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Hardly Anyone Cares About Computer Voting Problems
Avidwriter writes "It's a sad thought that Roblimo explores in a NewsForge article about computer voting fraud and how you'd think all honest politicians would be working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source, and why open source wouldn't hurt well-run voting machine companies' profits. Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?"
Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?
I don't know off hand, so let's put it to a vote!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
check out www.fromthewilderness.com.
even if you vote "abstain", or you get a small fine (unless you CAN'T be there, ie are hospitalized)
:)
At least it would stop the whining about voter turnout
(the Subject asks it all...)
"omputer voting fraud and how you'd think all honest politicians would be"
Hmm... lets think about this. "Honest" (looks up in dictionary). "Politicans"...
Yeah. Our politicians are REAL honest, when they're caught!
...you'd think all honest politicians would be working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source...
That assumes you could find an honest politician.
Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?
Most people don't even bother to click the link to read the article; you think they'd actually get up, leave the house, drive to the voting center, and push some buttons to vote? That's way too much effort involved.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Does that count? Heck, i'm usually even honest in those polls. (-;
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
What difference will it make whether the software running these systems are open source or not?
You could easily manipulate these systems without having access to source code. Just manipulate the numbers behind the scenes, and voila..there goes the 'open source' miracle.
Look at this site, the source is open, but the voting (moderation) is closed and unchecked. What matters is that the people should be able inspect what goes on behind the scenes.
I vote, but I don't need people yelling at me that it is unpatriotic or whatever the word de jour is to not vote. It's not like you really know who, or what the hell you are voting for anyways, regardless of what their campaigns say. Get of my damn back.
Security through Obscurity works as a temporary stopgap. It doesn't last long, but it does keep a system secure for a short time until someone discovers the security hole.
Voting takes place once every two years in the US (different for other countries). And it only takes place on one day. Security through obscurity can hold that long.
On the other hand, divulging the source code to the system beforehand (otherwise, what's the point to having the system being Open Source) makes it that much easier for evil-doers to find the holes in the system. Keep in mind that these fraudsters aren't going to fix the hole and "turn it back over to the community". They will have plenty of time to find the exploits and they will exploit it on election day.
Yes, in general Security through Obscurity is a bad idea, but in one-off systems like electronic voting, it is the best method of keeping the system secure short of armed guards and video cameras.
Polticians even believe the voting system is totally secure, and even if it wasn't, it's not up to them to sort it out, it's up to those 'computer people'.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?
Regardless of voter fraud, does it really matter who wins an election between the "two parties that dare not take just one name"? The major elections are rigged regardless of the machines. My vote: accumulate my wealth and expatriate this cultural and political inferno.
They're both dead. What point in voting for them?
If the system is open source then you have open source code to the system which means people can see how the system works. This mean that people could come up with back door or understand certain keypresses to activate easter egg and other undesirable outcomes.. The more popular something is, the more it will be hacked.
And does having source code in front of our eye really tell us that the voting system is legitimate? As I read on Slashdot earlier today India is going to be using electronic voting system for next major election. Do most of one billions people in India know to read source code or understand how it work? Again I think not, so open source is not too useful for checking legitimacy unless you are technical and understand to read source codes...
-- Dr. Fu Ling-Yu, Internal Technology Consult; Tongji University, People Republic of China.
"Hmm, who should I vote for? The puppet on my left hand? Or the puppet on my right? Wait a second! There's one guy holding the puppets!"
Sad, but true. How can a donation be political (in support of policy), when you pay both teams?
I can see it now. Next Bush campaign - democracy in the USA! ... Maybe not :)
.02
cLive ;-)
ps - the more paranoid amongst you may also wish to check out the Bilderberg Group.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
In the Quebec seperation referendum (sp?), which failed only barely, had quite a few spoiled ballots, most of them on the "no" side, and most of them questionable. So I guess it depends more on how much supervision by all parties the system gets.
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.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
You go fix it.
http://mediagoblin.org/
I remember seeing a study mentioned on the news about problems with computer voting, but I don't see it mentioned in this story.
Potential for fraud is a good thing in the eyes of sufficiently corrupt politicians. If it were completely impregnable, then those with the inclination wouldn't be able to fix elections. As much as I love throwing technology at a problem to try and solve it, I really don't think that eliminating a paper trail is *really* a good idea when we talk about electing such powerful people.
How about instead of changing the way we cast our ballot, let's focus on changing the ballot? Plurality voting is about the worst voting system there is. Of course, if we went with Condorcet, third-party politicians might actually get elected.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
What we need are some politicians who are knowledgeable about tech issues. Some like Howard Dean are a step in the right direction, and it will have to come down from the top as there are too many folks in congress that have no real impetus to get involved with on-line voting. Shoot even with recent administrations, personal computers were almost nowhere to be seen in the first Bush administration. All I saw there were the Sun workstations used by the military and other departments. A Windows or Macintosh computer was nowhere to be seen. The Clinton administration was considerably more computer literate and I've seen Cheney with a Powerbook when he is in Jackson, but for the most part these guys are not up with the tech times.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Open Source can't hurt, but
you'd -still- have to be sure
that -all- the executables
were made from the final source,
that everybody has access to,
for the eVoting Boxes.
Then, you have to insure that
no changes are made just before
the machines are used... etc.
My faith in the accuracy of /. polls has been shattered!
Does this mean the Cowboy Neil option didn't really count?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
That's one theory. Mine is that more and more people distrust the government so much that they don't really believe that who we vote for has anything to do with who they tell us won. So voting machine fraud is just a new tool for the new world order (not a term I invented, one Daddy Bush liked to use) to use to do what they have been doing for a while.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Don't get me wrong, I think open source is great, and usually results in better-quality software. Heck, I'm posting this on Mozilla Firebird (recently permanently switched from Opera).
But what's the big deal if it's not open source. As someone already mentioned, in the case of the limited window of voting, security through obscurity shoud work fine.
If the project leaders of some product decide to go Open Source, I say GREAT!!! Everyone wins!!!
But just because a product is NOT open source, should it be criticized?
And besides, most politicians don't no cr@p about PC tech, let alone have any clue as to what open source is. Unless a politician sees it in their best interest (like their researchers say teens and the PC oriented don't like them) I doubt they would push for anything like this. Remember, most of them come from old-school big businesses (or old money) and still see the world through old-school capitalistic glasses.
The new world order is not some shadow group that pulls the strings of the world's governments.
It is the current status of the world, i.e. Saddam is out, Kim is still in, Russia is not a superpower, U.S. is the military powerhouse, and Niue has free Internet.
Nothing more.
But then I could be an agent... *cue twilight zone music*
you'd think all honest politicians would be working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source
No, I don't think that by default. I believe an OSS and peer reviewed voting system would be quite enough, but thats from my experience knowing that a system that has ten thousand eyes on it is more likely to be secure.
Someone without that experience, a politician, marketer, postal worker, househusband or wife, musician, whoever isn't a coder is more likely to take belief in "hrm. all these people know the inner workings of it. surely that makes them likely to know how to take advantage of it!"
Say the name out loud. Clever, eh? Anyway, please don't waste time biting.
The Earth revolves around the Sun.
;-)
Birds can fly.
There is still no cure for cancer.
And a bunch of other painfully obvious stuff happened.
Raise your hand if any of this surprised you. If so, please move to the back of the classroom. Thank you.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Yes. That is true. You either
1. Go to jail for short stay
or
2. Pay a fine
Most people go for the fine. I don't think it matters, since like in the US, its two major parties, neither of which do anything new.
In my small district, its lifetime liberal voters, so if you vote anything but liberal your vote is wasted. So if i say i want to vote for the Democrats, they will recieve no benefit, due to the entire district only counting to one party.
There was an idea to become a republic, but the man in power gave us a non-direct election model, which would result in the same people being elected, and was thusly turned down in the referendum.
I am a firm believer in paper ballots counted by hand under full view of observers independent of the counting process.
The article is one sided and ascribes evil intent to only one political faction. History proves this is an error. Would I trust a computerized election in Califorina where the Democratic party holds all State offices and controls the state Assembly and Senate? No way in hell.
Paper ballots are trust worthy. Computing systems open source or not however are not.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
...and how you'd think all honest politicians would be working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source...
I'm sure they are doing just that. But just like with any team that has exactly zero memebers, progress is a little slow.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
...because the weather and the dead always control the outcome.
David Dill is rasing the alarm about voter verification. Granted he's not part of the gummint, but he's asking the right questions.
I'll tell you this... When something's fundamentally wrong, like.. A person whom everyone knows have no remote possibility to win whatsoever, a person who is butt ugly that you would make him walk backwards just to avoid looking at him, suddenly wins the election... By a huge margin too...
Face it, there's always holes that can be exploited in the voting process.. Be it electronically or manually.
As long as there's no transparency and publicity of how the actual voting process is being made and more importantly, the counting process.. As long as all these is being made in secrecy.. I don't see any improvements.
Yeah, people will say that there's an election commission or equivalent overseeing the process.. Who is overseeing the overseers? (Monitoring the monitors, so to speak)
Will sys-admin for food
when thier candidate looses in a close election. Then it will be the fault of evil [repub|dem|VRWC|commie] hackers, out to rob them of thier vote and disenfranchise them.
As long as thier candidates win, it's all good, though.
Just once, I'd like to be cynical and wrong.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
For example, if we use Slashcode then Cowboy Neal would be president.
Oh the horror!
My father is a blogger.
The results from the last election show that just over 105 million people voted. Since the US only has about 270 million citizens, that's not bad at all, when you consider that no one under the age of 18 can vote. That's about 25% of the population right there. Certain felons are also prohibited from voting, which takes out another few million. Basically, I think that about 60% of the people who were eligible to vote actually did. Which is not great by any means, but it is a majority. What's really interesting is that both Gore and Bush had just over 50 million votes, meaning that neither of them can claim to represent most of America. There's 50 million people who voted against you, and another 170 who either didn't or couldn't. Kind of freaky.
