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New Closed Source Voting Systems Malfunction
LowellPorter writes "Miami-Dade and Broward counties are having voting problems. After the 2000 election problems, new voting methods were installed including touch screen technology. Some times the problems were with workers not showing up, poor training, or mechanical problems. It doesn't look like they cleaned up the system there." Not all of the problems mentioned in the article are due to the new proprietary voting machines, but many of them are.
How hard is it to make a voting machine that works? All it does is count votes, it's not like it does rocket science!
For the babbler-in-chief and all of his henchmen
who work in
The White House
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Your headline is about as biased as "Microsoft User Commits Murder"
1. The article doesn't tell us that the software is proprietary. Nor does it tell us that most of the problems are due to the use of closed software. Anyone wondering if Slashdot is an example of journalism or just a bunch of poseurs-for-hire tossing words around need look no further.
2. So anyway, why would we expect open source to work any better?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Have you *ever* seen v1 of a system work flawlessly? It's so immature to toss the word "proprietary" in here, as if to insinuate that being open-source would fix anything. There's tons of open-source programs in v1 status with bugs. Anybody see any news headlines when Mozilla 1.0 came out and there were bugs in it? No? End of story.
What's your damage, Heather?
The problem is apparently that some legitimate votes slipped through in test runs.
Ahem: This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is also the same county that brought you the lawsuit against 2 Live Crew about a decade or so back which had the sole effect of probably doubling their sales, and getting the DA or whoever who started out of office...
The scary thing is, people in Florida can't grasp a simple concept like a voting machine, but they all drive a car...
If you can't push the right button, how can I be confident that you can hit the fucking break?
dammit. id have got first if i hadn't eaten those fajitas last night. i'll tell you, i've got a ringpiece like the fuckinig japanese flag.
Somebody added CowboyNeal as a voting option. It does it every time.
This isn't a "linux would have saved the day" story.. This same quote is reiterated and paraphrased throughout the article:
"She said many poll workers did not wait for the full six-minute activation procedure to occur and then became nervous and uncertain."
The workers just don't know how to use the machines. Either that or Jan the Man wants to play the "I didnt really lose! it was the hanging chads!" game.
Perhaps Florida is hopelessly stupid. Something to do with a close proximity to DisneyWorld. (that explains the lesser but omni-present stupidity in California too. DisneyLand isn't as big.)
How about a "blink once for yes, blink twice for no" system?
Or set up a "Honk if you love Reno!" sign and count the horns.
Or something involving hot grits or business plans or a beowulf cluster "of these"
I can't hear the word 'gubernatorial' without giggling.
Next story please.. I used up too much karma on this one.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Let's consider the source here. The "open source" bidders all spec'd out machines that would use GPL'd GNU code. A vote cast on such a machine is, of course, a Free Vote: You sign over the rights to your vote to Richard Stallman, who reserves the right to modify it as he sees fit. Sure, you can fork your vote, but ask the XEmacs people how much fun that is: You'll have Stallman bitching and moaning about your perfidy and bad judgement in weekly interviews on LinuxYammer.com until Hell freezes over.
The only possible outcome of Stallman's Free Vote philosophy is that all votes will end up being cast for Richard Stallman, after he's done "debugging" them. Maybe those "closed source" machines drop a vote here and there and hand over a solid 5% to Pat Buchanan just for the hell of it, but Stallman's Free Voting Machines would, within six years, leave us with Richard Stallman holding every single elected office in the United States of America.
So what's wrong with that?
A government of, by, and for Richard Stallman would have certain advantages. First and foremost, our many thousands of elected officials have many thousands of times the bandwidth that Mr. Stallman will have all on his lonesome. That means that a government consisting entirely of Richard Stallman will get into much less trouble than our current "distributed" system of taxation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.
The downside, of course, will be seeing Stallman on the television every single night, singing the "GNU Hacker Mazurka" in that shaky, pitch-blind voice of his and then ranting about how the XEmacs traitors will be punished for their crimes.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
Some may say this is a bold statement, so I will provide examples to back it up:
- Windows NT 4.0 contained several well-known backdoors that
allowed non-admin users to pop their code straight into kernel space. This
was done with "ease of use" for developers in mind, and since the OS was
closed-source, nobody questioned the poor design. The Microsoftie who
wrote it obviously conferred with several other Microsofties, who, lacking
security training, had no idea it was not the Right Way(tm) to do things.
- In contrast - Andrew Morgan's continuing work on the Linux privileges
project is the antithesis of Microsoft's uneducated, misguided attempt to
build a secure OS. Andy started out as we all do - with a naive view of
computer security and interprocess authorization. However, he learned from
the masters, and quickly designed and implemented a rock-solid privilege
foundation that is used, in its original form, to this day in the
Linux kernel. Granted, few distributions other than OpenWall Linux take
advantage of it (which is sad) - but if they did, we would all be much
safer from the threat of root compromises.
- The Windows 2000 FTP daemon has been notoriously insecure, in
contrast with open source products like MuddleFTPd and ProFTPd. Why?
Because the coders who wrote this security-critical part of the system
just didn't care.
And that is my point with these voting systems: they are produced with the bottom line and a fat contract on the line, not produced by people who actually care about developing a product that encapsulates accountability, security, and accuracy. In other words, these products are developed by your stereotypical non-geeks who buy a CS degree "so they can make more money." And those, my dear friends, are the enemy of everybody in our profession.I suggest a new voting system for those counties/states where a significant percentage of the voting population seems unable to grasp the mechanics of voting: randomize the layout of politicians so that misvoting doesn't bias the final count. Then maybe we can at least focus on the education/UI issue, rather than getting bogged down in partisan bickering over and interpretation of election results.
45,128 votes for Bush
45,132 votes for Gore
2,000,000 write in votes for Bill Gates.
Wha?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
..Bill Gates elected president.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
We need to give up on these fancy high-tech solutions that are so buggy and difficult for old people to use. Go with what they know, and what works...
Make the ballots like bingo cards. Give each voter a card and a daubber. I've seen grandmothers that can't work a toaster, but they can turn around and fill in 10 different bingo cards at a high rate. Not to mention that you almost never see them make a mistake filling out one of those cards.
This would solve the whole boot problem and software bugs. The logistics of it would be no different than the old punch cards, but with a lower chad pregnancy rate.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The problem is that in the last presidential election, the margin of difference was way below that 2% error rate.
But I agree with you here. The arrow ballots are really easy to deal with, and people who can't figure them out are probably not smart enough to vote intelligently, anyway.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Well, a few years ago virtually every ATM ran OS/2. But so did all of the banks (for front end systems, not backend). Most of the banks have since moved off OS/2 to Windows NT or Win2k, so I have no idea what's running in the ATMs anymore.
They should have used the new system they're testing for the 2004 presidential elections in Florida.
The biggest problem with these machines is that unlike most software it appeals to an extremely small market AND one where there are very low margins. It is hard to attract top software talent to write good code for these machines. Given the scenerio above, open source actually does make sense because it is the only way you'll be able to get solid talent for nothing!
Yea, just like a ballot where all the candidates names are listed with an arrow pointing to a different circle. Then you use a metal pin to punch a hole through the circle of the person you are voting for.
Oh, WAIT.... That IS what they did last time.
Don't waste your time trying to reinvent voting so that Florida voters can understand it. The old system was simple and easy. The claim of the Democrats was this: because there were two different columns on the paper, people got cunfuzed (spelled like that intentionally)and voted for the wrong person.
To this day that argument still makes me laugh.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
If anything, its just an indication that we're running out of things to replace with computers ... ;) Lets just hope IT investors didn't read your post or they might start thinking that there are some areas in which Computers Dont Solve Your Problems (tm).
"Old man yells at systemd"
They made little cardboard folders that the ballot papers fitted into. There were holes over where you made a cross on the ballot paper, and next to them were symbols for the candidates in a kind of simplified Braille. So the blind voters could make a mark in the right place without being helped to make the right decision by the local Bush-equivalent clan representative.
But hey, what do you expect from Third World people? And a lot of them were black, probably unemployed, and so wouldn't have had the vote in a civilised state anyway.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You know, lots of states have been using (closed source! GASP!) computerized voting systems for years, WITHOUT PROBLEMS. The fact that something is not open source does NOT mean that it will not work. Stop the unwarranted sensationalism.
Slashdot is about the sorriest example of "journalism" that I have come across.
I've been thinking of starting up a group for recovering Florida Voters. Something with the AA motto, our own 12 steps to recovery and so on.
Once it's up and running we'll follow up with a Florida Voting for Dummies book. Maybe even a talk show tour to wrap it up.
At least it couldn't make things ANY worse down there. Hell, it might even help!
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
One of the main problems with voting is that each individual voter doesn't know if their vote was properly counted, and has no recourse if the their vote was miscounted. One reason for this limitation is that the vote is anonymous, so you can't keep track of what happened to your vote.
My idea is to give each voter a secret unique identifier randomly generated at the poll. An online database would keep track of which identifier went with what vote. Then, anybody who had doubts about thier vote could look up to see if they were counted properly. If not, they could use thier receipt to petition for a revote. In the event that enough people complained within the deadline, the entire vote would be redone.
Not only were they told not to fix it, they were told to make it impossible to fix.
D-oh!
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Come to Belgium in june 2003 and watch us vote electronically. As we have been doing for the last few elections.
:)
It isn't that difficult.
You go to the voting-office.
You prove your ID (national ID-card)
Instead of a piece of paper you get a kind of bankcard (of visa/master-type) or a card with chip. (I am not sure)
You plug your card into the computer.
You vote (once, although it can be for more then 1 election. We have about 9 governments, I think. Hell, even we can't keep count)
You take your card back.
You put it in a box with the others.
The card doesn't have information about you.
The card-info can't be changed after voting.
At the latest one, you could put it back in, and check if it contained the right vote.
