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E-Voting Done Right - In Australia
tehanu writes "After all the furor over e-voting in America, Wired News has an article about e-voting done right in Australia. An important factor is that all of the software is open-source. The company responsible actually seems to have given consideration to the integrity of the democratic process, too - from the lead engineer: 'Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.' They also have scathing words for Diebold: 'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.' In general they are 'gob-smacked' by the whole situation with electronic voting machines in the US right now."
Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?). The only way to do that is to provide voting receipts which can be counted independently, by hand -- and that does not exclude closed-source solutions.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
E-voting is not secure because there is really no way to truly check someone's identity. HOWEVER!!!!!!!!, there are tools like openssl and gpg to give people certificates or keys that can prove they are who say they are when they are online to vote. I like to vote while knocking the bottom out of my toilet withmy wireless laptop. I believe keys and/or certs are the best way to go. Take it from me, I have been in the security part of the IT world for 6.5 years now.
Isn't that what the US has been using for years anyway?
Now that's what I call engineering ethics, letting people know the truth about what you're doing. Fine, maybe a computer should at least keep the software code to themselves (patent it so no one else could use it, I do believe in some intellectual property rights), but Diebold should have at least let us see the code so we can tell them how holey it is.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting By Kim Zetter
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,61045,00.htm l
02:00 AM Nov. 03, 2003 PT
While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.
Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.
Critics say the development process is a model for how electronic voting machines should be made in the United States.
Called eVACS, or Electronic Voting and Counting System, the system was created by a company called Software Improvements to run on Linux, an open-source operating system available on the Internet.
Election officials in the Australian Capital Territory, one of eight states and territories in the country, turned to electronic voting for the same reason the United States did -- a close election in 1998 exposed errors in the state's hand-counting system. Two candidates were separated by only three or four votes, said Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the territory. After recounting, officials discovered that out of 80,000 ballots, they had made about 100 mistakes. They decided to investigate other voting methods.
In 1999, the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission put out a public call for e-vote proposals to see if an electronic option was viable. Over 15 proposals came in, but only one offered an open-source solution. Two companies proposed the plan in partnership after extensive consultation with academics at Australian National University. But one of the companies later dropped out of the project, leaving Software Improvements to build the system.
Green said that going the open-source route was an obvious choice.
"We'd been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using propriety software that no one was allowed to see," he said. "We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone -- particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large -- could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing."
It took another year for changes in Australian law to allow electronic voting to go forward. Then in April 2001, Software Improvements contracted to build the system for the state's October election.
Software Improvement's Matt Quinn, the lead engineer on the product, said the commission called all the shots.
"They, as the customer, dictated requirements including security and functionality, (and they) were involved at every step of the development process, from requirements to testing," Quinn said. "They proofed every document we produced."
The commission posted drafts as well as the finished software code on the Internet for the public to review.
The reaction was very positive.
"The fact that the source code had been published really deflected criticism," Quinn said.
A few people wrote in to report bugs, including an academic at the Australian National University who found the most serious problem.
"It wasn't a functional or a security issue but was a mistake nonetheless, and one that we were glad to have flagged for us," said Quinn.
In addition to the public review, the commission hired an independent verification and validation company to audit the code, "specifically to prevent us, as a developer, from having any election-subverting code in there," Quinn said.
"We were concerned that it wouldn't be secure enough," said Green, the electoral commissioner. The audit
Isn't the voting system run by the state? Shouldn't the source code be available by the Freedom of Information Act or something?
This petition is the only way to guaruntee that your vote will be counted--it mandates that machine give the voter a human-readable receipt which the voter drops into a lock box in case. In the case of a recount, the paper receipts are counted. It also mandates a manual recount in .5% of districts to verify the accuracy of the machines.
The petititions are linked to at the bottom of the VerifiedVoting site.
Keep the freedom to vote.
Where's the OSS software? Can't find it on the company website.
"If a voting system precludes any notion of a meaningful recount, is cloaked in secrecy and controlled by individuals with conflicts of interest, why would anyone buy it?," Quinn said. "At the very least give citizens the right to choose whether they want to use paper ballots ... thus allowing each elector to be personally satisfied as to the integrity of the process in which they are participating."
That just makes... sense.
The company responsible (namely Software Improvements) is clearly pushing to pick up a contract for machine development in the U.S., and saying All The Right Things (tm) to get it.
Don't blame them really, Diebold left themselves wide open - should be easy pickins.
---
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
calling Dr. DMCA on line one... ...calling Dr. DMCA on line one...
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
When was the last time slashdot posted a pro-American article? Seems like all they do is bash it at every opportunity, along with Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, etc.
Not quite. This was a company spokesperson taking advantage of Diebold's failure.I wonder if some people here would be okay with eating babies, as long as open source is mentioned as its benefit
This company is trying to position itself to sell its own wares to the U.S. I hope they succeed too.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
so his comments don't apply here. An electronic system in the US that statisfies the owners of the democracy in the US needs to staisfy the Republican party and its big money supporters. The Diebold system is perfect for this and hence is the choice in the US. Why bother how people vote when you can control how the votes are counted? So long as the difference between the opinion polls and exit polls and the official "results" aren't too large you can get away with stealing elections for as long as you want.
development.lombardi.com
We would always do better to at least pay attention to what they're doing over there, the benefits would easily pay back careful study.
Persecuted Telemarketers Unite!
We have an incredibly secure infrastructure already in place that could easily handle e-voting. We can already buy stamps from ATM machines... I find it hard to believe that someone could write an app to be deployed on all the systems to handle an election. And as far as the constiuents that don't have an exsiting ATM card, I'm going to guess that its going to be a lot easier and cheaper to just issue them ATM-voter cards then to create/install e-voting needs for those without computers.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
a robust, fully secure, fully anonymous, standardized (across states, counties, whateveer your contry might have) would be a great step towards a true democracy instead of a, oh damnit my mind went blank and lost the word... a democracy that uses such machinations as an electoral college, as the U.S. uses. I would assume that the electoral college is in place simply because it would have been too hard to count millions of votes by hand. computers can count and sort easily. get rid of the middleman who may or may not (though historically does as the votes say) elect the correct person.
Likewise, no karma bonus for this post..
eVACS(R) - the modular system for conducting elections comprising:
e-set up
e-voting
e-data entry
e-counting
Key features
eVACS(R) maintains the key features of all parliamentary elections:
o Privacy of voter
o Authenticity of voter
o Avoidance of coercion
o Empty ballot box at start of polling
o Security of ballot papers
o One vote per person
eVACS(R) handles the simplest to the most complex of election systems, including multi-member proportional representation.
eVACS(R) enables rotation of `ballot papers'(eg Robson Rotation).
Accessibility and Privacy Guaranteed
Increase the level of accessibility and privacy for voters using eVACS(R) special features.
o Audio for vision impaired voters.
o Voting instructions in multiple languages.
o Any alphabet or character set available for e-voting.
Integrity of eVACS(R)
eVACS(R) has been extensively tested and audited against the detailed design specification and acceptance test cases and procedures developed in accordance with IEEE Standards.
Testing methods employed:
o Structured test cases in controlled situations, used to ensure individual modules perform as expected;
o Scrutinies in parallel, using eVACS(R) and manual counting of known sets of ballot papers, using a variety of test election outcomes to test specific cases;
o "Real user" testing, whereby large numbers of users cast electronic votes in a mock polling place and data entry operators entered the results from paper ballots, used to test useability and to simulate realistic loads on the system;
o Load testing, where large quantities of ballot data was simulated and loaded into the counting system; and
o Whole-of-life testing; in which the entire process was simulated, taking test electronic votes from a polling place, loading it into the counting server, adding data-entered results from paper ballots, and using the counting system to generate a Hare-Clark result.
Auditing undertaken:
o Software code was independently audited and certified:
o to neither gain nor lose votes;
o to faithfully implement the algorithm for vote counting; and
o is written in a consistent, structured and maintainable style.
o The independent auditor also checked the version of the code containing actual candidate information after the close of nominations that was used in the ACT election.
Internet voting
eVACS(R) was designed to collect and count votes electronically with no less security, no impingement of voter's rights and no less anonymity than the current paper based system. Internet solutions were not acceptable due to the possibility of voter coercion and system tampering.
eVACS(R) operates on standard hardware
e-Voting
Voting with eVACS(R) means using standard PCs, each with a keypad and barcode reader connected to an isolated LAN at each Polling Centre, plus a server with two hard drive disk drives and removable media drive.
Vision impaired voters use the same equipment but with a larger screen and headphones.
e-Counting
For data entry, standard PCs are connected to a server.
For the counting system, a server with a removable media drive and a Postscript Printer is used.
eVACS(R) was first used with the most complex election system, involving multi-member seat electorates with proportional representation according to the Hare-Clark electoral system.
eVACS(R) is tailored for use with all other election systems, such as, for example, first past the post and single member electorates with preferential voting.
eVACS(R) in use
eVACS(R) was used for the most recent ACT Legislative Assembly Election, and the subsequent Casual Vacancy arising from the resignation of a member.
The ACT has a multi-member preferential election system that follows the Hare-Clark rules.
Electorates have either 5 or 7 members.
Twelve
Foreign readers might also be interested in checking out the Australian preferential voting system. This is, in my opinion, a much fairer system than the "first past the post" system of the UK or US. In the preferential system, votes for minority candidates are never wasted as the vote cannot be split. This would be especially valid for a presidential system as in the US. For more details, check out: http://www.australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/p referential.shtml
isn't it like saying the techniques to print money should be open source and available to the public because we want to know if our money is printed right? Whether it is open source or not is irrelevant. Obviously the government should have access to the source from the vendor (just like the government owns the designs to all the military aircraft it gives boeing or lockheed to build). Good software is software engineered properly. Whether it is open or not is irrelevant
did you forget to take your meds?
Glad they've got a good voting machine. Next they should get a good election method. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) has major problems (though there is a variant that attempts to correct them).
Read my keyboard review.
Isn't the voting system run by the state? Shouldn't the source code be available by the Freedom of Information Act or something?
FOIA is a federal act, and while most states have equivalent acts, FOIA requests can not be made to a state. For example, New Jersey's equivalent law is called the Open Public Records Act. With FOIA, and with OPRA, requests can be made to any executive branch agency. The Division of Elections would fall under this in New Jersey. I cannot speculate as to whether or not they would agree to the request without court action.
The machine does not include a voter-verifiable receipt, something critics of U.S. systems want added to machines and voting machine makers have resisted.
A voter-verifiable receipt is a printout from the machine, allowing the voter to check the vote before depositing the receipt into a secure ballot box at the polling station. It can be used as a paper audit trail in case of a recount.
Green said the commission rejected the printout feature to keep expenses down. The system cost $125,000 to develop and implement. The printouts would have increased that cost significantly, primarily to pay for personnel to manage and secure the receipts and make sure voters didn't walk off with them.
Quinn, however, thinks all e-voting systems should offer a receipt. "There's no reason voters should trust a system that doesn't have it, and they shouldn't be asked to," he said.
Election Systems and Software, the other major electronic voting company, is also, coincidentally, run by a big Repub' contributor. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska has a stake in that company. Can you imagine that? A sitting senator with financial interests in a company responsible for counting votes? Unbelievable.