Vote apathy. Apathy is the only real choi... awww, screw it, I can't be bothered to tell you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I've written to the voting committee, written editorials, but no one cares. they claim that it's better than paper voting because machines don't make mistakes.
once I voted 12 times. but that was because they were relying on cookies. that was fixed in the revote. once they used checkboxes instead of radio buttons, and I voted for everyone. but that was fixed in the next one.
people are lazy, and even if it's got problems, they prefer clicking on some web form to actually going and voting in person. I say if you're too lazy to get up and vote, then you probably shouldn't be voting anyway.
but nobody cares, machines don't make mistakes... yeah? well, I've got a 20 page study of georgia voting technology that disagrees.
it's high time we had an election server h4x0red to make people think twice about it.
He's out of town.
Many open source systems run our most important backbones of commerce and even civilization. Take a look at OpenSSH. Oh yeah, that's right, it was fatally flawed and bug ridden.
Or maybe... sendmail? Everyone needs to send email and a vast majority use sendmail. Yet sendmail is the most chronically insecure software on the planet.
Now tell me, slashdot, how open source correlates to security.
Maybe you want to point out Microsoft's Windows and how insecure that is? That it's the worst of the worst?
I think you've just proven to yourself proprietary vs open source is moot. They are completely insignifigant in regards to security so stop pushing it.
It's said that as soon as you believe something is true it becomes false. Your belief in Open Source's security makes it false.
I'm sorry, but opening any headline with the phrase "Hardly Anyone Cares About..." just doesn't grab my attention.
New Mozilla Release: Who Gives a Shit?
Old News: Bush a Liar
Linux More Stable Than Windows, Sphincter Clicks Here
It's so much more attractive / inside the moral kiosk.
What could be worse than counting hanging chads for two weeks? Manual election systems prompted the Supreme Court to decide the last election. What could be worse?
"iRights" - Voting Machine Analysed, Found Wanting.
From the linked site:
From the conclusion of the paper, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, emphasis mine:
And finally, the text of the Voter-Verifiable newsletter I received regarding this issue, which should appear on this page sometime (July 24, 2003):
The Condorcet method of voting requires that each voter rank the candidates from best to worst. It's generally a good system, but has been criticised for being hard to understand (maybe not for those of us on /., but for the stupid voters). Another interesting voting method is range voting, which assigns a number value to each candidate based on that candidate's desirability.
Rated voting, which is a special case of range voting, was generally the best method (i.e., it maximised voter happiness) in a test of various voting systems. Also see ElectionMethods.org.
An improved voting system would certainly make lots of things better (though due to Arrow's paradox, a perfect system is impossible). I think we also need to improve the voters. The most heard criticism of Condorcet's method is that it's hard to understand, and it's really not all that complex at all.
I would think it'd be a good idea to have these electronic machines stamp out physical ballots that would need to be submitted and could be visually verified by voters as accurate. That way you could have the benefits of electronic voting (instant results, ease of use, and voting from more remote locations) and would still have a physical object to verify the results against should a recount be asked for. I'd go as far as barcoding each ballot so you could verify them against their digital version quickly.. to verify the machines are working properly in case of a recount.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Most people find it hard to care about a "theoretical" problem until it happens in reality.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Learn something? The general masses can barely double click. Or when they do, it would be sufficient to click just once. Now imagine convincing a bunch of lawyers (congressmen) how important it is to make sure software is open source... Better yet, imagine trying to convince their constituents.
It's worth a shot, though...
I had a sucky sig.
Go check it out at EFF's Action website and tell your Congress-critter to do something before Zippy the Clown gets elected President.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
For those of you who _aren't_ registered to vote (those of you that are over 18, and US residents, of course), go take a look at the Federal Election Commission's webpage. Since I'm an Illinois resident, I'll also point out the page that's specifically for Illinoisians (and it's pronounced ill-uh-noy, not ill-uh-noiyz): http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElecInfo/pages/Do wnReg.htm
My generation (which is those of us who just turned 18) makes me sick. I can count on one hand the number of people I know (that are my age) who are registered to vote. Letting your country decide everything for you is most definately _not_ the American way--you should be exercising the little trace of a voice that you have as an individual in this country!
"Hu, ho, ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Hu, ho ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Mario Paint! Whoaaa!"
I like it that there are people here who tout as FACT that GWB "STOLE" the election. Of course if Gore had won, the Republicans would all be screaming the same thing (be honest now).
/. we) doesn't mean it isn't the best solution for most people.
It's too bad the whole thing had to come down to hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads, but it did.
And computerized voting would quiet all this hubbub how?
Right. It wouldn't.
There would be a bunch of screaming memies saying the software must be bad 'cause it's not Open Source if their candidate didn't win.
Yet historically we've seen that even OSS isn't immune to bugs and security problems.
The fact of the matter is, the BEST system under MOST circumstances is the one we use, and will continue to use. Just 'cause it's not the solution we (i.e. the
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
For a long time, "honest politician" has been an oxymoron, a laugh amongst the working class. Heavens, we all know there is no such thing. It was Simon Cameron in the 19th century who gave us the modern American definition of an "honest politician" --
"An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought."
The real truth is that most people don't vote because they know their vote doesn't matter. No matter who you vote for, unless you write them a big check, they aren't going to listen to you anyway. No matter how many emails you send in, how many phone calls, how many pickets, it doesn't matter. Unless you have money, you are just a noise that the politician tunes out.
Did the US people want the Patriot Act? A war against Iraq? How about a real 911 investigation? What about the banks selling all your personal data in California? The list is endless. The laws that are passed are not there "for the people".
An awake mind sees that the people get what the politicians give them. Which for well over a hundred years in America has been what the special interests, corporations, and other powers tell the politicians to do.
The big step forward for a better America would be to actively choose not to participate in the biggest lie of all -- that our country is a democracy run by the people and that voting matters.
Think what would happen --
PULLING THE LEGITIMACY PLUG
PULLING THE LEGITIMACY PLUG II
As Thomas Jefferson said long ago, "Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom".
Isn't it time that we, the people, started being honest with ourselves about the current state of our so-called "democracy"?
- Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Of course i am. Why do you ask? (-;
...oh...righ^H^H^H^Hleft. (-; (-; (-;
I am left-handed, -footed, -eared, -toed, -kneed, -minded and -(*censored*)ed. And, like most /.ers, i often feel left out.
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
Hardly anybody cares about politics either
Tech sites like Slashdot and The Register were ignoring then ridiculing the issue a few months back.
The Rubin name is dropped, NYT speaks up, and overnight it is viable.
Who says nerds aren't sheeple too?
This mean that people could come up with back door or understand certain keypresses to activate easter egg and other undesirable outcomes..
It is highly unlikely that an "easter egg" will be hidden in an open source voting system. It would be too easy for the coder to be caught. Having the source code available for review and testing increases the likelyhood that security flaws, whether resulting from coding errors, improper algorythms, or intentional backdoors, will be found and corrected before the election systems are used.
The more popular something is, the more it will be hacked.
This is no argument at all. The closed source voting systems used in the United States in recent elections are based on Microsoft Windows, and have likely been used to alter election results. It seems that you are right about this, it would be better to use "unpopular" Open Source software than popular closed source software in election machinery.
And does having source code in front of our eye really tell us that the voting system is legitimate?
No, not necessarily, but I'd trust a system that can be examined before I'd trust a system that cannot.
Do most of one billions people in India know to read source code or understand how it work?
For Open Source to protect the voting system, it is unecessary for all (or even most) of the voters to understand the source code. It is only necessary that a number persons from all sides of the political spectrum be able to understand the source. Transparency in a voting system will prevent any one interest group from being able to alter the results as no one interest group will be able to control (or identify) all of the potential auditors.
Again I think not, so open source is not too useful for checking legitimacy unless you are technical and understand to read source codes...
Only a moron (or a tool) would make the argument that if a single individual person does not understand the source code, then the source code is not legitimate.
Read, L
...or else just look at the printout which says who you voted for, before you drop it in the ballot box. If there is any question about the results, the papers will be counted. Or the electronic results will be reported quickly while the paper ballots are being counted.
It takes something really, really bad to get people to notice (like the 9/11 atrocities). However, it's difficult to imagine something of that magnitude happening with voting. Even all the shenanigins with Florida voting died down. I expect even if it turns out a company like Diebold explicitly threw an election, they would settle out of court, admit no wrongdoing, pay a fine and hunker down for a bit. With companies like MCI coming back while new howlers are coming to light, corporate responsibility doesn't mean too much any more.
Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?
With the new system, they might have "voted" and they won't even know that they voted, right? Does that count?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I think it is possible to create a closed, proprietary e-voting system that is accountable.
OK, popular-OS may have many holes in it that we don't know about. You just make sure the total process takes such issues into account. For example; via physical security; by providing mechanisms to detect changes; and by design choices that make it impossible for the application itself to know whose votes are being tallied "at this polling station Mr Smith will be candidate A". Even an open source, peer reviewed system shouldn't discount the possibility of fiddling.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I can't believe this. It's not secure! shut up. can't you remember why you got into computers in the first place? Coz' your brain was stronger than your body, and it was your only chance to take control of the world around you. If the system is broke. I say, don't fix it. It would be badass if the president of the united states was a write-in candidate... From CNN.COM And The Winner is.... CowboyNeal! (who the fuck is CowboyNeal?!)
The company I worked for did all of the original design assembly of the PCB boards.
Everything is done on paper (on those models, I hear they have other electronic only models). So it is completely auditable via a recount. The Federal Election Commision certifies the software and the hardware as fit for use. Once certified, no changes can take place without a re-certification, and justification for all changes made.
