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Can America Trust Electronic Voting?
A anonymous reader writes: "The Sacramento Bee wrote an excellent article about the issues surrounding electronic voting. It was written by the Yolo County clerk/recorder and a professor of law at UC Davis. They quote sources such as Peter G. Neumann and Diebold's president Walden O'Dell."
... But the only e-voting situation I would trust would be an open source one. Even with paper reciepts, there's still an unprecidented oppourtunity for fraud.
No.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
Maybe I'll be a little 'off-topic' but I would like to add some reflexion to this article.
E-Voting and its problems are a clear example of what is happening: we are giving to our computers and networks more and more 'power' over our own lives. This wouldn't be a problem if security was some exact science.
We still have big problems with computer security and while we didn't fix them yet (anyway can we really fix them ?) the overall 'value' of the data that goes through our networks is fast increasing.
This, I think, will be even worse in the near future because the software, systems and networks we use will be more and more complex and it will be harder and harder to maintain a good level of security on them.
You could argue that the problems exposed in the article are not related to security. I would say 'not yet'.
But something really interesting is said: "These machines leave no 'paper trail,' that is, no voter-verifiable record allowing a retrospective audit of the votes recorded as cast for each candidate or ballot proposition.".
Everything in these system is 'virtual'. It makes it easier to loose, to replicate (to steal) or to alter information. I'm quite afraid about that.
Maybe the E-Voting system is not connected to Internet, which increase security of course, but maybe one day it will...
Iraq: war to save the U
at least not until proper and proven security measures have been put in place and that there is at least a paper trail to follow in the event that the votes are tampered with (a.k.a. Diebold).
The problem is not the technique, the problem is the fraudulous mentality of the management of these companies...
Like the last time? Summer 200? Excuse me, but I think it doesn't mean anything whether the machines work correctly - American votes are less democratic and true than the ones in China... No matter whether you get a receipt or not... Hail to the Banana Republic of North America!
Can America trust regular punchcard voting? Didn't Florida teach us anything in 2000?
Sigs are for losers
... for their next election, which seems to be the best option to me. Voter gets a piece of paper (anonymous) which records his/her vote. The slip has to be left at the polling station in a sealed container, and in the event of "it screwed up", the slips get counted...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
After the Florida shennanigans, which one of us trusts the current voting systems anymore?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Who cares about who's leading the country anyway, as long as he makes you feel proud or something...
Just think of world politics as some kind of football championship.
To hopefully fixing this problem. This week, the state mandated that all voting machines print a human-verifiable paper ballot. This is good, but the regulation is supposed to take effect in 2006.
While it's a step in the right direction, it's also ridiculous. A voting technology that is unacceptable in 2006 is also unacceptable today. I certainly hope they push up the deadline to before the 2004 election. There's plenty of time to fix it by then.
If you live in California, please bug the appropriate government officials about this.
To Slahsdot;
Considering the current administration's track record on accountability and conflict of interest, it wouldn't surprise me if Kellogg, Brown and Root were awarded the e-voting contract as a 'security' measure. Forget a paper trail, those can be dangerous to national security.
George Orwell
Frankly, I am not as concerned about electronic voting as I am getting Americans to actually vote in the first place.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Yes, if the greedy corporations are removed from the process, and an OSS solution based on an openly auditable platform like Linux or FreeBSD is adopted. We are not too far away from this eventuality.
In the last election, Bush won by fraud.
Actually, I don't think he did. Evidence, por favor.
Can America trust its voters (and those they vote for)? A quick look at some of the people in office, and one starts to wonder...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
it would be illegal.
No. Next question.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I think its pretty clear that there is a lack of faith in e-voting and also some mistrust of traditional forms of voting after Florida. I therefore propose that all voting be scrapped and the adoption a Supreme Leader to rule. Since its my idea I will be the first leader. My aides will be dilligently selected for their intelligence and integrity, if that just happens to be my old mates then so be it.
Obviously leadership is a great honour and a burden which I feel I can best fulfill if resident in a luxurious villa on a tropical island paradise surrounded by nubile native girls, with regular entertainment provided by Britney, Beyonce, Kylie etc. and a large collection of expensive playthings (Gulfstreams, Ferraris, Merc's, helicopters, speedboats etc).
My first order of business will the public execution of the SCO board of directors in a very public and painful manner.
And remember, we all love the Leader and are dedicated to his happiness.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Ditto, what he said..
It was Gore who attempted to win by fraud, and failed.
Granted, I'm not going to vote electronically without an open source system in place, but this _really_ isn't that hard.
As an example implementation.. When you register, you get a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on it. It has two 32-bit numbers on the card, with your name, picture, and address. One of the 32-bit numbers is your personal identifier, and the other is your signing key.
Now, for the ballot, every candidate also has a 32-bit number. When you want to vote for your candidate, you swipe your card, then select the candidate on the screen. Your pid is appended to the end of the candidates pid, and then it is hashed with your signing key. At the same time, a publicly available signing key from the government signs the 32-bit pid of the candidate. Two slips are then printed out, both with one barcode indicating your hash of the candidate + your pid, and a barcode with the hash of the government signed pid.
One slip is given to the poll people, and you keep the other. Also, a copy of the slip is sent over some network to the vote counting place. If you doubt that your vote has been tallied correctly, all you have to do is search for your signed 64-bit candidate + personal id in some government database.
Paper trail. Verifiability. Randomness. What am I missing? Was t overly complicated? Input, please!
P.S.: Want to vote for someone not on the ballot? Do a write in. They're rare enough that counting by hand isn't an issue.
This statement is false.
The only way to be sure that your vote is recorded is by looking it up in a ledger somewhere or a newspaper that prints it or on a website that lists it.
Anything else is (and has been and will continue to be) subject to fraud.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
that we should have a vote on it ...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
According to all the "media recounts", Bush won the election unless you counted the votes against methods prescribed by Florida law -- much like Johnny Carson's Carnac. I don't know if you understand US Presidential Elections, but our President is elected by the Electoral College not by the popular vote. Bush won by 2% in the Electoral College.
Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA. The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What irony!
must be humor....or are some people this stupid!?
What is, a 3rd grade history report, Alex.
Most people are missing the point. An election must not only be fair but it must be seen to be fair.
I have no idea why the US has such problems with their voting. In the UK everyone votes on paper..... with a fucking pen. (No dimpled chads crap!) It is counted by hand and is never out by more than 10 votes in 30,000. We also have the result by the early hours of the morning.
The point is if you want to go and count all the votes yourself you can. The whole idea of an election is that it is open. For this there must be a paper trail. Why complicate the matter? The other point is that it is secret. Who I vote for is none of anyones bussiness. I would always be nervous with electronic voting for two reasons. I want to know that my vote has really bean counted and I want to know that I am anonymous.
As regards election fraud it is easier to imagine someone messing with an electonic count than someone turning up with a few suitcases of paper and trying to stuff them into a ballot box in fron t of the election officals.
.
"In the last election, Bush won by fraud"
Bush won by...winning. The same way Clinton, Carter, FDR, etc won: they got enough votes in enough states to win the electoral vote.
"Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy"
Neither of those has anything to do with democracy. Your sentence made no sense. Democracy rolls on the same as before.
"The government is a completely corrupt organization with many of the leaders in it comming from large companies such as the oil industry"
It is much less corrupt than before. The second part of your statement is not true. Only a few oil guys in it, and so what?
"America cannot trust electronic voting because it cannot even trust it's current government"
But it does trust the current administration. Next time think about what you say.
A system is only as secure as it's weakest link. Voting is mostly secure because everything is done physically. And to change the votes all over america physically would be impossible. But if you could controll votes from your home computer, you are more dangerous. I dont believe that electronic voting should be used unless it's on a closed network, off of the internet. Even then there is a risk that somebody could tamper with the process.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
I've *always* thought that was a feature.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It is real history. Check it out sometime, and don't rely on press releases from Terry McAuliffe or the latest novel form Michael Moore as fact.
There are a lot of sore losers. The radical left felt it had a divine right to continue rule when Clinton's 8 years are up. They are shocked SHOCKED that they lost the election and can't handle reality. So they just make stuff up, anything but face the fact that they lost.
I think that the voting companies will eventually lobby to regulate out any scrutiny of their process. Will every attempt to investigate the security of such systems by an average citizen be dealt with as a "hacking" crime eventually? With today's fear of the "terrorists" exploiting things, the time for this type of legislation is ripe.
How's the weather in Ontario? Is rent cheap?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Next!
"Bush is by far the worst president ever appointed by the Supreme Court. --maddox.xmission.com "
Whether or not he is the worst president, you are accepting someone's lie as fact. The Supreme Court did not appoint him. The Electoral College did, however, through the usual process of election.
All the Supreme Court did was refuse to bother with a frivolous appeal filed with them. They in effect did nothing and let the real results of the election stand.
In Diebold America, the vote rocks YOU!
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
"But thats not the case - the recounted ballots showed that Gore took Florida"
No, Gore lost all the recounts, including the one he demanded of the Supreme Court.
The only way you can get Gore to come out winning is to count ballots without Gore votes as being Gore votes. This is the only recount that would have had Gore win, and it is one of the hypothetical scenarios.
"It is only because a smaller portion of the total votes were counted that Bush 'won'."
He won. No quotes needed. Get over it. And he won because the actual votes were counted in Florida.
Why can we trust computers to handle hundreds of billions of dollars in international business, but not voting?
The problem in the equation is the involvment of our government, who have failed to earn our trust in the last few decades, not the concept of electronic voting itself.
-Z
how about we vote for which ballot system to use?
It's all rigged...
Hi all,
With more and more surprise I am reading all those articles about how the USA (nr 1 in IT in the world) is struggling with E-voting.
I am 30 years old now, the first time I voted was when I was 19 or 20 yo (first chance), and that was electronical. I have never casted my ballot on paper, ever. At the time, we are talking 1990, about 50% of The Netherlands was using voting machines, a few years after it was 100%. The first machines were installed in 1985.
Agreed, no fancy touch screens (how would that work?? 15 parties, up to 40 candidates per party - that can never be shown on one normal touch screen, thereby giving an advance to the party first shown of course), though a reliable, robust, and secure way to vote it is. It uses a panel with a huge number of buttons (one per candidate), a display to tell which candidate you are about to vote for, and a "Vote" button. That's all. No Internet connection (what is that good for other than allowing hackerse to access the machine). Never, ever has there been a dispute on voting security with these machines.They work, everyone is happy with it, and they are a great improvement on the paper voting.
USA is making a true fool of themselves.
How come they can not even design something simple (not easy, but simple as in few functions needed) as a voting machine? How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot? And their computer based aeroplanes? And more computer software which has to be tamper-proof and absolutely safe.