The government knows that you have voted (it is required) once. (see above: ID-reg)
The cards get collected from around the votingdistrict, shoved into a coutingcomputer.
And you know what?
It works.
Perhaps the older people, might ask some help.
Why don't you just buy the tech from us, hey.
If your are interested, we even have electronical wallets, called 'proton'.
PS. my english isn't what it used to be, I know
I get suspicious... I look up... Yup. It's a Michael article.
Can I get a show of support for Slashdot to just freaking fire the idiot?
Why is it a big deal that the source code is closed to the public? I don't think we really need vote_for_me_many_times.mod going up on sourceforge, do we?
I certainly wouldn't want a L33T H4X0R messing with my vote.
I prefer to let the Supreme Court and the press do it for me.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
A voting system is just a simple Point of Sale system that only need to add - until someone figures out a voting tax. I bet that any self respecting POS system can be configured to handle a vote. So what the hell is the problem???
Florida is all screwed up. I mean Pat REALLY won the Florida vote in 2000 he was robbed by W and that asshole Gore
This is a disaster. A disaster like this can only come from one source: upper management.
I'm a government IT worker. While I'm mostly uninvolved with the election stuff, I do enough with it to understand all the stuff that goes on to make sure the votes are as close as possible.
This has nothing to do with software or even computers. This has to do with human stupidity, laziness, and lack of training. Prior to the election, the precincts receive training from an offical (usually from the county courthouse). The poll workers are trained to do their jobs, they don't just show up at 6:45. They've obviously never been introduced to the new hardware, let alone taught basic troubleshooting. And what's with poll workers not showing up? late? Take them out back and give em a good ass kicking. No excuse for that. They have a job to do, and when it's as important as electing the next officials, you just don't do that.
Whoever is managing/training these folks needs to be shot. At the very least, fired. Obviously those who were supposed to do their jobs didn't.
Now, a word about these ATM/kiosk thingies. Sounds to me liked they were working ok. If the case was that they blue screened and incorrectly tallied votes, that again falls back on someone who didn't test the system. Sounds like everything performed as designed, the blame lies on the idiot poll workers and the trainer who didn't do their job.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Bush did win. But only because his brother made sure florida went to the right. You don't see the Good Ol' Boys at work here? Open your eyes and close your open sores software.
After the last voting disaster a bunch of smart people looked at the situation and recommended simple optical scanning approach. That means Grandma uses a black marker or some such to fill in a bubble. Or circle the candidate, or write in etc. Computerizing things may help with registration, but for the actual vote simpler is better.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
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Someone h4x0rs the voting screen and puts Linux on it?
"...I accidentally voted for him three times!"
- Average Dade County Voter
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Well, I think the real issue here is that accuracy is not necessarily the desired quality here. In fact, high accuracy could be a very Bad Thing (TM), particularly in South Florida.
South Florida is home to a lot of voters that are susceptible to bouts of emotion when it comes to voting. Groups of people such as women, the elderly, African-Americans, etc. can easily be "riled up" by merely mentioning issues such as abortion "rights", Social Security, affirmative action, etc. They then take those emotions to the voting booth with them and allow themselves to cast a vote for a Democratic candidate without sitting down and thinking all of the issues through logically.
This is not the way Founding Fathers wanted us to vote. Although voting has become marginalized and something that few people do anymore, it still remains a very important and solemn duty. South Florida has a lot of emotional people, and if the inherent inaccuracy of the existing voting machines can help to offset the effect of the incorrectly-cast votes, then I am in favor of it.
I remember seeing some women shrieking in terror when they realized that they had just voted for Pat Buchanan, but the irony is that these same women probably would have voted for Pat intentionally if they just sat down and thought about the campaign issues rationally.
It may very well be the case that Al Gore would have received more votes than Bush if the machines were 100% accurate, but many of those votes would have been emotionally-cast and should have gone to Bush if the voter had been rational. Because of the inaccuracy of the machines, Bush won the state -- which is as it should be, because I believe that that was the true, rational intention of the Florida electorate.
The end result was correct, and we have the inaccuracy of the machines to thank for it.
Close sourced Microsoft Windows XP desktop is far superior to the Open source Linux desktop.
Bruce Schneier wrote about voting technologies in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the article is here. Interesting read, with good links at the end of the section.
My favorite quotation:
"Certainly Florida's antiquated voting technology is partially to blame, but newer technology wouldn't magically make the problems go away. It could even make things worse, by adding more translation layers between the voters and the vote counters and preventing recounts."
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Closed source bad. Open source good. We get it already. Why didn't you use the Bill Gates as Borg -picture while you were at it.
Does anyone else feel ashamed for Slashdot editors for posting articles like this?
it was more than that. There was a thick black line between each entry. The line was very similar to the arrow line except that it didn't have the small arrowhead and it was much longer. I tried squinting to see how an old person would see the ballat (I could read the names, but that big line sure looked more tempting than the little short line).
I read the internet for the articles.
Here let me help:
A little enclosed private booth.
A computer screen saying "Touch the person you would like to vote for."
A quote in the article saying "I've never seen anything like this. I've been here since 5:30 this morning, and I'm ready to blow my stack."
Come on people, lets get it together here.
Its easy to make a voting proces that works: print pieces of paper with the candidates names on them. The voter goes into a private area or "booth" and makes a mark by the candidate of their choice. These peices of paper or "ballots" are kept in a secure location until the voting period ends. They are then counted with representitives of the candidates and members of the public present.
This radical system is already in use in such exotic places as The UK, Canada and Australia. This system tends to be more accurate than mechanical devices and less open to fraud. The proces can also be completed in a matter of hours.
They are tried and true, and accuracy is very high, in most places 98% or higher.
Bush's final "winning" margin in the 2000 election was about 500 out of 6 million votes cast. That's a margin of error of 0.008% (unless I'm messing a decimal point up somewhere).
A 2% margin of error on choosing our next President is unacceptable.
I think the ultimate solution is this:
1) Increase the size of the ballot sheet to 8.5" x 11".
2) Insert that sheet into something that looks like a oversized Votematic machine.
3) It will work like a Votematic punch card machine, but instead of punching holes in the ballot sheet there is enough area exposed on the ballot where you mark off your choice with a small ink stamp.
4) Once the voting is finished, you give the completed ballot to the people at the voting station and they will do a preliminary optical read (without revealing what was voted on) to make sure the voter has marked off all the right spots; this will prevent double-voting, not marking in the right area, etc.
5) Once that is verified and the voter says they are satisfied with what they voted for, the voter gets a receipt proving they have voted.
The advantage of using a marker to make the selection is that the ballot can be both machine read AND hand-counted easily. That way, the accuracy will be very high indeed.
Why don't we use computers for all voting now? --Well in many cases we do, but you just don't know it.
Where I live, and in many places througout the US we have these ballots where you use your little marker and complete the arrow pointing to the candidate of your choise. Once you complete your voting you take your ballot and feed it into a machine I got news for you.. IT'S A COMPUTER.
One of the main reasons no one has trouble with this is that the average person is removed (even if ever so slightly) from the "computer". The system seems to work fine with no major issues and has for several years.
The we have the Technophobe Factor. As soon as you let people know they are actually dealing with a computer, all of a sudden it gets too complicated. Why? there is no real reason. It could be that the software in that voting thing is designed poorly, but even if it is really aweful, it probably isn't all that bad.
There is a segment of our soceity that will never want to work with computers, avoiding them at all costs, loosing all common sense when dealing with them believing they are too complicated to understand. What's worse is there is NOTHING we can do about it. Many of these people are older, but surprisingly they all aren't. It isn't just older people, it isn't just artsy people, it's more of a mind-set then any particular demographic. These people aren't dumb either... although the fringe of them who do try to use the internet usually end up starting their tech support call as: "I am the dumbest person". - You know the kind who have had the Internet for six years and still haven't learned anything - Not cuz they can't but because they won't.
It's hard for us techies to understand their motive. I don't, but I do know it exists and have learned there is nothing I can do about it.
At this moment, the best we can hope for is to make it so these people don't know they are using a computer. Using paper that you draw a line to complete an arrow, modding an old voting machine so those comfortable levers hit the right contacts for a computer to do it. Just don't let people know they are using a computer!
Hopefully in a few years we can slowly, incrementally get them to use computers -just not yet apparently
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Still people miss the point that the failure in Florida in 2000 was not the technology but the process.
Problem 1: No user feedback. You punch the chads, you hand in the card. No-one tells you what your card says, so you can agree that that is what you meant. There is no consistency checking. Everything is deferred until the stack of ballots go to the counting machine, by which time it is too late.
Problem 2: No defined recount procedures. There was a recount in a Michigan congressional race in 2000. The Michigan voters used the same machines as those in Miami-Dade. The Michigan recounters had clear, written, legal guidelines: if the chad is connected to the ballot by two or less connectors, it's a vote. Three connectors, it's not a vote. Miami-Dade and Broward had ambiguous language that was being interpreted on the fly by partisan election officials and reinterpreted in Tallahassee a day later.
Now, whoever bought these systems and bought the line of bull that said anyone could get them up and running with no training needs to be fired. Termination with extra prejudice if the machines are in fact unauditable.
The pen and paper system of balloting works. It scales linearly. Everyone understands it. But people live in Florida mainly because it's cheap. So they thought they could save on election costs by choosing a solution that was more expensive but requires a smaller fraction of the electorate to operate. Now, as in 2000, they're seeing that it doesn't pay not to value your vote.
--
E_NOSIG
"Lusers" angle notwithstanding, it was a *terrible* layout for the ballot. There are zillions of ways that the design of the ballot could have alleviated the concerns expressed by some voters.