Sort of makes me think about how incredibly brazen Halliburton's role is in Iraq now. These people don't even attempt to maintain the illusion of impartiality. So, see, you're right -- this Australian company's ideas about the proper way to ensure confidence, they just don't apply. As long as our Repubs can fly under the radar, they don't care whether it's right or not.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
In most elections that I have witnessed in Canada, either municipal, provincial, or federal, there is ALWAYS a paper trail. I mark my ballot with a big fat X in the appropriate spot on a voting card.
Then the magic begins: the cards are each fed, as collected, into a vote counting machine. The ballots are held in the case a recount (automated or manual), and the results are known just as soon as it takes to communicate the results from each of the machines at each polling station.
We usually have the final, _official_ results within an hour or two of the poll closing time, and you can always go back to the paper ballot to verify the count. And who the heck has a hard time with a piece of paper and a pencil?
No hanging or dimpled chads here, and this to me seems the best of both worlds - technology aiding the speed of vote-counting (isn't that what this is all about, anyway?), but with the safeguards (and transparency) of a manual voting system.
Nobody says open source is better because it's open source. It has to be open source because is MUST be open source by principle.
Get that in your damn head. Every citizen (who cares) should have the right to get a deep insight into how his vote is eletronically processed. If you're not allowed to know how your vote is processed you have no democrazy.
Hmm... What kind of babies?
I don't understand the hub-ub about rigging elections. Just because the voting machines are electronic does not make them "easier" to cheat with in elections. Bush was able to do it in 2000 in a district controlled by democrats with punchcards. Given his limited intellect it would seem anyone could do it.
In 2000 the broadcast media claimed that Gore had won Florida nearly an hour before the polls closed in the panhandle area (in the Central, rather than Eastern, time zone.) Such a call can be expected to result in a lot of panhandle voters to have stayed home rather than vote.
Since the pahnandle area (unlike the urban areas of the peninsula) is heavily Republican, this no doubt selectively reduced Bush's vote count by a significant factor. NEARLY enough to swing the Florida, and thus the national, election to Gore.
But despite the media's cheers (and slips like a major anchor referring to Gore as "Our candidate"), they didn't QUITE manage to steal the Florida election.
And despite days of squirming - trying to exclude military absentee votes in violation of Federal law, counting every dimple on a ballot, etc., the Democrats STILL weren't able to get the numbers to come out in favor of Gore - either before the Supreme Court finally smacked them down and made them adhere to their own laws, or after months of after-the-election recounting.
Yet the media, and certain Democratic politicians, STILL bury these facts on back pages. And even today they attempt to spin the Media/Democrat axis' failed attempt to steal the election into a successful theft by the Republicans.
What GALL!
One thing I have consistently observed: Whenever someone in the public light is engaged in shady activity, he'll loudly accuse his opponents, or anyone who seems likely to call him on it, of EXACTLY THE SAME WRONGDOING that he himself engages in. This pattern looks like a preemptive strike, trying to give the valid expose the appearance of a schoolyard "He did it!" "No, HE did i!t" finger-pointing contest.
And this instance is a case in point: The media trying (apparently successfully) to cover up their own, very public, attempt to steal an election, with a smokescreen about Republicans allegedly being bigger thieves than they are.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not so sure I like computer machines at all. People have been saying, well, if we have a paper reciept printed that can be counted by hand, then its ok, however... what happens when the computer, through some type of rigging software, also prints out a reciept that presents the faulty votes... I guarantee people probably wouldnt catch it... and therefore it does nothing to solve the problem
I prefer optical scanning machines... the voting is still done by hand and can be counted by hand
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
It's GPLed and available to download at this link:
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/evacs.tar.gz
So, if you want to get started advocating an open e-voting system for your neck of the woods or an alternative to Diebold, then you can get started now.
If you want to push printed receipts, I'm sure you can hire someone who could write an interface to a little thermal printer via the COM ports.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
... the fact that you can read "the" source code doesn't guarantee that's the version of the software -- or even the software itself -- actually being run on the machine. Is there some audit procedure for the compile/link/install process?
licet differant, aequabitur
Of course, this also leads to another serious point that should be considered. Shouldn't a federal election be run by the Federal Government? Sure, you can reimburse the state, but if the Federal Election were Federally run, and using the same methods. That way if crap happened then it would be brought to the forefront more easily, and people from outside of your jurisdiction would be able to impartially (well, as impartially as possible) assist.
errr... we all worked together to get baby Jessica outta that well! (You cynical bastard, you probably thought I meant a different Jessica )
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I disagree. The point is that you might be able to code a nice, very efficient voting system with cool features you don't want your competitors to *easily* replicate by copying your code. If you copyright your code, and close the source, that makes it a bit easier. If your code is open-source, then you've given up that advantage. I agree with the original poster - leave a paper trail! The primary reason for having a computer help you vote is so to make it less likely for you as a user to make a mistake.
I'm getting memories of the Florida Elections and these same sort of inept people trying to figure out an E-Ballet. brrrr ...Pokin at their computer screen with a hole punch /imf not we-todd-ed
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
THIS is an eletronic voting machine
Don't get off the boat. Absolutely, goddamn right.
Brasil is running on e-votes since 1996 (maybe earlier). The results are counted in less than 48h.
(Outside of a school gymnasium, November 2004)
Agent: "Pollster, you had specific orders to
wait until we got here to begin this procedure."
(looks around)
Agent: "Where are your men now?"
Pollster: "I just sent them up there a minute ago... they were gonna make a little side trip and then vote for Dean. They should be bringing down Bush now."
(Agent looks at school)
Agent: "No Sergeant, the Diebold machines have already voted for Bush."
Hammer of Truth
If it's a big Republican conspiracy, then how come CA and the chad-riddled counties in FL are leading the charge in implementing e-voting systems?
Also, remember it was a Davis backed lawsuit that the recall be postponed so that even more e-voting machines could be installed. Last I checked CA was not a hotbed of pro-Republican sentiment (yes I know Arnie is an R, but that was more about anti-Davis the bonehead than pro-Arnie).
johnkerry.com isn't exactly un-biased.
After the 2000 election several liberal-leaning news organizations went to Floriduh and recounted every vote. They used the most liberal methods they could, counting anything that even remotely looked like a vote for Gore. Guess what? In every recount they did Bush still won.
You can keep telling yourself over and over that Gore won in Floriduh, but you're only kidding yourself. Don't let little things like the facts get in your way.
Oh, you say you didn't hear about the recounts? Of course not; all you listen to and read is biased toward your point of view. It was not widely reported unless you listen to talk radio or watch Fox News. But, you'd never do that, would you?
You can't handle the truth!
"A quote from the lead engineer: Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me ...
...
Come to think of it, in the Diebold hoohah, I have never seen any quotes from any of the Diebold people who actually worked on the system. I'd expect to see some -- if no more than expressions of hurt feelings because people don't trust them.
Hmm. Want to bet it's because the programmers are overseas? My bet is on Russia
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Gore won the popular vote. He is not our president.
Just stating two facts, if you want to glean from that that I am calling our president a thief, well, that's you. That isn't what I said at all.
Yeah, just wait till the network miniseries on Reagan comes out soon. They'll try to make him look as shady as W.J."that depends on what the definition of 'is' is" Clinton.
wow, my very own sig!
And perhaps you too continue unfounded accusations (or, at the very least, the choice deselection of facts).
... :'(
That's why it's so hard to believe anything anymore
Aside from the double-meaning of my title (e.g. SI = metric system, something the US is also adverse to adopting), I see a couple obstacles facing the Aussie company if they want to break into the US market.
1) Imagine the outcry from Americans when they learn they're contracting a foreign company to handle their voting system. Oddly enough they won't have cared that Diebold's being all secretive and evasive about their own flaws while SI is open and honest and better suited to uphold the fair democratic system the US claims to cherish. To them I'd say ditch the NIH (not invented here) syndrome--if it works better than what you have, either make a competing product that's truly better or shut up about it.
2) Diebold will use MS' tactics, calling SI's system "un-American". Again, double meaning, but this time I mean because it's open source.
3) Watch Diebold play points 1 and 2 to the hilt, calling on its political ties to ensure SI never gets a foothold in the US. In so doing they pull a two-fer, by simultaneously kicking out a leg from under the democratic underpinnings of the US, as well as another leg from the "capitalist" system the US also claims to be, e.g. where companies compete based on the merits of the product and marketing, without political interference.
Incidentally, the Australian system requires you by law to vote. Maybe that's something the US ought to consider importing too. Argue if you want about being free to NOT vote, but voting is a duty, not just a right, and you should be compelled to do it. Just like you are to report to training if you get drafted, or filing a tax return--you're not free to refuse either of those without legal consequences, right?
What's sad about my writing this is that I have no influence in US politics, being a Canadian, but I seem to have more interest in your politics than the majority of voting Americans, who don't even bother to go to the polls.
When was the last time America did anything commendable?
The answer to your question is no. The technical legal reasoning for this is below. The practical reasoning for this follows. There is only one federal election: President(*). That election only occurs every 4 years. Creating a federal agency and bureaucracy just for that is pretty ridiculous. Because local elections happen several times per year (at least in my district, school elections are held in April, and general elections in November), the local election boards are much better equipped to run the presidential election.
*(Legal Reason) Because of the way the electoral college operates, the presidential election is technically a state level election. When you vote for president, you are actually voting for your state's electoral college members, who will then vote for their party's choice for president when the electoral college vote formally takes place in January. The constitution mandates that states shall select electoral college members in ways that the respective state legislatures shall establish. Obviously, for all states, this method is popular vote. In most states, the winner of the popular vote takes all the electoral votes, but there are a few states where the electoral votes are proportional to the popular vote (Maine and I think one other that I just cant recall right now). Anyway, because of that clause in the constitution (Amendment.. 12? or 16?), the states are essentially responsible for the presidential election.
we do the same thing in most precincts. The ballots are paper, you mark them and feed them into a machine that optically scans for your marks, and the results are available instantly. There are the paper ballots there in the locked box in case somebody yells foul.
Now, if only we could keep illegal aliens and dead people from voting, we'd have the perfect system.
Last time I checked, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the one with the most votes gets to be President.
Get over it already.
I don't know if the problem is really that the software needs to be open source, or simply the fact that there is software at all.
I mean, think about it. What do you really want the system to do?
State: Waiting for User
State: Present User with Options
State: Ask User to Confirm
State: Record User Choice
Four states. That's all you've got. Four states. Why, precisely, are they using cheap hardware for something that a pair of dual flip-flops could handle?
Honestly - think about this. The only reason there are "security concerns" at all is because they were too cheap to design a dedicated system, no software, just pure logic, that can be run on a logic checking system looking for races, possible vulnerabilities, etc.
Paper trail? Well, paper's not exactly THAT good (it does burn, and as Florida proved, it's not always verifiably correct). What about a write-once, read-many device? Like, I don't know, a CD-R, with packet-based writing?
Embedded systems are becoming so much more popular over discretes because hardware is cheap, and bad software is cheaper. But in a case like this, I don't understand it. An idiot could design dedicated hardware voting terminals, which don't even have the possibility of tampering. It's just incompetence.