Electronic voting is not rocket science. Ask the Europeans about it, there the technology can be bought in from the shelf. Not fancy, though tested in several elections and found good.
Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held.
Wouter.
"Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held"
You are right. The Mexican system is the best example in the world in how to run things.
"How many do you think would turn back if they saw how much people born here took it for granted and, in doing so help create the corruption they always complain about?"
None would turn back, because of the free handouts they get from the wasteful American welfare system which subsidizes laziness. They can't wait to get here and laze on the public hammock.
Bush won he was ahead in every count.After the Supreme Court shot down the unconstitutional actions of the partisan Florida Court Bush was certified as the winner of Florida's electoral votes.All unofficial recounts conducted by Journalists after this showed Bush won any legal way you counted it.
I didn't vote for Bush but he won "We all know that".
The Florida election was a marketer's dream. A good marketer know that the way to score big is to find a problem, then make it five times worse than it is. Finally, it doesn't matter if the product you sell doesn't really do anything.
As for evoting, why can't we just let the technology evolve? For that matter, the technology should be designed anticipating evolution. For example, maybe the software should not be bought from the same company selling the hardware...keep the programs independent.
I apologize in advance to any system architect reading this, but this vision we have a perfect designed voting system is bunk. It takes several iterations and gradual improvements to get it right.
The first post in this thread mention OSS for the voting systems. OSS is more open to gradual improvements, and it makes it easier for the same set of programs to be run on different machines.
Evolution will happen, the evolution in the closed system will happen by voting districts losing all of their ballots. The Florida fiasco was just part of the evolution.
if Bush were an experienced techie Barbara Boxer and Tom Dashcle would be screaming that Bush is in bed with the computer industry, and yet somehow life goes on...
Because Clinton had no real job or real skills, the complaint about him was limited to bedroom behavior, period.
Then again, I've never had trouble filling out my absentee ballots in WA. You just draw a line to complete an arrow next to the option you want to vote for.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
"Perhaps we can work on replacing the US Supreme Court with machines? Or, at least, with non-partisan judges "
If we had done that, all 9 judges would have rejected Gore's frivolous attempt to overthrow the election, rather than a slim majority of 5.
"That is really Step #1 to getting a fair, balanced presidential election in 2004 - ridding the Supreme Court of the current judges, "
Only get rid of the 4 who sided with Gore and against the Constitution and the democratic process of the United States.
We dont live in a democracy though. The vote of the people is only considered by the electoral college.
The electoral college votes are really the only ones that matter. They dont necessarily have to "agree" with the peoples choice.
A true democracy elects its officials by the people. We, do not do that.
The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military.
Where has the ideal "not guilty until proven otherwise" gone? In Guatama Bay (or whatever it's called) many people are held for years without having even talked to a lawyer, let alone having had a process.
And you know why? The USA DOES NOT HAVE A CASE! NO PROOF! NOTHING!
This is simply Evil. Bush being Darth Vader of the Evil Empire. Synonyms for President of the USA.
Wouter.
"An independent subsequent examination determined that the official margin of victory was accurate to within a few hundred votes under the voting laws in place at the time of the election"
... and count them all as Gore votes, then Gore wins. This is how they keep saying "Gore really won" - they count such ballots.
However, if you take the following:
- ballots where idiots chose multiple Presidents
- voteless ballots that Democratic Party vote counters turned into Gore votes after the fact by removing the chads.
- ballots with no votes or marks, period.
- ballots with no votes, but with stray pen marks.
NO!!!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Funny, substitute "President Clinton" in there, and I think it reads the same...
I read an article somewhere that the prototypes for it are all windows based. If that is the case, then no. You cannot trust it.
"And you know why? The USA DOES NOT HAVE A CASE! NO PROOF! NOTHING!
The prisoners were caught in the act of fighting in a terrorist army.
"This is simply Evil. Bush being Darth Vader of the Evil Empire. Synonyms for President of the USA."
The US is anti-imperialist. you have everything backwards. You probably cried when the Death Star blew up in "Star Wars".
The poster makes unfactual claims and shows no understanding of the US Constituition."popular vote" is meaningless in an American Presidential election-read our Constitution.
Bush(41) appointee Souter voted against the majority.
Bush won all unofficial post-election recounts.
...a spoiled, stupid child with a lot of weapons.
if you really want to know what happened in the florida election, read the first chapter of michael moore's "stupid white men". it explains exactly how jeb bush and katherine harris rigged the system to deny a large number of blacks the right to vote, thereby giving george bush a chance at winning.
they planned their scheme two years in advance, it's all there in print, fully explained and undeniable.
America's current president was placed in office by a series of criminal acts--and you just wait until the CIA and NSA get turned loose on whatever e-voting system you can come up with--it will another laughable example of why it's so dangerous for a spoiled, retarded child to have a gun...and proclaim itself a "leader of the free world"..."a beacon of justice and liberty".
"-------- Support Dennis Kucinich for President!!!! http://www.kucinich.us"
He should be elected President of North Korea. Based on his extremist and anti-democratic proposals (such as stalinized central-conrolled health care, and his strong support of Saddam Hussein), it would be a pretty smooth transition from North Korea's current government.
America won't miss him: he represents the interest about 1.3% of Americans right now.
Bush is a cheating hack and you are afraid to admit it.
No, I prefer the facts.
Bush won the Florida vote, which pushed him over the top for the national electoral totals. Bush did file an appeal, but it was not frivolous: he appealed a Florida court decision that basically said "Gore won here even those he got fewer votes than Bush".
"combined with chasing black folk away from polls"
That is an urban legend. Sounds really outrageous, so it keeps going. Yet it never happened. Gore and the NAACP would not touch this with a ten-foot pole, since it never happened. If it had, they would have rightly run with it.
"President Bush is clearly following the Joseph Stalin elctoral model"
Yet it is your man Kucinich who is proposing stalinist policies.
"It doesn't matter who votes so much as who does the counting"
No matter who counted it, gore lost.
Why not.... "\."?
Because that's Backslashdot
You are right. America is not a Democracy but a Constitutional Representative Republic. We just like to call ourselves a "Democracy".
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"The fact that they had delayed the counting thereby CREATING the ...
Big deal. They delayed the 4th (or was it 5th? vote count. The election was long over by then, Gore had fewer votes, verified repeatedly.).
Delaying yet another recount mattered little.
Gore treated the election like a dice game: roll again and again until he got those lucky 7's. Sorry, a national election is not Vegas. Nor is it golf. You don't get mulligans.
Thank you for making my point about the foes of President Bush.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I wish we were as concerned about who we vote for as we are how we vote for them.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
I forget what 8 was for.
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
Don't sweat this. The Gore side lost, and these few just can't get over it. They can't change the fact that their guy lost election. They are getting desparate sometimes, but their case is thin: they are using Democratic Party cheerleader Michael Moore as a source of supposedly convincing information. (It's like going to Rush for an unbiased look at Clinton). They have no concept of objectivity or fact: it is all a matter of spinning a web of lies.
Short answer: No
Long answer: NO!
Pretty Please?
By the way, if you say No, I'll become Leader of the Disloyal Opposition. And will do my best to visit upon you an appropriate Fall From Power. If necessary, I'll tell the rulers of Iraq that you possess Weapons of Mass Destruction.
"No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close"
No, the government should not keep secrets. Let it all out. if ABC censors this hot news, it will come out on Drudge or some similar place.
Yet, the 2000 election worked.
There is no way that China is more democratic, or even remotely close, to the USA. Unless you are referring to the Republic of China, which is a democracy and not run by the imperialist thugs in Beijing who think nothing of killing 5 million a year during agriculture reform.
A crooked election should be declare invalid.
I can wait for the true results to see the fate of the Republic.
gewg_
Next question?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
The butterfly ballot was legal, and quite easy to use. It was put in place by Democrats, not Jeb.
You don't have to wait for the true results of that election: we knew them in November of 2000.
"There were actually two decisions by the Supreme Court. One was 5-4, the one everybody talks about. The really important one was 7-2"
In both of these, you had "Bush 41" appointees voting on both sides. So much for another lie by the sore-loser camp about Bush 41 controlling them.
The sore-loser Democrats who claim this want us to conveniently ignore the history of Supreme Court appointees going against the ideology of their President.
If anything, it is more disturbing that justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg made such unconstititional decisions in this. That is what should matter: does the Justice's decision fit the Constitition, or not? Regardless of who appointed them.
This whole discussion is silly. We have trusted ATMs with our money for 30 years. The voting process is exactly the same. 1) Put in your card 2)Put in your PIN 3) Vote 4) Get your receipt 5) Get your card.
In fact, I suggested to Bank of America that they make their ATMs available on Election Day. They would only have to add a voting function. Cost less than the government and would be a great service to the community. Very simple for them to do. The government just has to issue cards.
In terms of security, every ATM is equiped with a camera to be used to prosecute fraud. We wouldn't even need those people at voting places anymore! Like they do any good now?!
"In fact, I suggested to Bank of America that they make their ATMs available on Election Day. They would only have to add a voting function. "
Would this be only for Bank of America, and not a widespread national thing? So you can only vote if you live in or drive to one of the few cities with Bank of America ATM's?
"And what's so great about paper audit trails?"
I once walked out of a toilet stall (or should you call it a Fecal Voting Booth with which you register your opinion of your least favorite candiate) with a paper audit trail stuck to my shoe. How embarassing.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
We Americans do not trust our government. We are very proud of that. It's an intentional act of will, and we believe in it more strongly than just about any other founding principle of our nation. Our very government is constructed in distrust of itself. We are taught by our parents, by our media, and by our government-run schools that government is a necessary evil and not to trust it.
But in spite of that, no, because of our distrust of our own government, we refuse to yield our national sovereignty to the U.N. or anyone else.
The question of whether we should use electronic voting or more laborious hand-counting also devolves to our basic distrust of government. Will it help or hurt? That's the question.
Saying we should hand-count because we don't trust the government misses the point entirely.
sigs, as if you care.
Maybe your idea of a shining example is different than mine... and the US had much better reasons for that little atrocity than they had for invading Iraq.
As an aside: Why do people think what happened to Jessica Lynch was terrible but have no problem with Guantanamo bay?
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties.
You forgot the rest:
"Or be an innocent bystander that the government beleives is a terrorist conspirator."
Of course, that last one is a little out of an individual's hands.
(No, I don't know that there are any innocent bystanders in there, but without the notion of a fair trial, I don't know that there aren't either.)
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
"We Americans do not trust our government. We are very proud of that"
You should trust the government. Trusting government has done Europe wonders. Benito, Vladimir, and Adolf only knew what was best.
President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Mkay.... that says it all.
NO SIG
It doesn't require a PhD to understand how the voting system has always worked, yet you will need one or at least a very deep knowledge of the inner workings of a computer to understand how will voting work, if you'll support E-voting without human readable paper ballots as a proof of your vote.