They use QNX as their base operating system, and use essentially fax based technology inside the system. They scan it using the fax scanner, using timing bars to tell where the bubbles are. They then read the black/white values using an A/D converter (at some point, they switched to infrared technology instead of fax technology). Each machine gets fed test sets of thousands of ballots ( I want to say over 100,000 ballots go thru the system during the final testing phase). Which the exception of a mis-feed, or jam (which has to be detected), there can't be any mistakes.
They are pretty serious about it. At one point I knew every guy who did the day to day coding on the systems. They are plenty trustworthy. Maybe not coding gods, but naferious evil plots just won't happen. Sorry, take your conspiracy theories and go home.
Oh, and no one in their right mind would want to read the code. For a variety of reasons. First it's boring as hell. Second, the rules make it nearly impossible to write interesting code. All function can have on and only one return. No function can be over 200 lines long. No matter how clear the function is, it can't be longer then 200 lines. Why 200, got me, but it's the rule. There are rules against using macros, and rules about function pointers, and rules about recursion, rules about how data structures have to be stored. Rules about lots of different things. Rules about election layouts. Rules about ballot layouts. All kinds of mind numbing rules.
Open sourcing them, or making them available under NDA for a third party audit, sure seems like a good idea. However, there are plenty of safety measures in place to assure that the right things go on.
Christ the machines run while being hit by a giant as static electricity gun. (Vandigraph generator, I believe it was called).
Kirby
Oh, is this off topic? Sorry. Guess no one cares about voting.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Concerns about the NWO and a belief that your vote just ges into a box to ignored at the politions leasure is only a factor in a small number of peoples not voting.
The fact is, most folks are fat dumb and relitivly happy. They can't be bothered with who is running for what office (or even what mst of these offices are supposed to do) and if they knew it is very hard to tell what major canidate is most likley to vote the way you would like them. As long as the wolf is not at their door and they can still spend money they don't care who is in office. To be fair at this point in the game the politions are so crooked and the parties so close in what they say (and more so in what they do) that it may really not matter.
So I throw my vote away on third party canidates in protest, but I do show up.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Are you implying that we're actually having a vote this time around...
I don't know about anyone else, but when I vote, there's these little senile old ladies who ask what my name and address is and don't ask for any ID. Give me some cheap sunglasses and a fake beard and I could cast several votes for me and my neighbors next election.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
"Hardly Anyone Cares About Computer Voting Problems"
Just a note, but hardly anyone cares about computer voting period. It's not even a blip on the radar for most people. And those who do know already realize there are people with a PC, an internet connection and way too much time on their hands waiting for this sort of opportunity to play around.
It's not that big of a deal yet. Really.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
In Chile we have *somewhat* mandatory voting. It works like this:
1.- You _register to vote_ if you want to vote, and you are 18 or older.
2.- Now that you are registered, you MUST vote on EVERY ellection there is. If you don't like it, don't register. The only excuses is being hospitalized or more than 300 Km from your voting home (you register on a given district, and must vote there).
3.- When you go vote, you must provide the national ID card, and you are tallied against a list of voters for that particular place. After you vote, you must sign the register. (that's how they know you didn't vote and get fined)
4.- ???
5.- Profit! :)
But seriously, I say *somewhat* because you can always not register and mind your own biz. I am 26 at the moment and I'm not registered, although I'm getting enough interest to register. The drag is that you *must* vote on *every* election, and there's the slim chance that you get drafted to man the voting tables :o (now that's a crappy job)
You're right about the problem: even with open source there's no good way for Joe Voter to be certain that the code running on his voting machine is exactly the same as the code he can pull down off some website, and hasn't been tampered with (or subverted in hardware) anywhere along the way.
If you want to see an even better system than randomly unique numbers, though, check out the paper at vreceipt.com. Not only can voters in this guy's system know their vote was tampered with, but they can prove it with their cryptographically signed receipt. Better, still, even though you can use the receipt to prove that your vote was recorded accurately, nobody else can use your receipt to tell what your vote was (and pay you for it, blackmail you about it, or in any other way violate the secret ballot concept).
You'd still need people in the polling places to make sure the number of votes reported matches the number of people who walk into booths, but that's not so hard.
If people don't keep up with politics, they would probably either pick the most recognizable name, or they would make their pick completely random, I would bet that whoevers name appears first on the ballot would get a noticeable boost in votes, simply because many people, when they just don't care, will always pick the first option. Plus, having people who don't care not vote means you are getting a more reasonable representation of the people -who actually have an opinion-
1. Embrace the machines.
:)
2. Force a recount.
3. Realize there IS nothing to recount.
4. Make popcorn and watch the crisis.
No more machines
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Mostly the Florida Election Commission, though, and they care because they're looking forward to doing some real election fraud!
I think we could improve on the votes/property ratio by allowing people to be property of other people. A people-owner gets the votes of the people he owns. If people want to be more powerful than corporations, than they must be bought and sold like corporations. People could have multiple shareholders, in the case of shared wives.
It's clear that America isn't, meaningfully, a democracy in the sense of "rule of the people." The people want to ban abortion, make homosexually compulsory, and bring firearms to school.
Yes, people vote, but financial and structural factors constrain the possible range of choices to a tiny percentage of political views. There is choice, but 99% of the possibilities are removed long before the ballot box: if the owners of TV stations (i.e. large corporations) hate you, they'll tell the populace you're a satan worshipping baby eater, as will the co-owned magazines and radio stations.
Similarly, if you're really, really anti-military, you'll end up the way of Kennedy. Who knows who really killed the guy but some kind of conspiracy or collusion seems fairly easy to prove: the Warren Comission report is totally bogus, magic bullets and all.
But still, we have some choices.
Rigged voting machines could change that.
It's an extension of the infrastructure problems of the internet: when a handful of companies own the backbone, the net becomes vulnerable to physical coercion.
Similarly, if voting machines are owned by a company with political interests, they can subvert the process almost regardless of the security measures put in place: hardly anybody can do analysis of the VLSIs inside of a voting machine, for example. It's just too damn hard.
This is why paper works: anybody can make ballots. Anybody can count them. They're a completly open, manageable commodity. Yes, you can lose them, mis-count them, design bad ballots, ban people from voting based on bogus data or any number of other stunts, but the basic infrastructure is built on open "standards."
In as much as open source and comodity hardware are like paper, there's a case for putting the voting system on an open source basis. But you have to have trust all the way down to the VLSI or you're back in a situation where a politically interested party (Intel or AMD) could, in theory, subvert your democracy.
Because of these factors, I'm against electronic voting for the moment. I do think that a hybrid system, such as the systems which count paper ballots automatically might be acceptable, but in general, we're safer using technologies which do not have owners and which are completely transparent: pen and paper.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I've always thought that it would be interesting to have a system where people would choose some set number of ballot measures out of all of the measures up for that election, and vote only on those. There would be some sort of formal system set up to learn about those issues in depth (other than wildly biased propaganda campaigns by the two sides), and a way of enforcing basic understanding of the facts on both sides of the issue (a simple test of some kind, probably). There would be a couple of big advantages:
Sadly, this system is totally unworkable in our society: it requires relatively equal access to education, an enforced way of making sure everone had time to learn so that those who have to work all the time wouldn't be shafted, a system of making sure "boring" measures were voted on by enough people to matter, etc.
But it's an interesting thought experiment in how to try to avoid the trap of elitism while guaranteeing a certain level of informed decision-making in the voting process
A large portion of people don't expect to be voting via computer. The old paper-tally method can still be fooled... but I think people still trust it more, and would just avoid the computerized stuff entirely.
Speaking as a Bush supporter, I say All The Way Dean!!
He's unelectable, but he can sure make a mess of the Democrats. If he's nominated he'll be impossible to elect.
Al Sharpton would be better, though.
What about the false-positive case, where a number is issued fradulently, and a vote is cast.
This is standard vote fraud: vote twice, or more times. This system does nothing to prevent it. Yes, it ensures that a given vote was correctly recorded, but at the price of making it possible to track down an individual and see how they voted, which is basically sacrificing the principle of secret ballot for some theoretical gains.
What if armed gangs grab people outside of the voting booths and record their numbers? Well, either people encode or destroy their numbers, or they can be coerced...
No gain here, as far as I can see.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Have you ever tried to explain "source" to a politician? I have. Let me tell you. Just getting them over that hurdle is tough enough. Most of them are lawyers, and for some reason lawyers tend not to care much about tech. Sure there are exceptions, but I can't help but get the impression that most lawyers would still be using quills and ink if they could get away with it.
So. When you go to policitians with this issue and say "The system should be Open Source so someone can perform a security audit" what they hear is "Our special interest group has an opinion about how the system should work". Really. I don't see any way around this problem either. We could sit around and wait for the public school system run by these politicians to produce lawyers who aren't computer and science illiterate, except of course that by now most of the politicians are products of that very same system!
I see a positive feedback loop here, which like all positive feedback loops tends to create instability. Now... how many politicians have the background to understand that analogy?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here are the guidelines I came up for a fraud-resistant electronic voting system:
1: The traffic with the database server should be properly secured (ipsec, ssl w/client certs, etc.)
2: The data should be stored in an accountable way. For example, if the data is altered, there should be a way to determine this.
3: The system should allow manual verification of results.
So here was the system I designed:
1: Database server communicates with clients using ESP/IPSec protected communications.
2: Voting machines use touch-screens. At the end, the voting machine displays a list of candidates you voted for and asks you to confirm. Then when you do, it submits your data to the database and prints a ballot. The database also stores information relating to the ballot regarding which voting station you were at. You deposite the ballot in the ballot box.
The ballot contains: 1: An easy-to-scan bar code
2: A human readable ballot listing for manual verification. 3: The ballot serial number.
This gives you almost everything you get with the paper system as well as everything you get with the electronic system.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I AM a Libertarian nut job.