(P.S.: Sounds like a decent business plan, doesn't it? "Tamper-proof Voting Terminals" - "No more software crashes, no more unreliable messes - works the same way, every time, guaranteed.")
Yes, I know things are a bit more complicated than I'm pointing out here. But it is still correct: E-Voting doesn't HAVE to be fundamentally flawed. It just is when they use cheap hardware. C'mon. Haven't they seen the i-Opener BBSes? Hardware based on the "limit possibilities by creative software" is screaming to be hacked.
So long as the difference between the opinion polls and exit polls and the official "results" aren't too large
Why should there be any differences?
Who checks what happens with "poll votes" underway?
Who funds the polls?
Who is the management of companies that conduct the polls?
We have elections instead of polls only because polls are considered highly unreliable comparing to elections. And their reliability is not only affected by statistical errors, but by many other "behind the scenes" factors too.
So - feel free to fake the elections as much as you wish, just remember to "modify" the polls results accordingly.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
aside from the actual discussion of the voting systems themselves, Quinn makes an interesting comment at the end of the article in regard to everyone in the world having a say in the US presidential elections.
:)
In a way, he's right, US policy does impact the rest of the planet, and I wonder if this is a step towards a unified global government.
can we really picture the koreans, french and germans as rebels fighting against the empire?
it will certainly have far reaching ramifications, including taxation... we already pay enough for our local politicians travelling too much and claiming it as work related.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
An electronic system in the US that statisfies the owners of the democracy in the US needs to staisfy the Republican party and its big money supporters.
As we all know, the Democratic Party has no big money supporters.
This doesn't need to be worked out for the 2004 election. Just make sure those fucktards in Florida hand in their results FIRST, and there won't be any shenanigans. Then we'll have until 2008 to either get the e-voting stuff done right, or to prepare for the second American Revolution.
It seems to me that touch screen voting systems are fancy for fancy sake. Sorta like the lottery in California, it is all about the fat contracts to produce the equipment and nothing to do with what is needed.
We use the hanging chad system here in San Diego and it has a few problems. The biggest problem is that when the ballot is in the machine, you can't see it to be sure you are marking correctly, and when the ballot comes out of the machine you can't tell what space corresponds to what vote, so it is no good checking that way. (Oh, that plus there seems to be an inordinate number of candidates on the ballot, but that may have been just a fluke)
It seems to me that the "connect the line" type ballots are the "right" level of technology.
The interface is simple and not sexed up to sell touch screens. Technology is applied where it helps. (by scanning ballots as they are cast this speeds up the count and allows voters who submit an unreadable ballot to fix the problem)
The whole touch screen thing seems to be a big scam to funnel taxpayer money to companies like diebold who want to produce overly complex and incredibly expensive equipment.
From Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, to Chicago's Daly, to hanging chads, rigging elections is the American Way.
To suggest they become anything else is, well, un-American.
I cannot speculate as to whether or not they would agree to the request without court action.
I can. The FOIA, OPRA, or any other open records act is non-applicable. The source code is not produced by the government and is not a "record" of any form that would be applicable under the various laws. The voting machines and software are being produced by independant contractors -- not by a government agency. You could request the records related to the bidding process (although all but the winning bid may be sealed; I'm not sure though. IANAL.), the selection, and so forth, but that's about it.
Asking for the source code to the software or the blueprints for the hardware is akin to asking for the blueprints and software to the Ford F-150 because the city's transit department bought a bunch of them. You'd get laughed out of court.
I eat babies quite frequently, thank you, and closed source ones, too.
Baby chickens, that is.
Okay, so open source is great and all ... let's say they develop their code to be run on the Windows platform ... doing all of their development work on MS Visual Studio. What's to say compilers aren't inserting malicious logic into your software? You check that "optimize" checkbox and whala! Your compiler of choice renders your open source stance pointless by throwing in some of its code. The open source solution has been agreed upon ... but it only makes sense if you compile your with a open-source compiler.
Bah, more filthy right-wing spin whining about left-wing spin. Face it, both sides would kill to win if they thought they could get away with it. By the way, your sig is the lamest evar. We never "gave peace a chance". The facists in charge didn't get to where they are in the world theater by utilizing peaceful means.
Sure you can tamper with the paper trail. However the election judges in my hometown are smart enough to watch for trouble, and have a sense of what might go wrong. You can get around them, but they are far more likely to notice you attemptm since a physical presense is required on the day of the election. I understand computers, and I have no clue how I could be sure someone didn't crack electronic only machines the night before, and hide their tracks. (I have to sleep, and any alarm I put on can by bypassed without a trace by someone clever enough)
Further in every location I know of there is always at least one democrat and one republican watching the polls all day. If someone physically attempts to cheat, there is a good chance that someone there won't trust the others, and will prevent it. Again bypassable, but a very good measure.
You obviously have little understanding of American history or the intention of the founding fathers when you "assume that the electoral college is in place simply because it would have been too hard to count millions of votes by hand."
First, in order to determine who was sent to the electoral college, all the votes would have been counted by hand anyway (duh?).
The electoral college was set up for various reasons. One of them is obsolete: at the time of the founding of the United States, it was extrememly rare that there were any public figures well known enough to all the various areas in the country to be elected. So let's say 1 person was running for President from each state, and there are 13 states. Each person would get the votes from the people in their state, and the person from the biggest state would win EVERY TIME. If I live in Georgia, I flat out don't know who's better, this-guy from New York or that-guy from Delaware. But if you get a small group of officials together who are involved in government and know all the big players, then they can work out who gets to be president. The voters would actually VOTE for the ELECTORS, i.e. "I know Bob, and he's a smart guy. I wan't him to be involved in deciding who's president, because I don't want to have to pick from a list of guys I've never heard of," instead of voting for a candidate or political party.
However, this is the only reason for the college which is obsolete. Another was the fact that America was never intended to be a DEMOCRACY, it was intended to be a REPUBLIC (i.e. representative democracy). In fact, I would say that you, yourself, are evidence that the many are so uneducated that a direct democracy is unwise.
Plus, the electoral college balances out a major problem existing even today:Look at the map of who won which states in the 2000 presidential election. Something like 10% of the states voted for Democrats, but the popular vote was close to 50% Democrat. This is because most of the population is in a few urban centers. So, if you were to hold elections based on the popular vote, candidates would battle over a few urban centers (New York, Chicago, LA, DC, maybe a couple others) and take the attitude that the rest of the US could go to hell.
Now if you're living in an urban center, you may think, "Well what's wrong with that? We're smarter and better educated than those rednecks anyhow. We SHOULD decide." However, this does not simply ignore the idea that everyone should have a say in our country, but it also disregards the fact that the NEEDS of Alabama are different than the needs of New York. New Yorkers don't generally have any idea what Alabama needs, and are usually too interested in the needs of New Yorkers to care. In fact, people in New York City would in most cases vote for what's good for New York City even if they knew it wasn't so good for upstate New York.
So, if you get rid of the Electoral College, you have a system where the inhabitants of a few large cities get full control over the elections and will probably vote for a President who is bad for any other area, even the country as a whole, so long as it's good for those few large cities.
Not so smart, huh?
If we really wanted fully functional and highly secure voting setups via computer here in the US, the government would require it to be written entirely in Ada.
This sig no verb.
Asking for the source code to the software or the blueprints for the hardware is akin to asking for the blueprints and software to the Ford F-150 because the city's transit department bought a bunch of them.
In strictly legal terms, maybe. In realistic terms, your analogy is awful. Why? Because I don't drive the truck that they buy. Because I don't use the truck that they buy to record my vote for any public office. Because that truck doesn't have the ability to rig elections. All of these are reasons which would never apply to a truck, and rightfully so. That doesn't mean they shouldn't apply to voting machines. The idea that some IP law trumps our ability to examine our election system is just a further example of the disgusting "business before citizens" mentality that the right wing has brought to the United States.
Holy crap. There is another intelligent person on slashdot. I was starting to lose hope. Moderators - this is the type of post that deserves informative. Please keep it as a model for your future reference. Instead of wasting points on copies of articles that aren't even slashdotted use them here.
Richard Stallman say Free software is not the solution to democratic election.
Adding a printer (Printing paper audit trail) might be the best option for the US that is stuck with voting machine.
The best solution of all is PAPER and PEN.
If you want speed in the result, then SCANNING the paper is the best option.
Using computer to generate paper is not the cheapest way to make a PAPER BALLOT and any device between me and my vote is a risk to the secrecy of my vote.
In french and dutch for Belgian that want to have fair election... PourEVA
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
if there was just one standard voting system employed throughout the freaking country. I know logic and common sense would get in the way of something this simple but jeez, we put a man on the moon. You would think we could develop an idiot proof voting system. I know, I know: show me an idot proof system and I'll find you a better idiot.
MMORPG Fan? Prove your worth!
In 2000 the broadcast media claimed that Gore had won Florida nearly an hour before the polls closed in the panhandle area (in the Central, rather than Eastern, time zone.) Such a call can be expected to result in a lot of panhandle voters to have stayed home rather than vote.
Since the pahnandle area (unlike the urban areas of the peninsula) is heavily Republican, this no doubt selectively reduced Bush's vote count by a significant factor.
I'm unable to follow your logic..
If the media reported one candidate as the winner, wouldn't it do the exact opposite of what you're claiming?
Think about it: If you're going to vote, and you hear that your candidate is going to win, are you more or less likely to vote, or just say "I don't need to."?
Conversely, if you're going to vote, and you hear that your candidate is going to lose, you'll be more encouraged to vote, in an attempt to change the outcome.
So, if the media were truly attempting to swing the vote, they would have decalared Bush the winner, so that all of the republicans would have stayed home, and all the democrats would have been spurred to vote.
Could someone explain to me why you can't just write an X on a bit of paper with a pencil, put it in a sealed box, and count up the totals at the end like we do here in the UK?
I just don't see why you need to use any more technology. What is the point?
Here at Diebold, we have decided to go OpenSource(tm) as well. Give us your best scrutiny.
void democracy()
{
if(vote.party == "republican"))
republican++;
else
republican++;
}
Sincerely
- Diebold
Until the voting public understands psychology thoroughly and how it can be used to divide and conquer the voting public I see no reason to ever vote again.
We are not making any progress here. Even if we have a completely fair and non-corrupt voting system we'll still have a completely unfair media system backed by lots of people with money and power.
Ever heard of psychological operations? The US government wrote the book on the subject. Think about it.
Who tells you what the issues are? Have you ever voted for anyone not from the 2 main political parties? Have you ever wondered why?
the people doing the recount have to be honest, too. i recall one story during the florida debacle about an all-republican audit committee. did they just throw gore votes away? no one will ever know but them. people collecting/counting receipts could dispose of those that they dislike.
the point is that an audit trail isn't absolutely safe. someone can tamper with that, too.
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
I'm not one for playing the mindless patriotism card, but I really do feel that (for the Americans out there) it is our duty to do something about this.
