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Indecision 2002
The most common story submission about the U.S. elections held today seems to be that the consortium which typically conducts and reports exit polls has encountered technical difficulties. If only they'd had an open beta program... There have also been a number of stories highlighting problems with new electronic voting machines, a topic Slashdot has hit several times in the past. CNN, the NY Times, and essentially every other U.S. news outfit are following the election results as best they can.
I'm curious, has someone audited the code for these devices? How do I know that some employee ,who's a hard democrat, republican, or independent, hasn't added his or her little hacks. Like every fifth vote that doesn't agree with his or her view gets changed.
I guess with something as valuable as my vote, I want the source to be public.
You guys could have posted a reminder to vote today. The election results are all fine and dandy, but a well-written summary of "Remember to vote," voting locations, etc. posted this morning would have been appreciated.
I'd appreciate it if you could keep this in mind for next year. The more informed voters we have out there, the better. Slashdot could really help get the word out (especially on the issues that matter most to geeks!)
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Wasn't Indecision 2000 the name of the campaign news on the Daily Show?
Exit polls are oftened cited as a problem in our elections. How many times have you seen an exit poll while the election was still going on? All the time and often it simply discourages voters from casting their votes... Why bother is Candidate X is leading in the exit polls. I actually am interested to see if the mid term turn out is greater than normal as a result. Mid term elections are always crappy.
Thalasar
I think that the "if-voting-could-change-anything-it-would-be-illeg al dept." shows how irresponsible and juvenile /. really is. If everyone thought like you, anyone who felt like it could decide what happens to us. Your voice individually doesn't matter, but don't you realize that it matters when its a part of a group, no matter how large or small that group is. For shame.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
As for voting glitches, I only have this to say. If you have a complaint about an election process, better to voice it before the election, not during or after when your party's candidate is losing or has lost. The reports that lawyers are on standby for each major party infuriates me. Either the process is goofed to begin with or it isn't. Maybe I'm just an idealist, but I believe any discrepencies with the voting processes are going to affect all candidates, not just losing ones.
That's the one thing I simply don't understand about modern voting rhetoric. How could we possibly place more trust in voting systems simply because they are electronic? All this would require is a single person with a single clue somewhere along the data chain to manipulate the results.
It seems that fraud would become even simpler with computerized voting to me. It's like everyone is jumping on a train without thinking about its destination, or, more to the point, the path it will take to its destination.
Where do the results go? Do they go to separate databases, preferably several separate databases, as soon as a vote is cast? This would seemingly allow for "diffing," for lack of a better term, between multiple sources of final vote counts.
I'm in no shape at the moment to define how the electronic/computerized voting results should be quanitified, but PLEASE, at least let us consider these things, rather than saying to ourselves "Well, it's computerized now, so at least there will be no more fraud."
If we're going to redesign how the votes in this nation are counted, and I believe that we are all in agreement that this system of voting desperately needs to be revamped in this modern age (please feel free to tell me I'm wrong), that we can sit down and discuss how it should be done, rather than allowing our morbidly ignorant "representative government" to tell us how it should, and will be done for us.
Oh, wait, this is the US. I forgot, we have no say. Ah, well, cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Even if it passes, it won't fly because a state can't legalize something that is federally outlawed.
Personally, I think the whole thing is silly anyways, there's more important things to worry about than one's ability to get high. Besides, people will do it regardless of the law anyway.
sometimes I really think that the South was right about State's rights.
We don't get the chance to vote on Federal law(only a few people to vote for us that only a majority of us chose), and when we DO get the chance to vote (State laws) they don't count worth a shit.
Something to think about.
Your belief that people will do it anyway is right on the money. So why punish them? It is an actual victimless crime.
But that's precisely the point -- people ARE smoking dope, and buying it and selling it and being put into jail for absurdly long times on account of it. I don't have statistics handy but surely you know the score -- our prisons are bursting at the seams, and the racial socioeconomic divide is still prevalent, thanks mostly to the drug war. It doesn't matter if you think people should smoke pot or not, or if you think that most pro-legalization advocates only want to get high themselves. What matters is that the drug war is a terribly expensive, destructive mistake and it needs to stop, now. Think about it.
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a state can't legalize something that is federally outlawed.
The federal government can't outlaw commerce within a state, can it? According to the U.S. Constitution, article 1, "The Congress shall have power ... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes ... To declare war ... To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers" (my emphasis). The 10th Amendment gives the states the right to regulate anything not in Congress's exclusive domain. (The 14th Amendment limits that slightly by applying most of the Bill of Rights to the states.)