What I don't understand is that since any competent system designers who take both computer and social issues into account will promptly arrive at this same conclusion, why do none of the systems use it? The lack of transparency of the computer-based systems is a fatal flaw for a process whose most important task is to promote confidence that everyone's vote was counted.
From conversations with my local election officials and other governmental types (I've held elective office myself and can speak politico as well as geek), I think that the main problem is that the officials are so impressed by the speed of the systems, and by their immunity to certain traditional kinds of fraud, that they ignore their lack of robustness and their potential to sabotage public confidence.
Making a GPLed demonstration system that used this idea (and perhaps extended it with judicious use of public-key encryption) would be a great project. Anyone interested? Or is it already patented?
Believe me, all the honest politicians are working towards open source systems.
-(())
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Join GTAA (Gay Troll Association Of America) today, and enjoy all the benefits of wiping your ass with lame posts.
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If you have any mod points, mod both this and the parent down.
Amen!
is that there are no honest politicians anymore.
Can't say that's much of a surprise, looking at the last few years of legislation.
Send me $1000 for parts and either another $1000 for my time and/or an ongoing job and I'll produce a nice voting machine for you. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to produce such things on my own. :)
If someone wanted to hire me I'd go as far as producing the software required and make sure it was properly tested and secure. I'd be more than willing to have the plans and source opensourced if my sponsor didn't care.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of the Diebold security leaks have been made public, and it has scared a bunch of people into *not* wanting to use computer voting, due to the problems (real or imagined) that might occur.
Me personally, I found it annoying to stand in long lines to use the old systems, and don't really feel like standing in long lines to use a new system thats just going to be jacked up anyway. Hopefully the new machines will be fixed before 2004
testing out my trending skills
Wouldn't it make a more compelling argument to discuss this once an open source solution actually exists?
...voting is done for you!
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
"This is an outrage! What do they expect?!? Do they honestly expect that we become Linux longbeards & hackers just to have a chance @ voting?"
"What are you yammering about? This doesn't use Linux."
"Well that just proves that I'm too dumb to use this technology...I mean that it's too hard to use because I honestly didn't know that."
testing out my trending skills
...and I have a good reason not to: I don't believe in mob rule (aka "democracy"). Nobody has the right to vote away other people's property, liberty, or life. Two people can't rightly steal from or kill one person; likewise neither can two billion. Majority is no excuse.
Not everyone who doesn't vote is just being "apathetic".
Well I don't vote now.
Since this /. article isn't as old as the actual "Diebold" post a couple days ago, I'll post a memo I received from an anonymous Diebold employee. I have no idea if this was released to the press or if it's "out there" for all to see.
I figured the same crowd reading this /. article also read the one about Diebold.
From: Internal Communications [Diebold]
Subject: Diebold responds to New York Times article
The New York Times ran a story yesterday (see article below, following Diebold's statement) based on a report issued by John Hopkins University, alleging security flaws in Diebold's Election Systems software installed in the company's voting machines.
In response to this article, Diebold issued the following statement to the media late Thursday:
Johns Hopkins University issued a report on electronic voting systems on July 23. We respectfully disagree with the researchers' fundamental conclusions. It is unfortunate that the Johns Hopkins researchers did not involve us or the election community in their analysis, including the Federal Election Commission, which sets standards that all election processes must follow; the federal certification independent testing authorities which tests and impose the standards; Secretaries of State and/or State Boards of Elections, which control the voting process within their states and the county election authorities. These entities would have added important real-world experience to their analysis. In addition, the study did not use our current code. The code was analyzed without the knowledge of the actual hardware in which it is used in actual elections, which caused them to draw many incorrect inferences.
By their own admission in Section 1.3 of the study, the researchers "have not independently verified the current or past use of the code by Diebold or that the code (we) analyzed is actually Diebold code." It is also important to note that the clinical research focused almost solely on software code, and overlooked the total system of software, hardware, services and election processes that have made Diebold electronic voting systems so effective in real-world implementations.
Our elections systems products and services undergo a series of certification processes, which are conducted by federal, state and local officials, including logic and accuracy testing, and represent a sequence of security layers in place within the elections process for actual elections. We welcome the chance to work directly with Johns Hopkins, its research team and other objective electronic voting experts to continue to ensure the integrity of the voting process.
America's elections history has been one of continuous improvement, and Diebold has been at the forefront of creating standardized systems that ensure the highest degree of accuracy and integrity for voters, elected officials and a wide variety of electoral jurisdictions. Our track record is exemplary as illustrated by the recent streamlined elections in Georgia, California and Maryland, among other locations. We currently have more than 50,000 electronic voting units installed throughout the United States.
(end of statement)
Jerry Fletcher,
Privacy Protection By:
http://www.cotse.net/servicedetails.html
If americans would just give up on the gizmos and use a very simple, time honoured system (pencil and paper, folks) you wouldn't have these problems....
stating the blindingly obvious,
simon
home page
slashdot. Are they voters?
This would be a good poll to run. (I will submit it.)
I am not sure how I stand on electronic voting. Open / Closed source both have good arguments. I do know that I want an audit trail though. Paper ballots can be archived for later study. Will the records of these things be the same? Will interested people be able to gain access without the software? If they are granted the software, will it run 15 years from now?
We need to have some durable record of what people did. If this is not part of things now, we are doing the wrong thing.
Blogging because I can...
One must consider the fact that many people in charge of implementing the electronic voting system have vested interest in giving the contract to a family member, or as a political favor. Keeping it closed source would make it harder for that contract to be lost by whoever gets it.
http://ablegray.com
if you are just reading and bitch'n, you are part of the problem.
/. for a reason. Why waste the effort?
It only takes a few minutes to express your views, or cut 'n paste someone else's you agree with. Noise works wonders to help bring an issue before a legislator. On average, very few people actually write any kind of response. Those responses they do get carry some weight.
This means we have a chance to punch well above our weight if we actually do *something*
So, do something. Do it each week. These stories are here on
Join the EFF. If you *really* can't part with the $25 or so to do that, at least use their EFFector mailing list. They provide very timely call to action letters that make providing your input easy.
Put your legislators address in your address book. When you have a thought, just send it to them. Does not have to be fancy, it just needs to be honest and somewhat timely.
I recently worked to help push the Oregon Open Source bill through the house. (HB2892) We failed because a well known AeA lobbyist (Jim Craven --I think.) had the ear of the house speaker. We did make this decision hard for Karen Minnis though. She heard a *lot* about Open Source. Maybe next session she will hear more.
This experience showed me that change requires ongoing dialog with our representitives. It is the only way to counter the lobbyists. Lobbyists offer deals and dollars. The only check on these is public opinion. --Votes.
I met and spoke with many legislators. They are people just like us, who are interested in the issues. Most of them want to know what you think and are willing to take the time to learn it.
Approach them as you would any other person you know. --Just start a dialog. Sure you will get form letters, but after a few of those, you will get actual reply mail. This is valuable.
Tell them you vote. Tell them your stand on the issue. Let them know about interesting news items. A good example for those living in Oregon would be the current Wyden bill.
--This is a great bill. Its risky for him. He needs to hear thanks and support. I wrote him today expressing exactly that while asking if there is anything I can do at the same time.
Do something if you want to see things change.
Vote --- Write your legislature --- Talk to your friends.
--It matters.
Blogging because I can...
Check out the top of this page:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/
The study the article references (by Johns Hopkins ) can hardly be considered a valid study. For an institution as highly regarded as Johns Hopkins, you'd think they'd have a substantive case before publishing such a study. The thing was replete with guesses and "what-ifs." They set up the software on a Windows PC, which is not the way the software is used in the real world. In fact, it's not even the same OS they use in the real world. Diebold, the company who makes the software, has (predictably) published 2 responses to the study. Both of them are .pdf.
Follow up statement
and
Technical Response
Of course, you'd expect them to refute the study, but their claims are valid ones. You can't fairly critique a system unless you can duplicate the process as closely as possible from start to finish. JH didn't do that.
However, all that said, I still agree with their initial assertion that all election software should be open sourced. Even though, as one poster said, the code would be incredibly, mind-numbingly boring to read, it would still be worth it to be able to have the code reviewed.
poor Mr Computingvoting Problems - no one cares about him boo hoo!!
It's about secure systems. Open source does not guaruntee security. Neither does closed. Good design, testing, and implementation does.
Yes, proprietary black-box voting equipment is a terrible idea. But what are you going to do about it?
What did Linus Torvalds do about Microsoft? He didn't sit around and complain, he wrote free software to compete with them.
Well, I can't compare myself to Linus, but I did develop a free GUI for voting, and I spent enough time to jeopardize my marriage doing it.
I call it the Graphical Voter Interface or GVI. I gave it a GPL license, and I urge you to check it out. It is full-featured, and I think you will be impressed.
GVI itself is actually a fairly complete voting GUI, but it needs additional components to become part of a complete open-source, free voting system. The documentation that comes with it explains what else is needed, and I wish some of you free-software guys would get to work on them.
Trust me, your arguments against closed-source, proprietary voting systems will be much more credible if you can offer a free, open-source alternative. So get your butts in gear!
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
When I clap my hands, is it the right hand touching the left, or the left hand touching the right?
I don't see the difference between requiring that citizens vote and requiring that citizens not neglect the democratic process.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
...if a hacker (or a friendly foreign governemen) breaks into this system and changes results to elect Bin Laden as President of the US.
Then, people would see the danger and care.
(I'm dead serious!!)
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
I could get very upset about this, but for a few salient points:
A) Most of you are stupid. It's not your fault, but clearly, judging from the number of dullards who slow down to stare at a car with a flat tire pulled off of a highway, most of you barely have the mental capacity of a chimp. Why should any intelligent person care if your vote counts?
B) It seems obvious, due to the secretive nature of voting practices here, that though votes are collected, they clearly are obfuscated by election officials. Now technically apt geeks will be able to skew those election results too, how's that a bad thing?