Just because *you* can do something doesn't mean everybody else should be able to. There is tons of literature in usability, design, etc that show that there are tons of ways of influencing a reader or user into acting a certain way, one way or the other. I'm not saying anything was done intentionally in the case of Florida's ballots. What I will say is that I have a lower opinion of your type of self-affirming drivel than somebody who mistakeningly voted for the wrong candidate. Your view is just as closed minded as somebody asserting that the design of the ballot was *solely* responsible for miscast votes.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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Here in Brazil we gonna have an audict system. One day before the election will be drawn two electronic ballot box for a parallel voting, per state. These boxes will be replaced for a duplicate. In the election day, the original boxes will be used (the votes, of course, will not be valid) with known preset votes. The results, MUST match. The results of elections are known in two ways. 1)The voting bulletin printed by the electronic box in the ending of day are delivered for the parties. 2)An electronic packet (encrypted) with the results is sent over a closed WAN to a central unit in Brasilia. Estimated total time: 7 hours.
Would any of these problems be solved with an open source solution? Do these problems have anything at all to do with the fact that the solution is closed source? Is the fact that these systems are closed source ironic, or telling in any way?
Yes, yes, and yes, it is telling.
Openness is absolutely critical to fair and free elections, and that applies to the technology as much as it does the people. Who knows what is being done with the data being collected, or how it is being massaged. Is every electronic vote counted? Do we know that the results being reported are accurate, or whether or not a systemic flaw (or deliberate alteration) in the software is causing every Nth republican or democratic vote to be dropped? No, we don't know this, because the software's source code is unavailable for public review, much less peer review.
There are all kinds of Microsoft apologists (not saying you are one, but the vast majority of posts taking a tone similiar to yours are, as evidenced by their posting histories) quick to point out that having untrained election officials has nothing to do with the closed source nature of the software, yet eagerly glossing over the profoundly obvious fact that if the election software is closed source, no amount of training can insure that the software is unbiased and the election results fair.
So the point is relevant, even if it does rub the closed source advocates and Microsoft zealots the wrong way.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It seems to me that open source would be the way to go, if only so any 'backdoors' or bugs can be found. 10 million stupid people or 5 million bored, smart people could really put our voting 'system' at risk.
This would also have the added benefit of removing the 'special interest' kickback that I'm sure the manufacturer/local politico is getting on some level.
Besides, what could be more patriotic (real patriotism, not bandwagon flags on your mailbox. ) than helping to create/debug a secure, fair, easy to use and accessible voting system? (Besides actually getting off your fat ass and voting. ;)
One of the benefits of moving to touch screen technology is that it will make Instant Runoff Voting (or Condorcet, or any type of ranked voting system) much easier and, potentially less confusing.
In these systems, the voter ranks his/her choices (i.e. "I want this candidate to win, but if he/she doesn't get enough support, I'd then prefer this candidate" and so on).
The current paper technology to implement this is generally either a box where the voter writes the rank number next to a candidate's name, or a bubblesheet where the voter fills in "1" next to his/her first choice, "2" next to the second choice and so on.
Although ranked voting systems are superior to our current system, these paper ballots are much more confusing than the simple "draw the arrow" or "fill in one bubble" or "punch out one chad."
This is where the computerized systems shine, though. One could imagine a ranked voting system that looks like this: There is a list of candidates on one side of the screen. You touch the names in the order I want to rank them, and your ranked list appears on the other side of the screen. If you make a mistake, the machine can either allow you to change the list in place, or can allow you to "reset" the vote and start the ranking process over (the latter approach being potentially less confusing). Before moving on to the next vote, you can clearly see your ranked choices for the current vote.
Now, the problem is, many of the machines that are being purchased today don't have this implemented, so they will be obsolete once the voters in this country realize how much better the ranked system of voting is. However, computers still have the advantage that they CAN be much less confusing for ranked voting systems than paper ballots.
Welcome to the Corporate Plutocracy. Just watch the TV and do what the nice newsman says.
She said many poll workers did not wait for the full six-minute activation procedure to occur and then became nervous and uncertain.
What, are they trying to boot WinXP on 75Mhz Pentinum I's ??
`They say they are having technical problems, but no one is taking responsibility for them. And they are treating us like we are morons.''
Sounds suspiciously like Msft to me. Let's all chant the EULA together now: "The VENDOR of SOFTWARE PRODUCT makes no warranty for it's fitness for use, and is not to be held liable for ANY damages due to defects in PRODUCT, either directly or consequential, so nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah. But we're DARNED SURE going to make sure you pay for each and every copy in use. PERIOD. You have no choice in the matter. You have already agreed to these conditions when you were born."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Yeah, here's a really simple idea:
1) the error rate should be estimated for whatever voting method is in place. Call it sigma.
2) if the race is not decided by a margin greater than say 2*sigma either re-vote or in the case of the stupidity known as Electoral College (maybe should be called the Electoral Vo-Tech) the split the votes.
The idea that an election may be won by a statistically insignficant difference is as dumb as believing your processors FPU is good to 1 in 2^128. Grow up.
The software was very easy, and the only "issues" I had with it were:
The voting machine itself felt a little flimsy; it was very easy to make the whole thing move as you voted;
You had to remember to pull out the smart card and find the right person to return it to. (there was only one such person at my polling place and she was kept busy trying to explain how things worked to the old folks.
Overall, the experience was easy and fast; Even the checkin went very smoothly.
The software is literally so simple (at least from a UI perspective) that I can't see that it would make a difference as to how the software was developed.
As an aside-- they were upfront that this was coming and even setup "test days" when you could go down and try out the new voting system. The people that have had problems probably should have availed themselves of these sessions.
rob.
The biggest problems is lazy or braindead voting officials that never showed up for training or caused the bulk of the problems as far as the article alludes to. Although 6 minute boot up for a voting machine is plain stupid.. If these are laptop PC's with touchscreens then the company that made them needs to be hanged. There is no excuse for having something as simple as a voting machine taking more than 1 minute for boot, and download it's configuration from a CF card or some other configuration card or flash memory inside the unit.
and yes, and embedded system is the way to go.. you dont need Full color, you odnt even need touchscreen. all you need is a line of buttons.
Aside from the silly design of the voting machines... it looks like forcing your voting officials to attend training and make them accountable would be the most important step in fixing the trouble down there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No. STFU. Anybody who actually read tech news knows that these machines are closed source and even opening them to inspect the equipment voids the warranty and they were quite expensive. There's no way to know whether they are rigged or not. In fact, confirming whether they work or not is basically asking it is it okay to which it gladly replies with an affirmative.
So, in defense of the headline, these machines cannot be validated, cannot be inspected, cost taxpayers of FL an assload more money due to their prorpietary nature, and to top it all off PEOPLE CAN'T USE THEM!
The same dumbass Democrats who designed the buttefly ballot and wanted to count after they were ordered to stop are the same jackasses who bought these pieces of shit. They should be tarred and feathered.
I'm not an expert on constitutional law, but isn't it a violation to not allow everyone the right to vote? Regardless of the cause of the error, I've always been very angry about the blasse manner in which most people approach issues like this one.
"Well, next time, what they need to do is this..." Doesn't cut it for me. There was an election in Seattle several years ago where several balloting locations RAN OUT of ballots, and everyone said, oh well, that's too bad...
I DEMAND MY RIGHT TO VOTE!!! If I cannot vote at my listed polling location, during posted polling hours, I feel that the results of any race I should have had input into is invalid.
My rant for the day.
even slashdot was hacked.
I don't think I need to say much more.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Does anyone remember the episode where Dilbert becomes the project manager for an electronic voting system?
:)
Then politicians try to buy him with a smoking chick
Here are some quotes from that episode for you fellow slashdotters:
Quotes from Ethics
Asok: "Oh, my, this is so not in my job description. I don't think I can possibly..."
Boss: "Stop whining and start slathering."
Boss: "There sure is a lot of weather today, all up there in the sky."
Loud Howard: "I always vote for the tallest guy. The tall ones are better."
Alice: "What's the old familiarity technique?"
Wally: "It involves spending so much time with a woman that she gets used to your faults. It's like falling in love, but without the expense."
Dilbert: "How did you get Ben Franklin's body?"
Garbage man: "You'd be surprised what people throw out."
Garbage man: "Keep your shirt on."
Dilbert: "I had no intention of taking it off."
Garbage man: "You make it hard for people to help you."
Dilbert: "I have an ethical question about our democratic system."
Ben Franklin: "Ah, yes, by now I suppose you've figured out it was all a big joke."
Dilbert: "What?"
Garbage man: "He doesn't know."
Ben Franklin: "Nevermind."
Ben Franklin: "The average voter can't find his bunghole with two hands. You don't want to leave it up to them, do you?"
Loud Howard: "Thanks to your internet voting network, no one will ever have to vote thirsty again."
Asok: "Hey! Look at me! I'm voting and I'm not even a citizen."
What is wrong with the United States, we cant get anything done correctly. Just look at foreign policy. Or How our president increases his approval ratings, anyone else see that the US is now at HIGH alert. Its screwed up!!
I understand why we need anonymous voting. But sometimes I think we need a system that has everyones votes associated with them in some way. I always worry about the old addage that you don't have to own the people casting the votes, you just have to own the people that count the votes.
In any system, paper, black balls, or electronic, the problem always exists. If everyone drops a black ball into a box, who is to say some slight of hand wasn't used change the contents. Just cause I hit the button for 1, and maybe even see the count for who I voted for go up by 1, who is to say that it won't go back down as soon as I walk away from the screen.
A division of the house/roll call vote is the only time when everyone knows the count was fair.
What we need is to figure out a way where I can check to see if my vote was counted, and counted correctly. If we are using electronic voting, maybe an electronic reciept of some kind. I could check what I voted at any time, and I could check to make sure "their" copy of my ballot looks like my copy.
For this to work, maybe even allow for the database of all ballots be able to be downloaded. I could then get a bunch of my friends together with the copy I have. Do my count, see if that count equals the main count, then spot check my friends reciepts. You could then concievably check an entire town/state/country.
But haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& most of the OECD) 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 fucked 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 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.
It's extremely rare for results to not be known before the weekend is out (actually results mostly come out on the Saturday night, meaning people can go to election result parties & still be ok for work on Monday)
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).
Now I bet someone will think 'oh but the US is much bigger than Australia', well my answer is no problem, the US having a nationwide hand paper ballot election would be no different than if Australia the UK, Germany the Netherlands & the Scandinavian countries all voted the same day, IE there's no reason to think it won't scale up fine.
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.
Except in cases where the instruction printed on the ballots themselves are wrong, such as the case in a northern FL country in 2000 where the ballots says vote on every page, but page 2 was an additional 5 prez/vp choices and if you voted "on every single page" you would have spoiled your ballot.
Too bad over 20,000 people in Duval County followed the instructions invalidating what looked to be a sufficient number of Gore votes to have easliy won him the election.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
with a good system like that, it's too hard to
rig the results. look at the last fl election,
they barely stuffed the ballots enough to have
George Bush elected. Obviously, this was not
supposed to look nearly as close as it did, so
now they have installed computerized ballots which
will make covering the tracks and defrauding the
public much less obvious.
not that it matters, nothing happened when they
were exposed last time
Palm Beach County suffers from massive corruption. From this report (using the Google .html cache because house.gov's .pdf crashes IE6 for some reason):
By a dramatic margin, the group most victimized in the Florida voting was African American Republicans. The new findings are stunning: African American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled. Spoiled ballot rates also much higher for white Republicans than either white Democrats or African-American Democrats.
Remember kids, Democrats run Palm Beach County, they designed the "butterfly ballot", and yet somehow everything that went wrong in the 2000 election is all the Republicans fault. Yeah, right.
Machine voting might fix things, but if we can't see the source code I wouldn't trust it, not from these folks. Open Source is our best shot at addressing the trust issue.
Wouldn't it be easier to create a system that allows people to vote using a touch screen system, then instead of trying to save the data (which could easily be corrupted or lost,) simply print the ballot. It could print two copies, one for the person to take home as a personal voting record and one that they put in the polling box. The ballot that is given to the state could even be encoded so that it cannot be read without a computer in order to maintain privacy, while the copy the person keeps could be in plain english, spanish, or whatever language, so that they can confirm who they voted for. I think this would be a reasonable option that would be easier to setup (maybe.) If anything goes wrong with the machine, send them to another machine and start fresh.
Email her and tell her how much of an ignorant, U.S.A. hating cunt she is: Email the Cunt
You hinted that a United States Citizen receives only Civil Rights at loss of Unalienable Rights. And an individual becomes a United States Citizen only when an entity/SSN is created and somehow is or isn't a Sovereign anymore? Does that mean all the people without Social Security Numbers 200 years ago were what: Ex-Britains, American Nationals, Sovereigns, or Nationals within their respective natural states (California National, etc)?
Par for the course, as is usually the case with the Trashdot editors, I read the article and they aparently didn't.
I couldn't find one reference to anything malfunctioning due to the closed source software. Only mechanical problems and HR problems.
In fact, the closest I could find was:
"Poll workers had trouble activating machines because of mechanical malfunctions or poor training"
I live and work in Broward County, and I for one would prefer that they use a closed source system. As is usually the case, and often ignored, is that closed source == accountability. When something goes wrong, I want to know exactly who's responsible. There should be someone (a person) or something (a corporate entity) responsible, in a real-world way. This means monitarily, civilly, and criminally. Frankly, I (and everyone else I've talked to) don't want the vote tallying code to be written by some kid in another country with nothing to lose if his code's screwed up.
But getting back on topic, the Nazi editors just used another lame opportunity to bash non open-source software.
I'm certainly a proponent of open-source, but it has it's place. Likewise closed-source has it's place as well. Each can be used as a tool, and a tool should fit the job. You wouldn't race the Indy 500 in a tank, and you certainly wouldn't want to take your Ferrari off-road.
Should Da Vinci have included detailed painting instructions for making your own Mona Lisa? Think about it.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
some respondents to this post have referred to the old butterfly ballot and claimed that to be proof that paper ballots don't work - that is misleading. the butterfly ballot was another (confusing, poorly designed) technical solution to a non-problem.
A paper ballot needs:
1. the names of the candidates in a single column.
2. a box next to each name
3. a pencil to mark a box with an 'X'
There is a picture of a canadian ballot on this page . It is fairly simple in design.
this whole thing really is a sick sad joke.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Voters in North Florida also had new voting machines to use, but they didn't have any trouble. It's not the technology, it's the system.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Gramps could have examined the source code and corrected the problems immediately.
Most of the folks running the polling places in FL are retired people with a well developed sense of civic duty but poorly developed technology skills. If anything, I suspect that these new voting machines will only exacerbate the problems. The new machines will most likely discourage many of them from volunteering as they are intimidated by computers. If you go to a bank here, you will see a lot of older people who will not use the ATM's out front.
Let's face it. The problems that were experienced in the last election had nothing to do with technology. Next time instead of disputing hanging chads and confusing butterfly ballots we will be hearing about confusing software, glitches, and misc system problems. We just blew a wad of money on nothing IMHO.
Yeah, all that's wonderful except ... IT'S NOT WHAT THE FREAKING ARTICLE IS ABOUT. The article is about the problems of the voting software, completely unrelated to the issue of whether it's open or not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
By mid-morning, countless people voted without difficulty....
Countless, eh? You mean you can't count the number of people voting? Not encouraging in my mind.
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
Ballot
A piece of paper on which are printed the names of the candidates, their political parties and a place for the elector to indicate the preferred candidate. (At a referendum, the ballot has a printed question and spaces for the elector to answer "Yes" or "No".) Canada uses the secret ballot, which means no one except the elector knows the choice that was made.
Ballot box
A cardboard box with a narrow slot on top, into which are placed all the completed ballots until the polls close and the votes are counted. There is one ballot box at each polling station. Metal boxes were used until about ten years ago.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Sorry, but it's unconstitional in many states (Colorado is one) to use any polling method that can be used to prove how an individual has voted.
This is a basic technique to prevent vote selling (or vote coercing, e.g., "vote for my candidate or you're fired/will lose the account/will never marry my daughter/whatever.") If you can prove how you voted, others may be tempted to "encourage" you to vote a particular way. If you can never prove it, you can lie.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
voting is a waste of money, buy a gun.
Maybe they need to make the voting machine's interface look like video poker - help the older folks over their confusion...
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
"if the election software is closed source, no amount of training can insure that the software is unbiased and the election results fair."
Well, you've got to trust someone somewhere.
If it's a closed-source system, we can have a review board set up to verify that the code in the election software is fair and unbiased.
If it's an open-source system, you still have to trust the compiler, or the person who installs the software onto the voting terminals, or the person who installs the vote-tallying software at the central server. Or trust the people who oversee those people. Or watch the installer yourself. But by your logic, why should I trust you unless I'm watching too? And why should anyone trust the both of us?
Shut up with your open source championing. It's tangential to this article, not relevant.
In response to the many responses criticising the headline for sugesting these problems are due to the system being propietary, you should read the link to the previous slashdot article. These machines have been used before and there were many problems. The manufacturer basically said "we guarantee they work, but we won't tell you how they work and if you try to figure it out you're gonna regret it." the system was broken and people wanted an open review of the system. That review was denied and now it is obvious that it is still broken. Therefore, the fact that the system is proprietary is very relevant to the discussion.
People who don't vote the same way you do are voting "incorrectly."
Thanks for the clarification, mein Fuhrer.
Wow! That's some intteresting inside info that you have about what the Troopers did.
How'd they keep it secret from Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and the rest of the Media?
Looks like leftwing mythology has paralized your analytical abilities.
... Take any old story from AP News Wire, twist the meaning of it so that it works in favor of something the /. community likes, then watch the comments roll in.
/. loves), then make sure to reemphasize the point that it is proprietary so that you can pretend that Open Source should have been the way to go.
/. All you need to do is pander to the people with extremist views. Everybody loves the chance to say 'I told you so!'
For example, take a story about a company that built a machine that had a defective component. Since the machine was built by the one company, you're free to call it proprietary. Since proprietary is the opposite of Open Source (which
As you can see, it can take very little spin-doctoring to get your story posted on
(Why do I have the feeling that my social satire will be read as trolling?)
You're only counting the Florida votes in your math.
If memory serves, Gore won the popular election-- meaning he had far more votes than Bush.
The deciding factor was those 500 votes you mention in Florida, because of the screwed-up way our system uses an electoral college (and also the screwed-up way the Supreme Court basically decided who would win the election). In a "one man, one vote" system, Gore would be our president now. You can call Bush the winner, but he certainly won no election.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I'm against Bush, but I'm not exactly for Gore. But any way you cut it, I'm pretty sure the numbers don't lie.)
But you're right. To permit a 2% margin of error is absurd. Nothing quite so disillusioning as knowing you've got a 1 in 50 chance of simply losing your vote, is there?
I've yet to see a better system than a paper / scantron type system. Fill in the hole next to the candidate. Beautiful system: no extra electricity needed, no specialized training for poll workers, no chance of BSOD, and it leaves a paper trail.
If Jeb had the ability to do such a thing this might be a feasible idea.
Please keep me informed about all the UFOs, black helicopters, and other top secret government conspiracies...
[FromTheMorning]
What is wrong with people in Florida? Lately it's just been one thing after another... Apparently simple concepts like "Due Process of Law" and "One (wo)man, One vote" seems to escape them. The recent fiasco with that murder trial plus this latest glitch just goes to show there's something in the water...
Too bad over 20,000 people in Duval County [jacksonville.com] followed the instructions invalidating what looked to be a sufficient number of Gore votes to have easliy won him the election.
