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E-Voting Companies Answer Critics With ... Spin
Whammy666 writes "Wired has a follow-up article which tells of how Diebold and other E-Voting machine manufacturers have enlisted the Information Technology Association of America (a trade public relations and lobbying group) to 'generate positive public perception' of the companies and to 'reduce substantially the level and amount of criticism from computer scientists and other security experts about the fallibility of electronic voting systems.' It seems the concerns about the lack of an audit trail are finally being heard as the industry is reconsidering its opposition to giving the voter a paper receipt of his vote. Of course, a paper receipt given to the voter still doesn't allow for a manual recount should an election dispute arise unless the receipts are collected and secured by election officials." Reassuring PR is Stage Two; remember that Stage One is silence your critics.
just like a certain administration did
aint truth a bitch, feels good when the gov think we are f**kin idiots
You're off-topic and off-base at the same time...
The student who made a fool out of the airport security system was conducting an act of civil disobedience, but the part of civil disobedience everyone seems to keep forgetting is it involves a public crime done to get attention, of course he's gonna get arrested and charged for it. He should be, he didn't just say "Somebody could.." he went out and did it.
Let's just hope the Feds are smart enough to sentance him to a community service project... telling them how they should have stopped him!
- Open Source Code
- Open Source OS
- Open Source Compiler
- Standard PC Hardware
- Independantly Verified by both Electoral Authorities and Independant Labs
- In 12 languages
- Audio help for vision-impaired voters
- And actually used in 2001 government elections
It cost less than $200,000 to develop too. But not "made in the USA".Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
If you haven't heard much about this lately, Salon.com recently ran an article detailing some of the injustices done by police at the instruction of the Secret Service. Saturday they posted some letters sent in by readers.
Note: you'll have to watch the brief commercial to get access to Salon, but once you do, you'll have full access to the premium content.
Additionally, the ACLU has filed motions (I believe that's the right term) on behalf of several protestors affected in this way, but I can't find a reference to the press release.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
...it's an optical scan machine. We use them in my town. You mark a paper ballot, just like in school (make your marks heavy and black...). Then slide it into the "Accu-Vote" machine [love that name...like something out of The Simpsons]
Anyway. What's wrong with this? Paper ballots, machine & humanly readable, electronically counted. And very similar to those used throughout history, where the voter made a mark next to the name of the candidate of his or her choice. Disabled voters are allowed poll workers to assist them in the booth. The paper ballots can be removed and hand counted if necessary.
Folks, this isn't rocket science. Touch screens, color and WinCE do *not* always improve things! Boy, I sure wish people would calm down and remember the KISS principle...
Oh, and by the way...the printers will *never* last. Touch screens are a bad idea from beginning to end.
The only way to make sure that your vote counts is a voter-verified paper trail for use in recounts and mandatory recount in a small percentage of districts chosen at random (to verify that the equipment is working). This is the only way to have meaningful recounts.
HR 2239 does just this (and was written by a physicist, no less)!
Sign the petition supporting HR 2239, there's a link to it at the bottom of VerifiedVoting.org!
Keep the freedom to vote.
Now he's being described as a dangerous criminal...
... the punishment no longer has any need to fit the crime. Personally, I don't feel threatened by this guy ... he obviously had no intention of using those box-cutters in any "terrorist" manner and the "explosive" was just clay. He also didn't use these items in the usual bomb-scare scenario (you know, call it in and watch terrified people run screaming from the airport.) He planted the stuff, emailed law enforcement and explained why he did it, and waited. And waited a ridiculously long time. Nobody got hurt, or was even aware of it until the news media spread it all over the place after the fact. On the other hand, I do feel threatened by a security bureaucracy that is completely out-of-control and largely ineffective anyway.
Amazing, isn't it? So far as I'm concerned (the illegality of his actions aside) he performed a public service. This whole idea that Amercans need to be made to feel safer regardless of whether they actually are safer I find to be patronizing and offensive.
But more to the point, the government won't allow him to be punished in accordance with his crimes. They will put him away for as long as they can, which is a long time in post-9/11 America. That, in itself, shows just how far astray the Law has gone
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That is essentially the system used here in Oklahoma. The ballots are pre-printed and marked by the voter with a pen. The ballot is then inserted into the machine that reads and tabulates. At the end of the election a printout similar to a cash register reciept is printed. A copy is posted on an exterior window of the polling place. The machine, ballots and all is delivered to the election board who then certifies the result. The ballots are there if needed for corroboration. An antiquated concept, I know, but nevertheless effective. redsilo
Right on! I would expand on this a bit.
/. story took me through blackboxvoting.org. I was enlightened, Bev did a fine job bringing the issue to light. It's too bad so many are trying to keep people like her quiet.
The entire transfer of data should be human readable, or at the very least, human understandable with some effort.
Moving the bits electronically is where the problem is. Too many ways to corrupt the process and no audit no matter how hard we try. This is the nature of electronic information. --I agree with you here.
What about a system where the ballots are encoded with the election? Ballots are mailed, or picked up at the voting stations. They are rrinted on the back with a simple barcode or binary image encode. (Like many drivers licenses) On the front is the info relevant to the election at hand. These pre ballots would be reuseable, or not depending on the preferences of those holding the election. Want to save a coupla trees? Keep the ballots near the voting machines. Want to let people kick the choices around a bit, distribute them with the voters guide.
The voting machine ends up being dumb, and provides an interface only to produce another ballot that is again human friendly.
The main advantage, with regard to the machines, happens to be stability. Once the encoding standards are met and the machines tested, anyone could make them. Testing and certification would be simple with the resulting machines being cheap.
An election could still be held without the machines if need be. --Just use human counters as we do now.
The final ballots can be electronically counted because of the encoding on the back, they can be verified to see if the printed result on the front matches the printed encoding as well. They remain after the fact for recounts and such, and the user does not have to keep their vote record preventing all the dirty tricks possible.
They can be time and date stamped with precinct and such saving time and effort on those collating election results. Those wanting some hard stats could get pretty finely grained unofficial results for a fee to the state.
With these methods, we still get significant time savings combined with an audit trail for problems. (We will have problems.) The machines could report electronically for estimates and such, but the final count would happen the old fashioned way. Sombody loads the ballots, the machine counts them. Errors are handled by hand, close elections get the manual recount.
Really close elections, or suspect ones get the full, look at every ballot double-check treatment.
The key being very simple. We need to store the election on media that can be examined with a pair of hands and eyes period. Said media needs to be capable of reasonable archive expectations and should survive a few handlings.
We should avoid mechanical things. Cuts, bumps, fucking chads and such are all bad ideas. The media should be as unchanged mechanically as possible. This means marks with ink --good ink.
The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that it really is a scam. Power without accountability is the goal of those either in power or who seek power. (Most folks are good people, but this sort of thing is in our nature --we might as well admit it.)
The last
I live in Oregon, we decided to to the mail-in voting thing. I found it interesting how many negative opinions there are about this. For once, the state did something right. We do save a batch of time, one can still go down and vote the old fashioned way, and we have a nice audit trail sans expensive machines and their problems.
Die Diebold, Die.
Blogging because I can...
Lets see who they are?
I did a search on google and found some scary stuff.
All 3 vendors only contribute to the republican party! Did you know one of Dick Cheney's friends from Halliburton is actually in charge of the voting machine division!
Link here and here.
What if lets say theoritically speaking of course the CEO of Diebold wanted a nice big pay check. He could go to Bush and give him 4 more years for a nice big paycheck from the RNC.
We need audits.
http://saveie6.com/