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VoteHere Whistleblower Suit
astar writes "VoteHere is a DRM electronic voting machine vendor.
Dan Spillane is sueing them for wrongfull termination in a whistleblowers suit."
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See, he's concerened about voting fraud, and you wore a hat to work and refused to take it off. No sympathy. That's like a huge difference in magnatude of significance.
I suppose that yes, all voting machine manufacturers are dealing in the management of rights, digitally.
I think it's obvious the poster added the DRM bit to be inflammatory but why does /. insist on using these submissions? Nowhere in the article does it mention or refer to DRM yet there it is, like the ugly weed sitting in the crack of the sidewalk for all to see. Not even the VoteHere website mentions DRM in their products decriptions.
After checking the VoteHere website I also discovered some discrpencies between what Dan Spillane is claiming in his suit and the products VoteHere is offering. According to the company their voting system called VHTi includes a verifiable paper trail. Their other product called RemoteVote was a bit sketchier about the audit trail but considering you can use means of voting that make printingvery difficult or impossible (cell phones, PDAs, etc.) this is not surprising. Perhaps Dan Spillane was simply an annoying prick that tried to make a mountain out of a molehill and got fired for it.
What I found was not impressive at all; it could take years for me to successfully sue my former employer and the onus for proof was on me.
This is exactly the same as in the US. Of course the onus of proof is on you. You are the accussor, they are the defender. They are innocent until you show otherwise, which is as it should be, however much that might not be working in your favor at the moment.
If it were otherwise we'd all just go around accussing everybody of everything and collecting checks from them.
KFG
He was there less than six months, and he filed over 250 error reports, often citing them as being priority one. Now anyone who has worked closely with testers know that the good ones are like gold and the bad ones can only bog down the system. And how much loyalty does a company have to a six month employee anyway? Especially one that comes in doing things in his way (citing standards, but those can always be interpreted in many ways) Last time I checked, we were employment at will, and if he wanted to be considered a "whistleblower", he would have done it 1.5 years ago and to a goverment or news agency. A little on my background.. I've been with my current employer just over six months after getting laid off for the second time after college. A lot of that time was learning how their systems work and improving those I understood. I've seen people come and go in that brief time that thought they knew it all and that they were going to shake things up. Problem is, they didn't want to work with people, they wanted to do things their way, other peoples opinions be damned. Andto some extent it is unfortunate that this guy was able to get a settlement from the company. I bet they, and others aware of the lawsuit, are going to think twice before hiring someone who is legitimately energetic and wants to improve the system.
I don't know anything about Canadian law, but in my state (PA) here in the US the rules for termination are convoluted in the extreme.
This is what's known as an "at will" employment state, meaning that either the employer or the employee can terminate employment for any reason or even no reason at any time. But you can't be terminated for your race, sex, religion, or any other such reason. In most cases, employers who would fire you for such a reason, would never hire you in the first place. But even if you're terminated legally, you can still get unemployment compensation if you were not fired for willful misconduct.
My last employer used to do things like selective enforcement of the rules. For example a woman's skirt could be no higher than 4 inches above the knee. But, many women wore skirts that short or shorter on a daily basis. If one of the people who were not in the inner circle did such a thing she'd be sent home. Hats are against the dress code, but that rule is never enforced against women. One day I had to remove a head covering, so I spend the next two weeks loudly pointing out every dress code violation that there was in the office. That got me a reputation as a "trouble maker". I got written up more than any employee there. But every write up was more for my attitude than for my actual actions, so I wasn't teminated.
Once, during training, we were instructed as to what we were supposed to tell our clients when our computer systems were down. The script was "our systems are updating", I stated plainly that I would not lie at anyone's request. My employment was threatened. My response was, do you really want me to let everyone know that I was terminated for refusing to lie to our clients? The details of that lie are immaterial, the damage to the company's reputation would be done if it became a matter of public record that I was terminated because you tried to force me to lie.
Eventually our client reduced the size of our account and I was one of the lucky few to get let go. I got unemployment compensation out of the deal.
I will never compromise my personal code of ethics for the sake of a job. They can take away my employment, but they can't take away my ethics and dignity.
In the end, if you get fired for taking a moral stand, there are many employers who would like to have you on board.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Reading the documents looks a bit like the average engineer under the gun. Release report regarding volitility of software, and numerous bugs in need of resolution, management goes "Oh those aren't THAAT bad" rather than fix them, they wanna keep to the release schedule on budget.
And the art of politicking is not too far removed from the art of karma whoring, so candidate retraining costs should be kept to a minimum.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
haha.. are you kidding? if microsoft was to own the machine that actually cast the votes and then everyone remebers the slap on the wrist for their monopley scandals, the general public would be calling for thier heads on a stick.
serriously, i don't think micorsoft would want to be in a position were they would have to be scrutinized more severly because they controled the technoligy that puts the politicions in place. A judge would be more likley to throw the book at them just to avoid the apearance of having them in thier pockets or being repsonsible for putting them in office. i would think any judge or politicion that would want to be re-elected would have little choice but to be extra harsh on anything microsoft does wrong just to protect thier perosnal integrity.
Additionally, you very well have the democratic right to vote incorrect if you want to do so.
To vote incorrectly means that you don't agree with the politics of any of the available candidates, opposed to staying at home which only means you don't care.
The security issues with voting and ATMs are of a somewhat different type.
In particular, we probably do not want people to be able to prove who they voted for. This could lead to vote buying, or women retaliating against their husbands for voting the wrong way. Or vice versa.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
The security problem is that people will see your ballot and match it to your face. If it spits out a ballot that's got errors, they can see who *you* voted for. That's the problem.
I don't see any reason that last step of the process (scanning and verifying your ballot) needs to be public. Go into a voting booth, fill out the scantron form, stick it into the machine in the booth, verify the results on the screen, and if they're correct, the machine keeps your ballot, otherwise it gives it back to you.
Sounds like an even better solution than having a touchscreen voting machine print off a receipt to stick into a ballot box outside the booth, since this way you're certain that every vote the machine counted is in the physical ballot box.
NO CARRIER