Mindless patriots support the government, while real patriots support the people, and challenge the government to do what's right for everyone. The implementation Diebold has come up with is not good for any of us, and is not right.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
I don't see how this Australian system is any more trustworthy than Diebold, ES&S, or Sequoia's systems (the latter three are all based on proprietary software). There's no voter verifiable audit trail (which is a showstopper) and yet, to read the review in the article, Software Improvements has apparently bamboozled people into trusting their work.
It looks like this Wired article gives an unjustified glowing review to a system whose accuracy can never be tested after the election. It looks to me like the reviewer (like so many programmers) gets caught up in the software being available for inspection.
If someone wanted to rig an election, they'd be wise to do what this Australian firm is doing: go through the motions to gain people's trust and then make sure there's no accountability in the system so nobody can second-guess your results (the firm even talks about how there's no voter verifiable audit trail because it is unneeded and not required by the 1992 voting law). We are fortunate Diebold has been so brazen about propping up President Bush and so hamfisted about stopping the leaked memos from propagating. Their actions give opponents a chance to be heard and say what a good voting system needs in order to be worthy of our trust.
How did this article overlook these glaring faults and conclude these "Aussies [are] do[ing] it right"? Is there some kind of financial relationship between Wired's owners (Conde Nast publications) and the Australian voting company?
Digital Citizen
Australians invented the secret ballot - which was referred to originally as "the australian ballot". Australian electoral processes have complete preferential voting - or automatic runoff. Upper house ballots are generally on a multi-member electorate - for the Australian Senate, 12 senators are elected from each state at large, this way you get more than just the two major parties, and they generally hold the balance of power.
Any technology introduced to improve the act of voting cannot make the act of counting less transparent or democracy suffers.
It is apparent that Diebold's systems (not to mention Diebold's paranoia for secrecy) render the act of counting less accountable and less transparent. Ergo, democracy suffers.
If used in a close election - where exit polling and other secondary measurements are unable to confirm the results of the counting - the wrong person might actually get elected President of the United States of America.
With no sense of responsibility to the coutry at large, this illegitimate President might launch a series of Napoleonic wars to to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy.
I digress into fantasy... the little blue ones I washed down with all those adult beverages must be kicking in.
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
And shortly thereafter, they reversed this and called the state for Bush -- which suggests that the effect was not nearly so large as you seem to believe.
It always mystifies me how so many people can believe that the same mainstream media that spent most of the election making up lies that Gore had supposedly told and mocking Gore for his every change in campaign strategy somehow had this overwhelming pro-Gore bias.
Um, I'm confused; how is it bad or "squirming" to exclude ballots postmarked after the election that had been modified by Republican handlers (since, as you rightly pointed out, counting them would have violated Federal election law)?
Yeah, who did those recounters think they were, following existing Florida election law by applying the "clear intent of the voter" standard mandated therein? I mean, the nerve!
You mean, of course, smacked them down for adhering to their own laws. The Florida Supreme Court had enforced existing election law, following precedents dating back a hundred years. The SCotUS admitted that the state court hadn't changed the election laws; their complaint was that the existing laws somehow didn't provide "equal protection" for Bush, and that the court therefore should have changed them to correct that (except, of course, that if they had changed them, the SCotUS would have dutifully smacked them down for that -- neat scam, this). The "Florida court changed the election laws" canard was invented afterward as a Republican talking point.
Um, actually, what the recounts found was that in a full statewide recount (which, recall, is what the Florida Supreme Court had ordered), Gore did win Florida, and thus the nation. You, and most of our readers, can be forgiven for not knowing this, since the media spun their coverage as hard as they could trying to avoid admitting it, focusing instead on other partial-count scenarios in which Bush won.
Well, it's always a pleasure to greet visitors from Bizarro World. Bear in mind that here in the real world, all the headlines read "Bush Won Recount", and what got buried on the back page was the fact (noted above) that Gore had won the recount that mattered.
Well, again, by contrast, the non-Bizarro mainstream media has been doing everything they could to prop up W's legitimacy and has bent over backwards to portray him as a True Statesman(TM). Gore, when he's even mentioned at all, is generally portrayed as some has-been kook who's drifted too far to the left to be taken seriously any more, and the 2000 election is portrayed as yesterday's news that only the so-called "angry Left" still cares about.
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
Who says a big difference between polls and results will prevent anyone from stealing elections? Just look at the 2002 Georgia gubanatorial election.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Ah, so the country that claims to be Free, and noisely and bloodily invades other countries to make them just as Free, actually only has the illusion of a democracy. Ignore the man behind the curtain.
You forgot the thousands who were disenfranchised weeks before the election, having had their names removed from the rolls because they were supposedly (but not actually) felons. That was in Jeb Bush's Florida.
The issues of voter-verifiable receipts and secret voting systems could be resolved in the United States by a bill introduced to the House of Representatives last May by Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey). The bill would force voting-machine makers nationwide to provide receipts and make the source code for voting machines open to the public. The bill has 50 co-sponsors so far, all of them Democrats.
So there is a bill currently pending in Congress that would make this Diebold shit illegal, and NOT A SINGLE REPUBLICAN in a Republican-majority Congress is supporting it.
You can always depend on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other options.
I must say I agree with you about what would happen to the SI system if they tried to enter (Diebold would say infiltrate or subvert) the market (and only DIebold is allowed to subvert the market ;).
;) just does not make sense.
However, I take issue with your last remark about importing forced voting. I am sorry, but I disagree with you quite strongly. How can a society be called free when you are forced to vote? What if you only vote for someone because it was the law and not because you agree with his or her political stance? This cannot be a viable option until voting ballots had a box labeled 'Abstain from this race'.
Even then, I would not want such a system. Forced voting in a free society (if you ignore most of what Congress does that is
I disagree with you about the draft too. To think that one could force someone to go die in a foreign land because someone calls it a threat to national security is insane! Look at what is going on in the world now. The lines that identify threats to national security are obfuscated both purposefully and unintentionally. If I were drafted (I am a potential draftee) I would not show up and would go to jail. However, I seriously thought about joining the military because I felt I had a duty to do so, but my parents were too worried for me to do it, so this is not just someone averse to military service (I may still join for limited service).
Just my thoughts.
TSage
How about a third fact: US presidential elections have NEVER been decided based on popular vote.
The problems with all of these "touch screen" systems, wether based on open of closed source, is that there is no way to guarantee that what the voter chooses is what is voted electronically and that the same vote is recoded electronically and on the paper trail.
The basis of the voting system (IMO) need to be the voter making a direct mark on some tangible and independently verifiable object. Touch screen systems fail at this, the voter touches the screen which electronically stores the vote. There is no way to verify that the vote recorded is that which was cast. It would be quite possible for a hacker to cause the machine to register one vote electronically and one vote manually.
Such a touch-screen and paper trail system seem to demand an automatic "re-count", you count the automatic system tally, then you must also count the paper trail receipts. What's going to happen when the two are not the same to within 1%? Will the electronic tally be deemed faulty, or will the paper handling system be deemed faulty?
With the single point voting systems this is not an issue. The "punch card" and "fill in the box" ballots both achieve the direct manipulation and independently verifiable tests. There have been some problems with them, but this should be taken care of with voter education, and voters actually caring about the process before the elections. You can't solve human stupidity with technology, you can only hide the symptoms.
I live in Mesa, Arizona where we use the "blacken this area" type ballot. It's easy to understand and easy to do. There's no easy way to alter my ballot without it being obvious it was tampered with. The ballot leaves my hand directly in to the electronic voting thingie. If ever there were a recount, the paper ballot if authoritative since that is what I voted.
Of course, we have our own problems here: the main one is that they don't check I.Ds at the votinc center. All you need to tell them is your name and your address. So all you need to vote multiple times is a phone book and a way to get to several voting centers.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
... tamper with paper ballots, but to do so on a large scale (e.g. large enough to affect statewide or national elections) would inevitably attract attention because one would need to gain access to, and modify or destroy, literally tons of paper.
I doubt that large scale tampering would be necessary and in today's political climate it would probably be self-defeating.The number of votes separating the two candidates in the article was 3-4; the number of votes separating Bush and Gore in Florida was larger, but not huge in any way. This suggests that if anyone were to get rid of 'tons of paper' (i.e. a great many ballots) the election would end up so skewed that it would immediately attract attention
The vast number of pre-election polls and exit-polls published in connection with almost any election now provides some sort of idea of how the election will go even before all the votes are counted. Imagine, if you will, a situation in which pre-election polls and exit polls have indicated virtually a dead heat: getting rid of oodles of ballots would be self-defeating. It would simply be too blatant.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
No, in fact, when they declare someone the winner, EVERYONE stays home. They figure "Why bother, the election's over". So, if everyone stays home, and it's a Republican area, well, you've lost a bunch of Republican votes.
Whenever you sample a population, there is a possibility of the sample being non-representative of the population. If you toss 10 coins at random, then you'll get 5 heads only a percentage of the time, but if you toss 10,000,000 coins, you'll get much closer to 50% heads.
There are formula which you can use to calculate how likely the sample is going to match the population, based upon the size of the population and the sample.
and a stick that comes back to hit you in the back of head.
So what is your point?
Someone explain to me why we need to spend billions on E-Voting when we can just improve the ballot devices (ie: cards /w hanging chads)?
Throw out the cards and replace them with laser printers. Use touch-screens to vote for your candidate by name and photograph. When the ballot is printed, the voter's selections are encoded via several methods on the sheet, say 3(barcode, numeric ID and possibly those 2d bar codes that UPS uses to track packages). With 3 corresponding 64-bit records of one's vote on the ballot the hanging chad problem virtually disappears, plus no prying eyes would be able to easily decipher what you selected on your way out of the booth. Fold up the page and drop it in the big gray box. Easy as pie.
Why wouldn't this work?
--
Any chance of you commenting on the thousands of so-called 'felons' who were purged from the electoral rolls at the behest of Katherine Harris (Bush's campaign manager and person in charge of the Florida vote - the ultimate conflict of interest) and Jeb Bush?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Oh, "since OS doesn't guarantee security, but merely improves the chances for security, we shouldn't use it". We need all the help we can get - and an open source solution will probably defeat a closed source solution, on the basis of accountability. Your slavish devotion to someone else's closed source reeks of the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. Experiment with binary logic in the disposable world of your own computer, not in the real world, where complexity demands sensibility.
--
make install -not war
India conducted successful elections in troubled state of Kasmir using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) designed by Bharat Electronics Ltd., a domestic electronics giant. This story just goes to show that when something is done by 3rd world country like India before the "1st world" then no one cares. But now that Australia has done, oh wow, everyone takes notice. We need to get out of this mindset sooner rather than later.
Yes you guys have a lot at stake here. The world sees America as the upholder and defender of democracy. We all actually beleive that if your government moves for totalitarianism 'you the people' will actually rise and do something about it. Once its clear worldwide that the 2001 election was rigged you will be in some kind of poo. Another dodgy election could easily spark the next American civil war.
How about this then, if you didn't vote then you cannot in all reason expect to be taken seriously when you complain about the actions of the government.
If you are unwilling to take part in the democratic process then you should expect to wear the consequences.
Mind you on the issue of the draft I completely agree with you. It is completely unneccessary and I think would be political poison for any party that reintroduced it.