:
1 01 10010000100000010110010100010101010011
How can this be good , considering the average education level of ANY population ? Would you rather understand if a vote is NO/YES by looking at a cross, or decode a binary code like 0 and 1 ? A cross on "YES" means "YES" and there is no argument over that. But is no cross on the computer, there's a 0 or a 1. What does 0 or 1 mean ? It depends : while YES is YES zero may mean YES or NO depending on what you think 0 or 1 means.
That only adds a layer of confusion that is not needed. You know who's having this same problem ? Electronic Librarians : they have electronics book nobody but a computer can read because all the words are composed by a combination of 0s and 1s. If the computers break down, you'll have to do translation by hand.
Here's an example
01001001001000000111011001101111011101000110010
Try reading that. Explain me wtf it means. Too hard ? That means "I voted YES" in binary code. Try the trick yourself this place.
Now it takes a computer geek to understand that binary and even a geek would have an hard time translating it by hand. Also it takes -seconds- to any good computer user to transform that sequence into another binary sequence that says "I voted NO" and there would be -no trail- absolutely -no proof- that the change happened, because there is no paper trail.
Also, a good computer user can turn 100 Million votes from YES to NO in a matter of -seconds-. Try doing that on 100 million paper votes, it would take a long long while and it probably would require to corrupt a lot of people, not only one computer user.
As hackers have proved one bazillion times, absolutely secure computer system do NOT exists and will NEVER exist ; some people is spending a lot of money into tricking your computer to receive spam e-mail, regardless of all the security measures you can buy ; but at worst you'll receive some spam, no big deal.
Now imagine what some motivated people would do to turn the votes of an entire -country- from a YES to a NO in a matter of seconds. They would do anything and everything, the prize is enormous : that of ruling an entire country.
I fear the day our will we be reduced to 0 and 1.
No, there were more reasons to retliate against Saddam's aggression than there were to drop the bombs on Japan.
"Why do people think what happened to Jessica Lynch was terrible but have no problem with Guantanamo bay? "
She was innocent. The members of Al Quada and Taliban were not. Incarcerating violent thugs is no problem at all. They were even given an ample length of time in which to surrender, but did not.
This touches the main point of the entire discussion: Smart bombs, computer controlled planes, and such are fully verifiable, whereas the current generation of US electronic voting machines are not. And no amount of testing before the fact can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the result of a vote actually follows the will of the voters.
Also, the issue is not the creation of a trusted voting system, it's the drive for a fully automated no paper-trail corporately-sponsored electronic voting solution. There are far too many people involved who might be pushing a personal agenda to really accomplish this.
Q: Can America Trust Electronic Voting?
A: NO.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Are you suggesting that US Soldiers are anally raping Gitmo prisoners? By the accounts I have read, most leave Gitmo heavier than when they arrived. If we were behaving like our terrorist foes, they would meet a fate not unlike Daniel Pearl.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Feel free to ignore the news, but don't censor it for those who want to know what is going on.
As for as problems with different closing times goes, why even have that at all? Have a single 18 or so hour voting time that is the same across the country.
There are actually certain rights that the prisoners in Gitmo have that the average citizen in Soviet colonial Cuba does (I know, the Soviet Union is gone, but the governor they put in place is still there).
I think the Bush adminstration is acting the way it is is not to railroad anyone, but to ensure actual justice. When you have defense attorneys who routinely lie in court to get someone off, justice does not occur. The most fair trial is one where the guilty is convicted and the innocent go free.
Shocking as it may be, the US Constitution protects only US citizens and legal residents. What happens to others is a matter of foreign policy goals and international agreements, which may or may not coincide with the consitution, but are certainly not required to.
Government IS the problem.
The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA.
:-(
As much as I dislike the UN, sadly you are wrong
Article VI of the US Constitution:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Government IS the problem.
Instead of spending millions and millions to build new machines and install them all over and teach everyone how to use them, why not just use the existing, proven, tested, installed, and WORKING infrastructure?
Just re-issue all social security card as credit card sized with magnetic stripes instead of just paper. Plug yours in any ATM on election day, vote on the screen, done. Sure it'd need software side work to switch the ATMs over for one day every 4 years when a specific card type is inserted but compared to what, building all new custom hardware? Plus installing it, maintaining it, and storing it when not in use?
And which is easier to gain corrupt control over, a couple of companies building new hardware, or every major bank in the USA?
Network security? The network's already been in use for secure transactions for over a decade. I doubt it has any major issues left, and it's constantly watched for problems already.
"Oh but what if someone steals my card?" Well what if someone steals your existing card now? It's still a problem, but it's not as common as people think. How many times have you lost your license? Major credit card? I think I lost my wallet once, when I was 16. Haven't since. Same procedure for credit cards, call, cancel, get a new one. There's too many people voting even in this apathetic country for it to be worth mugging people for their cards the night before an election.
"What about pin numbers so we know the right person has it?" Well first they'd have to steal your card, which isn't that common. I suppose you could issue random pins with the cards but people would likely forget it for a card you use once every 4 years or so. If you use something as common as birthdate or zipcode it'll be easy for anyone who's stolen the card to guess anyway. So why bother? Go with ease of use. You'd get 1000x as many "I forgot my PIN" calls than "I lost my card" calls.
Half the reason people don't vote is because it's a pain in the ass to go down there if you've got work and stuff to do on election day. If you could just pop your social security card into any ATM you pass and vote in 2 minutes, I'd bet alot more people would be voting.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
It's just that you were never meant to find out that it didn't work. The leaked memos for instance were an unintended setback. But it's not like it mattered much. Hell, the major media won't even touch the story.
can america trust americans? perhaps on a gentler note can america trust its politicians to assume the honesty of even british or german politics?
Wanted : A Signature.
Since its my idea I will be the first leader.
I call next!
In a Canadian federal election, there is only one list of candidates on the ballot: you simply need to choose your Member of Parliament (MP). In a provincial election, you simply pick your area's representative to the Legislative Assembly (MLA). Municipal elections involve the selection of Board of Education trustees, councillors, and a mayor, but even these pale in comparison to the complexity of a US ballot.
In a typical US election, you have something like 15 different offices to vote for on the same ballot because all legislative houses and executives are directly elected: even a large portion of the judiciary is elected in many regions. US elections also have fixed terms of 2, 4 or 6 years and polls at all levels are unified because of that.
US voters may have to pick candidates in categories starting from town council representatives, judges and mayor/town supervisor; county legislators, judges, and executive; state legislators (both houses), judges and governor; to their US Representative, Senator and choice for Presidential ticket, all on one piece of paper.
The reason for these differences is that, in Canada, the federal government agency Elections Canada runs the federal election; they've been doing it for ages, they're good at it, and they have a simple ballot to work with. Provincial counterparts run the separate provincial and municipal elections at different times, since most levels of government in Canada have flexible terms with a maximum term of 5 years or so; it's not possible or desirable to have all polls on the same day. In the US, all elections are organized at the county level under 'guidelines' set out by the state / federal Constitutions. Often this means that your neighbor will volunteer to run the local polling station. This is admirable and noble, but it does not match the training or organizational capability of an outfit like Elections Canada.
Does that mean the US should adopt a Canadian-style approach to running elections? I don't think so. It's probably not possible given the completely different Constitutional frameworks the countries run on in the area of elections, and the US system's distrust of the central government running its own elections. However it is possible to fix the US system by using common sense techniques to simplify ballot design, using a paper trail, certified public source code, or the dumb terminal approach.
at http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/198
... but how do you know that those choices are actually tabulated? The answer: trust the companies that make the machines. But that attitude, if it ever made sense, has been shown to be not just wrong but foolhardy in the past several months... "
Electronic Voting Debacle
Grave concerns over the security of electronic voting machines in the United States means the heart of American democracy is at risk.
[snip]
"...The Big Issue: Security
So, how do you know that the machine actually counted your vote? You don't! Oh sure, you may see a screen at the end of the process that shows you what you selected
ie: Australia has full preferential voting. You can say I vote for A. If A loses, my vote transfers to B. Then E. Then back to C. And finally, I vote for D, but hopefully someone else has won by then
Recounting that, and redirecting those preferential flows is a PITA. I've done poll clerking, and counting. Its long.
I believe America has a x marks the spot first past the post system. Electronic counting there not so important or diffucult.
Yay me!
While dozens of /. readers are busy spinning theories, touting the presumed superiority of open-source voting systems, and arguing over the relative advantages and/or disadvantages of various electronic voting schemes, we seem to have forgotten to ask ourselves a simple question: what's the point of it all? Why not just use paper ballots?
The answer is, to a great extent, impatience. We've been conditioned to think that it's important to know the election results before we go to bed on election night. It isn't. TV networks cover elections with the maximum of hoopla they can muster: pundits, talking heads talking to pundits, statistics, counts, partial results, and forecasts based on partial results. All of it meaningless to the democratic process. Feeding this hoopla is one of the reasons that we have electronic systems - election officials decided to spend money on unproven systems simply to get results faster to keep reporters off their necks.
What's wrong with paper ballots, marked with a rubber stamp and counted by volunteers supervised by other volunteers? Nothing.
There have been a lot of issues with how the votes were "officially" counted and what those "official" numbers are.
The other issue is how Florida's electoral votes are cast. I believe they all go to whomever wins the popular vote in Florida. That is why you see 25 votes for Bush there, but none for Gore, despite their numbers being only about 500 votes apart out of over 5 million votes cast between them.
Which is why the debate was so intense at the time.
There were a number of instances that seemed to indicate that people who would probably vote for Gore were being prevented from voting.
Then the USSC got involved a lot sooner than it had to. This was purely a Florida issue and up to Florida to resolve.
Of course, given that Bush's brother was the government in Florida, the results would probably have been the same.
But not necessarily.
Do you want to hear some valid complaints about him?
#1. Yellow cake
#2. No "WMD's" have been found despite claims that we knew they were there.
And so on.
I am a bit confused, after reading this thread, am I right in thinking that US elections are anonymous? I'm pretty sure that here in the UK, elections are not anonymous, the results are made public after a number of years so you can find out who voted what. Correct me if i'm wrong...
Yeah, too bad so much of this vitrol is true. Take a look at this article on ZDnet. Its about that guy at Intel that got arrested, and the "evidence" that let the US hold him for over a month in solitary confinement (check the date on the article and the date in the story). He was a Citizen of The United States. A citizen. You know, the people who make up this country, live here, and who are guaranteed certain rights such as due process, a speedy trial, and representation? You? Me? Note also the end of the article:
So he's not an isolated case.
According to what was released by the government (who has recently felt an unusual need to hide the truth from its people on a lot of things, such as trials, so its entirely possible they have other charges they're neglecting to let us know about) Mike's crimes were growing a beard after the sept. 11 attacks and visiting China during the same time that a group of other people arrested the year before had visited. Ah, sweet justice.
