Besides, this is the same company that takes so much pride in handling golf scores for USGA... wow, some real complex calculation algorithms there.
If this system ever gets in place I not voting. Seriously, the voting system needs to be as simple as possible. If paper ballots ever get replaced with a computer that isn't 100% Open Source and Open Hardware and developed entirely by the government, I'm moving to Canada
I trust the government less to produce a system than I would Microsoft -- the government has a lot to gain from designing a system they can swing at the flip of a switch; Microsoft doesn't.
SImon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Democratic party.... no votes
Republican party.... no votes
Bill Gates.......... 97,312,437
Every Win2K machine in the US automatically starts playing Hail_to_the_Chief.mp3
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
A spokesman was reported to have said,
<i>"With eBay's advanced voting error correction technologies, I can confidantly say that we will never again see the kind of shambles we got in Florida when amateurs were allowed to mess with electing government."</i>
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
That seems to be the prevailing attitude for SourceForge projects...All you need is a cool name. Actually producing any code is optional.
SourceForge is like one big lump of unfinished (never to be finished) projects started by starry-eyed 16 year olds looking for net-cred.
He came over and I said jokingly, "Ah, it's probably running Windows and just needs a reboot." I was totally joking but he kind of gave me the evil eye.
He popped the cover off of the screen and reached in back to push a button or something, when LO AND BEHOLD, what should appear on the screen but a blue background with something at the top which read, "Windows NT 4.0 SP3....."
I couldn't believe it! I was TOTALLY joking about the Windows/reboot commment, and it turns out I HIT THE FREAKING NAIL RIGHT SQUARE ON THE HEAD!!
I fail to see how that could have possibly been more rich! :)
I'm not voting until at least Service Pack 3, which would be right around 2006. Everyone knows it takes MS 3 revisions to get a stable product. If every there was a need for an Open Source project, this is it.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
And yet I find it hard to trust any of these systems. I wonder why the ballot has a black background? I'd say it's to hide ambiguous votes - marks made between two of the circles. So the vote counters can say with a clear conscience, 'there was no mark.'
Assuming that their are Canadians as stupid as the ambiguous voters in Florida, there are probably many Canadian ballots with an X half way between the white circles.
I had wanted to draw a little dialogue that said "Do you think microsoft should be found guilty of violations of antitrust laws?" with the only buttons being "No!" and "Of course not!", but slashdot decided that it was full of junk chars and wasn't worth posting.
You'll just have to use your imagination... until the system is released, that is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I hope they keep a paper trail of each vote. If there is a disk head crash or some other loss of data, who's going to attempt the re-count... Let's see... looks like a scratched "1" bit to me.... That's easier to discern than a Florida Dimpled Chad. Don.
If electronic systems become widespread, this kind of thing could decide an election.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The Wright brothers claimed they had done it in 1903, but nobody but them had seen it. Even if it were true, their machine was not self-propelled. It had to use a catapult to take off. Can you call that an airplane?
Really having a hand ballot hand counting system in the US, would be no different than if Australia, the UK, Germany, Canada, Spain & France all voted on the same day.
& the simple fact if all those countries could all finish their hand counts on the same night, so could the US.
Its just a matter of hiring enough Temp staff. Look at Dade county, they reckoned it would have taken 14 days to do a hand county. Which meant if they had just trebled their temp staff they could have done it in 5 days, & if they had hired 15 times as many temp staff & turned all the convention centres & indoor stadiums into counting centres, the hand counting would have been done overnight.
That's the way its done virtually everywhere else in the world
Plus you don't have to worry about "threats, dirty tricks and other shenanigans" because everyone of those thousands of counters have both a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over their shoulders.
It may seem labour intensive, but its only for a day or 2 at the most - it is afterall the standard way its done arround the world (Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, Denmark, etc, etc).
You ask "How would an X marks the spot system be immune to being altered? Or having extra ballots entered?"
Well its simple really, the whole election is monitored by the independent election commission & they are the only ones who have the ballot papers (they can be numbered & holigramed). When you get your name crossed off you are given a ballot form, then after you fill it out in your booth you put it in the locked ballot box. From them on to the end of the counting procedure that ballot is only touched by the independent voting staff who are at all times scrutineered by scrutinneers from both the labour & conservative parties.
This is the standard method its done virtually everywhere, except the US & Brazil & one or 2 other places.