- [...] open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system [...]
No, you're right: open source doesn't guarantee that. But no system can. What open source can guarantee, by its very openness and accessibility, is that any person (be it a voter or not) can perform a check. And can scream blue murder if an error is found. (And with today's media climate, my guess is that it would end up as the number one item on every news show in the region.) This a difference in kind, not degree, compared to a system in which voters can only suspect dupery, and make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they have standing to do so, but not actually verify it for themselves.- [...] suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?
This is not limited to open source; what makes you think it couldn't happen with proprietary source? And that would be virtually impossible to check for non-election officials too. Furthermore, there is a low-tech equivalent of this case: viz., wilful mis-counting of votes or wilful and erroneous denial of a person's right to vote (this is the place to cough Florida).- [...] to provide voting receipts which can be counted independently [...]
Then you either sacrifice the secrecy of the ballot or you don't prove anything- [...] and that does not exclude closed-source solutions.
No, it doesn't exclude them. It's just that in this particular case open source is better, that's all.The liver is evil and must be punished.
It's good that you're suspicious of mass psychological manipulation, but I want you to consider a number of things before you start coming up with elaborate theories.
Isn't it more likely that a good percentage of people are aware of psychological manipulation targeted at them, but still do not know how to defend themselves from the barrage of psychological gambits?
Isn't it likely that many of these psychological maneuvers, despite being well documented and well understood by many, are designed to be effective against alert detection while circumventing most other defenses?
I can't explain why there are only 2 political parties, but I do understand that a good majority of industries like to hedge their bets by giving money to both parties equally.
I also understand that politicians and political parties need to leverage the meaningless and divisive issues like abortion and prayer in school to get the attention of voters.
Having been following nerd related issues for the past 10 years, I think it's pretty clear for me, most Slashdotters, and many of my friends that industry lobbyists and corporations push a lot of their exploitation through very specific esoteric channels, so that the average voter doesn't understand or care that they're being screwed.
As a matter of fact, most people already know they are being screwed. What they want to know from you is: "What am I supposed to do about it?"
What can you tell them? Sign a petition? Carry a sign and protest? What good is it really going to do? More times than not, you can save your inspiring speeches, because they've probably already heard what you're going to say anyway. (You really don't think you're original, do you?)
Look how long it took for this many people to understand the ramifications of the DMCA and understand the need to talk about intellectual property issues? The only reason it's finally getting as much media coverage as it is today is because these issues are finally becoming more relevant to peoples' lives as well as adversely impacting certain corporate interests. It didn't happen magically. There was a lot of conspiring, debating, and rabble rousing that made THIS much happen.
If you believe the government and media have a monopoly on psychological manipulation and that there's nothing you can do, then you need to start looking at the world around you and start asking a lot of questions and not settling on any one set of answers.
To help you get started understanding the world around you, I recommend investing $10 in an Almanac. I then recommend you check the Almanac's sources, to find more information.
If you know what to look for, you won't believe what you can find.
(Sorry for being condescending)
Though I suggested voting be forced I don't really consider it an option myself, believe it or not. Canada doesn't have forced voting either. I don't know how Australia handles the issue of "check off any random candidate because I have to vote"; in an ideal world everyone would just know the issues and candidates better, but then in an ideal world everyone would vote to begin with.
On the draft issue--Canada also doesn't have a draft, and the couple times it came up in our history (WWI and II) it was such a contentious issue the actual draftees never saw action before the war was over. BTW, I never said I was in favour of a draft--just pointing out it's a cumpulsory duty that comes with living in the US (and other countries too).
The draft may have been a bad example, and ok, paying taxes is also necessary to keep the government running (and voting isn't necessary in the strictest sense)... how about jury duty? Just a month ago I had to respond to a request for possible jury duty in the next year. Failure to respond within 6 days without valid reason would've landed me with a sizable fine and/or jail. Unlike the draft, jury duty does not put my life in danger (leave aside hypothetical blackmail, because it can happen to voters too), but unless I have a good reason to refuse I may have to serve as part of a jury. I imagine the US has a similar system. Who *wants* to serve as a juror in a case involving criminal acts against children? Most wouldn't, but they aren't free to refuse serving their country in that capacity without a good reason.
I didn't mean to seriously suggest compulsory voting, but my point was to address the "duty to country" principle. No political system allows the people to be truly and completely free, not even the US.
BTW, I've been thinking maybe there should be a "negative count" ballot for elections. I think we've gotten too cynical of our politicians of late, so we can't really say we want so and so in office. However, I would LOVE if there were a "I DO NOT want this candidate in power" option, and checking off a candidate would DEDUCT a vote (or maybe just a half-vote) from him/her. I bet that would increase turnout substantially...
Uhhhh... I'm guessing you get your news from a "fair and unbiased" source like Roger Ailes, Media Director for George HW Bush's campaigns and creator and producer of Rush Limbaugh's TV show.
There are some FACTS that get in the way of your straight-from-the-GOP arguments. I figure it's probably a lost cause to try to convince you, but here they are...
(First, for the record, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and am horrified at the increasing narrowness of the American political "spectrum" after having lived for 3 years in a thriving Democracy (Brazil), where there are more parties than anyone can name, and virtually all points of view are represented, with no one or two or even three parties able to dominate)
That said, on to the uncomfortable facts...
Yes, there was some serious rigging in the 2000 Florida election, but it looks like most of it was done by the Republicans. Besides the funny business that went on before the election (ordered by Jeb Bush) to remove tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the lists of registered Florida voters, and besides the numerous African-American (likely Democratic) Florida voters who were denied their right to vote, there is the matter of the leaked Diebold memos, which show that there was some election night hanky-panky with the 2000 Florida presidential vote totals (made possible by Diebold, a company whose top man has declared that it is his mission to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W Bush). Best of all, Diebold does not deny that these things happened; it is trying to use the DMCA to shut down any site hosting copies of the incriminating memos, alleging that these company memos are copyrighted material. IANAL, but that looks to me like a direct admission of ownership and verification of the authenticity of those shocking memos. If I had a site hosting those memos and I were to get a Cease and Desist from Diebold, I'd simply tell them "no way" and hope hope hope to get the chance to discuss the contents of those memos in front of a judge.
Bad as all this is, as they say on infomercials, "that's not all!" Recounts were stopped because the Supreme Court, loaded 6-3 with Republicans, including one major political activist (Scalia) and his apprentice (Thomas) basically said that if the recounts weren't stopped, George W Bush might not be President. Worse, they basically recognized the ridiculousness of their own arguments and said that this case could never be used as a precedent for a future case. Funny that... (in a distinctly non-humorous way, of course)
I'm guessing Ann Coulter didn't mention these things. I wouldn't be surprised if the presenters at Fox News forgot to mention them either...
Don't even get me started about the fact that exit polls unanimously showed Gore winning Florida... or on the recent election in Georgia, where every poll (exit polls, third-party pre-election polls, Democratic AND Republican internal tracking polls) showed the Democrat winning handily, but the Republican ended up winning with relative ease. Small but possibly important detail: an unverified patch was applied to the Diebold (that name again!) voting machines after they'd been certified by Georgia election officials.
What? Brit Hume didn't mention that? Color me shocked!
As for your comments about people engaged in shady activity loudly bla
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
This is the good news of the day... http://www.online.ie/news/viewer.adp?article=%2030 46344
0 3143251
http://www.labour.ie/press/detail.tmpl?SKU=200311
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
Consider this.
You vote for Candidate B. Candidate G wins.
Candidate G then goes through all of the voter receipts, finds those who voted for Candidate B. And maybe overtly, maybe covertly, starts retaliating against you and other who voted for Candidate B. Maybe the airbase where you work gets closed. Maybe your driver's license gets suspended for no particular reason. Maybe you hear a clicking noise whenever you make a phone call.
One of the most vital bits of democracy is the ability to vote anonymously. So a paper trail is still the only way to go. The government knows that I voted, but they don't know who I voted for, and that's the way it must be -- for our own security.
What's with the 'true democracy' thing?
There is direct democracy and indirect democracy. They are two, different ways of organizing a democratic system. Neither is 'truer' than the other.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
When the ACT ran this election I was actually working for the "section" that IT related things were in-sourced to. I was one of the people responsible for the onsite testing and then pre-polling setup and it was one of the most enjoyable jobs that I ever did will working there. It was great to see not only electronic voting done properly - beside the fact that I think we were the first in Australia to do it on that scale - and secondly to see it done using open-source software. The terminals that were designed for disabled people had headphones and the voting process was presented audibly. Now if only other places could do it as well...
Mind you, in the current system those in power aren't supposed to know whether you voted or not. Or, for that matter, whether you voted for him or the other guy.
The representative is supposed to represent ALL of those in his electoral district, whether or not they did vote. Or even *could* vote (minors fr example).
They already do have such a box. It's called writing 'All politicians are bastards' across your ballot and putting it in the box. The election is secret, so dummy votes cannot be traced. The only legal requirement is that you be recorded as having voted and no ballot papers are allowed to leave the voting room. It's not a good idea to deposit a blank ballot, as it leaves open the possibility of someone behind the scenes filling in your vote.
If you want to come here, just don't come by boat or we will lock you up - unless you can make a contribution to the right party in exchange for a visa.
I think you forgot some things, such as 1) the FL Sec. of State who controlled the recounts working for the campaign of Bush or 2) relatives of two Supreme Court justices (Thomas and Rehnquist, I think) working for Bush's campaign while they decided the outcome of the election. #2 is in (I think) Vincent Bugliosi's commentary on the 2000 presidential election. I'm not certain of #1, although I am pretty certain she got a nice ambassadorship (suprise!). Then again, it's bad form for Republicans or their institutions to let facts get in the way of a good argument - an example would be the Patriot Act website, which, not suprisingly, doesn't get its facts right either.
Correction, it is not compulsory to register to vote. It just happens that a the electoral role is used as part of verification of identity for a number of institutions. It is possible to never be on the electoral role, and if one choses, be removed from the role.
In fact a friend has successfully been removed from the electoral role and therefore the obligation to attend an election.
I think using computers to count vote is a mis-application of technology. My reasons are:
- Security. None of the operating systems and hardware in use are designed from the ground up to be secure. The reason is that security and ease-of-use are at loggerheads - get more of one you lose some of the other. One of the key features of every OS I've worked on is the ability to install a daemon somewhere in the message queue so you can remap devices to other purposes. For example, keyboard drivers are easily changed to morph a 'p' into a long sequence of instructions. No matter how well you try to detect a daemon/hook/wedge or whatever you want to call it, if the developer is intent on inserting his code and there are provisions for mapping into user space (I've yet to run on an OS that that couldn't be done) the code can be inserted. That means that open source, closed source, audited source, tested source are all susceptible to modification by a malacious bit of code. It just requires access. Touch screen/punch card/optical scan - it doesn't matter - if you're relying on a computer to do the tally and you can't guarantee that no one has inserted a daemon, you don't have a secure vote.