Did you know that Bush said he doesn't read the newspapers? Yeah, thats right, he "trusts" his advisors to tell him whats worth knowing in the news. These are the same people that brought us nukes in the middle east, magical disappearing WMDs that nobody has found yet, and our current foreign policy of "piss everyone off".
As for Bush's belief in "democracy", he'd rather be a dictator. Out of context? Joking? You decide.
Nobody "underestimates" Bush. The fact is, the poor man is an idiot and a puppet for the people pulling his strings and whispering in his ear who we didn't vote for and who we have no control over. Your examples of Germany and Japan are great ones, too bad they shine brighter than the US right now.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Hello people, here in Brazil we have eletronic voting since 1994, in the last presidents ride back last year, we were able to have the results just about 4 hours from the end of the process.
IMHO the equipment is very good, several enitities got samples to check for its consistency and fail-proof and the equipment are uncrackable.
Obviously, it consists of several security measures around all the process but since Electronic voting started here, the cases of fraud in the election processas are zero.
Hope you have some kind of it soon, it's realy good stuff
The org is on the ball: http://www.verifiedvoting.org
Since 2000, municipal elections here are counted with a mark-sense reader.
Voters get a letter-sized ballot, and they mark their vote with a sharpie. Then, they insert the ballot in a carrier-envelope.
Each ballot has a detachable stub with a sequential serial number, which is initialed by the scrutineer. When the voter returns, he tears-off the stub, and hands it to the scrutineer; this way, everyone can be sure it's the same ballot that was given (instead of a telegram, where you put in a pre-marked ballot, and prove you did it by bringing back the blank ballot).
The ballot is then passed though a mark-sense reader which tallies the counts, and drops into a sealed box, along with the other ballots.
This way, the results are known within seconds when the polls close, AND you STILL HAVE the paper ballots to be recounted, if the need arises.
The machines are not open-source, but starting tomorrow, I am pursuing the matter with the authorities.
Why not turn to Internet2 for this type of highly sensitive application? It would eliminate the general public and most hacker types from interfering with the voting process.
NO FUCKING SHIT!
NO GODDAMMED FUCKING SHIT ON A STICK!!!
Do you FUCKING REALIZE the EXTREME TERMINAL STUPIDITY of what you're saying???
Why the fuck do you think that VOTING IS SECRET and HAS TO BE SECRET?
It's to frigging MAKE SURE VOTERS AREN'T BOUGHT OR INTIMIDATED into voting for a given candidate!!!
Sheesh! One wonders what goes through the heads of those youths nowadays!!!!
Hell no!
Like other companies get these harebrained ideas that they could make their stuff hackproof, it's not gonna happen.
You could NEVER have voting over the internet!! Well, I wouldn't say never, but not anytime soon.. not until there's a revolution in computer security, anyway.
Most people in charge of these elections know nothing about technology. What's to guarantee us that they'd know if someone hacked the system and skewed votes? They wouldn't.
Unless, of course, you brought in some company to monitor it, but that's not gonna work.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
...and someone asked me if I was ready for electronic voting, I would respond: "The world is not ready for this jelly."
Do we have a treaty that states that the UN can usurp the US Constitution? I haven't looked it up but I don't think that is the case.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Puh-leeze, left-wing sources to bolster left wing insults? Thank GOD people like you will be forever condemned to march in the street and never have any power whatsoever. Drop me a line in 10 years from your cardboard box--
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's to frigging MAKE SURE VOTERS AREN'T BOUGHT OR INTIMIDATED
:P
I'm so glad you chose the word frigging. It shows that you really disaprove of cursing
Lynch was an invading soldier, wasn't she? The people locked up in Guantanamo Bay, many of whom are children, were defending their country from invasion. Now they are locked up without even the rights accorded to them in the Geneva convention, and if Bush gets his way they will die there as well.
What is worse: getting raped after invading somebody's country or being put in front of a firing squad because you defended your own country? Personally I think getting raped is pretty bad, but at least she lived to tell the tale. If Bush has his way there are going to be a bunch of unmarked graves in Cuba soon.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Wonderful what search and replace (with a bit of editing) can do, aint it?
(You need to imagine that this is spoken by an Iraqi.)
Saddam Hussein and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The US does not dictate to Iraq because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Hussein to allow the US to dictate to USA. Iraq does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention those that have attacked or are plotting to attack Iraq or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of the Iraqi Secret Police, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in Iraq and we prove it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Afghanistan and the Lebanon.I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Saddam Hussein's main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Since politicians are known to be tech-savvy enough to take advantage of this...but they would never do that. Here in America, we demand the highest level of integrity before we will elect anyone to office.
Or do we? (laughs nervously as theme from The Twilight Zone plays ominously in the background)
~Knautilus
As much as I dislike the UN, sadly you are wrong :-(
No, he's not. Article VI says that the Constitution, Federal Law and treaties take precedence over state constitutions and laws.
The US Constitution overrules any US law and treaties. In practice, a treaty is considered on an equal footing with US law, so if a new treaty contradicts existing law, the law is considered overruled, and if new law contradicts an existing treaty, the treaty is considered overruled.
Beyond that, I don't think the US has entered into any treaty that says we must do whatever the UN says we must do. If we did, and if the Senate approved the treaty (making it US law, effectively), the courts would probably declare it unconstitutional, and would certainly find unconstitutional any UN mandates that contravened the constitution.
IANAL.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If Bush is reelected, the system was obviously flawed.
I know more than you drink.
On Friday, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich from Ohio requested that the House Judiciary Committee take notice of Diebold's misuse of the DMCA:
From Kucinich's press release:
Write your own Congressman, and ask him or her to call for this hearing!
Are you implying the Palestinians are too stupid to vote? I know Palestinians are stupid, but taking away their vote just isn't right. They should be free to elect any fat Arab they want to lead them to defeat.
-nudicle
Exactly. I'm disappointed that none of the electronic voting schemes so far utilize these advantages. We could have trusted 3rd parties obtaining copies of votes in real-time. Imagine this : the voting machine takes your vote, then transmits copies - one to a reciept machine, and one to a secure repository. The reciept machine and the repository compare data, and if everything matches the receipt machine prints a reciept. Otherwise the discrepency is noticed immediately, and you get the opportunity to recast your vote right away. To comprimise the system, you'd need to control the reciept machine and the voting machine, but the code for the reciept machine would be so simple that it could be made public, and verified by interested citizens.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Do you remember when the U.S. Supreme Court 'ordered' Florida to stop it's recount _immediately_? Remember how the decision was completely along party lines? In my opinion that was totally criminal, and showed how the Republican party did indeed hijack the election. The federal government has NO BUSINESS telling a state government which president to vote for. It has no business telling a state how to run it's election unless that means upholding the constitutional rights of the people, which in this case was clearly not the motivation.
About the U.N. and your comment on the U.S. Consitution - I shall refer you to Article VI of the U.S. Consitution:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
That is, we are bound by the U.S. Consitution to abide by our international aggreements. The U.S. ratified the U.N. charter in 1945 - thus we are constitutionally bound by it. By breaking the U.N. charter, Bush violated our U.S. Constituion - simple as that.
Also comparing this preemptive war on Iraq to WWII is a tremedous insult to the millions who died defending our country and allies in WWII.
That may happen in some parts of the country, but not at the California polls I've worked at. This sort of rhetoric is part of an idea that people seem to have that elections in California are hard to defraud when paper ballots are used, it almost seems to me to be a deliberate misdirection from the electoral risks that are independent of voting machines, or specific to the older paper technologies.
Given that you can walk up and vote as anyone you say you are without any worry that you'll be asked for an ID (in fact asking would be illegal in CA), the last thing I'm worried about is someone leaving a software paper trail of having done election tampering. Much simpler to hire people to vote as dead people, and much less tracable. Buy votes, pay cash. No muss, no fuss.
I'm a nature photographer.
Furthermore, each voting system should have a secret key. On the recipt there should be a hash (ala MD5) of the information and the secret key. A recipt with this hash would be *proof* that a vote was cast, on which machine it was cast, and what you voted for. This way there would be no way for someone to come in later and change votes in the database without that change being evident. Voters could punch in their recipt code into a web interface and have the system automatically check that their vote was cast and counted correctly.
The central votes database would need to record:
- What voting machine cast the vote
- The unique ID of the vote
- What was voted for
Things not recorded in the central votes database:- What time the vote was cast (this would be too easy to tie to who came in and voted when)
- Weather the recipt was printed (If that was in the DB someone could go in and only change votes where there was no proof of what the original vote was for)
- The voting machines secret key (this should be a well guarded secret.)
The recipt should have:- The id of the voting machine used
- The unique ID of the vote
- The MD5 of what was voted for, the uniqe ID, and the secret key
- (Voter Optional) A printout of what the votes were cast
The voting machines would need to disable themselves if for some reason it's printer didn't work. The key to not being able to tamper with the votes is that verification must be possible. Without that, votes could be altered with impunity.set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Ingredients:
One contested election
One quart hysteria
A pinch of conspiracy theory
A dash of racism
One cup of political opportunism
One pound punch card ballot junk science
Pour junk science into bowl. Add hysteria and whip until frothing. Add conspiracy and racism. Fold in political opportunism until it cannot be seen.
Simmer in the press for six months.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Hmmmm. Interesting points. I rather agree about the importance of security w/respect to our important data. However, I'm not sure that problem here is really a matter of our systems being too complicated to handle. The problems of DOS attacks, identity theft, and personal privacy would support your points better.
The vote counting problem is actually quite easy to solve. Vote counting machines have no real need to be networked. We're not talking about internet voting here. A LAN to connect all of the machines at one polling place would be useful, but if there's not connected to the outside world, it should make security much easier. The real problem here is that there is no way for the voter to verify his/her own vote. For that we need a paper trail.
The real problem here is the amount of influence that big business has over government. The article refered to congressmen being overwhelmed by all of the bells and whistles of the the machines. The average congressman is not well enough informed to be able to distinguish the voting companies' lobbyists' propoganda from objective analysis.
Our legislators are too unqualified to make important decisions about many issues, from the environment to IP issues. I think we simply need more qualified legislators. Some of the most intelligent people in our country become doctors, lawyers, professors, or technical professionals. These jobs often pay more than governmental jobs without the hastles of election. The way these politician make real money is by working in industry after they retire/lose.