If banning beverages containing ethanol required an amendment to the Constitution, then how can Congress get away with banning pot? That should be the State of Nevada's right to put on the ballot.
Case law citations welcome.
Will I retire or break 10K?
nearly all laws congress makes that seem to have no authority to to do so, are based on this precedent. The intra-state activity could effect inter-state commerce. But this has been streteched to the breaking point. For example, why is it a federal crime to use a hand gun near a school, or to commit a "hate" crime. there is nothing in the constitution that seems to permit this.
scooby snacks all around!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've got two words that should fully capture how encouraged I would be by that prospect:
John Ashcroft
The Republicans had the Senate for a few months and it brought us the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, some of the most frightening abrogrations of basic constitutional protections, gutted antitrust enforcement, and who knows how many other goodies.
Fritz Hollings will be perfectly capable of doing damage whether the Democrats stay on top or not. As I recall, Republican Congresses didn't stop the DMCA or the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act from sailing through.
> a touch screen interface [...] the X magically appears [...]
> a card with a magnetic strip is activated [...] you go and
> stick that in the machine [...]
This was probably invented by Wallace & Gromit, right? It sort of reminds me of the NASA program to create a pen that could write in space. NASA (and american taxpayers) "invested" close to one million dollars on that. The russians used pencils.
> it eliminates multiple votes for the same office,
Huh?
> it allows you to *change* your vote if you've pressed the wrong box,
If you make a mistake, ask for a new piece of "paper". They're free.
> and it allows you to *verify* that you have voted for the right canidate!
I assume you mean "right" in a practical sense, not in a philosophical sense. In which case, using the "paper" method, you can use your "eyes" to look at the "paper", and you'll know if you've voted for the right candidate.
Also, computers are known to sometimes misplace some bytes. It's extremely rare for a cross made with a pen to jump from one part of the paper to another.
Sometimes low tech is good tech.
RMN
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I have no idea why this is modded down to zero, unless zogger usually posts a lot of penis birds or something...
You raise the biggest objection that I (and all of us should) have to "paperless voting." Where is the accountability? Where is the audit trail? How do we even know how the dang software works?
With paper ballots, you can always go back and do a hand count; and that frequently happens in elections. What do you do with electronic-only votes? And let's say you do re-tally the electronic votes, and you get a different answer... then what?
Sure, paper ballots can be lost, burned, counted improperly, etc. But at least they're tangible things. We don't even know what's in the guts of electronic-only voting machines. What happens when the power goes out? Mabye they have some weird Pentium math error that the coders didn't take into account?
I'm sure many on Slashdot will think I'm some sort of neo-Luddite for not trusting the technology, but DO YOU want to trust code you haven't seen?
I like the voting machines here in Seattle. It's a fill-in-the-bubble ballot, which then gets read by a computer. If they need to do a recount, they can always go back to the paper ballots. What are you going to fall back on in Georgia if, I don't know, lightning hits the voting machine, or evil terrorist somehow hack the central election computer?
Just because there's a new high-tech way to do something doesn't mean it should be done that way. The bread that gramma bakes in the oven is ten times better than the stuff coming from my computerized Zojirushi bread machine.
Some points:
The President submits a budget to congress (what exactly did you think Reagan was talking about when explaining his "trickle down economics" program? An Econ 101 paper he was writing?)
The President appoints the leaders of the departments of the executive branch (such as that Dept. of Defense, which accounts for 43% of federal spending)
The President gets to veto any law passed by Congress (like the ridiculous defense pork that the Republican congress kept trying to pass during the Clinton years -- despite the fact that our military is grossly over-prepared for any realistically plausible enemies)
Its interesting that the Republicans are the ones that spend money hand over fist (that little 43% number again) and then when caught with their hands in the cookie jar, grin and point at the Dems.
There's an easy solution, and I don't know why nobody's thought of it.
Make the voting machines print out a summary page.
Confirm your votes on the screen. The machine prints out a list of your votes, with a stamp on it to confirm which machine it came from and when it was made. You visually inspect the list and compare it to your choices on the screen, and then confirm a second time. Then you're done.
If something doesn't work right, then one of those 10,000+ lawyers that were at the polls yesterday could raise a Big Stink(TM) about it.
Sure, it could be hijacked. I mean, if it's got rogue code which is designed to only register votes for John Q. Incumbent, then maybe it'll print your results accurately, but actually log a vote for the other guy. SO...you do a secondary confirmation count by machine processing the paper votes, just like your fill-in-the-bubble ballots. Check the paper results against the electronic results. There you go. And in the event of extreme paranoia/lawsuits, you've got the *voter confirmed* paper printouts which can be visually inspected for a recount.
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