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Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting
gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."
Given that much of the media is similarly controlled?
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
They just let us know there was cheating, but no one in power will look at them. Look at the presidential election in Florida 2000!
Why do people need to believe this is some conspriracy. Bad Code /= a vast conspiracy to steal the election. Bad Code = Bad Code.
Lets get upset at that.
Bad code on a voting machine = potential to steal the election, but until you have proof please keep your fingerpointing to yourself. Both sides of the political debate here in the States and abroad would love to steal an election.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Sign the HR 2239 petition. It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box in case of a recount and mandates .5% of districts at random do a recount to verify accuracy of the machines.
Keep the freedom to vote.
From that point the ballots should be counted in the traditional manner and used to audit the eletronic reports. If there is any significiant discrepency the paper ballots should take precedence. This procedure should continue until the eletronic voting process is as reliably accurate as the ballot method for a period of years.
After that point we can take the electronic method as the primary method, witht he printed results being automaticly placed into a ballot box connected to these machines.
If there is ever a time the printed ballot form should cease to exist i cannot for-see it right now. If there isnt physical evidence of the voting process somewhere, i feel highly dubious as to the integrity of the entire system.
--vision
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
The only corruption here is the horrible corruption of the English language that somehow lead to CmdrTaco thinking "to savage" meant "to ravage."
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
Stop bitching and moaning and get out there and DO something about it. Jeez...
That's the last political statement I will make on /.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
led away to his Guantanamo relocation center, he was quoted as saying ...oh, wait. The Official Information Minister has informed me that reporting Vidal's final statement would make me an enemy combatant, and would mean that the terrorists had won. And that would be doubleplusungood.
Why do I care what a popular salon owner says about this issue?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
No, I'm sad to say, it's the American way.
There is no spoon or sig.
We need these things to be built upon Open and Inspectable Source and on machines that the public can trust as giving valid results. Otherwise - it is all BS. I have been calling for a Corporation for Public Software to do just this. I continue to do so.
This simply is too important to allow hacked machines to spit out as answer that somebody pre-determined in a back-room deal.
We can do something about it now, or we can pay the consequences of an untrusted election system come next year. The choices are few, the ooportunities many. Write me off as stupid if you just don't give a rat's, but you will sooner or later.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Bad code on a voting machine = potential to steal the election, but until you have proof please keep your fingerpointing to yourself.
Proof? No, but what looks like frightening bugs in one of the most critical tasks of a democracy, from companies whose owners are heavily involved in politic. Now, that does not necessarily mean that election-rigging is under way, but IMHO it is cause enough for public scrutiny.
Both sides of the political debate here in the States and abroad would love to steal an election.
So what? Should we let them do it, trusting that some sort of balance will be kept by the rigging on both side?
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
And if Clinton was president odds are they would be donating to Clinton. It may be corruption, but at least it's universal.
So you think Vidal is an idiot (debatable). What is your position then on Bush's assault on the Constitution? Do you support the wholesale destruction of our freedoms that Bush is presiding over? Stand up and be counted if you really think this is better for the republic.
sulli
RTFJ.
Marge: So, did you call any of your friends?0
Lisa: Friend? [scoffs] These are my only friends.
[holds up a book]
Grownup nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys
than I ever will.
Marge: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration
Everyone who pays taxes in the US is a "donor" to the executive branch. Perhaps you mean the Bush campaign? In that case, you may be suprised that most companies actually donate pretty equally to both sides just to cover the bases. What were these companies' total donations to political campaigns compared to just to just Bush's? Without that info, this is a meaninglessly paranoid "article".
it's not al gore we're talking about ... it's gore vidal, some wierd person
If we're talking about paper voting, don't paper mill companies give big bucks to the Republican party?
The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
:o)
Really? The PATRIOT act was written in German?
Newsflash, you're confusing Gore Vidal with Al Gore.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the USA already is a despotic state but with better PR. After all the last election wasn't actually won by Bush, and there was that scene of Republicans battering down the doors of the Democrat offices where they were holding ballots. You wont know if you're living in a dictatorship until you test the boundaries. But if the voting machines get in then you'll lose your chance.