My proposal is this: Every congressman should be paid (tax free) $3*10^6/yr. Every senator should be paid $8*10^6/yr. The president should make $2*10^7/yr. These amounts are a pittance compared to the national budget that these people write every year. If it saves U.S. taxpayers 1% of the U.S. Budget, it will save more than 2*10^10 every year. Furthermore, senators, congressmen, and the president should not be allowed to spend their own money on campaigns. They should only be allowed to accept contributions from individuals (NOT corporations), and only from individuals that are registered to vote in their districts. Also, the spending limit for a campaign should be the yearly salary of that position. To prevent politicians from selling out to big corporations for promises of future gainful employment, they should not be allowed to hold jobs for corporations for 6 years after they retire/lose. The generous compensation they receive should more than make up for this restriction.
Also, before every election, there should be a flyer circulated by election official containing a resume for each candidate, and a one-page statement. That way, voters could have an opportunity to base their votes on something more than just twenty second sound bytes.
This system would guarantee the election of qualified people to govern with a minimum of influence from special interest groups and corporations. Of course, it's not realistic to implement. The average voter would be way too offended
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
What evidence do you have that Lynch was raped, anally or otherwise?
Lynch doesn't claim it - she was unconscious. And the Iraqi doctors who saved her life claim that there was no evidence of rape.
The one person who claims it is the author of the Jessica Lynch book.
To paraphrase one of the Iraqi doctors who saved her life: "This woman was unconscious, bleeding, with many broken bones, and clearly near death if not already dead. What kind of monster would then anally rape her?"
Answer: The boogeyman that the author of the book wants to convince you exists, so that he can sell more books.
Ya know, it kinda makes me wonder; if you can't fill out a simple box sheet, mabye you shouldn't be voting?
Seriously, I know election officials will try all kinds of bullshit to rig elections if their hands are greased properly, as is happening right now. If you've ever played postal 2 and done the election day voting, you know what florida's ballot sheet looked like and no logical person can figure that sheet out. Everyone's been exposed to check in the box, it's not that difficult to understand and if you need to know how, then there should be clear instructions posted. If you can't read...well...then I REALLY don't think you should be voting because if you can't read, you can't get information properly but for these people, such as the blind or disabled, a voice option should be available.
In any case, when one takes upon the cause of designing such a system with such an importance (the voting system arguebly being the most important computer program on the planet) you've got to look for how it works and how you can keep elections from being rigged.
The reason paper ballot works so well is because you've got counting centers, then districts, then the state. The votes are counted as correctly as humans can count them on a center level. The on the district level, you get all of the counting centers votes tallied, then onto the state level.
It really wouldn't suprise me if someone at the state level decided to toy around with omit votes for their side of the bargain, but the beauty of even this system is that they've got to grease the hands of 50 state officials. So there's a distribuited component to it.
So, what'll take to make voting work properly with computer? First of all, the hardware needs to be cheap and difficult to rig. We can come up with all kinds of proprietary hardwired garble made by corperations with agenda's and loose pockets and make it cost $1000 a machine, but when it comes down to it, we need to make something that'll work on multiple platforms, that the average 40's-somthing old person windows user can setup and verify. It needs to be distribuited, needs to leave a verifyable paper trail to proove it's counting ability at all levels, it needs to record who made votes for whom such that records are kept incase of a recall election (so you don't have a bunch of dumasses coming in saying they voted x when they really voted for y). The hardware needs to be trustable, inexpensive, and simple to fix if something goes wrong.
Finally, it needs to have good security, crypto, anti-hacking measures etc out of the box. I should be able to throw it on a machine out of wallmart on a CD, it'll format the harddisk for me, install it's own hardware drivers, kernel, etc, ask for new drivers at install via disk (so you can't install new drivers later on) setup the polling option, hook it upto the internet, point it to the p2p master and be on our way. So, how do you go about making this system?
(note, the next part is imho)
Since X86 is an open standards compliant hardware platform that is extremly difficult to rig; is everyone going to buy from dell? No, that's already abundant; you can setup a lot of clients at schools, goverment buildings, etc and all the hardware is already there; that already has a connection platform; the internet, and has lots of readily available inexpensive hardware that is available everywhere, I choose it. (I could go mac, but you see, mac is proprietary.)
As for the software component, get an OSS GPL project going with some competant people (and by all means, multiple projects!). This way, people can check the whole system, they can put it on their machine and know it works and moreso, know it works at a hardware level.
So, what must this application have? First of all, it must be easy to install. I should be able to slap in a CD, have it install, select the options I want and it'll do it's own thing. Everything that needs to be installed should be installed at the first
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Germany had democracy since the late 19th century, up untill Hitler took absolute power.
However, it is the position that the current administration has been pushing. Even so, they've been careful with things like taking the captured Afghanistans to Guantanamo Bay, which they can claim is not US soil. If they were to have shipped them to Texas, they would have even more trouble in attempting to hold them without trial.
The UN is a treaty.
Government IS the problem.
The US Constitution overrules any US law and treaties. In practice, a treaty is considered on an equal footing with US law, so if a new treaty contradicts existing law, the law is considered overruled, and if new law contradicts an existing treaty, the treaty is considered overruled.
Have there been Supreme Court rulings stating this? Without a supreme court ruling, it is unclear.
Beyond that, I don't think the US has entered into any treaty that says we must do whatever the UN says we must do.
The UN is a treaty!
Government IS the problem.
A form of Electronic Voting with a reciept, (optional) anonymous online submission verificaion, and ballots that are printed out will be a on par with our current system - maybe even better.
Technology should be used to making the process of voting easier, not the counting.
The details have to be worked out to make it strongly secure and anonymous.
Asking for ID would be illegal in CA? Every election I've voted in here, they require a driver's license or other ID matched against the registration roll before they'll even give you a ballot. That's really the only way to avoid graveyard voting.
For eVoting to go ahead does not require trust, just apathy and acceptance.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The only thing they really need electronic voting for is speed. They want the results faster than manual counting would allow. If you want a system at least as good as what we had, all you need is a system that produces machine+human-readable ballots.
When you vote, the machine when finished prints out a ballot with both machine-readable (barcode, perhaps) and human-readable versions of your vote. You confirm that it matches your vote, then drop it in the ballot box. The voting machine can hold an electronic tally internally which can be read after close of polls for a fast result. If there's a question of validity, you machine-scan the machine-readable portions of the printed ballots. As a check, you can compare the human-readable and machine-readable portions of a sample of the printed ballots to make sure the two really do match. If you select the sample randomly, it'd be statistically improbable for the voting machines to deliberately put incorrect machine-readable versions down without getting caught at it.
You can use smart-cards or whatnot for enabling a vote on the machine, and the traditional methods work for spoiled ballots. A one-use magnetic card like the airlines use for tickets would be even cheaper.
Given that it's not all that hard to design a system like that, I have to wonder why Diebold and the rest are so adamant about not doing it.
Even if you can look up your own vote, the election could be fixed. What if they record your vote but don't count it? Are you going to ask everyone to just write their names and their votes so you can be sure the count/recount is accurate? I didn't think so!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"Oh yes they did. If Afghanistan invades the US..."
They DID. Ever hear of something called 9-11? Taliban and Bin Laden's group were united at that time.
Anyway, your scenario is nothing like reality. If the Afghanistanis were bringing freedom, and I lived under a totalitarian rape-ocracy, I'd welcome them.
" It is clear that they have no intention giving them a fair trial."
Yes, they do have this intention. Why would they waste time incarcerating them if they were not actual terrorists?
"They want to put them away "without lawyers getting in the way"
Blame the lawyers. The lying in court has gotten way out of hand: you can't have justice with lawyers lying in court. Get the scumbags out of the way. Maybe they can go elsewhere and harass companies when someone spills hot coffee on their lap.
"...Vietnam, Grenada"
I detect your alternate-reality history here. If they wanted to attack the regimes that invaded these countries, they would go to Moscow.
Dennis is Mr Establishment. He wants to enrich and empower the bureacrats like no one else.
The problem is that he is like Ralph Nader. Nader campaigned as a left-wing fascist who never met a personal freedom he didn't want the government to take from people.
Thankfully, Dennis really is no threat to anything at all: only about 1% agree with him. He won't get the white house campaigning to represent such a tiny ideological minority.
This is due to the continued mismanagement of the east, causing continuous, massive population movement to the west, with no adjustment of parliament seats.
The longer this situation persists, the less motivation the gov has to correct it, because it is all the disgruntled people that move, while the lazy welfare bums stay behind and guess who votes Liberal...
Eventually, this will lead to a Georgia type situation where people have to walk to parliament and kick the bastards out.
"Do you remember when the U.S. Supreme Court 'ordered' Florida to stop it's recount _immediately_? "
Yes. The recounts had already occured, and the legal deadline for recounts was long long over.
"showed how the Republican party did indeed hijack the election"
They got more votes. That is not hijacking.
"The federal government has NO BUSINESS telling a state government which president to vote for"
Yes it does, if that state government illegally makes arbitrary decisions that nullify the actual vote of the Florida voters.
"It has no business telling a state how to run it's election unless that means upholding the constitutional rights of the people, which in this case was clearly not the motivation."
That was exactly the motivation. Let the actual results stand: no tampering, no counting voteless ballots as Gore votes.
"By breaking the U.N. charter, Bush violated our U.S. Constituion - simple as that."
Except he did not break it. Next...
"Also comparing this preemptive war on Iraq to WWII is a tremedous insult to the millions who died defending our country and allies in WWII"
First, it was not preemptive. Iraq had attacked Americans many times in the years leading up to it. And yes, Iraq's threats and aggression were very much like Nazi Germany's. So it is like WW2. Why are you sticking up for the Hitler figure in all this?
"In the 2000 election, Fox News was the first network to call Florida (and thus the presidency) for Bush. All the other networks had been waiting for official word. Is it a coincidence that the person in charge of Fox News' Election Night Decision Desk was John Ellis, cousin to both George W Bush and Jeb Bush?"
Yes, as Fox was just reporting the news. Are you going to make other claims about Dan Rather, who was one of Gore's fundraisers? Probably not, since left-wing news is OK, but centrist news (like Fox) is not.
Fox has gained a reputation for excellence by getting the facts reported ahead of others.
Once you read about how the electorial college works, you'll realize how stupid your post sounds, especially the part about Gore receiving ~500,000 more votes nationwide than Bush being in any way relevant.
ever watch the morons try to check themselves out at the grocery store? i actually avoid those lanes now, because there is always some low/normal load ahead of me, inventing new depths of illiteracy and stupidity, and it's faster to wait in a line with a human cashier. now transfer this whole scenario to the voting booth.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
The question is not, "Can America," but "Will America trust online voting?" I'd be afraid of Florida's popping up all over the place next year because of people claiming that the system was rigged/cracked.
`which fortune`
There is, as I suggested above, an exception (you're not on the roster index, you are at your "new polling place", haven't reregistered, have moved (there's some time requirement), but are still in the same county as before.... then you can vote provisionally, and asking for ID is cool in that case.