- Little gained. A lot of "improvements" to what's out there right now discuss the idea of a voter-inspectable audit trail. Voter uses a computer to vote and the computer produces a paper ballot that the user can inspect to make sure the computer isn't cheating. There are two things wrong here. First if a computer is going to tally the paper ballot, you're back to point 1. You've just moved the location of the fraud. If the computer is going to tally and the paper is just a backup, then in most cases, a fraud will go undetected. If the fraud is small enough to be within the bounds of statistical uncertainty but large enough to sway the vote, you're not going to catch it unless you hand count the entire population of ballots. Secondly, you're in essence using a machine to mark a piece of paper which a human can just as easily do - you haven't gained anything by introducing the voting machine into the mix.
I think the Canadians who just use a paper and pencil and cross-checked human counters to tally the vote have it right. The whole system is very simple. You mark your ballot, put it in a box. When the poll closes, at least 3 pairs of eyes look at it, one person is the election official, the other two are from opposing parties. When all 3 agree what the vote is, it's tallied as such. They can cross check tallies as they go so you're not running into a transcription problem down the road. The precinct reports its tallies to a higher level up the tree and the results are published so that the three (or more) counters can check the tally was accurately registered at the next level. Anyone who wants to can check the process from start to finish. Open, transparent, accurate and simple. Contrast that to encrypted keys, password maintenance, static discharge induced miscounts, lack of audit trails and the rest of the mess that characterizes the spectrum of American voting techniques and you have to ask - why the hell do we bother using machines to do this when we can do a better job by hand?There are lots of times that tech is part of a solution. Then there are times, like vote counting, where it is part of the problem. It may be retro and old fashioned but I think it's time we just used paper and pen again. It worked all the way up to the sixties and the country managed then. If our parents and grandparents could manage it, shouldn't we be able to hand count as well?
I don't know how Australia handles the issue of "check off any random candidate because I have to vote"
We don't have this problem. Everyone aged 18 years or older must vote, meaning they get checked off on the electoral roll and are given a ballot paper that they must place into the ballot box.
There is nothing in the system that states that the vote must be valid. If you want, you can put a blank ballot paper into the ballot box, or write an essay on the evils of the preferential voting system, or whatever you please as long as you show up and put the ballot paper in the box.
Our vote counters and scrutineers then remove the "donkey votes", as they are known, from the rest during the counting process.
The whole point of this is to get truly representative government, or as close to it as practical.
However, I would LOVE if there were a "I DO NOT want this candidate in power" option, and checking off a candidate would DEDUCT a vote
The Australian preferential voting system effectively gives you this ability, by allowing you to place your voting preferences in order. The candidate you loathe would be placed last amongst your preferences, meaning that under no circumstances would s/he get your vote, even if it meant your vote went the the 2nd-worst candidate.
Yep Certificates are a great way to go. After all, nobody every breaks into central servers and steal Credit Card numbers. And never in history have dead voters shown up in voting (Texas, Florida, and Chicago). So they sure as heck can not rig the election with this approach.
hehehehehe
Somehow, I feel like a vampire is approaching to sux the blood from our democracy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hi all
I used the system in question and was surprised by fact that they really tried hard to understand the issues.
I work in IT security was impressed with the approach they system to system security. Physical intervention was required at a number of points in the collating process. Ie Systems were not connected to any network during the polling process. Batched uploads of voting data occurred. Not rocket science just automating where it made sense.
- Unfortunately, the idea is completely unrealistic today.
Seeing that the idea turned out to be completely unworkable when Plato himself tried to implement his system on Sicily, I dare say the idea was totally unrealistic right from the start.- Personally I think that the state should be ruled by a group of philosophers (in Plato's terminology), basically by scientists and other specialists (engineers, generals for Defence Ministry, etc.). The emphasis should be made on the consensus-based decision-making, but voting should still be an option. These rulers should be well-educated and raised to be honest. The selection should be done in an objective and transparent way.
First of all, scientists and specialists are not the impartial and unprejudiced uber-folk they are cracked up to be. For better and worse, they are human too, with all of the foibles and idiosyncrasies characteristic of humans whatever their specialist status. If you knew a fair number of them or if you knew anything about scientific history you would know this. (For an enjoyable read on the subject, cf. e.g., Steven Jay Gould's Bligh's Bounty and In A Jumbled Drawer in Bully For Brontosaurus or Thomas Kuhn's -- I think -- musings on paradigm shifts in science.) Sometimes they are perhaps 'better' than non-specialists, but sometimes they are decidedly 'worse' and sometimes they are just plain 'awful'. And as for their upbringing. I doubt there are very many people who were brought up to be dishonest; they may end up that way in the end, but do you really think that they were raised that way? And how are you going to ensure that a suitable upbringing is being applied anyway? By some 'Gattaca-like' analysis and selection coupled with some Spartan-like mandatory boarding schools for future leaders?Further, selecting them in an 'objective and transparent way' -- how? And by whom? By voters? In an election? Or do you perchance know of a better way to select/elect people? Maybe you think you do, after all, democracy has many flaws. So far, however, it has turned out to have the least flaws; to quote Winston Churchill: It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Finally, let us imagine a hypothetical case in a society in ruled by your 'philosophers'. Let us imagine that we have a curvy road on which 100 fatal accidents occur every year. According to the appropriate road accident experts straightening the road would bring the death rate down to 50. We assume that they are right. Straightening the road would mean draining a swamp where the road would go. In the swamp lives a certain species of frog. Our frog experts inform us that this frog does not live anywhere else and that draining the swamp would render this particular kind of frog extinct. We assume that they are right. So now your society is faced with a choice: either let 50 people/year die or let the frog go extinct. We assume no other solutions are possible. How would your 'philosophers' solve this question? Consensus is out of the question as no compromise solution is possible. In other words, they would have to vote on the issue. Let me now suggest to you that we are already really close to doing what you suggest: we are already electing 'experts' but they are experts at choosing one thing over another rather than at the scientific reasons supporting that choice. Oh, and we prefer to call them 'politicians'.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
I think an "American" solution to the forced voting would be a $500 tax credit for voting (we of course raise the taxes by $500 first). It would encourage, but not force, people to vote.
Katherine Harris was the CHAIRPERSON of the George W. Bush election campaign in Florida.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
For reference, there's an updated version of your "George W Bush might not be President" link in the Red Rock Eater Digest. Good stuff.
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
OK.. I'll start by saying that maybe it is you who need to broaden your horizons a bit and get your news from sources other than Fox News (whose Chairman and CEO was the media director for the George HW Bush campaign in 1988 and the creator and executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's TV show) and heavily Republican-leaning talk radio. You yourself state that johnkerry.com isn't exactly un-biased (sic). Do you think Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are? I am not a Democrat, so that's not why I'm saying this. I'm saying it because the very facts you sarcastically say we shouldn't let get in our way don't support your position.
Take a peek at this. It's a presentation of the results of the recount. It starts by repeating that Bush won the official certified result by 537 votes (Bush 2,912,790; Gore 2,912,253). It then shows what would have happened in 5 different possible recount scenarios.
First, if Gore's request for recounts of four specific counties had been granted, he would have still lost, though by a smaller margin-- 225 votes (Bush 2,913,351; Gore 2,913,126).
The second scenario presented is if the Supreme Court had not stopped the partial recounts already underway in Florida. Again, Gore loses, by a margin very slightly smaller than the certified result-- 493 votes (Bush 2,916,559; Gore 2,916,066).
So far, two "Bush wins" results, both coming from what Democrats were seeking (Gore's request for a recount of 4 specific counties, plus completion of the partial recounts already in progress). Looks like Bush would win in any conceivable scenario, right? Let's continue.
First, they could have used "the most liberal methods they could, counting anything that even remotely looked like a vote for Gore" (as you put it), but they didn't. They did do one recount using a similar but fair standard, accepting any dimpled punch card or any mark on an optical scan ballot that indicated a candidate choice, whether it was Gore or Bush. The result? Gore won (so much for "In every recount they did Bush still won), by a very narrow margin of 107 votes (Gore 2,924,695; Bush 2,924,588). But if that were the only Gore victory, your argument, while wrong on some details, would still have a foundation of truth. Let's continue.
Given that very loose standard, one could fairly ask for a recount with a very rigid standard. For example, one could ask for a recount where only fully-punched ballot cards and correctly marked optical scan ballots are accepted, again, independent of the candidate chosen. Who'd win that one? Bush? Nope. I'll give you one more guess...
'Dja get it right? Let's check. Here's the result of the recount using that very rigid standard: Gore by 115 (Gore 2,915,245; Bush 2,915,130).
Hmmm... looks like your "recounting anything that even remotely looked like a vote for Gore" has been debunked by those inconvenient facts you mentioned, as has "In every recount they did Bush still won."
There is one more reasonable standard that could be applied to a recount: one could simply let each county's own standard apply to disputed ballots from that county. Recounting under those conditions yielded President Gore too, by a margin of 171 votes (Gore 2,917,847; Bush 2,918,676).
It's ironic that Gor
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
OK.. I'll start by saying that maybe it is you who need to broaden your horizons a bit and get your news from sources other than Fox News (whose Chairman and CEO was the media director for the George HW Bush campaign in 1988 and the creator and executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's TV show) and heavily Republican-leaning talk radio. You yourself state that johnkerry.com isn't exactly un-biased (sic). Do you think Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are? I am not a Democrat, so that's not why I'm saying this. I'm saying it because the very facts you sarcastically say we shouldn't let get in our way don't support your position.
Take a peek at this. It's a presentation of the results of the recount. It starts by repeating that Bush won the official certified result by 537 votes (Bush 2,912,790; Gore 2,912,253). It then shows what would have happened in 5 different possible recount scenarios.
First, if Gore's request for recounts of four specific counties had been granted, he would have still lost, though by a smaller margin-- 225 votes (Bush 2,913,351; Gore 2,913,126).
The second scenario presented is if the Supreme Court had not stopped the partial recounts already underway in Florida. Again, Gore loses, by a margin very slightly smaller than the certified result-- 493 votes (Bush 2,916,559; Gore 2,916,066).
So far, two "Bush wins" results, both coming from what Democrats were seeking (Gore's request for a recount of 4 specific counties, plus completion of the partial recounts already in progress). Looks like Bush would win in any conceivable scenario, right? Let's continue.
First, they could have used "the most liberal methods they could, counting anything that even remotely looked like a vote for Gore" (as you put it), but they didn't. They did do one recount using a similar but fair standard, accepting any dimpled punch card or any mark on an optical scan ballot that indicated a candidate choice, whether it was Gore or Bush. The result? Gore won (so much for "In every recount they did Bush still won), by a very narrow margin of 107 votes (Gore 2,924,695; Bush 2,924,588). But if that were the only Gore victory, your argument, while wrong on some details, would still have a foundation of truth. Let's continue.
Given that very loose standard, one could fairly ask for a recount with a very rigid standard. For example, one could ask for a recount where only fully-punched ballot cards and correctly marked optical scan ballots are accepted, again, independent of the candidate chosen. Who'd win that one? Bush? Nope. I'll give you one more guess...
'Dja get it right? Let's check. Here's the result of the recount using that very rigid standard: Gore by 115 (Gore 2,915,245; Bush 2,915,130).
