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Super Tuesday Not So Super For Electronic Voting
October_30th writes "It's Super Tuesday in 10 states (including California, New York and Ohio) and various reports are coming in that the equipment built by Diebold and various other manufacturers is proving more troublesome than previously anticipated."
Georgia Tech student Peter Sahlstrom said he found 10 Diebold terminals sitting unprotected in the lobby of the school's student center Monday. Sahlstrom, 22, photographed the machines in their unlocked cases
This has zero to do with tech but will serve to give e-voting a bad name if one of these machines is compromised. Not good.
What's really quite disturbing is that the unreliability of these voting systems has been well covered in the mainstream press, not just the left-wing open source communist web blogs, yet the voting officials still have no clue or interest in considering the liabilities of using these systems. It just defies reason, and makes me lean ever closer to my paranoia / tinfoil hat and wonder about payola.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes, because only 50% of us vote but 100% of us bitch.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
The problem is that the two actors involved here, the public (government) and Diebold, each have two completely different aims. The public want a secure, easy to use, verifiable, non-bullshit voting system to ensure fair elections. Diebold wants to maximize shareholder value. A closed process will NEVER produce the desired result under those circumstances. Diebold will say "sure it works, trust us." Trusting them assumes they're not maximizing shareholder value: big mistake.
It would be sort of like fully privatizing mail delivery. Sure you could set it up as a viable company, if you are willing to entire A) drastically raise postage or B) cut vast swaths of rural mail delivery. When you get down to it the aims of the public are not compatible with running postal service as a completely private venture. The aims of the public are also not compatible with running elections as a completely private venture.
That would mean treating electronic election machines, no matter who produces them, as an extension of public service. Almost as a utility, perhaps. Political parties are heavily regulated as would be a utility, why not the very machines we use to vote?
I mean really, why all the fancy computers with touch screen monitors, why complicated software? Grab the vote in from a keyboard, encrypt it, save it, done.
Which doesn't address the problem with the voting machines at all.
The issue is not the fancy interface. (So changing to a keyboard would just add the problem of how you are supposed to collect votes from people who don't grok keyboards.)
The issue is: How do you KNOW the software that grabbed the vote (from the keyboard, touch screen, or what have you), encrypted it or not, and stored it in the database, ACTUALLY STORED THE VOTE THE VOTER CAST, rather than making up its own vote?
And how do you KNOW that the database ACTUALLY SAVED THE VOTES THE VOTING MACHINES FED IT and ADDED THEM UP CORRECTLY, rather than making up different values or being altered by some human intervention?
The MAIN problem with computer voting machines is that, along with hanging chads and dimpled ballots, they've eliminated any paper trail (actually checked by the voters themselves) of how each voter actually voted.
If the software is broken or corrupt, how do you do a recount? Ask it to give you the corrupted numbers a second time?
(Interestingly enough, that's EXACTLY how Diebold proposes to do a recount: Have the database print out the corrupted values as separate printed paper ballots for people to hand-count. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
no amount of technology will ever produce a voting system that all can use
Excuse me? Where I live we have this amazing technology:
a) A piece of paper printed with circles which are labeled with the name of the parties in big letters
b) A pen
c) An envelope
d) A ballot box
Any dork can use that and for those who can't, it's better when their votes are discarded
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I mean really, why all the fancy computers with touch screen monitors, why complicated software? Grab the vote in from a keyboard, encrypt it, save it, done.
1) Reliable software is very hard to make.
2) Mathematically provably secure software is impossible or very nearly so.
3) Reliable software that is mathematically provably secure and is affordable simply will never exist.
4) Our county and state gee-whiz government officials don't really understand this and are blowing wads of taxpayer dollars on a hopeless technology project.
5) Representative Democracy gets a big spiked shaft in its rear end.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Um, a bit confused, here. Political parties are private organizations in the US as well, right? Doesn't that mean they can choose their candidate in pretty much any way they damn well please? Primaries, mail-in ballots, an all-night draw poker game among all interested candidates, or simply drawing a name out of a hat? I mean, a party can just declare a candidate by fiat, without having to even pretend choosing among a pool of willing people, right?
...iffy. Say a party has an internal rule that whomever is the party chairman will also be the candidate (as is the case in all larger Swedish political parties). It works for them. If you don't like it, you vote for another party. Why should a law be passed to forbid them of doing that? Same thing here: if a party wants to have different days, and the majority of members are fine with it, let them. If a majority actually feels it is a problem, they can presumably change the rules internally, switch to another party or create a new party with the intention of replacing the old one.
Now, I understand why you suggest adding rules for this. But first, telling organizations that by their very nature have _very_ different views on precisely things like elections how they should do them feels
Second, I doubt you can write any clear rules that will not penalize some parties. Say you have a rule that primaries must be held at the same day in all states. Then how about parties that are too small to have the resources to do so? Or even too small to ever want or need to hold primaries in all states at all? You will start to need a bunch of qualifiers to the rules, and probably start to classify parties according to size. And if you want to only regulate primaries, you will have a hopeless time defining primaries so they neither penalize other party systems, nor give openings to redefine the process so the rules no longer apply when they should.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Some people, such as Orthodox Jews, restrict their activities on Saturday. You might reply "tough for them", but any change that makes voting harder for a significant class of people is going to be opposed by elected office-holders from any party that draws support from Saturday-observing people. That's why this proposal won't go anywhere in the U.S.
Here's a different proposal: make Election Day a national holiday. A lot of people would also take the Monday off as well. I think that democratic elections are important enough to be a national holiday, don't you?
The UAW (United Auto Workers union) negotiated a contract where Election Day is a paid holiday for their members. Good for them.
This proposal gets floated so often that I can only consider it malinformation at this point--a pervasive meme which works to people's detriment.
Let's say, for sake of argument, that all 50 states have their caucuses and/or primaries at the same time. They start at the same time, end at the same time. What are we going to see from the candidates?
Well, Kerry would park himself in California for two weeks prior to the primary. Edwards would take New York. Sharpton would go for an inner-city like Baltimore, Dean would take Boston and everyone would be lobbing grenades at Kerry in a desperate attempt to keep him from getting God-knows-how-many delegates in one fell swoop.
Do you see what'd happen? The candidates would campaign only in high-population areas and would talk only about metropolitan issues. Because really, if everything all gets settled at once, it doesn't make any sense for Kerry to sit down at Gwen's Diner in Lisbon, Iowa (great food if you're ever in the neighborhood) and talk to the usual crowd of farmers, hunters and retired schoolteachers who hang out there.
These people are American citizens. They pay taxes. They get overlooked by East and West Coasters every single day of the year except for about one month every four years, when the East and West Coasters come to Iowa to ask Iowans "so, now that you've actually met $candidate, what do you think?"
If you make everyone vote all at the same time, what you're going to do is tell everyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area--and that's forty-eight percent of the nation--that their opinions don't count, that they're too minor to matter, and that since everything's settled all at once and fifty-two percent of the delegates are decided in the big cities, that the entire political debate will revolve around big-city concerns.
A campaign season exists to allow vigorous political debate to take place. It exists to make sure rural citizens, who have as much right to be heard as you, have a voice in political proceedings.