But, yes, in general, if I know friend Fred dies a few miles away, I could go over to his polling place, say I'm him, and vote as him. The catch there is the poll workers might know I'm lying, and there's gotta be some mechanism to deal with that potential, but....)
And since a copy of all the voters is posted, and even marked a few times during the day with marks indicating who has voted, you can come in late in the day and make sure you pick someone who hasn't voted yet. Nifty, that.
I'm a nature photographer.
"Nine thousand blacks were wronly denied their votes because of ChoicePoint list""
This is an urban legend. The error rate on the ChoicePoint list was rather low. This system, designed by Democrats, actually weeded voters only in regards to felon status, and not race.
The myth is out there of a "If Race = B, Off List" system" now. It is so silly that the civil rights groups won't touch it: it never happened.
"banned in the USA documentary done by the BBC outlines the fraud. Of course, it's banned only in the "land of the free"."
Except that it is not banned in the united states.
slightly more people voted in Florida cast ballots for Bush than for Gore (this is counting actual votes).
No black voters were disenfranchised, legally or illegally. All lies by left-wing columnists aside.
The Palm Beach ballots were not a problem: if you read the instructions and read the name, you have no problem. If you are too stupid to follow directions, stay home.
"I'll apologize in advance to Slashdot and its readers for continuing this uncommonly tiresome thread. The last two comments were so unbelievably stupid, I just couldn't resist."
So you go ahead and pile on more stupid comments.
"A decision by five conservative Republican judges that conveniently handed the election to a conservative Republican"
No, a decision by the florida voters in November handed the election to a conservative Republican. The Supreme Court had nothing to do with it: they let the real vote stand.
"A unanimous Supreme Court previously told the Florida Supreme Court that they couldn't change the rules after the election. Then, a 5-4 decision found an equal protection violation because, well, the Florida Supreme Court didn't change the rules after the election."
Yes, it is pretty silly. That's what you get when the Florida Supreme Court was changing the law on the fly in order to change the election results.
"This type of funhouse jurisprudence should disturb anyone who cares about democracy."
Yes, those Floria justices should have been jailed for trying to overturn a federal election.
"Gore partisans can point out that more people actually voted for Gore in Florida (sorry, it's a fact), "
No, it is not. In counts of actual votes, Bush got a few more. Stick to the facts next time.
"It's also undisputed that Gore received a half-million or so more votes nationally that Bush "
Yes, but the fact that your bring up this totally irrelevant total shows you know nothing about the election process in the United States.... 2000 or any election.
"But I am looking forward to someone booting that lying, scheming, fascist sleaze out in the cold in 2004."
Scheme? Probably. Lying? He has yet to lie. Fascist? He is rather anti-fascist. He's a lot smarter and has better policies than his opponents, I'm looking forward to another 4 years as the people elect him again.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Have there been Supreme Court rulings stating this? Without a supreme court ruling, it is unclear.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that if there is no Supreme Court ruling, it's probably because no one has ever pushed the cockeyed interpretation all the way to the USSC, or even if they tried, that the USSC simply refused to hear such silliness.
Think about it for a moment: if treaties could, in fact, override the constitution, then that would mean that, in effect, the constitution can be amended by a simple 2/3 vote of the Senate, without the concurrence of the House.
However, all you really need to do is to read the sentence and parse the grammar correctly. The article reads:
Read the last bit carefully "the Constitution or laws of any State". A look at the grammatical structure of the sentence makes it clear that it's referring to the primacy of the supreme law of the land (which includes treaties) over state constitutions. A look at the grammatical structure of the first part of the sentence makes clear that the overriding supreme law of the land is "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States...; and all treaties made". So if the treaties override the US Constitution, so do the laws of the United States (since the sentence places them as equal parts of the supreme law). For that matter, the Constitution therefore overrides itself, which is either silly or trivially true, depending on your point of view.
If that's not clear enough for you, note also that it says "the Constitution", rather than "this Constitution". If you look through the US Consitution you'll notice that every time it refers to itself it always uses the article "this". Do you think such consistency was accidental? Or that this particular inconsistency was accidental?
In the absence of a Supreme Court ruling to the contrary, I think we can safely just read the plain language of the article.
The UN is a treaty!
Yes, it is. And do the terms of that treaty include a requirement of obedience by its signatories?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But there is no such commensurability between the false vote tallies that electronic voting systems might yield when things go badly, and the benefits of speed and efficiency that they might offer when things go well.
Why are there benefits to speed and efficiency?
My understanding is that the people who work at the Polls are either volunteers or temporary employees who earn a 'civic duty' stipend for providing their services. Efficiency is something you worry about at a hamburger stand, not at a polling place.
As to speed: why the hell does it matter that we get a 'speedy' result. The whole obsession over 'speed' seems to be driven by the 'news' media and their incessant need to report results. In actuality, it is always weeks or months before the result of the election is put into action.
Screw speed. Screw efficiency. Let a bunch of community volunteers tally the paper ballots. Fine any news organization that 'reports' official results before they're posted by elections officials. The vision I get of a group of old ladies saying 'hold on and we'll have the numbers in a few hours' to some yuppie fuck journalist is wonderful, and should be the reality.
A Good Intro to NetBS
I suppose the poor fellows will have to wait for ``Democracy" until they roll out the Arabic language version of the Diebold voting software.
you are disgusting. get some help man.
Once every 4 years? Yeah, maybe for the President, but around here we have 2 elections per year. They're everything from tax levies, to state constitutional ammendments, to various elected positions. And any given city could have a large number of different districts, each with a different ballot.
aQazaQa
It isn't that we shouldn't (or for that matter don't) trust the electronics, it is how we feel about those in charge of systems. What we are talking about is human error. I for one have never heard of a computer prefering one candidate over the other.
-jake
We would invest heavily in Sharpie markers, and return to the 'ol ballot box until this sorts itself out, preferably via an open source solution of some sort...
Sometimes low-tech is the only tech that is 100% effective.
I trust the hackers more than I trust the people to pick the candidates. Blah. Does it really matter? It's all corrupt anyway!
reciepts imply that the voter takes the paper record home with them -- they don't, what California is mandating (in 2-3 years!) is a paper audit trail, or ballot.
in many districts you have to *swear* that you will not be anywhere near the district on voting day, by a plane artineary or a sworn statement
these measures are there exactly so that this sort of fraud does not happen
http://tarpley.net/bush2.htm
Their history is largely suppressed by the main stream media but the fact is Bert Walker and Prescott Bush, George W's Great Grandfather and Grandfather were actively involved in funding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The assets of Union Banking which they headed was seized in 1942 for trading with the enemy. The prominent Nazi's Thyssen and Flick were their partners in this enterprise. Thyssen wrote a famous book "I Paid Hitler". Powerful friends of the Bush family managed to have the investigation in to their pro Nazi activities suppressed in 1942 claiming it was a diversion from the war effort and the truth never did see the light of day.
The other chapters of Tarpley's work are a pretty good read too if you want to develop a keen appreciation for how dangerous the Bush family is especially working in tandem with the powerful people in the secret Yale society, Skull and Bones. Democracies should actively discourage election to high office of people whose loyalties lie with secret societies first and serve the interests of that society and its members before they serve the nation.
Not sure how much truth there is to it, but apparently Ronald Reagen didn't even trust the Bush family and there were some eleventh hour shenanigans , possibly involving the Iranian hostage and their release, which forced him to nominate George H.W. Bush to be his VP. There is an odd footnote, Neil Bush, George Bush's brother was apparently new the brother of John Hinkley, who tried and failed to assassinate Reagan.
@de_machina
This post, my friends, is the *typical* IT nerd. They come jaunting in talking about hashes, 64 bit signing keys, and other nerd talk -- and typically miss the problem. This is one of the key problems with the current voting systems. The whole point of this article is that the technologists haven't even bothered to study voting and its politics before *imposing* solutions. If you want to automate a process, do your self a favor -- go and work the job for a while. I bet $1,000 that not one of the programmers in either of those 3 voting companies worked in a actual election as someone maintaining the machines.
He was just saying that ATMs have an acceptable loss level, namely -- if ((PriceForATeller - PriceOfATM) > (ATMFraud - TellerFraud)) then the ATM is a good decision. His point is that election fraud cannot be measured in dollars.
Interestingly enough, after the revolutionary war almost everyone in the new country wanted Washington to be "king". He could have been king if he wanted. But he didn't. He publicly stated that didn't even trust himself! How does this scale up with someone who *jokes* that if it were a dictatorship, it'd be so much easier, especially if he were king? *shudders in fear*
Why do we need to change? Like I have said before.
Paper Ballots are about as fool proof as you are going to get.
If some fool spoils their ballot too bad
Keep the paper ballot even if it's just a scantron.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Germany had democracy since the late 19th century, up untill Hitler took absolute power.
...and that was through democratic processes. He simply told a once-great nation what the people wanted to believe - that they could achieve greatness once again.
Ring any parallels, people?
Sorry - I've just upset the majority of US folks here.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
"Except they did not. Oops. reality got in the way of your neat idea."
Wow. Your argument is so well-stated. Your facts are so solid and indisputable. You are truly the Reality Hammer.
OK, but for Australia, then, it may only make sense to build a computer based interface simply because it's an easier interface. But there's still no reason whatsoever to make this vote electronic. I.e., use an electronic voting system to decide who to vote for, but let that system only print out your result in human-readable form.
Germany has a simple "make two crosses, one per column" rule for most elections (see an example here), and "make up to three crosses, distributing them for different candidates or all for the same candidate, etc." for communal elections. Ballots are then counted manually by the helpers in each precinct, which makes rigging the vote on a greater scale fairly difficult. That, admittedly, makes it fairly easy, and it also works well enough in most cases.
If preferential voting can actually be explained easier with a computer interface than with a paper-based interface, OK. If results can be calculated much easier, then OK too. But that's a different issue. For this we only need local machines with no networked setup whatsoever, and a simple verifiable counting system, meaning that if necessary, the printed ballots can be hand-counted if the results seem shady.
But, I repeat, this has nothing to do with E-Voting as most people perceive it (and as planned, e.g., in the US), where voting systems are, to quite some extent, software-only, and results may be collected via a network, again, software-only. And that is just too dangerous.
NO! Heck, the Democrats found ways to cheat in
Florida in 2000 (and Missouri), and in Illinois
and Texas in 1960. Paper trail, schmaper trail.
That is what they do best, and changing to an
electronic system will, ironically, make it
easier for them to do.
The dutch voting machines are just as bad as the us ones. They have no paper trail and can't be checked. Read this (in Dutch)
I started out liking this response, then I realized you were a moron. Sorry, I shouldn't say that. But here are my points.