"In the 60's it was not uncommon for ballots to be altered (indeed, today there are dead people still voting in some areas of the country...). This is why machine's were brought in, to try and reduce the amount of ballot corruption."
Actually no (It seems I know more about US voting history than you), the US introduced voting machines as far back as a hundred years ago, & by the 60's the vast majority of the US already had voting machines. The reason was simply cost. Counties did not want to hire thousands of temp staff to do the counting. Even though it was just for a day or 2. Plus the political parties were unable or unwilling to provide the thousands of scrutineers that are needed . Mainly because the US has alway stupidly voted on Tuesday, which means people couldn't or wouldn't take time off their regular job.
However this problem is instantly solved if the US did what the rest of the world does & votes on Saturday. Considering how keen American workers are, they wouldn't have any trouble employing thousands of counters to count away all day & night on Saturday & maybe Sunday too. Particully if they are getting double time for working the weekend.
Actually the pair of people working at the voting table are not volunteers. They are hired help and paid not too bad for a day's work. (I know since I worked at the polls for the last election.) They are not from opposing parties -- they have no party affiliation at all, or if they do, they are required to keep mum about it. Political discussion of any kind is verboten in the polling place.
There may also be one or several observers on hand on behalf of the candidates, but they don't actually do any of the work involved in conducting the voting.
During the ballot counting, the party observers may also be on hand, but even if they are not, the ballots must be counted in the presence of 2 witnesses.
All in all though, you have described the Canadian voting process pretty thoroughly.
Some trivia from the Canadian election day: of the 181 people who cast a vote at my polling station, 27 of them made a joke about the US elections; of those, 18 of the jokes were about chads.
Trickster Coyote
Howl at the moon!
Ideology is for ideots.
That should put a spanner in the works!
I don't see any development, they are just going to use existing systems. Microsoft Windows, Dell's Wintel Hardware, and Unisys to do what ever Unisys does. I can just imagine the future of the free world riding on the back of Wintel Servers. I can just see it right now..... Just make sure an election worker doesn't open a file called A_Love_Letter_For_You.vbs. On the software side I see the typical microsoft overkill, once you step upto the machine it will ask you if you want to play an MP3, and open a web browser. I personally don't have any problem with the Vote-a-matics (I live in Florida), When I voted in the last election I verified that my Presidential, and Senate votes were properly punched out, and they were. If someone can't properly use a vote-a-matic, I'm almost positive that they won't be able to use a computerized voting system. My grandmother still doesn't trust ATM machines.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Bill Gates appears as a drop down list choice on every write-in slot.
BSOD counts as a straight party line vote.
Unisys as a contractor guarantees DOD oversight of elections.
Microsoft as a contractor guarantees DOJ oversight of elections.
Dell as a contractor guarantees a 50% plus failure rate if the systems are portable.
Two words: BANNER ADS
Votes for third party candidates cause segment faults.
VNS hires the same triuvirate to produce inaccurate results for media feeds.
Bill Gates replaces Jim Lehrer as moderator for the debates.
Katherine Harris becomes a UN Election Monitor.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
- G.W. Bush successfully shuts down the antitrust action against Microsoft.
- A couple of month from now, private recounts (which are possible under Florida's sunshine laws) prove beyond doubt that Gore was the actual winner.
- International outcry is big enough that Bush has to step down, and Gore immediately resurrects the antitrust actions.
This series of events will have shown unambiguously what far greater mess will happen if you allow an entity which has a vested interest in the outcome of an election, to design a voting system. And remember, with Microsoft's machine, there will be no manual recounts, all is electronic. So we wouldn't even know if any cheating went on.Say no to software patents.
What is it with America's love of voting machines? They don't use them virtually anywhere else.
Haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& also virtually the rest of the democratic world) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good (they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fuked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised ). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has about the lowest voter turnout in the OECD.
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
Imagining just one of them is bad enough. 'Scuse me whilst I go wash out my brain with soap and water.
IBM declined to get involved in voting mechanisms in the 50's under Thomas J Watson, and declined again this past year, when Lou V Gerstner was approached about the matter.
/. will say, "yes, we knew it would happen, " the rest of the world will say "How could this happen?" and because MS is ubiquitous, it won't really hurt their bottom line, proving that they are a monopoly, regardless of what Judge Jackson's pursuit of them results in.