Hmmm... looks like your "recounting anything that even remotely looked like a vote for Gore" has been debunked by those inconvenient facts you mentioned, as has "In every recount they did Bush still won."
There is one more reasonable standard that could be applied to a recount: one could simply let each county's own standard apply to disputed ballots from that county. Recounting under those conditions yielded President Gore too, by a margin of 171 votes (Gore 2
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Easy to imagine, since I used to live there (although I was not a voter).
Switzerland has a system whereby people vote regularly on all sorts of matters, both cantonal and federal. From memory, people often voted on several referenda at once, filling out several voting forms on the same day (presumably to save themselves a trip to and fro). There are about six major political parties, and if you don't like any of the candidates, you can elect anyone else who is eligible.
While I'm sure many of us could imagine this in their own neighbourhoods, and citing low turn-out and apathy (or general ignorance) of current affairs as reasons why such a system couldn't work for them.
However, the Swiss don't do too badly out of it, for the simple reason that they take responsibility for what goes on in their village, region, canton and country. The system means that the voters have to be, to some extent, both enthusiastic and well-informed. It might sound like a (crack) pipe dream for the voters, or possibly a nightmare for contemporary governments, but the Swiss are a smart bunch - well educated, fiercely patriotic, argumentative without compromising neutrality - and tend to form opinions in a very cool, calm and collected fashion.
How well does it work? The Swiss actually voted for a blatant tax hike, for no other reason than to pay of the national debt. Imagine that.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
The recount was not conducted by the major media outlets; it was done by the "NORC," the National Opinion Reseach Center of the University of Chicago. It was sponsored by some major media companies (including, among others, the NYT, the Washington Post, CNN, and the AP).
Ya wanna say the NORC is liberal-leaning?
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Re:Obstacles to US adoption of SI system(Note: OT) (Score:2, Interesting)
by quacking duck (607555) on Monday November 03, @05:02PM (#7381439)
BTW, I've been thinking maybe there should be a "negative count" ballot for elections. I think we've gotten too cynical of our politicians of late, so we can't really say we want so and so in office. However, I would LOVE if there were a "I DO NOT want this candidate in power" option, and checking off a candidate would DEDUCT a vote (or maybe just a half-vote) from him/her. I bet that would increase turnout substantially...
----
We have this in Australia. It is called preference voting. What happens is you get the list of candidates and rank them in your order of preference.
Just say there are three candiates...
Joe Blow, Miss Scarlett and Godzilla
You rank them 1, 2, 3. Then, when the votes are counted, if your number one choice loses, your vote goes to your second choice, and so on.
Example: If Godzilla gets 40% of the primary vote (ie 40% of the voters put him first) but the 30% that voted for Miss Scarlett and the 30% that voted for Joe Blow put Godzilla last, then that means 60% of voters want anyone BUT Godzilla.
Then Godzilla is knocked out of the race and his second preferences are sent to Miss Scarlett or Joe Blow. If most Godzilla voters put Joe Blow second (above Miss Scarlett) then Joe Blow wins.
So in preference voting it is possible for someone to get 49.9% of the primary vote and still lose, as long as the 50.1% wanted anyone BUT that 49.9% person.
I think it is a good system.
Note: If someone gets 50+% of the primary vote they win.
Also, on the topic of compulsory voting. I think there should be an option on the ballot "NONE OF THESE CANDIDATES". It is essentially a donkey vote, but lets politicians know how many people are disillusioned with the process.
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
The representative is supposed to represent ALL of those in his electoral district, whether or not they did vote. Or even *could* vote (minors fr example).
Good point, however I still believe that if you can vote then you should. It is one thing to rail at the government when you are disenfranchised, however it is quite another to have the opportunity to actually have a say and waste it.
Voting is not a right it is a responsibility. It is, for a lot of people, the only way to get a say in what the government does. If you voluntarily abdicate that responsibility then you have to wear the cost.
sorry...I thought so but wasn't sure. Thank you.
Actually the electronic voting system described in the article is secure because all voting takes place on a local LAN disconnected from the internet. The voting boxes are locked down and people watch the voting process to prevent tampering.
In the ACT, when people go to vote their identity is checked (driver's license or whatever) then their names are marked off the electoral list. With eVACS they are then given a little card with a bar code on it which allows them to "sign-on" to the voting machine.
The point of electronic voting in this case is not so people can be lazy and vote from home (insecurely) but so the votes can be counted quickly and accurately.
But you do have to make the decision not to vote for anyone. The law states you must turn up, get your name ticked off, take a ballot paper and despose of it correctly (ie, put it in the ballot box). What you do between steps four and five is entirely up to you.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Re: Katherine Harris, chairperson of the George W Bush 2000 presidential campaign in Florida, making decisions about the recounts in her capacity as Secretary of State
It's enough to make one wonder why the verb "recuse" even exists...
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I am not a programmer but it seems to be if I where intent on rigging an election I could print the voters choice on an audit trail and "behind the scenes" count it towards the voter of my choice. If you don't TRUST the company making the software any security measure put in place will be questioned. The real question is it better than what we use today. I am still waiting for someone to figure out a way to keep dead people or illegal immigrants from voting. People have been dying for a long time and we still haven't got that one fixed.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
> Our vote counters and scrutineers then remove the
> "donkey votes", as they are known, from the rest
> during the counting process.
They better not, donkey votes are 100% valid. It is simply voting (in preference) in the order which the candidates appear.
See: http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/donkey.html
In most elections the winner would win without almost any single state. This means that corruption in a state election office, while not excusable, does not ruin the democratic process. On the other hand corruption in the federal government would be a problem if federal elections were held federally. Even an extremely unpopular incumbent would win the election, as federal departments are headed by his appointees.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
I believe it was an american who said "with rights come responsibilities".
I look at it this way - you value your right to free speech / privacy / whatever. Fine. Then the absolute minimum responsibility that goes with those rights is that you have to attend a polling booth every couple of years. If you don't want to vote then get your name checked off, pretend to vote, and leave. This software allows you to do that.
(Quickly: Once I walked in, got my name ticked off, took a ballot, walked into the booth, turned around, walked out, and put my paper in the box.
The observer said "you didn't vote!". I said "prove it..."
If you can't be bothered to at least pretend to vote, I think the very least you can do is give up the right to complain about any outcomes from the result...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Ah, so the country that claims to be Free, and noisely and bloodily invades other countries to make them just as Free, actually only has the illusion of a democracy.
It isn't a democracy, and was never supposed to be a democracy. It's a constitutional republic. That means election of officials and representatives rather than direct votes on issues, and rules to prevent large groups from using the power of the state to destroy the rights of small groups and unpopular individuals.
The president is elected by the electoral college. Each state gets one vote per senator and one per representative - guaranteeing even the small states a minimum of three votes.
This system was part of the original compromise, without which the small states would never have signed on.
If the preseident were elected by the popular voute, a couple of states with very large populations could run roughshod over the rest of them. And a corrupt election process in a SINGLE large state would control the presidency, and thus one entire branch of government.
Sometimes the loser of the popular vote is SUPPOSED to become the president. This happens when:
- The election is close.
- The issue is split between the big urban states areas and the small rural ones.
- One candidate only appeals to the big urban states, while the other is popular in a large number of rural states.
The Bush/Gore election is EXACTLY such a situation. See the map here for a very graphic ilustration of how the vote was split by region.
What this USUALLY does is encourage presidential candidates to appeal to ALL the people, rather than to favor one group over another. Sometimes a candidate forgets this and snubs the little guys while playing to the urban crowds (typically by promising to loot the productive to give them their bread and circuses). Then he may lose, even with a plurality of the popular votes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I take issue with your last remark about importing forced jury duty. I am sorry, but I disagree with you quite strongly. How can a society be called free when you are forced to sit on a jury? What if you only vote for someone's acquittal because it was the law and not because you agree that he was not proved guilty? This cannot be a viable option until jurors have an option to 'Abstain from this verdict'.
rules to prevent large groups from using the power of the state to destroy the rights of small groups and unpopular individuals
Yeah, and thanks to the Republicans being in charge, that won't ever happen now! You fucking cowardly faggot, you simply won't admit to the lies of what is going on now. Suck up you your Bushboy, semenwhore, cuz you fucking Zionists are really going to get what you want in the end (shredded flesh in the form of cross-shaped martyrdom). Fucking assholes, and the rest of us non-religion-types would simply try to run our lives, but you fucking idealist assholes must insist on fucking everything up. Thanks a lot, fuckcheese.
Open Source is just one part. The rules on deployment are equally important. There are very clear rules on how the hardware was handled, not too disimilar to ordinary ballot boxes. Networked voting was deliberately not considered so that *physical* security could be used to secure the votes.
So what do you do when someone rigs the voting receipts and demands a recount? Unless carefully integrated, the prescence of duplicate data can increase your exposure. Putting that duplicate data on paper doesn't neccesarily improve security either.
Our Electoral Commission's only task is to ensure that elections are conducted securely and accurately. That independence is also why I had no qualms in using electronic voting at that election.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Australian law doesn't require you to vote. It requires you to turn up at a voting centre, have your name sign off, collect a piece of paper, and drop it into an appropriate box.
What you do with that piece of paper is your choice. Most people take it into a curtained enclave and write down some numbers in the boxes. If you want, however, you can drop it straight into the box blank.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
In australia (and the rest of the world) we are extremely sensitive to the american political decisions, especially those relating to foreign trade and policy.
The concept of a closed source system, developed by people who openly pledge to "deliver votes to the president" (you don't need references, it's all over the /. front page), can covertly apply patches and allegedly have back-doors, seems pure insanity to me.
Just my AU$0.02...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
State/Local elections - Plead interstate.
Federal elections - Plead incapacitating illness and no carer to provide absentee voter form.
They are getting more serious about enforcement in recent years, so your mileage may vary.
Not that I like missing out on having my say, but it is worth knowing if your memory is as shocking as mine. :)
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Once you reach voting age (or are naturalised as an australian) you are eligible to "register to vote". Once you complete this process you will then be expected to vote in ALL future elections for your area. If you do not register to vote you will not be allowed to vote in any elections.
This is analogous to a "one-way" opt-in process. You can choose not to vote until you so desire, but once you register there is no way to de-register yourself (excluding death and insanity).
Q.
Insert Signature Here
In Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission oversees all voting, at all levels, not just federal. As part of the Separation of Powers, the AEC is funded by the federal government, but isn't responsible to it (similar to the judical branch).
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
How can a society be called free when you are forced to vote? What if you only vote for someone because it was the law and not because you agree with his or her political stance?
In Australia, you're not forced to vote, merely to accept the form and have your name crossed off.
There's nothing stopping you from:
Most people end up voting because otherwise it's a wasted trip to the local school hall. But they're not forced to.
The biggest benefits of so-called 'compulsory voting' are:
Frankly, I can't imagine a viable working democracy without ensuring that everyone's voice is heard. Anything less would be decidedly secondrate and liable to disenfranchise people who have lost faith in government: the very people who need to be empowered the most!
First, I'd like to apologize for misinterpreting anything you said.