Yes, the government does detain prisoners without charges. Yes, they are *supposed* to be connected with terrorism. But as no one has to be told of their arrest as an "enemy combatant", and that they are automatically declared an enemy and are placed under military hold, put in a military tribunal, and not allowed legal representation, we won't ever know.
George "Dubya" Bush is not a smart man. He applied to attend my high school when he was a youngster (Yes, I go to an elite private school. No, I'm neither rich nor a stuck up snob, though I have to deal with several dozen of those type everyday). He failed miserably to get in. He applied to our rival school. Again he failed to get in. So his daddy built that school a new building (an offer made to and declined by my school) and Lo and Behold! he got in. Many other people have, however, managed to buy their way into my school. I know (but try very hard to avoid) several of them. And they are stupid. They are dumber than bricks. They are going to live off their trust-funds and inheritances, and they have no problem telling me about this. And how they're going to get a Yale/Harvard/Ivy League degree to make sure they do it in style. Yet Dubya was dumb, he couldn't make it in. That doesn't give me much confidence in him. And I'm not saying that people who don't go to my elite school are stupid. There are people at the public school next door ten times smarter than I am. But if he was so dumb they wouldn't even let him buy his way in with more money than you've ever made in your life, then that says something about the man...
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
What I don't understand is why there is not a combined system put into place where the voting machines prints a ticket that can be verified by the voter and then placed in a standard ballet box.
Afterwards take the total from the electronic system and randomly select a number of areas to be hand counted. This would make it much more difficult for anyone to fix the results as they would need to change both the paper ballots and the electronic count to ensure that their vote fixing is not picked up.
37 - what does it stand for really...
The prisoners were caught in the act of fighting in a terrorist army.
I saw Dubya say the same thing on TV, and he was lying too. And the pussy of a british journalist (david frost) didn't challenge him on that point. It is not the case for all the detainees.
I would rather believe my local paper (interviewing the detainees families), which said that at least one of the British citizens detained was in Pakistan (hint, separate country from Afghanistan) in a house (with his wife and kids I think) and was arrested by Pakistani police based on his name being found somewhere in Afghanistan. That is not being caught in the act, that is something that needs a trial to determine the facts of the case.
I'm not one of those people who think that the CIA blew up the twin towers or the HSBC, but when the president is so sloppy about the facts all the time (and the US previous history of attacking itself in order to get a pretext to start wars - read some Chomsky) I can understand why some people might, and think that a little bit of due process and rule of law might go a long way to redeem the current US image.
Is that why you are allowed to manafacture biological weapons, in the face of the treaties that you have signed (whatever happend to the anthrax attatcks? its all gone very quiet).
WAY too much attention has been focused on the ballot. I highly suggest reading "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast which documents Jed Bush's role in election fraud in the presidential election. The ballot was a diversion, in my opinion, for those who really care about free and fair elections. And as an American I am embarrased when the Albanians feel compelled to come and observe whether our elections are free and fair!
s /main295656.shtml s /main301511.shtml
= 1
The real issue IMO, centers around the way that due diligence was not used when disenfranchising 17000 Florida residents due to the fact that their names were on a list of convicted felons. No verification was ever performed that they WERE convicted felons who could be denied the right to vote. These disenfranchised were largely African-American, and would almost certainly have made the Florida race go the other way.
For additional reading, I suggest the following links:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/06/08/politic
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/14/politic
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=27&row
It seems that electronic voting isn't the only way to get ahead-- the problem is that we have to ensure that it is trackable.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
No.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I fail to see the difference with the current voting system.
There is only one vote in the US, which is spelled MONEY. The whole election is being bought, whether it is Clinton, Gore, Bush.
Sometimes you guys are lucky, and get a president that is a capable person. Sometimes you don't.
You can paper trail all you want, but the real election has been decided long before your vote is counted. The more money, the more media coverage, the better the speeches, lesser bad press, etc.
However, there is a simple solution to this.
Have every candidate take a poll. Simple questions, only to be answered YES or NO.
Will you raise taxes (YES/NO) could be an example.
Then, Look at the answers you want, and vote the candidate that has most good answers for you.
No money involved. Plain and simple: do as you promised. If not, you will not be president for long.
But, of course, I live in a country where we can trust the government because it has a political system where political success does not depend on having access to large amounths of money, and where the press it not owned by large companies that have ties with political parties, and where companies are forbidden to donate money for (presidential) election campains. I am happy that we do not have a president and election campains that cost millions of dollars, which can only be seen as a form of legalized corruption.
The code reveals something else: It relies heavily on Microsoft components.
Oh lovely.
One may argue that the public has only to gain if the public official brings his expertise into the private sector. My concern is, however, that the public official will use his expertise in side-stepping regulations or choosing the way of minimal resistance, to maximize profits at the expense of following rules and regulations.
Kind of like a hardware vendor optimizing their wares for benchmarks as opposed to real life situations!
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
From the article:
Um... weren't the Diebold machines tampered with repeatedly? When are these so-called "felony charges" going to actually going to be applied? Or is tampering only illegal after the votes are deposited in the transport box?
Until the software and hardware is totally open for scrutiny, the answer it no.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot?
Um...because they work and have been used? Those smart bombs are why it cost us so fucking much to wage that war (justly or otherwise). We could've saved a shload of money and probably time if we'd just not cared about civilian casualties as much. They may not yet be perfect, but I'd like to point out that it is the US who is pioneering and bankrolling such technology...and it works.
Look, it ain't the same people designing both. I have little doubt that if asked, a military contractor like Lockheed Martin would make short work of the task of designing a solid e-voting system. It likely wouldn't be free software, but I bet it'd work. As things stand, the wrong people are making these decisions. As you must know, the US government is sprawling and just because one branch can do a thing well doesn't mean another can.
Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise
Save the rhetoric. Whether you like him or not, he was not the election disaster. The disaster was the clusterfuck that the situation became as Gore threatened lawsuits and held up the election process, and as Bush acted less-than-magnanimous about his victory. God, I'm so sick of hearing about this supposed "election disaster". He won. Some old people couldn't figure out a ballot (that was NOT that hard to figure out), and some election fraud came to light all over the country on both sides of the political fence. It was a call to arms for corrective measures, but hardly spelled doom for the electoral process in the US.
it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held.
And it's just that sort of childish bullshit that will keep the divide between the US and Europe growing. Your sniggling little insult is about as useful as all the France-bashing ignorance I heard on our side of the moat the last couple of years.
If you want to offer help, be genuine and keep your sarcasm to yourself. If you want to be a sarcastic prick, don't expect a polite reply.
-Tom
-Tom
The dutch voting machines are just as bad as the us ones. They have no paper trail and can't be checked.
That's true, but I do consider them to be safer than (some of) the US ones. Have you heard about the negative votes that were quickly fixed (during the election process)? That could never happen with the dutch machines. There is no (easy) access to the voting results, so it cannot be 'nursed home' by stopgap fixes.
I'd be perfectly happy with this if the United States would reprocicate by not dictating to anybody else. However, they don't. The United States is a superpower and it uses its power in ways that influences the lives of most people on Earth. I'm not against everything US. The United States is a great country and have done lot more good things for the World than bad. It's just that with so much power that the United States have, comes an equally great responsibility. And when the United States don't live up to that, the consequences are felt worldwide. And that is why we from the rest of the World are not always happy about the actions of the United States.
The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military.
Excuse me, but I can't for the life of me see the difference. These people have been locked up for over two years without a trial. Yes, they were in wrong place at the wrong time and probably carried arms when they were there. Well, there was a reason for detaining them so what is the problem? Put them before a court and have them convicted if they are guilty. Anything else is unworthy of a democratic country.
We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.
Except that that there are far too many more recent examples of the opposite. The other day I saw an old TV clip where a smiling Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein. In those days, the United States supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein. And don't tell me that they didn't know then what kind of regime they were supporting.
That being said, I was glad to hear president Bush say recently in London that "yes, we have supported un-democratic regimes in the past but we will stop doing that". I'm looking forward to his words become action.
My opinion? See above.
Anything can be compromised. We've seen it happen on paper already. How about worrying about electing better candidates in the first place.
And no post from demachina (71715) is complete without running a spell/intelligence checker against it....
Who the hell is "Ronald Reagen"?
Apparently, I never "new" John Hinkley the way you did.
Yeah... The "Bushies" were backing Hitler. I suppose that's why George H Bush fought in WW2, got shot down and all (just for appearances).
I think you should loosen your tinfoil hat (or it will leave a mark).
We have similar systems in the US as well. However, voters often mark too many boxes or don't mark well enough for the optical scanner to tally the vote. In a close election, you still will have both candidates whining over how to tally the votes. Just like the dimpled/hanging chad crap in Florida in 2000.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what type of ballot you use. The average voter is a moron and will find a way to screw it up.
Again, this doesn't match what happened. I was registered, was on the registered-voters list for the precinct, hadn't moved since the previous election. They still required ID. They were requiring ID of everyone, no exceptions. And the list was being updated continuously, since you signed beside your entry to indicate you'd gotten your ballot, and was not posted anywhere that I could see besides in the book in front of the poll worker.
"No discussion of the Bush family is complete without reading Tarpley's unauthorized biography"
Yes, it is very complete. This is the biography rejected by the publisher because the publisher had standards, and there was a lot of fiction in this supposedly factual book.
Of course this book that did not meet rigorous standards ends up on the Web, where the gullible show up and take it as fact.
A discussion without this book is complete. A discussion with this book becomes invalid because the content of the book is made up.
The source you cite is not a source of information. Palast is a partisan editorialist, not a journalist. The "disenfranchised blacks" story turns out to be one of those urban legends.
"ps: I'm not even a US resident - yet I know that Fox News equals Fox Ficton, at least when it comes to reports about the rest of the world"
You don't "know". Substitute "have a false impression".
FNC has a reputation for accuracy about such matters. However, as you have never seen it, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Those who believe that news channels should be left-wing such as CNN instead of centrist such as Fox get angry that someone dare to try to be balanced and accurate.
"and the US previous history of attacking itself in order to get a pretext to start wars - read some Chomsky) "
I have read Chomsky. Unlike you, I checked what he said against the facts: the two rarely ever meet.
Chomksy is a person who has an extreme left-wing fascist ideology that is rather simplistic. If real events do not fit his ideology about the way things should happen, he ignores them. If nothing happened to support his view, he makes things up.
He is one of those anti-intellectuals who has come up with an overriding simple idea (Marxist theory) to explain things. The problem is, blaiming things in Marxist reasons is just as invalid as explaining history using the Illuminati or interepretations of Revelations.
He is a reknowned expert in linguistics. Outside of that, he is a hateful, raging, anti-semitic boob. Fortunately, everyone realizes this, except for a few True Believers.
"Wow. Your argument is so well-stated"
Thanks. Perhaps you started to fact-check Moore's book. That is a real eye opener.