C) Commercials. I don't know which one of you brain dead fuckers thought up commercialization and emotional appeal as an effective method for choosing politcal leadership, but I want you shot now. If stupid ad hominem attacks on personality traits can get a person elected, then the whole system is a waste of time and effort.
At least your forefathers had the excuse of being raging alcoholics. But this myth that our genesis was somehow guided by the hand of God to procure freedom and hope for the universe is a fantasy we need to wake up from. Our ancestors were mostly lucky despots and slave fuckers.
Had they been sainted personalities guided by some heavenly personage, they should have struck most of us dead for having the gall to murder and re-populate an entire nation, while lacking the creativity to build a system with some immunity from bribery and despotism. Being a little better than a communist dictatorship is NO great accomplishment. Having a faulty voting system at least holds out the hope of someone who can solve problems making a leadership decision.
I'll vote for that! Oh wait, I won't have to...
"Not that most people care, since they don't even bother to vote, right?"
I find it pretty hard to worry about electorial fraud anymore, in the same way (and for the same reason) that I am uninterested in a bad call in a pro wrestling match. Like the winner is decided by actual citizen votes, hehe, yeah right.
As far as I can tell, electronic ballots are serving the same function as the 15 foot tall chainlink cage they put over the top of the ring. Its supposed to increase the excitement and help you suspend disbelief that the danger (or the election process) is all just an elaborate act.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
future elections should just be put up as a /. poll and not tell anyone about it. however i do fear cowboy neal being elected president
When they engineer a system that:
1) Encrypts my vote so that nobody else can see what I personally voted on,
2) Allows every vote to be independently verified,
3) Mathematically guarantees that, without breaking the privacy of any vote, counts all the ballots in such a way as each independent vote must be part of the aggregate number,
4) Does all the above on an open, independently verifiable platform that can be easily tested for accuracy, (OSS)
I won't trust e-voting. Even with the above, I'd be suspicious. I don't trust our paper-ballot system, but I trust e-voting even less.
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Face it's true. If you say that there could be mass voter fraud, no one will believe it, unless it's shown to them in a horribly embarassing way. Therefore, what needs to happen is this:
In some small voting district (preferably one of the smallest in the nation) that has electronic voting, some third party candidate, or even better a write in candidate needs to get AT LEAST twice the total world population voting for him. Someone would for sure get arrested for the unforgivable and henious crime, not of election fraud, but of making the powers that be look bad. At least done this way, the obvious defense would be that harm could already be done, this person just made sure it was known since no one would listen. Not that I think that would help much.
However if some lunatic fringe candidate were to get 900% or 1000% of the total possible vote, and all of that were to come from the same district or even pricinct, there would be some attention given to it.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
Since the Australian people have agreed to let their personal liberty be compromised, and have made this violation law, then yes, the government has a duty then to compell it's citizens to vote. The Australian people have a right to give up their liberty. Self-determination is important. Do not misunderstand me though.
While the government has a duty to do this, it does not make it right. During World War II, in the United States, mass numbers of Japanese Americans were held in internment camps for supposed protection against espionage. The gaurds certainly had a government-sanctioned duty to keep them there, but this does not change the fact that those citizens' personal liberty was violated. There may not have been a vote that put those Americans there, like there was that put Australians in voting centers on election days, but there was no vote to halt their internment, so their liberty was still removed by a democratic majority process.
First of all, the bill of rights is part of the constitution. And no, the philosophies behind the documents that are the basis of our government and key points in our history are not the philosophies of the American people. They are just philosophies.
As to why the American people tout the Declaration and the Constitution, well, they don't. I doubt the average American could identify the Preamble to the Constitution for a hundred dollars.
According to the latest polls, 11 out of 5 does not care about errors in the voting system.
my sig
A couple of years later I'd almost completely lost interest except in the soap-opera aspect of the political game. Organised party politics is a waste of time, designed to keep the middle-aged, early retirees and people on long-term invalidity benefit occupied. The others are power-crazed over ambitious types just like you find in any other occupation. (It's not the money, not in the UK anyway, where cabinet ministers only get about 70K sterling IIRC.)
The last year or so have made it clearer than ever that real power is in corporate boardrooms and the country clubs of the US, and proved the truism of the old adage "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal". I'm more and more cleaving to the Chomsky-esque view that the organised political scene is just a distraction, a meaningless soap-opera designed to keep us asking the more profound questions.
The ludicrous US turnout rates - what is it, 35% in /Presidential/ elections? - is only a few decades ahead of Europe IMHO. These people can't claim any sort of popular mandate. Basically what I'm trying to say is: it all sucks.
How can you expect anybody be interested in malfunctions of voting machines, if the majority of the population is not represented anyway?
How can you expect that if the President himself was elected only without a number of votes which a judicial decision has separated out?
It appears, democracy and USA are two different matters, and they're on two different ways.
Why do people waste so much energy trying to get children to learn what happened decades ago (or even centuries and millenia)?
1.) To let them avoid repeating the same old mistakes.
2.) To bias their perspective on the future.
Voting should not be an object lesson for school children. The restriction of voting rights to those over 18 was intended to help prevent peer-pressure-voting. (In a way similar to statutory rape is supposed to prevent the exploitation of minors.)
Why do I not support mandatory voting? Because "the unwashed masses" usually act on a deficit of information. If you haven't taken the time to research the issues/politicians, you shouldn't be voting. At best, an uneducated vote adds noise to the system. At worst, it supports the charismatic charlatans who own our political system today. (Side note: having reasons to lean one side or the other counts as slight education; just make sure your representative doesn't take advantage of you as mine seems to be doing.)
Take a look at the sharp difference in politicians and their image across some cultural changes...
pre/post-railroad, pre/post-radio, and pre/post TV
In all three, reputation and character were valued more highly before the change; campaigning and appearance were valued more highly after.
I can only hope that the Internet, with its wider availability of information, can do something to reverse this trend.
Please.
The major political parties policies exist to serve "the majority" they couldn't get into power without aiming squarely at "the majority" and therefore their policies are all very similar.
If your views fall slightly outside views of "the majority" you simply don't get any representation. You also have to remember that "the majority" has an *average* I.Q. of 100.
None of the major political parties views or policies represent my own, so should I be forced to vote for someone who doesn't represent me?
The top down architected democracies which we have at the moment basically don't work as forms of representation. They don't represent the people they are supposed to. Representation really needs to come from the bottom up where local views and issues can be expressed, which means democracy and therefore taxation have to be turned upside down.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You didn't vote? Then you don't care.
You voted using this system? Then you don't care.
The US electoral system is an obsolete farce. I care passionately, and that's why I won't support it by participating.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
your vote can abstain from you!
...I just do it via persuasion rather than force. Make no mistake, voting is force. N times removed via proxies, but when you vote something and it becomes law (or emplaces lawmakers) then people may be killed or jailed or have their property stolen because of your vote. Almost certainly they will be robbed ("taxed") to pay for it.
My refusal is both principle and pragmatism: you cannot win a battle by playing within the rules-sandpit your enemy defines. It is not apathy to refuse to participate in the prescribed "political process", especially when one takes part in the real political process: changing people's opinions, one at a time if necessary.
> you'd -still- have to be sure
that -all- the executables
were made from the final source,
using a compiler that's known not to contain any code that can generate unexpected code from the supplied input... okay, so we need an open source compiler...
but how do we know that the compiler was compiled using a compiler that doesn't inject malicious code that would mean that the compiler compromised the ballot software?
You might want to check out this classic ACM paper
So you look at the disassembled binary code, and verify that it does what the sourcecode says, right? But then you have to trust that the chips do what the manufacturer tells you they do. Maybe you should dismantle the chips and get them under an electron microscope, verify that the gates and pathways all work according to spec... but what if the electron microscope is rigged to misrepresent certain images?
The thing is, you can't be certain that the intentions of sourcecode will be executed faithfully, without returning to first principles (basically the laws of physics), unless you start trusting some of the layers. And once you start trusting layers - say, the hardware layer, the compiler - why not extend that trust further up the stack? So, why is sourcecode access so crucial to trust?
What's important is that there be some external, verifiable proof that the machine results reflect the intentions of the voters. That means a system where the machine prints off a physical ballot paper, the voter checks it accurately reflects their vote, and deposits it in a secure ballot box. That way an audit trail exists that means that you can physically count the votes and ensure that the results are what the computer said they were. Source access isn't necessary to ensure this, just as access to electron microscopy of the chip surface isn't required.
Then contact your local representatives and congresspersons. Is that too much to ask? No.
The biggest problems with the US political scene today is APATHY likes yours and laziness.
Did you know that in MOST states there is a "no vote" option. Go in. Select NONE of the switches (for those with decent voting booths, FL is OBVIOUSLY excluded from this category) and move the handle. You just voted for no one, BUT you increased the number of voters to hit that booth. This is recorded and denotes a no vote.
Personally if more people that whine about "no one represents my views" got off their asses and got involved there would be people to represent them. If more people like you did a NO VOTE then it would make things happen as well.
Who ever increased your mod falls into your category as well.
Get active in. The fact that there are SO MANY people like you in this country is how a childish, idiot like Bush made it into office. Americans dropped the ball on that one.
You can download the source code here.
And how exactly will doing that make any difference? The person you just didn't vote for will go and campaign for a completely different democratic system (one in which s/he probably wouldn't be voted in)?
Yeah, right.
And stop insulting people. I care - I just don't care for politicians!
* It took a constitutional crisis to get rid of punch card ballots. Noone cared until the direction of our country was in question. They still don't care enough in most states to pay to fix the problem.
* Voter turnout is typically less than 50% in most elections.
* Accountability is a boring concept.
-- $G
Everyone remembers the paper ballot fun in Florida, right?