Voting is too important, and IBM has always chosen to keep their hands clean of ethical quandries, where possible. Besides, it's bad for business if fraud is committed on your machines.
What are the ramifications here? That if fraud is committed on a MS box, all
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
If I understand correctly, the authority to set the voting policy in USA resides with the county officials. They decide what kind of voting machines should be used/not used and the money to implement such comes from the county. I don't think the story implies the Feds have commissioned MS/Dell/Unisys to build the voting machines. They are building these on their own and unless some county authorities decide to buy these they cannot be implemented.
The best way to go about the voting machines is for the Feds to publish the specifications of the ideal voting machines and an agency to certify whether a particular brand of machines satisfy the specifications. These specs should be open and without any patents. Any company small or big would be able to build machines according to the specs and market it. Counties can buy the machines from whichever company they prefer. This may not guarantee fair play, but atleast there will be some competition, and the government can buy the machines in their own terms, not some big corporation's EULA.
Twenty million people sent it in?!? I demand a recount!!!!!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
We Americans enjoy a tighter grasp on our government, who is responsible to us every day, not simply at election time. For that reason, we Americans have a whole bunch of things to vote for when it comes around to election time, not the one parlimentary representative, but a slew of legislators to local, state and federal government as well as referendums, bond proposals, and other such ballot initiatives. Sure, the Canadian way is much more simple. But that's only because simple people require simple procedures.
--
If there is one single thing that I have learned about security is this... There is none.
If you want it safe, you dont want an electronic method like that. The more people involved, the more it (at least appears to) lessens the chance of seriously tainted results.
They shouldnt object to an open audit of the code, seeing how there isnt this huge demand for US Election Wizard 2.0, and they wouldnt have to worry about competitors.
I can honestly say that if I was involved in the project, and had access to the data in anyway, I would at the very least consider the idea of fixing the results.
Did you just grab my ass?
I agree whole heartedly. That would be one step toward sanity, although I think the software companies might cry and scream "needless regulation!".
I don't know how many EEs get licenced though, there is a Professional Engineer certification for it. It's not like licencing electricians.
I believe the mission critical software is done by licenced EEs. None of this "Software Engineer" crap where there is no certification or IIRC even a available degree in.
Folks, this is your democracy. How about debating the pros and cons of electronic voting instead of taking cheap shots microsoft?
This past election was my first time voting and we used lever style machines, which wasn't too bad. Pull a lever by the name of the guy you want in the big chair and in the congress. Or if your feeling extra fastfood style american, one quick thrust of a lever of your party of choice. Not too bad IMHO.
But MICROSOFT? The same people whom the DOJ is opening a can of woopass on? The same people you read about who make NT/2000 patches like a bodily function? I *DON'T* hate Microsoft, But look at the proposing companies past before you decide who'll be making the software for the machines you'll someday use to put democracy in motion.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Great thinking, guys.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The ideal alternative would be to have paper ballot. The voter marks a cross (or a /. if you're so inclined) on the idiot he wants to vote for. This can be hand counted, does not lead to ambeguities. Who knows, the supreme court may not understand the system long enough for the recount to be finished. Besides, you people don't have problems like booth capturing. Here in India, there are instances of voting booths being taken over (by bribery or by force) and all the available ballots being marked for the bastard indulging into it.
-Shaunak.
Thanks for the link. It's very interesting that it is the IEEE doing this and not the ACM or other computer science related professional organization.
Does this mean that next time I go to vote I'll get a blue screen of death if I vote for anybody but Gates for President?
I'm an civil engineer (actually Engineer In Training with a (EIT) licence) turned programmers. The worst civil engineering plans and designes are vigorously reviewed by PE (licences Proffesional Engineers.
They won't build it unless a PE stamps the design with his stamp
Software design and testing is a lot less mature..
Can't you people see this is just the first step in Gates' plan for World Domination? They control the ballots, it'll be a bigger sham than gwbushs' presidency. :p
F.O. Dobbs
I believe Jesse Jackson is, at heart, a good man. However, many of his actions are divisive and destructive to our culture. Jackson accuses anyone and everyone of racism, from Bill Clinton (true!) to GWB and everybody in between. He is a laughingstock because he has destroyed his own credibility by endlessly dishing out baseless accusations over the years. The more he rants, the more people hate him -- it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and is a recipe for instant racists.
Did anyone hear about Compaq vying for the position Dell was given? If so, what happened?