Too bad you didn't read the article. Those instructions were for the sample ballot, where everything was on one page, the real ballot had two pages and correct instructions for this layout. Also, gore would have only gained votes if a) his voters were not as smart as bushes, or b) the county was democratic, in which case, like with the butterfly ballot, it was designed by democrats.
unfortunately, people fall for your stupid dribble, like the previous replierSorry, should have noted that I was only talking about Florida.
:-)
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm also against Bush but not exactly for Gore... I'd actually have voted for McCain over anyone else.
... our electronic voting machines seemed to work just fine. It was actually cool to see my older neighbors figure out and make friends with the new technology. I overheard one older gent tell his wife how much easier the big screen was to read and the big (touchscreen) buttons were to push.
I spoke to one of the pollworkers, and he told me that one positive change was that the county gave each location a CD with ALL voter information, updated from the registration cutoff date. If someone came to the wrong place, they could be looked up immediatly without having to call the central office. In the 2000 presidential election, this was one of the big problems - the phone lines were jammed and many voters never found out where to go. Amazing how a simple database and a CD burner can fix things.
Have you *ever* seen v1 of a system work flawlessly?
There's lots of code out there in the world that has to work right the first time it's fielded. Code for things you launch into space. Banking software better be pretty damn close. Nuclear power plant and other machinery control code. All of these things have to be a cut above normal code, and they are.
Code for voting needs to be held to the same standards. Instead we have a bunch of nny-come-lately goofballs who think that thier buggy ecommerce product can, with a few tweaks and a few political connections, be voting software.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
> They are tried and true, and accuracy is very high, in most places 98% or higher.
Oh? 98%? Funny, that last 2% would've been more than enough to give the 2000 election to Gore, or vice-versa. If one out of every 50 Americans is disenfranchised, how can that be considered "tried and true"?!
-dan
=== "Some people see the glass as half-empty. Others see it as half-full. I see the glass as too big." -G. Carlin.
Especially you cant do it with punch ballots, which get less accurate after every counting/handling/moving. IF you've ever worked with a box of those ballots before, well, its pretty simply clear. You take them out of a box and whats in the bottom? A big pile of loose chads.
Except that if they used punch machines with thicker cards like we do in most of Southern California (I can't speak for the whole area, but OC uses this). You have a card with a + next to each candidates name. You line up the pointer on the machine with the candidate and push down. It punches a clean hole right through the card. No messy chads to deal with at the bottom of your box of ballot cards.
There may be some disadvantages to this method, but it seems to work fine for us and you don't have to worry about not completely punching a hole. It acts like a hole punch, there is no paper left behind.
Machine are better than people... ...because people are stupid dirty stinking liars.
Machines are just stupid.
Much like the bullshit Democrat Vs. Republican race the US is stuck in, the choice between hand counted or machine counted is a choice between the lesser of two evils.
The US will only wake up and create a better voting system when they overcome their idiotic obsession with choosing between two horrible candidates. (What? Are we Americans afraid what we might get done with a GOOD president?)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I voted in central FL this morning on our new touch screen systems with no problem. Much better than the punchcard system we previously used.
/., I would have rather seen an open-source system. I even submitted a letter to my local newspaper arguing for open-source. It was never published, and I don't recall any mention of open-source in the mainstream debates surrounding the switch to touchscreen systems.
However, as with almost everyone else on
More important, I would have like to have seen these expensive voting systems utilized for more than occasional elections. I believe Florida should have looked for a dual-use system that could have also been used in my kid's schools for testing. The annual FCAT test that virtually all Florida's public school students are required to take is a great example. Florida spends millions each year to have an independent company evaluate/score the FCAT tests. This could have been completed in-house with the correct equipment, saving those millions for more meaningful use within our education system. In addition, computerized testing would allow quicker, more accurate results, less cheating, and much less late-night work by teachers.
As for those who continue to bash Florida's voters for the 2000 election fiasco, some of it is deserved. On the other hand, Bush's margin of victory was much less than the margin of error in the Florida's polling system. If this was a 100 meter race, Bush would have won by less than an inch. Even a photo finish system would have trouble with such a close race. The reason that Florida is the butt of everyone's jokes is because Florida's 25 electoral votes were more important than all of the other closely contested states combined (Wisconsin/New Mexico/Oregon). This fiasco could have happened in any state of the union. Otherwise, why has almost every state re-evaluated and in some cases, overhauled their existing election systems.
At some point maybe you just have to assume that Floridians are incapable of running an election.
I don't really think it matters that much whether it's open or closed source. What boggles my mind is...
She said many poll workers did not wait for the full six-minute activation procedure to occur and then became nervous and uncertain."
What are they running over there, WinXP on a P90?
Whatever the hard/software combo, shouldn't it be embedded? More or less instant on? It sounds like they just slapped some propietary software over a commodity hardware/OS solution. Kind of weak.
E
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Which means there isn't supposed to be voting at all! You idiots think you are electing people into a government office, but realy another group of voters do that. And it isn't a government, it is a coroporation. The United States LLC is an oppressive bunch of quissling agent that make money off taxes and has no legal standing because it is non-commercial. non-commercial (LLC) means it isn't supposed to participate in commerce and can't legaly initiate any financial transactions with other persons unless it owns the person/entity.
Socialists/Communists:Fascists all of you are.
Being a stupid simpleton, I had to look up what the OECD was. Aha: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
I don't even know where to begin. First of all, I live in Florida (in Tallahassee -- I can almost see the capitol building from home). I've always thought of myself as quietly patriotic, not as someone who makes a big display of saluting the Stars And Stripes everytime I see it or rabidly defending the US anytime someone dares utter a negative word about it, just as an American citizen who is proud to have chanced being born here.
..."
... it makes me sick.
... it's disgusting. I don't see how it can be allowed to stand. Those people pay their taxes, they obey the laws (else they couldn't vote in the first place), they are American CITIZENS. Yet the government screws up: sorry, better luck next time.
Yet, increasingly I find myself developing sentiments many would likely label anti-American, maybe even seditious. And you know what the worst part is -- the very worst part? For the first time, it occurs to me that I have good reason not to voice my opinion. Our government, of, for, and by the people, has lately acquired the ability to detain (read as: unilaterally imprison) any of us indefinitely for "suspected terrorist affiliation". So I worry, at least in a small "what-if" way, that by condemning the actions and policies of my country, I could place my personal freedoms in jeopardy -- and if that is the case, then my country has, in any way that matters, ceased to exist.
When I read the article mentioned in this post, my heart sank. My stomach kind of tightened up, and after the first few paragraphs the sorry general state of American affairs solidified for me.
A couple of things from the article that I find most disheartening:
In Tallahassee, Smith, the secretary of state, said he received a call from someone -- he did not say who -- on the Broward County Commission who told him the county did not have enough voting equipment.
He said the county commissioner said the governor should call out the National Guard to deal with any problems.
Since when do Americans participating in the election process need the supervision of armed troops to "deal with" any problems? Americans watch armed troops "dealing with" voters in other countries and shake their heads sadly: complacent, arrogant, secure -- "Those poor bastards. Thank God I was born in America, where such things simply don't happen. Honey, bring me another slice of apple pie
What have we become that problems with a simple gubernatorial primary (not even the main event, just a primary) should lead someone with the power to make such decisions to even CONSIDER such a thing? The thought of Americans -- subdued, casting furtive, uncertain glances at the soldiers in their midst -- slinking quietly behind the curtain to cast their ballots
At Precinct 224 in Carol City, a predominantly black precinct, potential voters complained that once again they were about to be disenfranchised. The trouble: At 7 a.m., none of the 14 machines worked. Some left out of frustration.
If I think I'm disgusted, being a white American, I shudder to think what black Americans must think of this. Were they being targeted for disenfranchisement this morning? Probably not. But that is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I should be able to say, unequivocally, that they were NOT being targeted, that they COULD NOT BE. I should feel that in my bones. I don't. And for those black voters who left in disgust this morning, that feeling must be amplified beyond my ability to understand. After all, I'm white, and this is the Deep South. But for all those who read this, not that it matters, know this: I am not one of them. This ties into the next part:
In North Florida's Gadsden County, which had the state's highest percentage of rejected ballots in 2000 -- 11.5 percent -- new ballot-reading optical scanners drew early praise from voters.
Gadsden borders Leon county (Tallahasse, the capital, is in Leon). The population of Gadsden county is predominantly black. I don't have the exact figures, or particularly feel like digging them up, but I can say from seeing with my own eyes that the vast majority of Gadsden's residents are black. 11.5% of them had no say in the 2000 Presidential election. Rejected. The highest proportionate number of rejections in the state, in a predominantly black county. Go figure.
Bush won the Presidency of our nation in Florida. Everyone knows that. But, all other things being equal, Bush won the Presidency of our nation in Gadsden County. Here in the South, black voters generally vote Democrat. Of the thousands of residents, mostly black, mostly registered Democrats, 11.5% had no say. Bush won by less than SIX HUNDRED votes. What have we become that even the Presidency of the United States is a fraud on its face?
Did I want Gore? No. But I didn't want Bush, either. I felt that the 2000 elections were pretty much a lose-lose scenario. I had no strong feelings either way, yet I do feel strongly that the process at least be legitimate. Hopefully, Bush's brother, our illustrious governor (who promised us all the 2000 fiasco would never come again) will be taught a very public, very visible lesson in the coming election. If he regains office, the tiny faith I have left in the American people will likely evaporate.
''What do I think about her efforts?'' Sager said. ``I think they're non-existent. What ability? I don't see that she has any ability. And if I can't vote, I can't change things.''