Long before there was electronic voting, there was vote tampering. You think the l337 hax0rz are fast are reverse engineering; they've got nothing on those that want to manipulate the vote.
Hanging chads, missing boxes of ballots, spontaneously discovered boxes of ballots, invalidated ballots, you name it.
Anyone that thinks that paper is secure is too gullable.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I'm not even going to address the computerized aspect here ...
But in a happy, free country, turnout should be low.
We don't, collectively, have to worry about politics that much, and that is a grand thing!
I vote, but frankly I'm pretty happy that no matter who wins, odds are pretty good that taxes and regulations will stay tolerable, death squads won't be roaming the streets, etc.
Turnout was 100% in good old Iraq, if that's what you want to emulate.
No that is not her prerogative. Her responsibility is to make an informed decision.
Fuck that. If people want to be apathetic or vote foolishly, then society SHOULD be punished with corrupt officials and rampant lobbyists.
Apathy and foolishness need to have consequences.
Informed and interested voters don't grow on trees and they rarely cultivate themselves to caring about the issues.
It is *our* responsibility to cultivate each other's interest, educating each other, and debating in a productive manner. That means capturing old ladies interest who are mesmerized by Al Gore's tie by talking about issues that matter to her and helping her make an informed decision.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
It's very simple and has been studied to death. It's APATHY, indifference.
It's not that we are too busy, it's not that we don't trust voting booths, it's not that we don't think our one little vote is going to make a difference... it's that we don't CARE who gets voted in.
Clown on the right or clown on the left, he's still a clown. "Who gives a rats ass. It's just powerful people doing shit for other powerful people. I work 50 hours a week, come home, eat dinner, let the dog out, watch corporate sponsored news, and go to bed, and it's what I'll do for the next four years too."
Is it sad? Hell yes, but it's not the "people's" fault. If they have a reason to vote, they will. They just don't see a good reason. They've literally given up.
We saw an election literally "stolen" in the last presidential election. We also saw a president get into office even though most in the country voted for the "other guy" (if you remember, Gore had the popular vote, but not the electoral vote). You wanna talk about an apathy spreader, that was it.
We (Americans) simply don't care, as we haven't been shown any reason to. Left or right, we still see a power hungry corporate lackey
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
All the honest politicians ARE working on a solution. :)
They've teamed up with the surviving dodo birds, a few wolly mammoths, and a sabre tooth tiger.
A) Yes.
B) No.
C) CowboyNeal.
--
Voting machines seem to be an interesting business. This is one reason why outside the US, all the other western countries have chosen to stick to pencil and paper and to build in oversight to the counting process.
See my journal, I write things there
... than the blantant gerrymandering by the republicans in Texas?
Note: I am a registered republican.
I think you just said that at WORST, we would get the same system there is today. Why not give it a try then?
It won't be an issue until Bugs Bunny gets elected Governor of California.
... it would be illegal.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
These beasts are the best. No electricity required. Simple operation, and a stylish curtain for privacy. With a computerized voting system, your chances of having problems goes up dramatically. As do your costs. Try to think beyond geek and look to what has worked for close to a century.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
that most people just dont really care about their country anymore.
Black Box Voting
The source code for the software used in one voting machine was discovered on the Internet, on an unprotected FTP site belonging to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. The software, when compiled and run in tests, showed that it appears to be the code used in the company's AccuVote-TS touch-screen terminals.
This software has been analyzed in detail at Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States. I think your stomach will start turning just a couple paragraphs in. No, let me start it turning for you: the backend database for this state-of-the-art touch-screen votiong machine is Microsoft Access. But that's only part of the story. Wait until you read about the hidden tables. More details here: How We Discovered The Backdoor. The actual code from the FTP site is here: Original Data.
I don't know about you, but I became a little nauseous reading this.... It's quite the yee-opener.
Some more on "problematic" election results:
Florida Ballots Project
Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
NY TImes: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
The most stomach churning thing of all, I think, is the Christian Right connection to Deibold and ES&S.
If you find this stuff credible, spread the word around.
Edith Keeler Must Die
The US Declaration of Independence included an argument (in fact, that's what it is, a statement of one side of an argument) that certain ideas are universal. One of these ideas is that governments are devised by people for the purpose of protecting those same people, and that if the government does not protect them, the people have the right to change their government.
Once the ideals of the American Revolution became well-known, most people agreed that, in general, anyway, these ideals are universal. The devil is in the details, of course, so how these ideals get put into action, get institutionalized, has been the story of political history ever since.
The point was made that the Australian people have decided to make voting mandatory, and have called on their government to administer this law. Someone said that, in doing so, the government was doing what it was supposed to do, which is follow the will of the people.
Someone else said that he felt that requiring voting was a violation of liberty, and, were he an Australian, he would (at least consider) violating the law.
Thus it has always been. Individuals are free to do whatever they choose. The problem is with the consequences, if the powers that be -- family, society, clan, tribe, religion, local or national government, or even supra-government (e.g., UN) -- consider the transgression to be serious enough, they will impose sanctions as a consequence of any individual's actions.
So the question becomes "Is it worth it to me, as an individual, to go along with [insert law here], or suffer the consequences, [insert consequence], and break the law?" For some people, in some societies, the moral imperitive to follow the law is strong. In other societies, such imperitives are weaker. When such societies interact, the differences will be a source of conflict. Everything from drug laws to copying music files to planning civil disobedience to plotting insurrections are possible actions in contravention of various and several laws, and how any individual treats those laws is his business -- provided that those whom his/her actions touch have the same right to react. That is, your decision to NOT vote cannot impinge on my right to do so. Now, not voting doesn't actually harm one's fellow citizens, except in the most abstract sense, so if the government were to make the consequences more draconian (imprisonment, corporal punishment -- bring back the stocks! -- etc.), then that same government would not be maintaining its duties vis a vis its citezens, and should be changed.
Long-winded, ain't I?
Ed
In other words, i think most /.ers feel like the rest of the world doesn't understand them or their issues, and hence they feel left out. We comprehend the vast techological difficulties with properly implementing a secure voting system, however, the average Joe Bloe doesn't give a hoot whether it's DES encrypted or if there is a paper trail.
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
Once he's bought, he STAYS bought.
The annual meeting of the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers is going on this week in Denver . It includes a sub-conference of technical types who are trying to slow down purchasing and installation of the new machines until they are made more secure. Meanwhile, ignore Jonik's comment.
And yes, I do contact my representative, or "Member of Parliament" on issues which concern me.
Does it make a blind bit of difference? No, I don't have remotely enough money to show up on his radar.
So, it isn't just America, or Britain, it's the form of democracy which is at fault.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
secret ballots? where?
Not in california where the ballot serial number or the number plus a known offset is recorded next to your name.
there is no way that electronic voting is going to be secret. it will not be tolerated.
Elections should be eliminated, replaced by a random draft system. If you get drafted, you can take the job, or pass. If you pass, then another person is drafted.
all honest politicians *are* working to make sure computerized voting systems are open source.
Security Through Obscurity is widely disparaged.
If the code is published, then it is apparent whether faults have been fixed.
If not, then there is a commercial and sales-driven urge to simply say the faults have been fixed, or that there are none.
"You would think that voting machines you would want simple and private code with high encription."
So no, you wouldn't, and any encryption you do see used should also have algorithm and source code exposed to view.
Of course, there is a further, thus far undiscussed, problem with voting machines in general: They deny a person the right to spoil their ballot paper. This is a right that needs to be protected until there is a 'none of the above' box on every ballot paper.
Chicago, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida...
That being the case, I would like to state as a matter of public record that I take no responsibility for the American government.
My vote does *not* matter, because my vote has zero chance of changing the results of a fraudulent system. Nor do the politicians pay attention to the votes, or the polls, or (often) even the letters written to them, as a gauge of whether their intended laws are good or bad: if they did, I would still vote.
Nor do the politicians represent me. They represent themselves, and claim that it is me they represent.
Nor is this simple cynicism. The voter fraud being standard is also a matter of public record.
That being said, because there is no ocean, would that there were no drops. People keep on dropping drops into a bottomless hole, and convincing themselves that there is an ocean. Much better, it would be, that they said "there is no ocean, forget the drops", and then got on with life.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Dewey Defeats Truman.
nuff said
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So, exactly how are you going to get the law changed, so that we get better politicians in control? Are you going to, for example, organize a grass-roots effort for an Amendment?
Good luck -- most Americans still watch TV for their news. The TV is controlled, in turn, by the Media 5, and so limited by the FCC, which is selected and given orders by Congress, which gets their publicity from the Media 5.
But suppose you do get enough publicity, and it does go up for vote. Understand that the 16th Amendment was fraudulently passed by Knox, quite likely at the behest of the Morgan and Rockefeller banks. (That, again with the help of the media.) That doesn't mean it is any less the law -- it is definitely the law. But I think it unlikely that your amendment will appear to pass, especially since the voting systems are regularly rigged (as you point out), and it would be unhealthy for the corrupt politicians who rig the votes.
Who's going to bell the cat?
My advice -- get on with it, get a job out of the country, and work for a full-time residency permit there.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
There are no ballots with touch screens.
And stop calling something a conspiracy theory when it is scrutiny. If there was nothing wrong with Chuck Hagel running the company that counted his votes, why did he lie on his disclosure documents about it?
Those documents clearly instructed him to list every position held. He listed everything BUT the fact that he was CEO and Chairman and a part owner of ES&S, then called American Information Systems.
That's not a conspiracy theory, that's a fact.
By the way, in the code I've looked at, the most problematic part of it traces back to just one stockholder, and this was an item that was hidden in a dll and stuck in a Windows file.
Had you been programming for Diebold, I can assure you that you would never have seen that code, and it certainly wouldn't have been caught in certification testing (where they do not test Windows).