Space Invader... Lurker of the Far and Beyond. Welcome to my Realm...
Ok, let's see. Someone else said that Canadian votes have a single box to check. OK, in the recent election here, there were no fewer the 40 different votes to make on my ballot -- in addition to the presidential vote there were congressmen, senators, local officials, local/regional judges, ballot initiatives, etc.
Ok, add to that a population roughly 10 times as large as Canada's. Now we've got a voting problem about 400 times as complex as Canada's. When will we get the results of an election? In a couple of years?
Seriously, hand ballots are good, but that don't scale worth crap.
Can't they make a voting machine that gives me a frickin reciept so I can confirm who I voted for. ARG!!!!
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to show the government the benefits of viewing the source of a program they buy. We start up a oss voting system running on the same hardware as the setup in the article, perform a full openBSD security audit on it, and it'll be a hellofa lot more secure and stable than any closed source system (at least i would feel more comfortable about it). It would cut down on the costs on implementing the new system and stop the gov't from being dependant on ms for any security updates.
====
All things in life are subjective. At least that's what I think.
====
"white bread, redneck, chicken-shit, motherfucker" -- Dr. Dre on "Straight Outta Compton"
I hope any system they create can support Instant Runoff Voting.
See http://www.fairvote.org/irv/
A quick snippet:
"Instant runoff voting is a winner-take-all system that ensures that a winning candidate will receive a majority of votes rather than a simple plurality. In plurality voting -- as used in most U.S. elections -- candidates can win with less than a majority when there are more than two candidates running for the office. In contrast, IRV elects a majority candidate while still allowing voters to support a candidate who is not a front-runner. IRV is a sensible method in single winner elections."
I can just see it now... As soon as you make your selection for President, the rest of the ballot form auto-completes with that candidate-party's plank.
Personally, I'll keep using a mail-in vote so I can vote weeks in advance and not stand in line. I mean, I use computers and other technology for just about everything, but I just can't trust this particular troika when it comes to my vote. Call it a vote of no confidence.
Do not touch -Willie
I never voted Bill Gates for President!
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Major Security Flaw
On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks. -- H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"
> SOMETHING has to be done about chaos in our electoral process.
Definitely. For starters, let's get rid of the electoral college. IMHO, the main problem with our electoral process is that someone can win the popular vote and lose the election.
This idea of using computers to vote has so many problems I don't even know where to start. But, it is well-known (i thought) that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be broken into. Period.
We should try to fix the current system rather than blindly throwing technology at it. Something as important as the election process should be very, very simple, not full of cool 'features'.
Silverlock
Australia is also a bit smaller than america population wise. A hand count of 300 million would be impossible in the length of time required (electors cast their ballots in mid-decemeber, AS REQUIRED BY CONSTITUTION). A hand count would never be done in time.
-
i can see it now:
'Could not connect to main server... please try again...'
my $.05
I love it when you Windoze phreaks spew this crap when trying to defend Microsloth. You trying to tell me that there are no buggy drivers for Linux? If anything, the drivers are much buggier overall, since the moronic hardware companies refuse to release specs so people writing the drivers for Linux have to hack them the best they can.
And if you try to tell me that Linux isn't more stable, than I'd like to have some of what you're smoking, please. I use Winblows2000 at work on an Athlon 800 with 256mb and, while it's definitely way more stable than anything I've ever used from MS, I still have to reboot it every couple of weeks due to some weirdness with Explorer or whatever. Sure, that's no big deal really, but I almost never have to reboot my Linux boxes. In 4+ years of using Linux on several different computers, I've maybe had to reboot a total of 10 times or less due to an OS issue. I've almost reached that total already in just a few months using W2K on one machine.
It is Microsloth's fault for making an OS that is horribly unstable and insecure and trying to tell their hundreds of millions of users that it isn't. And even when they use NT, it still crashes. See my post in this thread with the subject "More airport fun...".
Dell would only kiss M$ arse, as they do now...
Unisys OTOH... gotta pay them a royalty, too! Well, until they say that the ppl who develop for the system only has to pay the royalty and M$ buys them out ;)
Just a little chaos theroy :)
Karma whorin' since 1999
And if Slashdot ran the elections, who would win?
The Karma whores, the first-posters, the hot-grits trolls, the beowulf clusterers, Natalie Portman, or CmdrTaco?