Gore also mentions the partiot act part II which he condemns utterly. An old quote I came across recently now seems frighteningly prescient:
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?
Because if Al Gore had been president any of the following may have happened:
1) We would have surrendered before the second plane hit the WTC.
2) Only criminals would have guns.
3) Even more money would be taken from my pocket to support inner city kids who don't understand "Gang Banging" isn't a productive life style.
4) We would be paying $5.00 for a gallon of gas, to put in a sub-standard 1000 pound car that would be destroyed when it collided with a june bug.
Ya know, there's more, but I'm getting angry just thinking about it.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
I really wish we could abolish "Left", "Right", "Liberal", and "Conservative" from political language. They've become no more than insults. The "Left" is in charge? Oh, then the "Right" is a bunch of evil zealots come to crush us under their heels! The "Right" is in charge? Now the "Left" is a bunch of evil terrorist sympathizers who want to bring about the downfall of America!
Stop it. Just stop it.
It disgusts me how easily people are blinded by their preferred camp. Both major parties(and their associated platforms) have major problems. Pretending otherwise is foolish, but it seems that that's just what people want to do. It's especially amusing when we have repeats of previous incidents that garner the same response from opposite sites. Clinton lies about blowjob? IMPEACH!(if "Right"), FORGIVE!(if "Left"). Bush lies about WMDs? CONDEMN!(if "Left"), IGNORE!(if "Right"). Sound similar? They are! What happened to lying itself being bad? Why won't people admit that their own side can fuck up too?
It doesn't matter which side you claim to be on. Evaluate people based on what they do, not what views they pay lip service to. If you do otherwise, you're just being a sheep.
And for the love of all that is good and right in the world, come up with some new insults while you're at it!
Visit the
How hard would it be to hack up a cash register to work as a voting machine, complete with e-reporting to the vote counting center and printing of a hardcopy receipt in duplicate, one for the backup ballot box and one for the customer?
.
You could revel in your contribution to democracy with the sound of the cha-ching!
--
"Every time a bell rings, a founding father gets his wings."
I live in Mississippi, where they're still untangling a mess made by malfunctioning electronic voting machines that do have a paper reciept deposited in lock boxes. As just an example of things that can still go wrong:
-Some poll workers didn't put reciepts in lock boxes.
-Some poll workers decided to "manually enter" data from back-up paper ballots once they got the machines working.
-Some reciepts/machines did not make it back to the main office until two days after elections.
-State law requires initials on paper reciepts. Some unititaled ones were counted anyway.
And before you come down too hard on Bush, it's the Dems who are benefiting here. From a developer standpoint it is clear to me that the problem is poor system design. Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. What needs to be done is a standard design process: gather requirements, design the system, and implement it. Because state and federal laws come into play, legislatures should be envolved in the whole process and revamp laws where necessary. In the end, it all comes down to poor design.
Like the onion once said:
"Our 8 year nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over" -GWBush
"It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box.... "
Lock box.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Damn, I blew my last mod point earlier today, otherwise you'd get a funny. That's one of the most hilarous spoofs of the right's view of the left I've seen in ages. You forgot to include the line about requiring everybody to participate in homosexual marrages.
I read the internet for the articles.
Wally O'Dell has sworn to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for G.W. next year. That's well beyond the level of the generality you've just expressed.
And no, companies and industries don't give money equally. In some industries they do, in some there's a much more slanted bias. Think the energy industry's giving money to Howard Dean much? Trial lawyers give money to Democrats. HMOs give money to Republicans. For some mysterious reason, there's a very real Republican slant among these vote-counting companies. We're not talking about them covering their bases both ways, we're talking about openly advocating for one party while selling machines that count votes.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
A quick google search pulled up this: [This year]"at least 39 states have considered more than 100 bills that affect immigrants' access to driver's licenses." Some of them moved in favor of granting licenses, while others were against it. The controversy lies in what a drivers license means. As codified in law, many states just use it as permission to use the road. It just happens that so many groups also use them as identification cards or proof of nationality, which is a bad thing.