Pay careful, careful attention to that last line. It is the most ringing line in the entire article. This is not "just another" right being mishandled, maybe even trampled upon, this is THE fundamental right -- the only hand we truly have in goverment. All those people who have been turned away
Every person turned away -- EVERY person denied the right to vote today -- should promptly sue the state of Florida for a refund of ALL taxes they've paid this year. Why? Because one of the fundamental tenets of American society and government is the belief that taxation without representation is wrong. These people, who have been turned away, have lost the right to the most basic interaction we have with our goverment: our very own small but vitally important part in creating the government in such a way that it represents us as a people. Without that right for EVERY law-abiding American, we are nothing.
''I was there at 8:20 a.m. and the [poll worker] yelled at me,'' she said. ``He said, `You have to wait. They're still setting up the machines. You don't like it, you can leave.''
That poll worker should be fired. At least. If not for the fact that the worker committed no actual crime, that I know of, I'd say he should be stripped of HIS right to vote. But that isn't the way our system works. Or, at least, not the way it's supposed to. That's why we have the system: so that someone like me can't get angry and arbitrarily strip away the rights of others.
''This is outrageous,'' said Pauline Winick of Miami Beach. ``After being so embarrassed by Florida's voting scandal [in 2000], you would have thought that they'd do better than this.''
Yeah. You'd have thought.
In case you missed it. Here is the GNU free evoting project.
http://www.free-project.org/
Don't complain, contribute.
-munk
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
Try reading for comprehension. It will make you look less like a total ass.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
You go to the 1st person with your card. This person reads the number on it and person 2 checks it against the registered voters register. Number 2 gives me a number and I give that to number 3 who in turn clears the machine for entry. I can cast one vote and then the system is locked till the number 3 person releases it again for the next voter.
The security measures:
A vote can only be made if the system is open and it needs to be opened by the 3rd person.
The machine registers the number of votes and at the end that number has to be the same as the number of cards they've received.
They do not keep track of which number you used to vote. The system knows that voter 467 voted socialist, but there's NO way to track voter 467.
The benifits, 5 minutes after the polling station closes you have the results. These results are phoned to the central place where they are used. Within 30 minutes you have a preliminary result for the whole county. The lists the machine prints get printed in multiple numbers and all data including the results and the cards are secured (secured in a way that tempering after they've been secured, something the public can see, is considered a crime) and brought to the central place. There they will go over them again. In general you can say that if a polling station closes at 21:00, next morning's paper has the almost official results.
Beat that with you pencil and paper.
why anyone would *believe* the results tabulated
by software that was immune to public audit gathered
from complex and bug-prone devices operated by a
secret mechanism is beyond my comprehension.
given the history of democratic elections around the
world and in the united states itself, it seems
more than apparent that such devices, if they
continue in use, will inevitably result in massive
electoral fraud.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Are you prepared to die for your rights and freedom?
Are you prepared to kill?
September 11th marks a turning point in history. The day the islamic world showed its true face. The terror of that fateful day need not be recalled here, for there are far worthier media outlets that can stage a fitting tribute to the fallen. But the repercussions of this event have been felt for the past 365 days.
Notice how you don't feel as secure as you did in employment. Notice how suddenly your salary doesn't stretch as far as it used to? Notice the lump tightening in your gut every time you see an islamic walking freely.
Now ask yourself? Have you let the terrorists win?
They are laughing at us. The whole islamic world is laughing at us. They will be in our streets tomorrow, cheering and celebrating the act of mass murder. Why are they permitted to support acts of barbarism?
Why? Because we live in a Free Country. Yet, paradoxically, it is our freedom which offends the islamic the most. They know fine well that in their barbaric despotisms they would not be permitted ANY means of protest against the goverment. Yet, not only are they free to protest, to burn our flag, but they are nigh on ENCOURAGED to do so by the liberal media.
Switch on your television set tomorrow. You'll see them. The liberals. Plump and fat with the rich pickings of their well-fed middle class white heritage, they shall be bleating that somehow, it's all America's fault. That America is a nation forged from genocide, that the numbers of children killed in Iraq and Afghanistan far outweigh the tiny little statistic of the World Trade Centre murders. Making us feel guilty for the privledge of being noble-hearted Americans. Denying our nation the opportunity to mourn.
We face a twin pronged attack. The liberal media, forever assaulting the values we hold dear, and the islamic menace. A permanent threat that has been allowed to continue far too long.
Understand that for an islamic, the idea that a non-islamic should be permitted to live in peace is HERESY. Like any good brain-washing cult, islamics are indoctrinated from birth and are forced to remember every verse in their "Terrorist's Handbook", the Koran. Without recourse to other treatises on morality, is it any wonder that islamics have degenerated to the point of raw animal savagery?
As long as islamics are tolerated in decent society, there will always be terrorism. They want to see this 'decent society' destroyed from within. Notice how, although islamic culture is supposed to be a 'paradise', these animals cannot WAIT to get out of their own countries and into Western civilization.
Why is this? Surely, it is a core belief of islam that a muslim should offer shelter to their fellow muslim. So, why is Europe infested with the black cancer of 'asylum seekers'? The answer is simple. Asylum seekers are an invasion force. Entering decent countries and tearing them apart from within. Demanding to be treated with more privledge than the native population. Clogging up government services and squandering taxpayers money without offering anything back to the society they force to become their home. Other than an increase in crime rates, of course.
Surely a western government is in place "For the people"? Ask ANY European Citizen whether they want asylum resettlement centres in their towns, and you'll recieve a unanimous "Non". So why is THIS invasion tolerated?
Socialism! Successive socialist goverments in Europe have allowed the islamic cancer to spread unchecked. This is why, even though islam is a religion, and not a skin colour, every muslim knows how to cry "racist" whenever they are asked to behave like a human being.
For a 'just' and 'tolerant' religion, it is shocking to see how quickly islamic settlement areas degenerate into high crime zones, where the rest of society; be they white, chinese, hindu, sikh, whatever; fears to walk. There are areas of all our inner cities which operate under strict Sharia law in all but name. Gangs of muslim youths roam freely, each one of them a mini Bin Laden.
This is the army which we must face. Together, not as whites, or purebreed aryans, or any of that bullshit, but as AMERICANS, we must stand together. For even the most liberal of human beings knows, in their heart, that islam poses a threat to the very foundation of our existance.
We have guns. We need to use them before further liberalism pries them from our grasps. Because we know that THEY have guns as well. And they are just waiting for the call from their Terrorist Training Camps (mosques) to begin the holy jihad. And it will be the blood of our families, our beloved ones, that will be spilled if we don't act. We must act soon and decisively. Entering the muslim-held areas en masse and eliminating their foul subhuman breed for good. For once our country is purged, and no more islamics are permitted entry, we know we shall be steadfast on the road to security.
The muslim's heart craves war, and on September 11th 2001 they chose to bring the battle onto the streets of America.
September 11th 2002 shall be the day we fight back. Our new Independance Day.
I ask you now, if any word of this diatribe strikes a chord in your heart, PLEASE post it on. Usenet. Online forums. Wherever. Because, despite decades of liberal propaganda, you know that every word said is forged from the cold, harsh flame of truth.
likewise Open-Source != Good Quality.
There is no substitue for good solid software engineering open, closed, zippered, puckered and/or buttoned.
Repeat ten times : I shall not hype open source as the silver bullet to cure all.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
The electoral college is rather nice in distributing representation geographically as well as by population.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Don't the optical readers that Florida had so much trouble with (hanging chads and all) use some kind of software? If those are closed source why aren't we up in arms about that?
This is exactly what I did to vote today.
With the only difference from you don't show a "national id", but a voter registration card and a photo-id (which should be somehow combined in the future).
- sigs are for wimps.
This would never work. When another close race came, there would be people screaming that their vote was wrong. Some people vote one way when they think it is not close and would vote another way if they knew it were going to be close. This would just be just like the old people in Florida who claimed the butterfly ballot was too confusing.
They couldn't make simple pin poke cards work. Is anyone surprised that they can't use a more sophisticated system?
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
As of my drive home, they were saying on the radio that the race was a "statistical dead heat." They also said that (at least some claim) that the incidence of problems is not uniform and that the worst problems are occurring in urban areas...
What they didn't say is exactly how a recount is performed with these systems. Does anyone know? Do you pull down "recount" on the menu and have it display the same answer it displayed before and say, "Look, a recount?"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
For one, polls are always open long enough for people to have time before or after work to vote. Also, I've yet to have an employer that wouldn't allow me to leave work to vote if I had a conflict that prevented me from voting before or after work.
It's not a problem. Municipalities have little or no trouble finding enough poll workers to staff the elections.
It doesn't have much to do with cost. The reason why the US uses voting machines is because we used to use the paper ballot system decades ago and it was subject to all sorts of fraud and tampering. I'll agree that the US needs a consistent system of voting machines, not a different setup in every county. But I still think that machines are inherently less subject to fraud than paper ballots.
Actually, Oregon had just about the highest voter turnout in the 2000 election specifically because of the convenience of mail-in ballots. You can't really include the homeless because the ballot in each municipality is full of local races - you can't let somebody vote in a race unless you can confirm their residency otherwise the results would be invalid. Is that disenfranchisement? Maybe, but I don't have a better solution. But discrimination against the disorganized? That's just insane. If a person is incapable of filling out and returing a mail ballot, I can't accept that as an excuse.
Maybe things are different in Australia, but in the US there is practically nobody that is intimidated by ATMs anymore. The illiterate are vanishingly few in number and I definately don't want them voting for obvious reasons. There are a lot people with poor English skills in the US, and many of them do not vote. But to be honest, this is an English speaking nation and I don't any problem with expecting citizens to understand the language to participate in the political process.
We do use local schools as voting centers. Low voter turnout has very little to do with holding the election on Tuesday instead of Saturday. Trust me on this, I live here. Polls are open long enough so that it doesn't conflict with anybody's job, the precincts are small enough that people don't have to go far to vote, and I rarely hear of people offering the inconvenience excuse for why they didn't vote.