On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks. -- H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"
In Queensland, Australia, we're going through a painful process whereby the electoral rolls were found to be corrupted by one of the political parties to skew pre-selection ballots. The public are (understandably) concerned that holding a fair election will be very difficult until the rolls are cleaned up. One can imagine the political mischief that would be possible with closed-source election software.
The software for running an election would seem to be ideal for the open source community to tackle, because its peer review process will implicitly find bugs and loopholes earlier rather than later.
The last thing we want is for a major security flaw to be found on election day, when it is too late to fix it.
Because there is an election happening somewhere in the world every other month, plenty of testing can be performed leading up to a major country election. The voting systems are different in different countries, but adding such flexibility won't be difficult. As an added bonus, poorer countries will be able to run computer-counted elections a lot cheaper than if they had to buy a commercial package.
Don't take the above as Microsoft-bashing: I believe that *no* commercial entity should be allowed to write the software. They simply don't have the peer review processes in place to ensure that the code is right for election day. We do.
I voted in a computer this year in Morris County, NJ. It was just like the old pull-dial ones but you pushed buttons instead. Is this hackable? Probably not.
While I do think that the code should be auditied THOROUGLY I do not think there is need for as many flames as this article is drawing. Let them make the system. If local/county/state/federal governments start to use it then use your constituional right to yell at every elected official telling them that with the errors these might cause, they may not get elected :)
rwm
... is still the best voting technology available. It provides reliability, traceability, flexibility and usability. And nations can hand-count the millions of ballots produced in one night, with a few more days being taken for close elections, postal votes, &c.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I guess it's not very likely then that the govt.
will take any more action against their good
friends at MS now. And with MS being the number
2 contributer to both parties, they were guaranteed
the deal regardless of which evil won.
just what we need...
No, he's right. Being Canadian, you line up nice and neatly, and patiently await your turn to vote.
:-) Besides being both Canadian and French (but not French-Canadian), I can never remember if I'm supposed to be polite or arrogant.
Since most Canadians pre-register, and are assigned a recommended polling place - usually close to the residential address - the lineups are short. I doubt it has ever taken me more than 15 minutes to vote and 5 minutes is probably closer to the mark. This does make it easier to be patient about waiting to vote. The polling places are staffed appropriately to handle the expected workload, instead of being understaffed like a big box supermarket where a customer checking out in less than 30 minutes indicates that cashier productivity isn't being maximized. Our polls are also open long enough (~12 hours?) that going either before or after work is easy, further decreasing opportunities for voting booth-rage.
We only vote federally once every 4-5 years so we take the time and expense to do it right. Per capita we probably spend less than you do since you do it every two years, even if the Presidentials are the ones that get the most attention.
One of the bigger expenses used to be canvassing for voter registration, which is now mostly handled on an ongoing basis as part of driver licencing. It seemed to work fine in our last election BTW, so I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the idea that the reason why most US conservatives are against the idea is that it would make it easier for liberal-leaning members of minorities to get registered and vote.
Personally, I think that if you're going to be elitist and want to disenfranchise some voters because they are insufficiently educated to make an informed decision, then have an honest-to-goodness test. I figure that would be fair since many conservatives would have failed the Accounting, Micro and Macroeconomics portions of the test during the Reagan era and it isn't clear they would do much better nowadays.
Ok this ended up as a bit of a troll, but he started it
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Microsoft wins dismissal of 38 private antitrust suits
This does not mean that Jackson's ruling is removed, but it is not insignificant.
Name a recent President who was truly qualified for the position. Bulletprood security is neigh impossible. It's hard enough to secure a fortified position, any time you transit anything you increase the security concerns ten fold. Demoncracy isn't about getting what you want, it's about getting what the majority wants. We however live in a Democratic republic which means the majority gets to choose from a small list of options decided by a not necessarily concerted means. Read up on this country's governmental system before you start going on about getting what "we" and "you" want.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
1 aM t43 N3W Pr351d3N7 oF 7h3 Un173D 57a73S!
Y00 4aV3 B33N 0wn3d!
Y00 mU57 b0w b3f0r3 m3 b3cAu53 1 aM 50 31337!
;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
All 3 of these companies are on relatively good standing. This is not 5-person startup eVotingMachine Inc. which might go out of business a year after delivering their systems to the nation, thus screwing all of us when things break. This means that we can expect this system to be kept in good working order.