It seems you are a little late in your discovery.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party.
Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).
It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.
This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.
The only reason 95% of Americans wouldn't like Hitler is because they KNOW about Hitler. If Hitler was starting today, he'd be Bush's campaign director, or Secretary of Defense (since he came from the military initially - and with the Iron Cross to boot).
A large number of Americans supported Hitler in the 1930's - including Prescott Bush, George's grandfather who eventually had his bank taken away from him by the US government for supporting the Nazis.
Bush is at least as much a raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler was (he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying) - and he has much more power and much less control and much less opposition in this country than Hitler did in Germany.
Finally, Bush's cronies, the neocons, are mostly neo-Troskyites. It's amusing to me that the rightwing Christian Zionists are all supporting people who follow other people who were essentially ex-Communists! It doesn't get more bizarre than this.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You may disagree with Gore Vidal, but while being quite inflamatory, he is articulate enough in expressing his position that I don't think it is fair to characterize him as an idiot.
More importantly, not being born in the US does not in any way reduce the value of your insights and opinion on the American system. I was born in NZ, and have lived in several other countries since then. I can assure you that I know a lot more about the US constitution and current government than the average native, and seeing how things work in other countries provides additional insight into the best and worst aspects of different governments and forms of government.
I have always believed, and continue to believe that the US is the best country in the world to live in, but lately the margin is getting smaller and smaller (IMHO).
So you are telling me that the majority of newspapers -- which are municipal, county, and regional publications -- are liberal? It goes to follow, then, that massively-syndicated columnists like Dear Abby are also liberal. Does this mean that staunch conservatives in your strange corner of reality read the The New York Times for their daily dose of news?
========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
If you don't believe that the U.S. is a now a dictatorship and
:
are not operating under Plan G, after you read this, you WILL believe
the U.S. is a dictatorship and implement Plan G:
Despots in the Whitehouse
We are the patriots
How is it possible for the US to engage in
wars without the consensus of a large part of
the American people? Gore Vidal places the
question within a historical perspective that
reveals the remarkable foresight of Benjamin
Franklin
I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those
who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity--Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against
what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.
But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last
century--and I lived through three-quarters of it--we still
held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of
Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once
believed that I would see a great part of the nation--of we
the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of
war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an
arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting
wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the
unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of
the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.
During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard.
Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam,
replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us
sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to
fulfill.
So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame
certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the
government from presidency to Congress to, most
ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the
means have always been there. It took the higher greed
and other interests to make this coup d'Ttat work.
It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future
most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the
Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the
first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was
dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had
prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement
that most school history books omit his key words.
Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution
despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might,
he said, provide good government in the short term. "There
is no form of government but what may be a blessing to
the people if well administered, and I believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a course of years,
and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done
before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to
need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly
ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father
at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently
by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush
Administration. Think, finally, of the electoral college, a piece
of dubious, antidemocratic machinery that Franklin
doubtless saw as a source of deepest corruption and
subsequent mischief for the Republic, as happened not only
in 1876 but in 2000.
Frankli
you mean the ones owned by giant corporations? Like general Electric for instance? G.E. being a major defence contractor is sure to hire a bunch of pacifist lefties for their news operation because that would help their bottom line, right? I mean just look at the hard in dpeth questioning Bush got during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. The liberal media was out there all the time questioning whether Iraq had WMDs and whether they had ties to terrorists etc. Not.
We do, of course, have two American citizens (Padilla and Hamdi) declared as enemy combatants kept in Naval brigs, not charged with any crimes, not allowed access to lawyers, not allowed the right to remain silent, held indefinitely by fiat of W alone. But you're right, they're not at Gitmo. They're here in the US.
Nobody ever seems to get this. I have a few friends (quite liberal) in media, mostly in entertainment (although this should apply to all facets). Nothing will ever make it to press without approval from the 'top 10%' as you put it.