The real reasons why voter turnout in the US is so low have nothing to do with any of your points. Basically, the reasons for low turnout boil down to this:
1. As long as the country is doing OK economically and crime isn't out of control, people see little need to change the system and the candidates run on centrist platforms. The result is that most people here don't think that their lives will change much no matter who gets elected.
2. Most people don't like and don't trust any of the candidates (particularly in national elections). People want to chose a candidate for positive reasons, not because they are the lesser of two evils, so they don't vote. Look at the last election in France where voter turnout was something like 40%, below the level of the 2000 US election.
Besides, you can't make any meaningful comparisons between the US and Australia on this topic because voting is not compulsory there. If voting wasn't compulsory in Australia, do you think turnout would remain high?
The people doing the vote counting aren't unemployed people pulled off the streets to do the counting anyway. They are in most cases quite highly paid professional types, often (always?) judges and other people involved in the legal profession.
So THAT's what Americans are taught in law school? How to count?!?!? HA HA H AHA HAHAHA!!
I didn't realize you need such a lengthy American education just to be qualified to count. Do they teach them ADVANCED counting techniques, like using your fingers AND your toes??!?!? ROTFL!
Apparently the Canadians might be able to lend you some qualified people who can count. You should go ask them for help.
Regarding the problems with voting in Florida, consider that
1. the race was so tight between gore and bush, that the winning votes were within the margin of accepted error. every election has ballot and counting errors, plus disqualified absentee votes. (the recount process isn't normally so politicized, though..;)
2. the new "butterfly" ballot used in palm beach county for the 200 election _was_ confusing, as bush and gore were on one side, and nader on the other. the punch spots were lined up vertically in the middle, with nader's in the middle, and if you weren't paying attention, you might just look at the left side, and punch the second sopt if you wanted gore, and wind up voting for nader. (curiously, nader/green party received a very surprising strong show of support in palm beach.)
3. many of the problems with today's election stem from the changes and new equipment brought in following the scrutiny of the 2000 fiasco. the poll workers in many areas of florida are typically retired senior volunteers. they don't adapt well to changes.
4. because of all the confusion and electoral mayhem today, Governor Jeb Bush just announced an "executive emergency order" to keep the polling stations open until 9 pm!
-sheepish in florida
It isn't the closed soure that is the problem, it's the UN AUDIT ABILITY that is the problem! If you can not audit a machine, then you can not verify if the counts have been tampered with. It doesn't make a bit of difference if it's open or closed source. The problem is a problem of TRUST. Anybody know who the company that makes the machines is? I didn't think so.
Now with that said. Being Libertarian, I shall provide my solution. Use Paper and Pencil. Why you ask? Because it does not need electricity, or rely on a piece of hardware or software, it can be audited, by anyone who has eyes to see, old or young, and in fact it has to be audited in order to create the count.
This whole snafu in Florida is intolerable.
Voters should BE REQUIRED TO SHOW A VALID ID!
The people responsible for these mistakes need to go to jail.
This has made a mockery of our constitutional republic. And yeah Brazil gets it better than we do right now.
a VERY angry citizen.
Lets make the next president election as a slashdot poll!
CowboyNeal for the president, yay!
IMHO making a cross on a piece of paper is a very simple user interface so no need to improve that
Counting may need some assistance: what I know of in Germany is having an ID in form of a bar code on each sheet of paper and a software that helps the person who COUNTS the votes not who CAST the votes!
So voting machines have been proven not to have the better track record when it comes to correct results, the UI of a piece of paper and a pencil to make a cross is simple (even if you have to pay attention to the layout of the ballot). Why don't you go for improving the vote counting instead of the vote casting? (besides that this method has a proven track record in most of the developed world)
As a central Florida resident, I don't see what the flap is about. We've got potential voting machines that work fine on virtually every street corner. Wino's can pick up a piece of road tar, scribble on a ticket with it, feed the machine and it gets read right every time. What are these magical machines? You guessed it. Lotto. They work day in and day out - not just once every few months - but then there's a buck involved here, not mere constitutional rights.
No wonder.
I have never found such a easy ballot cast.
Fonts large enough to read (without my glasses) full proof in so far as not voided votes due to exceeding the number of picks per item. The machine took less time to use than it took the polling clerk to find my name on the list.
It also has to be capable of verifying tha tthe voter is valid, that the ballot is valid, and that it itself is valid
You honestly think whatever company got the contract actually did this, and did it properly?
I'm guessing this is a Visual Basic app plopped on a Windows kiosk.
May we never see th
If and when open source programs reach 1.0, they're generally pretty solid.
I'm using finger-0.17-9, pam-0.75-32, pan-0.12.1-1, yafc-0.7.10-1, and passwd-0.67-1, for instance. All of these are quite high-quality, production-level software packages.
May we never see th
Last I heard, OC was still using a Votematic type punchcard system (PollStar is the variant I think you are describing). Funny how you missed the concept that this is the exact same system used in Florida 2000. So I guess you also missed exactly how so called hanging chad happens.
Hanging Chad: The stylus punched through but didn't tear the last little bit off. This is usually counted as a vote.
Dimpled Chad: For some reason, the chads from previous voters did not fall through, clogging up the space with previous chads. The result is a clear indentation in the chad from the stylus but because the space for the stylus to pass through is full, all it can do is dimple the paper. This is also caused by glue or other stuff in the hole either accidentally or intentionally damaging the guide to change the results in a precinct. If you will recall the bilingual education initiatives of 1994, you will also recall the widespread use of glue in the holes in OC.
Pregnant Chad: The chad is bowed in but not imprinted with the force of the stylus. This is usually caused by the voter placing the stylus in the wrong hole and then pulling it out. The chad is a little bowed but is not otherwise disturbed.
A Dimpled Chad is probably a vote but a Pregnant Chad is probably not. However, determining if a particular chad is one or the other is a problem that would make Solomon nuts. Then of course, simply moving the ballots around is sufficient to dislodge some chads.
As for OC being a pargon of virtue when it comes to elections, look at what happened in the 46th Congressional District in 1996. Nativo Lopez has never gone to jail for rigging the election of a US Congressman. The disaster of 2000 can be directly traced to the decision by congress to ignore a clearly rigged election. That decision lead directly to the free for all that happened in Florida.
Orange County would be my personal favorite example of how not to run an election except that there are so many states and counties that are so much worse.
Australia's electoral system is not perfect (we have a ludicrously unrepresentative senate where a Tasmanian Senate vote is worth about ten times that of one from New South Wales, and we are not immune to electoral fraud) but it has survived extremely close elections without the convulsions of the US system.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It seems that people have not noticed the word "secret" in my post. The vote is still anonymous, since the identifier only matches the vote, not the person who made the vote.
Who decides who will be on the electoral commission? You can bet that members are selected at least partially because of their ideology, loyalties, and connections - just like the judiciary. It may indeed be better than the US system (which is currently quite corrupt), but nobody is ever truly impartial, and if you think your electoral commission is immune from political influence, you are naive.
..voting systems arn't that hard, people make them all the time, and make them secure, i myself have made several, in tens of languages, whoever wrote a faulty one should be blacklisted for life, thats just newbieish.
I always find it amusing how many people from other nations just assume they know everything there is to know about America. While in reality they usually don't have any clue and are basing their conclusions on hearsay, propaganda, and faulty assumptions. Of course, we Americans do it too sometimes, but lately it just seems like every non-American on Slashdot is a self proclaimed expert on America.
I wish for a paper ballot system where the ballots are handed out ahead of time. Post offices, grocery stores, mailed to your home, etc. Everyone fills out the ballot ahead of time. You go to your local polling place where your identity is verified. You go into a booth and run your ballot through a scanner that has a display that shows you how you have voted so that you can double-check your ability to make circles. The scanner/display checks the ballot for consistency (multi-candidate markings for example) and alerts you that your ballot may be invalid. Then you go to the box where the poll workers view your placing a single ballot into the box to be counted. If yours doesn't scan, you get out of line, drop it into a shredder and fill out another. 90% of the people will simply walk through and drop their ballots which would reduce the multi-hour waits that plague some cities voting.
If the machines screw up, the ballots can be counted by hand. Where I used to live (small town) they had mechanical machines that would sometimes screw up and lose all the votes, particularly in the neighborhoods thought to be leaning toward the non-incumbent candidate. Do you suppose the malfunctions get reported in the newspaper?
This is exactly what will happen with the electronic ones.
Consider this scenario:
Left Wing Joe is running against Neo-Nazi Bob
A neighborhood occupied by relatives of Joe is expected to go 85% for Joe. At about 1 hour before the polls close, an unknown workman accidently shorts the power line's 14Kv into the buildings 110 circuit and all the pads are smoked. All stored votes are lost from that precinct. Or acid is poured into the keyboards of three of the devices so that you now have to wait three hours to vote so many people just go home. Things may get awkward later between the two groups.
So the votes get modemed out as the votes are made?
same scenario, just downtown.
There MUST be a physical ballot in the US.
I come from a place where the dead rise from their graves on election day to vote in alphabetical order and no one seems to be bothered by it. Introducing the complexity of electronic devices is just asking for trouble.
For your information, this is what we use:
Orange County Voting System
Does that look like it's going to leave a hanging chad. I hope not, because they don't exist in OC.
It's called Datavote and it's nothing like the Florida system. I believe you were referring to this one
Votomatic and Pollstar are used in completely different counties (if you don't think LA and OC are completely different, you've obviously never visited both of them).
Seems the voting machines have worked just as intended.
I guess closed-source is just the scourge of the planet isn't it. If they had used open source, there is absolutely NO possibility that any problems could occur! Open source always has been and always will be absolutely perfect. If only Florida knew that!
-1 Sterotypical Slashdot Post
But there has been no review board. The companies who write this software have kept it a proprietary trade secret, just like every other proprietary software company. They have refused to allow any kind of review. You've forgotten that "closed-source" means that the purchaser of the software (I'm sorry, the license) doesn't get to see the source either.