With 3 companies working on it, they will all have to be privy to the source and specs for everything involved. This will include numerous security audits by all sides. Who knows, they might even release the source code to the public (it would be in their interests to do so, and good PR)
And despite what some claim, all these companies have lots of money to throw at figuring out the best interface for the system. What works best for the public? Which is easiest and idiot-proof?
-
This stuff is way better than Rand's novels! You are one screwed up fellow, and have my deepest respect.
It would be very possible for a group to modify the public source, and change the way it works, but not change the interface behavior at all. Those allowing millions of people to vote for someone they did not intened to.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
I lived in Montréal in 1995 when the Québec separatists held a referendum on declaring independence from Canada, using their wonderful hand-marked, hand-counted ballots. It turned out that in certain districts with large English-Canadian populations, where a high percentage of NO votes would be expected, an unusually large number ballots were declared "spoiled" because the mark wasn't an officially approved shape. The mark had to be either an X, a check mark, a horizontal line or you had to fill the circle entirely. For instance, people who made the left stroke of the check mark too long (so the mark looked more like a V) had their ballots invalidated. In one district, 12% of the ballots were declared "spoiled" (the normal average is about 1%). Of course many YES votes were also invalidated but the point was that far more NO votes were invalidated.
It was an extremely close election. The YES side lost by fewer votes than the estimated number of NO votes stolen. Some of the election monitors almost got into fistfights during the vote counts. (That seems un-Canadian, but that didn't bother the YES side, since they didn't want to be Canadian! :-)
Let's face it -- if an election is close, there will be borderline ballots which can be argued either way. Those non-Americans who are sneering at Americans over this election are probably happy to have any opportunity to sneer at Americans!
I can just see State legislatures approving this system just because it's accociated with M$. Keep in mind the separation of power, just because 20 some states have a anti-trust suit outstanding doesnt mean the legislature will think before acting. Hmm, Makes me wonder... how about anyone else?!
Bob
I mean, the US government designed, built, and delivered the electronic system Brazil uses. It works like a dream, so I hear from the Brazilians I work with. Why the heck don't we just use something that we know already works?
It seems Americans as a group believe throwing money at technology can solve any problem. Sometimes it works spectacularly well. I doubt this is one of those times.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I read a funny article about something like this a while back.
/etc/vote.config /usr/gvote/vote.db
The article talks about the future voting machines of the 21st century, and what OS they may use.
I had to laugh at the GNU/Linux voting software solution:
echo "George W. Bush" | gvote --add -c -x
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Will I have to agree to a Microsoft End Use License Agreement before I vote?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Now instead of old folks getting confused about their paper ballots and not punching the correct hole... We are going to spend a bunch of money to develop a system where they will just press the wrong button on a keyboard. I say bring back the lever system.
Possible solution:
14 Nov 2016: The Microsoft Accounting agency has completed its review of the vote. Technical Wizard Bill Gates has reported that Steve Ballmer has won the election. VP Elect Michael Dell was with Bill Gates as he reported the results.
"This is the first election in history that was run by a private sector firm. And it has been a great sucess. It takes large companies to properly run a democracy" VP Elect said in a statement today.
Due to the cost analysis of required improvements, 26 states were not included in the count. "Some states did not wish to pay our licencing fees, deciding instead to perform their own election with unsupported open source software. This is unacceptable in a Democracy." reported a Unysis representative.
The tallying of the election returns occured in a bunker located under the former Netscape Headquarters.
In his celebration speech the president elect reported that we need to increase spending to $20 Billion dollars per year to prepare for the next election and provide better security. And make the next version more feature rich for the voters.
Will be some guy called "Fatal Exception"
Can someone let me know why exactly dell is so bad? :) (actualy, I kinda liked it for the laughs)
Well other than that fucking commercial this holiday season
I have used a few of their systems (servers and desktops) and they worked fine for me . . .
echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13
At least it will be a fun ride.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
Brazil has had a computerized voting system for years which uses machines that are sort of like touch screen ATMs. It works fine, and has done so for many years. After all it's hardly hardly rocket science...