/. said a while ago in another article, it would prevent candidates saying they have the support of 'the people'. Maybe this would get people off their couches to vote, but then again maybe not. It all depends on whether the main cause is disenfranchisement or just voter apathy in general (sadly enough I'd rather the former--it's horrible we're at the point in society where I actually said I'd rather disenfranchisement).
I too believe that people should feel a duty to serve society through a number of means including jury duty. You are correct that we have to give up freedoms to live in a society. Even in an anarchist world people would have to give up freedoms (of varying degrees) in order to interact.
I'd also like a box on the ballot that denotes 'I do not vote for this candidate'. That way if there is no one on the ballot whom I agree with, my vote is not voided because I didn't vote for someone. Too as someone on
TSage
We throw the ballot boxes in the bay
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
More interesting than 'Donkey Voting' is the sadly recently outlawed Langer Voting Method.
Australia uses a preferential voting method. So voters must number the candidates from 1 to N in order of preference. As the votes are counted, the candidate with the least number of votes has their preferences distributed until someone has a vote of over 50%.
What Albert Langer noticed was that there wasn't anything in the wording of laws at the time to actually require you to fill in every box correctly. You could cast a vote of 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 (where preferences 1, 2 and 3 were valid and every preference marked 4 was invalid.
It was a watershed. Finally, people could vote for minor parties without their preferences assisting the major parties. The courts ended up ruling that the voting method was legal but publicising it wasn't. (Then, of course, they changed the wording to patch things up so the Langer Method no longer worked.)
Interestingly enough, it was also Australia that came up with the secret ballot in the late 19th century. At the time, American political machines (Read political circle-jerks) printed their own ballots on distinctly colored paper. No need to explain the kind of corruption this caused. After the secret ballot was introduced, counties with 100 registered voters no longer returned 250 votes :)
So now they've repeated their earlier sucess... What will be next, perfecting telepathic voting systems?
"Gore won the popular vote." True, but irrelevant. The president of the U.S. is elected by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. Don't like it? Get the Constitution amended.
One of the reasons that there has been so much recent interest in the US in electronic voting systems is that the overall election result is so sensitive to (even relatively small) errors in the vote counting process. Realistically, there are two solutions to the problem: reducing the error rate, and making the overall voting outcome less sensitive to vote counting errors.
Indeed, an unstable voting system (such as first-past-the-post in the US/UK elections) where a change of one vote can trigger a drastic change of result is fundamentally undemocratic - it gives some individual voters (e.g. in Florida) much more influence on the final result that others.
If you are trying to measure any quantity reliably, you want your metric to be as insensitive to errors in you input data as possible, and a proportional electoral system is one way out of that problem. Not all the blame belongs with the vote counting technology.
It isn't a democracy, and was never supposed to be a democracy.
So why does Bush keep talking about bringing democracy to Iraq, as if democracy were an American ideal? What is he, crazy?
:-b
:-) )
(You forgot the spelling/punctuation flame. That would have given me extra points.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's incomplete. At least one directory is missing.
A lot of stuff - and a lot of ad hominems. I'll just hit a couple high points.
Besides the funny business that went on before the election (ordered by Jeb Bush) to remove tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the lists of registered Florida voters [...]
You mean the order to actually enforce the law purging convicted felons from the list of eligible voters? Are you saying crooks tend to be Democrats? B-)
As to the few non-felon Democrats (AND Republicans) who got zapped by accident because they happened to have the same name as a felon, they had plenty of time to correct the error.
[...] there is the matter of the leaked Diebold memos, which show that there was some election night hanky-panky with the 2000 Florida presidential vote totals (made possible by Diebold, a company whose top man has declared that it is his mission to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W Bush).
My impression of the current state of the corruption of the voting process is that the D's political machine perpetrates most of it and receives most of the benefit. I was concerned that the automation of vote corruption would also end up in their pocket, locking them into power forever.
So it pleases me no end that the first computer voting machine company whose flaws were exposed has prominent R connections, getting the Ds on the bandwagon to fix the problem.
And now the bill to force transparency onto e-voting is introduced and co-sponsored by a stack of Ds. How convenient! This means it might actually get fixed!
If they Rs were cagey enough the could play to the
medias' image and initially withhold their support, then "reluctantly" trade it for including a rider to also eliminate some of the OTHER corruption mechanisms. Such as:
- eliminating the "motor-voter + absentee-on-demand" phantom-voter printing press. -flagging non-voing status on California illegal-alien drivers licenses.
- requiring actual proof of eligibility to vote for registration, and actual registration for voting.
- auditing voter rolls to clean them of the dead, moved-away, multiple, felon, non-existent, and otherwise inelegible voters.
- eliminating the presumption of discrimination in poll-watcher challenges.
and several other items.
(Of course the Rs have proven themselves NON-cagey far too often.)
Yes, let's clean up the election process. ALL of the election process!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do I need to remind you that 30,000 more legitimate Democratic voters participating in the election could drastically change the result of an election whose official certified result had a difference of 537 votes between the top two candidates?
Few? Which election were you watching? Palast PROVES (again, he doesn't just allege things, as you claim that Dems do more election cheating, but fail to cite a single case or shred of evidence-- Palast has AND PRESENTS evidence for his very serious claims) in his book that the Democrats lost at least 30,000 net potential Gore votes due to Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's funny business. Again, in an election decided by hundreds of votes, that's a really, really big deal. As for your assertion that they "had plenty of time" to correct the problem, you are ignoring the fact that they didn't find out until they were wrongly turned away at the polls on election day.
You correctly note that the Dems are basically supporting efforts for things like auditability in electronic voting because the Republicans have a distinct advantage in connections to the e-voting companies. But you neglect to mention that the Republicans are NOT supporting those efforts. So can you now admit that while the Democrats are right for the wrong reason, they're right on this one and the Republicans are wrong?
Ugh! It leaves a horrible taste in my mouth to say the Dems are right on an issue, but I guess that puts them up 1-0 on the Republicans.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
You reply to an obvious troll, plus you still suck the massive cock of the right wing. But feel free to guzzle some more cum from the massive whore that is modern conservatism.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of me taking a massive shit on your mother's forehead?
live in a banana republic. get over it.
i had a sig, once..
> Also, remember it was a Davis backed lawsuit that the recall be postponed so that even more e-voting machines could be installed.
Are you sure about that? I didn't follow it too closely, but most of the things I heard is that Davis didn't back that because he just wanted to get the crap over with quickly. I thought it was other Democrats (in the CA State Leg.) trying to postpone it.
> The world sees America as the upholder and defender of democracy.
What a crock of shit. The world just blames America for everything.
> Another dodgy election could easily spark the next American civil war.
I don't see that happening. A military coup could take over, making this a police state, yet the majority would not care, as long as they can still get a 5lb Quadruple Cheeseburger meal with 10 gallons of fries and a 50oz McShake for 5 bucks. They'd talk a lot about it, like how offended and oppressed they are, but they will not actually DO anything about it. Think I'm cynical? Damned right I am, I have to deal with these idiots every day.
Yup, and that's the source of the problem. Here's a voting scenario I whipped together. There are better examples at ElectionMethods.org, but this one is mine:
The lowest is E, so she gets dropped, leading to:The lowest is D, so he gets dropped, leading to:At this point C is the winner, but digging down to 3rd out of 5 doesn't strike me as a ringing endorsement. Furthermore, a whopping 80% would have preferred E over C.Next, let's kick it up a notch and see what happens if a few people who favored D instead voted for C:
The lowest is D, so he gets dropped, leading to:The lowest is B, so she gets dropped, leading to:The lowest is C, so he gets dropped, leading to:At this point E is the winner. Candidate C lost due to getting more votes!If you're going to use numerical ranking, Condorcet is clearly superior to IRV. If not, Approval is easily implemented and avoids paradoxes efficiently.
That's not the point.
If you claim heads appear in 60%, then toss 200 coins, and when nobody's looking, flip twenty of coins that fell tails up, or just place another 4 coins heads up in the bin, and you get a pretty proof for your claim. Just remember to pay whoever tries to repeat your experiment, so they flip their coins afterwards too.
The differences don't have to be a result of blind luck or laws of statistics...We can MAKE it so that there are no differences.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I don't see how you could profit from Diebold's debacle unless people came away thinking you had a foolproof electronic voting solution we could use to replace Diebold voting machines. But that was not that the point of my question. It seems reasonable to me to wonder why the problems the article mentions were not considered showstoppers. Open Source voting software doesn't explain away all the problems clever people can think of to rig even one of your voting machines. One company looking to promote another company in which they have a financial relationship is reasonable thing to ask about. I'm glad to hear you tell us this is not the case.
That's the point--it's impossible to do that because the only software worth checking is the software actually running in each and every one of the voting machines and any software that tabulates votes across machines.
There's no way I can tell the software posted on your website is the same software running in each of those machines on voting day. This makes the posted software only useful to point out hypothetical problems. Nobody has the ability to walk up to one of these voting machines and determine that only trustworthy software is running on it. This problem exists whether the machines are running on proprietary software (like on Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia's machines) or if complete system source code is available under the most liberal terms.
Great, but I don't trust the lab by default. And I don't know if anyone was able to alter the software on the machines before or while the votes were collected and counted. I'm not saying you're devious like Diebold apparently is, I'm looking at what happened in Diebold's case and I'm becoming curious--the leaked Diebold e-mails suggest Diebold was able to alter the software after certification. Could the same thing happen to eVACS?
The whole software questions in this debate are a red herring. In the context of voting software for polling place elections, nobody's voting software provides real accountability.
I want a voting system that doesn't introduce more ambiguities into voting than we already have. I am willing to trade away speed in exchange for accuracy, accountability, and voter verification. What I want essentially acts as an end-run around inherently untrustworthy electronic voting machines: I want for each voter to have the opportunity to verify for themselves that their vote was recorded accurately and for that record of the vote to be countable after the election is declared over and the results are announced. This requires a permanent non-electronic record.
Digital Citizen
For those who don't know, that guy in the very first Unix was the Unix coinventor, Ken Thompson himself. He wrote about this Trojan horse (the most brilliant one in the history, I might add) in Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984 -- Reflections on Trusting Trust. Truely outstanding article.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
And why would a public voting system be based on software at all, in the first place? I'm serious. What are the advantages? Is it that much faster? Cheaper than manual counting of votes? Because it's most certainly not more secure. When I first read about the e-voting my first reaction was: "But... Why?!"
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Well, I've been reading for quite some time now about all this mess about e-voting and have to ask someone: what is the problem? E-voting has been employed for some years now in Brazil and nobody disliked it. Well, you still can't vote by the net, but who is perfect? Brazil's way for avoiding disapproval is quite simple really: in every machine there is a small printer that prints paper votes directly into an urn. So, if someone thinks there is fraud, you can ask to recount the votes. If power fails for too long for the no-breaks to resist, you still have the paper voting for backup. It's really a matter of keeping it simple.
Gee, I'm completely ignorant of how the Constitution works.
Shut up, all of you. I know that the popular vote doesn't decide who is the president. Do you know why that system was put in place? Because the Founding Fathers didn't trust the common individual to be able to make such an important decision.
And look where they got us. Good thing the common man didn't elect that idiot Gore, otherwise we'd be a laughingstock in the global community. Oh, wait...