Nevermoind that the voting machines didn't work. Lets remember that Florida is the land of rigged elections, thanks to our little friend Katherine Harris (a bigwig Republican).
Personally, I think her ass should be in fucking federal prison for criminal tampering with the election process. Please follow me on this one. I have been picking this one up on the way all through the AP wires (I get access at work) and a good book by Michael Moore called Stupid White Men that I have been reading.
Shortly before the election even began, Katherine Harris decided to expunge the system of any felons that might be in the system. Those felons were (by vast majority in America on average) usually of African-American descent. Finding and removing all of these felons would have been a herculean task, so Katherine Harris and all of her election board members decided to go with a close match criteria to expedite the removal of felons in the system. The Election Commission also sent out memos to other states to give them lists of other possible felons that may have moved to Florida. Take a big stab on the only state that gave them a possible list.
TEXAS. That's right. Texas.
SO WHAT WAS THE OUTCOME OF THIS? Thousands, and I mean thousands, of African-American voters that were NOT FELONS got turned away at the polls for matching up all of their kangaroo court requirements. THOUSANDS OF AFRICAN AMRERICANS, CITIZENS WHO EARNED THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE THE HARDEST WAY IN AMERICA COULD NOT VOTE. Imagine getting to the polls and getting turned away. Now imagine being black in America and getting turned away.
Here's another one: Entire districts were lost or counted as null or erroneous in Florida elections... or the locations were moved entirely. TAKE A STAB ON THE MAKEUP OF THESE DISTRICTS. If you guessed African-American, you'd be dead on the money. This is a PROVEN FACT. The election commission only messed with black districts.
DID KATHERINE HARRIS AND ALL OF HER ASSOCIATES GO TO JAIL? No. Actually she ran for US Senate. What a payback to get all of that campaign funds. I wonder where she got them.
In an interview Katherine Harris said that if Gore had been nice to her, he might have been president. After the fact, that ego alone tells me that all of the allegations are pretty much true. That statement alone wants me to see her go to prison even more.
So here is the question... with all of this crap going on in the system. Why is it that we don't vote? BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER. THATS WHY. But many of us are out there for the reason to get our votes back. And we will. We will be watching the election commissions. You all should. Especially in America, where election commissions are appointed by the local bigwigs.
It's doesn't have to do with a true malfunction in a propriet system...it has to do with the UI sucking....something the friggin open source community is great at....just look at the GIMP.
Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
This has just turned into more fraud. Just like "emissions control" in the Northeast. Spend Billions -- have the system fail. Spend Billions more for "Plan B" -- have the system sorta work.
Now we find out every car has an Onboard Diagnostic Computer that can just tell you The Answer. We paid for the car, yet we paid BILLIONS.
That's all this is about folks.
Go vote. Nobody cares.
In Brazil (were I live) we have near 15% of illiterates in the population. They can vote (but they aren't obliged, as people older than 65yrs) We are using voting machines during 5 years or so... they are fast... the results of a presidential election are known about 6 hours after the election ends (don't forget that Brazil is almost the size of USA!) with 98% (or more) of the votes counted... and we have regions like Amazon, with very difficult access... the system is based in numbers... each candidate gets a number... when you type it in the machine appears a picture of the candidate... if it's really your candidate choice you confirm your vote, or else you can correct it... the system permits blank and null votes (it happens since voting is mandatory here, so some people null or blank they votes if they think that no candidate deserves his/hers vote)
So... no rocket science here... and already done... I remember that after the Bush election some represenatives of the company that make the voting machines here went to the USA to offer these machines...
By the way, before anybody ask... the votes are encrypted, the data is dumped in front of testimonies (from government and parties), the data line used are encripted too (they use VPN-like networks)... pretty secure...
But there has been no review board. The companies who write this software have kept it a proprietary trade secret, just like every other proprietary software company. They have refused to allow any kind of review.
Good point, but that's really the Florida voters and legislator's problems. They didn't have to purchase a license for this software. The could have gone with any other number of voting methods (including more traditional voting methods....not every ballot is as confusing or difficult as the infamous butterfly ballot). If they didn't like the terms of the license they could have negotiated and/or pressured for better terms, or gone with a different voting method.
Dude, I wish I could mod you up +1 as Funny.You're hilarious!
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Whether the source is availible or not, this does not matter. If you think it does, congratulations on being an idiot. Open source may be good for lots of things, software for home or business use, that's great. But would open-sourcing a voting machine help ensure that it is fair and accurate? No. /help/ here.
Open source is slightly more trustworthy, provided all the potential users are downloading and compiling that source. This would never be the case with a voting machine. Just because the supposed-source is availible to you doesnt mean that the unseen binaries, hidden behind many different layers (we would hope, for security), which you actually have no access to, are the same ones you get when you download it from nerdvote.sourceforge and compile it. Many factors can change such things, and there's really no garantee that the binaries of any one program compiled on different machines would be the same. Do you have the same compiler? headers? You don't know. And even if you had the exact same setup, it's not like the machine will give you a confirmation MD5 of the binary before proceeding. Open source, for something like this, would just be a joke. Get off your damn mission. Open-source is nice, it's good, people should use it, but it won't actually
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
A 2% margin of error on choosing our next President is unacceptable.
Umm, I don't think you are evver going to do much better. I'ld say you can get down to 0.5%, maybe. Personaly, I think 2% is abut right.
Your not talking about rounding or counting errors. Your talking about user errors. If you got 1000 people, gave them a form with 5 boxes, and said tick box number 4. If you counted all those forms, how many would have something other then box number 4?
People make mistakes. People think they know what they are doing and they blink when they go looking for the right box. If its an election, they never find out about it.
Even if I'm wrong, do you honestly think that you are ever going to get 0.008%?
I'm interested to see how many people vote in the next US presidential election compared to 2000. I know that one year less then 50% of elegable US citizens voted for congress, it was either 1994 or 1998. In 1996 less then 60% of people voted. Will florida make more or less people interested in who rules them?
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
Can someone tell me why this machine takes 6 minutes to boot??? Seems incredibly long for something that, after all, does so little; basically display some choices and increment a few counters.
Votehere has an open-source voting solution based on a custom version of linux for both the client (a touch-screen voting tablet) and the server. Check their stuff out: www.votehere.net
Perhaps it is not bug-free (it usually isn't), but it is functionally correct. In my opinion, the companies concerned should be taken to the cleaners. If they won the contract by underbidding (or corruption - but that is another matter), they are still responsible for ensuring that the s/w is tested.
The point of OS is at least other people have a chance to audit the things (I guess the political parties would be interested).
Two words: Easter egg.
A programmer from the voting machine company walks into the booth. She types a nonobvious sequence of buttons. A week later the company lands another ludicrously overbudgeted contract from the surprise winner of the election.
Couldn't happen? Why not? If the code isn't available for public review, and worse, there's no paper ballot for a backup audit (recount), how would you ever know?
Their lousy voting systems don't affect the welfare of the rest of the nation at all.
One of my parents works with the poles here in Florida. According to what she was told, it was mostly user error. The people running the damn thing didn't know they had to turn them on.
:)
Somehow I don't entirely buy this. From what I see, there has to be someone in that part of the state what doesn't want the election to be fair. Between not knowing to turn things on, closing the systems down early (7pm) (Gov. Shrub along with others decided to keep the polls open an extra 2 hours) and just general 'I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I'm here...' is what is causing these problems.
But that's just my $.02, so take it as you will
Have a nice day
Just to note... in Florida the election was within 99.98%. It better be a LOT higher than 98%.
Look, all you need is a paper ballot. The type where you take a pencil and complete the arrow to point to the name of the candidate you wish to vote for.
Part of the problem in the US is that they appear to go in for multiple elections at the same time and want to minimise the number of ballot papers.
Its extremely easy to print them. It is extremely easy to fill them out. It is extremely simple to hand count them or two design an optical scanner to read them.
So long as you have one election per ballot paper. You can even use a different machine to collate and count.
And, what if say one of the candidates hired a hacker and modified what was in the database? Everyone could be voting for the exact opposite of who they want. Complexity was also another reason for the failure of those elections. The punch card ballot machines that were messed up were also placed in the poor, low-income sections of town, while the people who had more money got more reliable machinery.
Anyway, back to the voting machines.
They could make a very complicated interface that could defer the voters that may have less of an education (which is primarily the people in the poorer areas of town, and most of these people would probably vote Democratic, as that would do them the most good). A complicated interface would not only defer people who have little knowledge, but it could actually make the election turn out differently.
A computerized voting system will never work because of random hackers and/or employed hackers that might have an interest in the result of the election. This is because any way the voting machine would work, eventually a way to circumvent the machine's security would emerge. This is just an easier way to rig elections.
The only voting system that will ever work well is a system that is used in several states, including Oklahoma, where you fill in arrows that are pointing to the candidate or option with a pen. The machine then stores the ballot in a lockbox, and then the ballots are ran through an OCR machine, that searches for the arrows and records the vote. Machinery like this is much harder to circumvent than a punchcard machine. And, computerized voting is also not secure, so it looks like the way I just mentioned (Filling in arrows for candidates) will work well.
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I live in the Netherlands, I'm of voting age and I voted a couple of times. I can tell you that we in Alkmaar (shitty little town "famous" for our cheese market) use VOTING MACHINES as do many other towns. Not that I like or trust machines with my votes, but we do use voting machines in Holland. The momentum is towards more voting machines (Amsterdam for example has none, but will get them.) In Amsterdam there was even talk of internet voting with thumbscanner identification, what happened to that plan I don't know.
Please do try to get your facts straight next time around.
And we could go back to programming computers with punch cards. *They are tried and true, and accuracy is very high, in most places 98% or higher.*