Your reliance on the concept of Logic and Accuracy tests shows that, even though you are a programmer, you know even less than me about testing for vote fraud. Unless the person who put the problem in the code is a complete doofus, and L&A test certainly won't catch it. You could put half a million ballots through and if you have an item that is only invoked with a trigger, it will never show up in the test.
Bev Harris
Bev Harris again (I really will have to sign in so as not to get confused with other anonymous cowards)
First you say they do all this rigorous logic and accuracy testing on the machines. Then you say they accidentally use a ballot face from a previous year?
Not an acceptable answer, sorry.
By the way, what is your answer on the ES&S optical scan machines in Allamakee County Iowa that were fed 300 ballots, in the 2000 presidential election, and ended up counting 3.9 million? ES&S couldn't explain it. How about the Dallas ES&S machines that miscounted by 40,000 votes? And was it ES&S in Comal County Texas that counted three candidates in a row as 18,181 votes?
As for relying on certification when you've got machines popping up with errors right and left (I documented 112 miscounted elections in my book): If certification worked, I guess the machines wouldn't keep miscounting, would they?
Bev
This point is absolutely correct. The electronic voting systems are based on trust (of the (mechanical) technology, of the developers, of the people operating them). This requirement of trust is not a new thing-- don't you have to trust the poll workers to do things the right way? If they wanted to do shady things, don't you think they could?
I don't trust any system that doesn't have paper ballots. I've never worked on one, I think they are a crock. Never, ever trust a non-paper ballot system. Okay, it doesn't have to be non-paper, but if it doesn't have something that is physically token based, there is a problem with it. I've never, ever worked one of those. I've never seen one that worked that way, I'm not sure how the audit trail works on one of those. I don't need to see the code to say, that they can't be trusted.
They can't have an acceptable audit trail in my opinion. I'll back you as far as you want, if you have a petition to sign to have the laws/rules changed, post the URL, I'll sign it, or physically send you a letter attesting to that fact.
Sure, you can have a trigger, however, I believe a number of people review the actual honest to goodness code. They might, not, but that's not the fault of the companies that do it, it's the fault of the FEC to not do the testing, and to not ensure the testing is done properly. I've always been told they had good rules. They might not be enforcing them.
As I've said in another post, I've never seen how they handle the build configuration managment. That would be my largest concern. Who does the final build, and certifing that the build is from auditted source would be the trickest part. I never was clear on who did that. I always thought ES&S sends the final build machine, and they put the auditted source on. Which I could tamper with the build configuration at that point. Who built the final build machine? Who provided the install media for the toolchain, and the instructions for such an event? How would you verify it, given that a lot of that can't be rebuilt or verified as an exact duplicate (timestamps and other nigling little issues would pop up). It isn't an exact science building software.
Kirby
... then I honor them for the effort.
Nonetheless, I too think that it should be open-source code, and that any group should be able to register to audit the process from code download, to hardware certification, to compilation, onward [do it on your own penny, but get full visual access.]
If nothing else, it may well satisfy the conspiracy theorists, and put some confidence back into a system in which many (including me) have little confidence (due to vote fraud being standard fare since before I was born).
Aside from that, if your explanation is correct, I really would like to see the code. Is this the six-sigma process, then? I'd like to know how bug-free code is written. I had enough trouble back in the days of DOS and C; nowadays, C++ and Windows just blow me away -- I find myself reverting, with relief, to Assembly to get things done. Or C, when I want fast coding: I still do have the old compilers. But I have to say that I've never been great, and I'm not as good as I used to be.
OT note:
Don't take the name of Christ in vain. If you don't believe in him, it's offensive to a lot of those who do: I never supported Rushdie (of "Sat. verses" infame) for the same reason, though I am not Islamic. If you do believe in Christ, it may be comparatively minor to a lot of other sins, but it does undermine your faith.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
But then you throw in the "stolen election" comment. Since you've ignored all the stories of the actual vote counts giving the election to GW anyway, let me address only the following:
Go back and look at the counts - most in the country didn't vote at all (apathy striking early, was it?). Among those who did vote, the numbers were split into the 100ths of a percentage, with NEITHER GW nor Algore getting a majority! Yes, Al got the "popular vote," meaning a few voters chose him over GW, but the law says the Electoral College makes the final choice.There were plenty of shenanigans in that election - Florida's crappy job "cleaning the poll lists" which kept criminals on them while dropping legitimate voters, Indiana's keeping open the polls in the urban & Democratic city districts while closing the rural & Republican sites while voters were still in line, etc, etc, etc. Get out there and make a difference, and stop crying over yesterday, or you're as responsible for the apathy as anybody.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
1) Republican
2) Democrat
3) CowboyNeal
4) I'm a libertarian, you insensitive clod!
Sean
has to not have the trick that recompiles a back door emplacer into itself even if the compiler is recompiled from source code that doesn't show the backdoor emplacer.
But, the protection OSS gives against the code in the ROM not being the code that the system should compile to is that anyone can duplicate that, and check the checksum or whatever one can do to EPROMs to compare them.
Only in that respect does the situation differ from the closed osurce situation.
I'm sure more people would care once a /.er decided to take advantage of these security flaws/features and made it so yoda/captain kirk/captain kangaroo/etc wins the next presidential election.
ps. this might not work so well if any star wars fans have actually changed their name to yoda
Fuck that. If people want to be apathetic or vote foolishly, then society SHOULD be punished with corrupt officials and rampant lobbyists.
No, fuck THAT. Why should all of society suffer just because a larger number of people are fucking idiots? Mob rule is retarded.
It is *our* responsibility to cultivate each other's interest, educating each other, and debating in a productive manner. That means capturing old ladies interest who are mesmerized by Al Gore's tie by talking about issues that matter to her and helping her make an informed decision.
When was the last time you were successfully able to imprint your view on someone stupid enough to vote for a tie? When was the last time you managed to convince someone to even change their mind when it came to politics?
I renmember hearing in my government class that Florida was experminetingn with using touch screens in voting machines, but being florida there were problems. The old people would run their finger along the screen to read, and thereby vote accidentally. Noones gonna trust computers with stuff like this untill maybe 2 more generations die out.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
When I applied for my California ID, they asked me to register to vote. The form asked what party I was. I couldn't decide whether to choose Democratic or Republican, not that it made a difference or anything. So I wrote Communist. Funny thing is, I never receive my sample ballot in the mail. I am also never told where my voting location is... oh well
A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
--This isn't a man who is leaving with his head between his legs.
The greatest advance in democracy since, well democracy really ,SECRET BALLOTS.
The idea of having serial numbers on the ballots is to provide some level of intrusion detection (i.e. if oyu see two ballots with the same serial number, it should raise some concern about fraud). This is already done today.
The importance of secret ballots is that we are protected from persecution based on votes. So the information that could be used to link people with votes needs to be stored and only used for the purpose of auditing the election. After the audit, that information should be destroyed. But the serial number can still be used for statistical verification later.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That all sounds fairly fair to me.
One point though, though the bill of rights does say these rights are universal, that doesn't make them universal. Nor is it a document the rest of the world looks at to help define human rights.
In regards to invidividual freedom to choose their own path, and suffer consequences, I whole heartedly agree. The good news that in Australia not turning up to vote (note that you are not forced to vote, just turn up to vote) is punished by a $20 fine, which is hardly ever enforced. Though I know plently of people who have not voted, and been sent a fine (including me), I don't know anyone who has paid it. 3 years after I received my $20 fine, I wrote and told them I was at my sisters wedding (I was...though both she and her husband managed to vote!), and haven't heard anything since the first notice of fine.
You agree to abide by the outcome. If anything those who don't vote have more right/reason to critcize politicians and their actions.I strongly discourage voting for this reason.
No, fuck THAT. Why should all of society suffer just because a larger number of people are fucking idiots? Mob rule is retarded.
We don't need to suffer.
Mob rule is retarded, and generally we try to employ protections to safeguard society from campaigns which seek to exploit the mob.
Unfortunately, over time, a good portion of the mob usually turns apathetic creating an opportunity for some ambitious politician to swoop in and make nice little "exchange liberty for benefits" deal with the public (usually on the behalf of a special interest group).
A portion of the public is naturally cautious and if their concerns aren't addressed, the rest of the mob *may* become concerned and not vote for the representative next election cycle.
When the mob gets to the point where they're not holding their politicians accountable by not voting them out of office the next election cycle, then you start approaching the point where the safeguards aren't going to matter much as they'll be ignored, circumvented, or dismantled by the officials holding the power.
The only way out is to get people to care. Suffering is a very effective way to get people to care, but I'd rather see it used as a last resort.
Fortunately, there are other ways to get people to care. Look at the methods websites like Slashdot use to rally support and get people interested.
When was the last time you were successfully able to imprint your view on someone stupid enough to vote for a tie?
Stupid people are usually easy to influence even if they are stubborn. It's a matter figuring out what matters to them and getting them to relook at the issue using their perspective.
When was the last time you managed to convince someone to even change their mind when it came to politics?
I do it all the time. The key is not to try to subvert their ideas by challenging its authority or consistency, you'll just end up causing a lot of cognitive dissonance.
If I'm trying to convince an individual or a group that thinks similar, I have the opportunity to listen to what matters to them which gives me a window into their belief system. I can then repackage my idea so as not to cause cognitive dissonance, rather I'm aiming to gently introduce consistency and help them harmonize their ideas rather than shatter their fabric of reality.
If you're lucky, they'll shatter the fabric of their own reality with an "epiphany". (You can't force an epiphany)
It doesn't work all the time, but it does work.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
You put it much better than I would have been able to.
Going that far down into the stack crosses the line from sensible caution to paranoia; risk can be mitigated by using commonly available, preferably open-source, general purpose products to build the system. How can you trust that the compiler is doing what it's supposed to? Because thousands of other programmers are using it and receiving correct results from their programs. If you're worried that your compiler has been tampered with, you can take the MD5 hash of it and compare it with those of other copies.