If such a system was put in place, none of it should be patented and all of it should be open source. Nothing closed or hidden. No hardware, no software. No one is to "own" anything about it. They just work on it and paid to work on it. There should never be only 1 vendor for something. Also, it would have to be in testing for YEARS! There are so many things to take in place, blind people(brail), people w/ bad eye sight, people who don't have fingers, color blind people, people over seas, voting at home. It should also have some form have hard copy at each station. Maybe just a dot matrix printer priting user:vote. None of this data should be put into a dadabase other than the votes. Peoples names, time of day, etc should not be put in electronic form. A form of receipt would be good, gives the "customer" that warm and fuzzy feeling.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
...because there's only like 50 people in canada.
:D
/me runs away from the rotten tomatoes and hot grits being thrown at him
IT WAS A JOKE!!!
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Dakota means friend in at least one Sioux dialect.
The Sioux happen to be the people who inhabited the place before we built Fargo there. The only stupid thing about the name is the north and south prepended to it, especialy since there is basically no logical reason for the division(east and west Dakota would make more sense geographically and culturally).
I like native names-Denali(Great One) is much more fitting than Mt McKinley(renamed to increase voter name recognition) for instance.
I live in Brazil and I would like to ask you:
Now, some comments:
just use ctrl alt delete instead of counting by hand....
You are witnessing someone voting for the third
or fourth times because you happened to have
a good eye and can see father than the
table that you are working at.
You complain to the supervisor who tells you
that you are not allowed to question the
honesty of a voter who has just sworn on his
honor that this is his only vote.
The same guy is back within an hour or two
at another table and when you complain again
you are told that at the next outburst you will
be expelled.
Now you see a neighbor that you know is a refugee
come to the table. During the revising of the
list his name was removed since he has just
arrived a few months before in some container.
The law allows him to register on the day of
the election. All he needs is to swear that he
is a citizen and perhaps an ID proving that his
face is the same as the one on his fake ID.
He votes. He can go in the next table or county
later on and vote again.
Yes I have worked many times in canuck elections
and have witness a lot of shit of the kind.
There was even an empty high rise every one
not living in the said building voted. Then
there were cemeteries.
Fraud is just as bad in Canada as it is in the
USA. It is just done in different ways.
The only way around this bullshit would be
to identify you with a finger print or eye print
not use winblows as the platform for any voting
machine.
"Microsoft will do the software, Dell the hardware, and Unisys will assemble the systems."
Doesn't that sound suspiciously like the joke about Canada being a mix of French, British and American influences - but they got French technology, British food and American culture...?
Take a look at
http://snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.htm
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Electronic voting is no more "insecure" as paper ballot voting. It does however give people the chance of adding better scrutiny to vote counting. After the votes are tabulated by the county they ought to be sent to several independent counting firms under firm disclosure regulations. The hardware and software ought to be up for public audit and the machines built to higher security standards (C3 or higher) than the typical desktop workstation. Partisan politics really fucked up this recent election and distribution of the tallying functions ought to provide adequate redundancy. If a firm comes up with a different number than all the rest that county's ballots are then sent out to the rest of the firms so they can verify the descrepency. I'd rather have Wang GS doing the hardware and software than Dell, Unisys and Microsoft though.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Can we possibly trust closed source software to run our own voting systems? The source should be open both to ensure that it is reliable and sound and also as a tool for the general public to reference for similar projects.
It still amazes me... what the hell is our government doing? Asking Microsoft to write software within a YEAR of our courts finding them guilty of violating antitrust laws?
Please see ElectionMethods.org for critical information on alternative election methods.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Are we propopsing that there should be a separate list for internet voters and regular voters? I don't see a way in which somebody could vote online and have their name checked off the list automatically. Even the best financial websites disclaim that they have a 5 minute lag. How bad would this lag be on voting day?
I don't think that the problem lies with the internet security at all, It's just a matter of the voting system to be able to adapt to the new process properly without fraud.
We saw enough bad stuff as it was this past election. I don't want the next one thrown out because of some hack.
cnote
They move there voluntarily. Part of the aging process...
Ah... That would explain why I (And others I know) Have been having so many problems with hotmail lately. (No... I'm not trolling. Seriously. Over the last 3 months, 6 people I know have had problems with their hotmail boxes... misdirected messages, corrupted passwords, whole folders disappearing, explorer crashing every time they try to check their hotmail.... I was wondering what happened to BSD/Apache that would cause that....)
These three companies were chosen to do this? I want a recount!
Answer: An election.
Question: What if we had a Beowulf cluster of these...
... and, would they call it the Blue Screen of Manual Recount now?
but if Bill G@es stands for office after this system is installed....