Also, you forget the party that Clinton was in: it was Democrats. And you forget the radical left-wing fascist ideas he proposed: like taking health care choices away from the people and giving it to the government.
Clinton was not the best Republican president. He was one of the worst Presidents (the crime and secrecy of a Nixon combined with the charm-glossed corruption of a Harding) and he happened to be in the other party.
Ok, so if the UN passed a resolution banning ownership of firearms, since the 2nd amendment hasn't been incorporated under the 14th, the states would be obligated to ban firearms in compliance with this UN resolution.
This isn't as stupid as it may seem - global firearms bans is one of the things that actually has been brought up at the UN.
The thing is, our founders really really really disliked the idea of "entangling alliances" and wanted to generally discourage future law makers from signing on to treaties. The UN is a treaty, and any of a number of bad things could result if we aren't careful. That's why more then a few people want out of the UN.
Government IS the problem.
Note page 15 of this PDF'd election manual. (The document is an election workers manual from the County of San Francisco, I've worked polls in Santa Clara County myself.) Note that it does not state that ID is illegal to ask for, but does say that "Voters are NOT required to provide proof of identity or residence."
I will add that many voters do bring their voting booklet, or present an ID, and it definitely helps poll workers when you do that, it's somehow just slightly quicker to look something up when you have a nicely printed version fo what you're searching for, particularly with hard-to-spell names.
Here is the text of a proposed law, from February 2003, to require IDs to be checked by precinct workers.
I can't, in the few moments I've looked today, find an explicit prohibition, although I believe I've seen one, I'm willing to drop the assertion that it's directly illegal until I can find direct proof of that statement. I will note, however, that if it's not required, it'd be a pretty bad idea to demand it of voters, since it'd be a direct opening to charges of discriminatory, selective checking of IDs.
On the other hand, a mistake by a polling worker on this point is far more likely to be a mistake than a serious attempt at fraud, poll-workers don't get a ton of training.
I'm a nature photographer.
"Oh, you mean like the morning show anchor who accused people who disagreed with the GWB of being "traitors"? "
You will have to show the entire context. Were those accused merely disagreeing, or expousing hateful traitorous views against the country and its people? The first thing to do, always, in such situations is to determine whether or not the statement is accurate.
Also, was it an actual news anchor, or one of the commentators?
Ok, so if the UN passed a resolution banning ownership of firearms, since the 2nd amendment hasn't been incorporated under the 14th, the states would be obligated to ban firearms in compliance with this UN resolution.
What are you talking about with respect to the 14th? My reading is that although the states might be bound by a treaty (I still disagree that UN resolutions have the force of a Senate-ratified treaty, BTW), that would put the states in opposition to the 2nd amendment, which would override the treaty. Further, Congress can always pass laws that override any treaty if that becomes necessary.
The thing is, our founders really really really disliked the idea of "entangling alliances" and wanted to generally discourage future law makers from signing on to treaties.
This is true. I think perhaps their wishes would have been better fulfilled in many ways if the 17th amendment had not been ratified.
The UN is a treaty, and any of a number of bad things could result if we aren't careful. That's why more then a few people want out of the UN.
I'm no fan of the UN, but I don't think fears that UN resolutions could really damage US soverignty are well-founded. UN rules and resolutions have only the force that we give them.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Any and every electronic system will be vulnerable to fraud, as are the current schemes, it's just a different type of deception. The question is, which kind of fraud do we want to live with? Will a computer-based system be less likely to undergo scrutiny because "computers never make mistakes". When CNN announces "Colossus has determined that the next President of the United States is George W. Bush Jr", how many people will think "well, the computer never lies" and how many people will think "I'll bet it was rigged"?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I recall some changes in the laws this year, but I can't recall details so I don't know whether that proposal actually went through or not. I do know that not requiring proof of identity and/or residency is an open invitation to massive vote fraud. As for selective checking, the answer to that is simple: don't be selective. Check all IDs for everyone, no exceptions. If everyone gets asked, it can't be discriminatory (except perhaps against noncitizens in the country illegally, and I don't think we should be kludging the voting laws to work around an immigration problem).
Here is the text of an article which appeared just last month in the New Hampshire Gazette, by John Buchanan who recently rediscovered documents in the national archives proving the substance of the Bush family's links to the Nazi party and its financeers
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
Exclusive to The New Hampshire Gazette
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The Summer of '42
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
Business is Business
The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker.
@de_machina
After the 2004 Election Chaos that will undoubtedly ensue - (most likely a "hacked" machine somewhere; somehow) - there will be a new Mandate that will pass UCITA straight through the congress and the DMCA will be expanded in its scope. Furthermore, DMCA violations will become Zero-tolerance - resulting in mandatory prision terms of 20 years for ANY violation (no questions asked). DMCA violations will fall under the "Terrorist" umbrella and thus violators will not be eligible for due process (NO right to speedy trial). Instead they will be tried and held indefinitely until they are "judged" in a military tribunal (they can do that to US Citizens now you know - see Guantanamo Bay). Similar to what happened to Mitnick, however, they'll use the "Military Tribunal" to justify indetermininate imprisionment.
The end result will be this:
- Scientists and security professionals will NOT BE ALLOWED to question/criticize or even evaluate future voting machines.
- The SIGs,lobbyists,corporate attorneys will end up with the Government in their back pockets (moreso than they currently do)
- The corporations will become the new government
- The people/consumers will become the victims
Also, if you think this is just an "American" problem, think again. You'd be naive to think that the USA doesn't influence other governments in one way or another.
Welcome to 1984 (George Orwell Novel).
Let the revolution begin.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
You and I are in complete agreement--proof of identity should be required, and making that required removes any issue of discrimination.
I'm a nature photographer.
The BBC is not that accurate: it is just another one of those official government news agencies that tells it what the government wants you to hear.
In this, Britain is as backwards as North Korea in that it has the problem of government domination of news media. Thankfully, alternative voices (such as Fox, etc) are allowed to be heard.
But, as I've said before, we should fix this. Required IDs to vote, period.
I'm a nature photographer.
"Personally I'm more concerned about the fact that in many states, someone who committed ANY felony at any time in their life can never vote "
Why be concerned? They had to go out of their way to be greedy/violent/stupid and commit that felony. If you want to be in the polling line, don't do the crime.
That type of fraud is miniscule compared to a fraud where the voting machine switches every 100th vote to the desired candidate. This is the type of fraud that is being feared with these machines.
Did you read any news sources about what happened in, oh, Florida, a few years back? Remember people who said their ballots had been "spoiled" but who were told they couldn't have another by officious poll workers? Remember the charges that the cops were out intimidating voters, that they ran roadblocks in certain neighborhoods on election day? Remember the stories about incompetent poll workers not instructing people in how to use the ballot? Does any of this sound at all familiar?
You ask us why people might feel intimidated from asking for help? In a state where thousands of voters were "mistakenly" purged from the rolls because they were "mistaken" for felons? "C'mon" right back atcha.
frankly I'd rather count every vote as is then try to "determine voter intent." Especially if the voter doesn't take the time to learn the system.
Again, did you read the stories from 2000? "As is" doesn't cover a situation where a hole seems to have been punched out, but the little "chad" is clinging to the back of the card. What does "as is" mean on that vote? It ain't that simple. We all wish it was, but it isn't.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Assuming any sort of proper procedures, your theory has just left hundreds of thousands of copies of a record of your fraud in the voting machines themselves. Even a few illegal (and indefensibly so) updates for unqualified code in the machines doesn't get rid of the hacks you've left in the remaining machines.
I'm a nature photographer.
"BBC is well known for reporting the truth when the British government wants to hide it."
Only when the government allows them to. It is fun to be called a "troll" for challenging someone's uncritical acceptance of government propaganda.
The machines could overwrite their software with a clean version when they turn in the final tally. Or they could respond to outside requests to change their tally and that would not be discovered unless somebody accidentally sent this cryptic request. Or the numbers may be changed at the central location and not by the machine.
+chicago. Turns the dead into eligible voters.
+florida. Adds a dangling chad to your equipment arsenal.
+totalrecall. Hasta la vote, baby.
Only if the non-volatile program storage was actually writable by the voting machine without additional equipment.
Or they could respond to outside requests to change their tally and that would not be discovered unless somebody accidentally sent this cryptic request. Or the numbers may be changed at the central location and not by the machine.
Which would still leave the trail of code, and, by virtue of the fact that those "requests" would have to be entered manually (The California voting machines I've used are only connected to the outside world via a daisy-chained 120V power cord.). Which leaves us back at the "voting as dead people" being something done more easily, since you'd need about as many people either way, but in this case you'd need more training and you'd be leaving an additional trail of evidence.
I'm a nature photographer.
If you are Dutch speaking you can read ou Open brief aan de leden van het federale parlement van Belgie, else you can read the whole web site in french.
There might be some stuff you don't know about election in the US. They have 100+ question to answer, from who should be the governor to the color of traffic light. So simple solution are not simple.
Now back to the nederlands... and a few question:
How do you deal with two election run the same day (European + xxx)?
Is the source code + hardware specification of the system available to the general public?
How does the voter know his vote has been counted... trust an expert?
Is it possible to do recount in the Nederlands? What do you recount then?
Is there a paper version of the vote printed (paper audit trail) that is VoterVerifiable?
Do not hesitate to contact me (the web master of PourEVA) with information about e-voting in your european country.
Don't let the computer/expert control the election. Information for Belgium in french: http://www.poureva.be/
Nice troll. Even Mike Hawash admits he is guilty of being a terrorist conspirator. I suggest next time you want to bash President Bush and Administration, you look outside your "clickish" group for information so you don't end up with egg on your face.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The score I found was three Britons arrested in Pakistan (Tariq Mahmood, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar), one in Zambia (different continent even!) (Martin Mubanga) and six arrested in Afghanistan.
In Quebec's separation referendum in 1995, a corrupt election official ordered ballot counters in certain districts to use extremely strict standards in reading ballots. If the mark in the circle did not correspond exactly to one of the approved shapes, the vote was counted as "spoiled," even if it was clearly a mark in one circle and there was nothing anywhere else on the sheet. In one case, observers at the counting complained that a check mark (one of the approved shapes) was drawn wrong; the left stroke was as long as the right stroke, so it looked more like a V than a "proper" check mark.
All the districts where this occurred were those where it could be predicted (from demographics) that an overwhelming percentage of the voters (80-90%) would vote against the referendum. In some districts, the "spoiled" vote count was 12% (vs. a historical average of 1%).
The refendum lost, but only by a margin even smaller than the number of votes undercounted in those districts. The Quebec government, run by a party that favored the referendum, proceded to "investigate" (whitewash) the incident, and exconerated everyone involved. They were more interested in harassing some students in Ontario for driving out to an anti-referendum rally.