Source code needs to be transparent because that's the part of the system that's most specific to voting and most susceptible to problems, either through improper handling of possible attack scenarios or through deliberate tampering.
Having the ability to audit for discrepancies after the fact is a poor substitute for getting it right the first time. Suppose, hypothetically speaking, a nefarious voting program was written to give a slightly higher margin of victory to one party in areas that already lean heavily toward that party--e.g. in an area that typically votes 70/30 Republican, it boosts the Republican candidate's votes to 72%. Who would question that? And if no one questioned it, who would count the paper ballots to make sure the count was accurate?
You're a little confused, and that's fine because you probably have no reason to be that familiar with early American history. Most Americans wouldn't know what I'm going to tell you either. Let me try to straighten you out on a couple points.
The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document of any kind. We can't go to court and say our rights were violated in a way similar to the way in which King George III violated the rights of the colonists.
Our "legal rights" are laid out in our Constitution, in the part called the Bill of Rights. The preamble to the Constitution is not really legal either. We can't go to court and try to argue that the government is not doing it's job of "creating a more perfect union." The Preamble is just a kind of "introduction." It explains why the constitution is being written, and some of the philosophy behind it.
I've tried to explain, this philosophy is just philosophy. You can't say that the statements made in our Declaration are purely American and can't be applied to the other nations of the world. They are not American statements, but human statements.
A side note, actually our government and our revolution WAS something that many countries of the world have looked to as an example, and have modeled their governments after. And the writings that influenced our forefathers, as well as later American writings, like Paine's Common Sense and Thoreau's Civil Disobediance HAVE been something the world has looked to to help define human rights. I'm not saying either that America TODAY is all that great of a model, but it was an excelent one when it started.
I think that this conversation has gone on long enough that I've figured out the core issue of our discussion, the difference in philosophy, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. Here are, as well as I can tell, the possibilities:
1. Man has rights. He has the same rights whether he is a wheat farmer, forced to hand over his crop to Stalin, in exchange for almost enough bread, or a hermit who hunts his own food, lives in a house he built with his hands, and has managed to avoid any interaction with any other human for the last 12 years. Government's job is to define an implementation of those rights in a legal way, and protect them.
A. These rights include life, liberty, property and self-determination. Revolution is a corollary of self-determination.(This is my view and the view of the philosophers of the age of enlightenment.)
B. Man has inalienable rights, endowed by the Creator, but they aren't the same as what is laid out in 1A.
2. Man's rights are those that are defined by the government. If the government says he has a right to liberty, then he does. And if they say he has to hand over his property to the government, or that he doesn't have the right to be on the street after midnight, or that he has to go to the polling center today and place a piece of paper, blank or not, in a box, then that's the way it should be.
I suspect that you are of the view of 1b, and you just disagree with my views on liberty, but still hold that man has certain unalienable rights. You may also be of view 2, I'm not sure. Either way, I think that there is a philosophical difference, that cannot really be resolved with further discussion. We've come down to a matter of pure opinion.
I used to think that way. Then someone told me they voted for one person over another because he looked better on TV. Nothing to do with what he stands for, how he looks. May the most handsome man win. Now I've come to say "You should vote, but only if you are informed about who and what you are voting for, if not stay home." I'd prefer an informed voter who votes 100% opposite to me, to 20000 voters who vote the way I do because my canidate (that I have researched) looks better.
Actually I recignise a protest vote. In my state anyone can vote in primary elections on who the major parties should send to the main election. I always encourage people to choose the worst canidate for the other party and vote for him.
So don't vote unless you know what you are voting for.
By definition a non-beliver cannot take the name of christ in vain. You seem to be under the (common) misconception that taking a name in vain is swearing, it is not. Taking a name in vain means that you claim Jesus/God wants something without having heard it from God. IF you are a non-beliver, then nobody will belive you when you say God wants xxx. A beliver who says God wants XXX may encourage others to do something wrong or unnessicary because they are trusted to carry God's (christ) words.
That isn't to say swearing isn't evil, but it isn't nearly as evil as taking the name of God in vain.
1. Man has rights. He has the same rights whether he is a wheat farmer, forced to hand over his crop to Stalin, in exchange for almost enough bread, or a hermit who hunts his own food, lives in a house he built with his hands, and has managed to avoid any interaction with any other human for the last 12 years. Government's job is to define an implementation of those rights in a legal way, and protect them.
A. These rights include life, liberty, property and self-determination. Revolution is a corollary of self-determination.(This is my view and the view of the philosophers of the age of enlightenment.)
B. Man has inalienable rights, endowed by the Creator, but they aren't the same as what is laid out in 1A.
2. Man's rights are those that are defined by the government. If the government says he has a right to liberty, then he does. And if they say he has to hand over his property to the government, or that he doesn't have the right to be on the street after midnight, or that he has to go to the polling center today and place a piece of paper, blank or not, in a box, then that's the way it should be.
I think we may actually have a meeting of the minds! You are right in saying I am of catagory 1B. Some of the rights you point out in 1A I would also claim to be basic rights.
I still think you are very American-Centric (understandable) in defining what "rights" there are. The writers of bill of rights attempt to define universal rights. You are correct when you point out this is based on a philosophy held by a group of people, not just Americans. You are even right in saying that other countries have looked (and do look) at the US Bill of Rights as worthwhile. But...even though it is a good document (and based on good philosophies), I am hesitent to use it as the basis of universal rights. There are many philosophies out there regarding basic rights. The Bill of Rights is one of them (though a good one). As you pointed out, this is a difference of opinion on the basis of human rights. I am happy for you to use it as your own basis.
The interesting thing about rights is what defines a "right".
There are "Basic" rights (or
For example. My government has given me a right to drive a car. This is certainly not a "basic" right, but it is one I have been given, and will fight for. When I say "fight", I don't really mean with deadly force.
Yes, there is a difference between basic rights and derived rights. Whether or not I have the right to freely make copies of a piece of software and distribute them to friends is a derived from property rights. With the right to property comes the right to engage in business, licensing and contracts. One of the government's jobs is to protect property rights by protecting people from fraud and theft.
Maybe I have some special rights as a shareholder of a company, or as an employee, but these again are just derived from property rights, which are protected by the government.
Government can only take away or protect our rights; they cannot give us anymore.
The right to drive a car is not a basic right, but it is a derived one. It is derived from the rights to liberty and property, and should not be taken away unless one's use of a car violate the rights of others.
The government does not really give you the right to drive a car. You already have that right. If there were no government, there would be nothing to stop you from driving a car, save individuals and corporations. Government protects your right to drive a car from those individuals and corporations that could try to prevent it with force.
Besides the phrasing, I don't see what is American-Centric about my definition of basic human rights, especially considering that the ideas originally came from chiefly European philosophers, and considering the incredible prevalence of violations of those rights by the US government, and how much the American people are willing to disregard them. Even about eighty years after our government was founded, we still practiced slavery, possibly the worst kind of violation of human rights there is.
I would be interested in hearing what you see as the basic rights of mankind.
I would be interested in hearing what you see as the basic rights of mankind.
I'm afraid I'm still fuzzy on that. I mean, what makes up "basic" rights. If you need a government to "protect" those rights, how can they be basic? Surely those rights are the ones that your government gives you.
On the other hand I believe that there are certain rights every government should give their citizens. Free Speech, freedom from opression, freedom of religeon.
Though I am in no way a comunist, I wouldn't automatically throw in "property". In Fiji you can't own land. You only rent it off the government (or is it the local tribes?). This lack of ownership of land doesn't look like it is such a bad idea. Different cultures, countries, history and countries need different solutions.
Also, the liberty one is an interesting one. Though I would say I believe in liberty, I also have no problems with the idea that we live in a comunity, and part of our responsibility in exchange for the benifits of our comunity is to fulfill our duties to that comunity. That may include paying taxes so everyone can go to school (Is education a basic human right?), or have medical care (is that also a basic right?). It includes jury duty, possibly the draft, voting and other such things. Of course, the government (or others) should not abuse these things.
I'm also not sure that I would claim that driving a car is a derived right of property. By saying that, am I now saying that those who don't drive a car (or can't...even in other countries) have had their right to drive a car violated?
Possibly a government should not only protect "rights" as maintain a comunity. Freedom of Speech, Religion, Medical Help, Education, and maintaining roads may be examples.
anyway, as always, there is never any easy answer.
...so I'll take a stab at it. 1) the voting device must do proper verification for the voter, of course, before the vote is officially registered. 2) the voter selects a personal key, combined with a machine generated random key, or some such. 3) the voter gets a receipt, with a bar code and human readable information which can identify the voting record he registered. He keeps it, we hope. 4) all registered vote packets are encrypted so that any individual voter information in the packet is not publicly available, but the full vote tally is publicly readable. 5) the vote packet is not alterable without violating the encryption, to keep the integrity of the vote. 6) all interested parties may access the database, meaning everyone can keep count, and anyone who so desires can -- using a voter receipt -- verify that the vote packet is in the database the way it is supposed to be. Is that useful for a start?
that I take no responsibility for the American government
That's the problem. You leave it up to crooks to run your country. That's collectively neglecting responsibility, ultimately over your own lives. You become a victim of your own apathy, collectively. The forefathers of your country was afraid of such, because it undermindes the whole democratic process. Remember, democracy only works when the collective wants to take part in it. It doesn't run itself, however lazy you have become.
A single person can do much. Voting is just a miniscule part of politics.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
It won't be an issue until Bugs Bunny gets elected Governor of California.
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Well, we do have Elmer Fudd in the White House right now - either that or Foghorn Leghorn, not quite sure which
Without validation of votes by some other methods, the system will be used to cheat voters out of their choice, in favor of those with money.
> --- All Of The Above --- >
It seems wilwheaton.net changed for the worst since last I read it.