All I can hope for is that all of the people who are yelling about how evil Bush is get out and vote next November. If every person here on Slashdot votes next year we'll get him out for good. And if the guy we vote in sucks then lets vote him out as well and keep voting them out until they get the message that THEY work for US.
"Terminate?"
"Terminate... with extreme prejudice"
There are strong parallels between early Hitler and the current Bush. I'm not saying that Bush is or is going to be as bad as Hitler. The big difference to my mind is that Hitler served in the trenches during the WWI, Bush hid in Texas during Vietnam. If you cannot see the danger in :-
the new laws like the Patriot Act,
treating POWs as examples, Guantanemo Bay,
the use of no-bid contracts by the executive,
the new people employed to spy on Americans,
the increased control exerted over the military,
the attempts to obilterate any dissent,
the new selective service jobs,
then feel free to read what Hitler was doing after his first election. I take it you have the books you so freely ask others to read?
Bush got rid of two dictatorships, I assume you mean Afghanistan and Iraq. My politcal knowledge is limited but I do not think Afghanistan was a dictatorship, no single leader you see. Also, Saddam is not accounted for, his dictatorship is seemingly gone.
Why did the US invade these countries? We were after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and WMD in Iraq. 100% failure so far. Silly me I was forgetting the world is rid of two dictatorships.
Now I see you're anger when people compare Bush to Hitler. Hitler could plan a decent shock and awe, I mean blitzakrieg, campaign. Bush couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
The EFF is running an action alert on the Voter confidence and Increased Accessability act of 2003 which mandates public review of the machines (i.e. opening the source for review) and including paper recipts for recounts. U.S. Citizens can go here to submit a letter to your congressional rep.
What's a few minutes of your time for democracy?
Maybe I'm new here, but I'm really failing to see the problem...
Though I am sure they do just what is necessary to not let you die.....
Half of his time he spent in Europe tough....
Actually those numbers, even though they look nice, don't paint an accureate picture.
Once people loose their unemployment benefits they also fall out of the statistic, so in essence it could just mean there are no further job losses, but not necessarily the creation of new ones.
Likewise, when the numbers were climbing, they were also understating.
In comparision: In Germany for example anybody who is without a job and because of this is on any kind of welfare is going to be counted in the stats, thus the numbers in Germany for example, tend to be higher.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Now you're just trolling. If Slashdot is a "liberal" blog, you have a twisted idea of Liberal.
I'm suprised there are so many ultra-conservative, love it or leave it, our president - right or wrong, types on here. It'd make me say that Slashdot had been invaded by Ditto-heads.
It is very on-topic that these Electronic Voting proponents are connected to the Republicans. The Republicans who many people believe both cheated and unfairly took advantage of errors in the Florida election. The fact that these companies are very obviously Republican supporters, and that they have donated to the Republicans, goes together with the apparent corruption in that party and suggests that perhaps some of the insecurity of the electronic voting platforms (and the reason it's not generated a lot more noise in the government) is intentional.
The fact is that these companies publicly support the Republicans, and that the Republicans are the largest proponents of using these machines. The conclusions are your own, but an article that mention how one political party seems to be embracing flawed technology (which has been discussed here) seems on-topic.
Idiocy: The swift, wholly uneducated dismissal of that which is above one.
Look, you may disagree with him, but Gore Vidal is one of the country's foremost writers and public intellectuals. He's been writing and publishing a sustained and articulate critique of the current directions of American political leadership -- from a decidedly patriotic, and small-r republican, perspective -- for decades. He was one of the most prominent intellectuals in this nation before I was born. Disagree with him all you like, but calling him an "idiot" like that betrays an incredible depth of ignorance.
Gore Vidal is related (albeit distantly) to Al Gore. Doesn't this sound like sour grapes to you? Plus, he's got a new book out so he's probably going after some free publicity. The new book looks pretty good, though, I must say.
Amazing magic tricks