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Dave Barry on Electronic Voting
eggoeater writes "With the general interest Slashdot has with electronic voting machines, I thought we'd all enjoy reviewing Dave Barry's take on touch-screen voting machines and debating the merits of police officers carrying lightsabers."
Apparently, you haven't read much of Dave Barry's writing...
Internal changing of values happened in Las Vegas. Gurantee it'd happen in voting. www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
... I just can't tell anymore whether I'm supposed to be laughing WITH or AT people.
I don't speak Portuguese, but I did a quick text search on the page you linked to. The word "Diebold" does not appear anywhere on that page.
I am inclined to think that your system is probably more reliable than what ours will be... and we're not just using it for municipal elections either. We're using it--for only the first or second time in most states--in a Presidential election.
Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11, MORON. 1000 Americans have died in Iraq for NOTHING.
I find it ironic that /. the home of let's network our toasters and have them run linux is against modernizing voting.
I bet if Diebold used Linux you'd be all for it.
Ok, so there's two checkboxes for excluding Politics in the preferences, neither of them seems to work and as long a these stories get posted on the front page, there's no way to avoid them.
So a small plea to the editors; please keep politics in their own Section until someone fixes the Exclusion? Please?
You're naive if you believe that iraq had nothing to do with 9/11
Oh, then perhaps you'd like to share this super-secret evidence that links Iraq to 9/11?
We're in Iraq because George Bush is angry that Saddam wanted to kill his Daddy.
How long before we demand direct democracy.
Seems like something that could be really useful in politically backwards countries like the U.S.
Of course, its not very informative, but it will at least lead you to think about hackers as a concern for e-voting.
Hackers aren't the real concern for e-voting. Partisan election officials and machine manufacturers are. So in a way, this Dave Barry article both introduces a real concern, and at the same time disposes of it by implying that it's far-fetched.
But I think you're very right about comedy being a good way to point out important issues -- for example, The Daily Show is probably one of the best news sources out there.
Not about the electronic voting or anything, but that is pretty dang funny.
...
I think he's got some points being funny though. I mean, how many people do you know who becoome so obsessed with this election, that even a mention of "a different" canidate will get you a glare?
Peopel need to tone it down a bit. Stuff like that really provides some needed comedy, when it's really needed too.
I walk down the hall talking to some people, and they say that this year is going to end up sucking. "Why's that?" I ask. "Because I've got several massive projects due in the start of December, my grandma is on the verge of death, and to top it all off, Bush might get re-elected."
This guy isn't even of legal age to vote, and he was literally thinking that Bush being re-elected is by far worse than anything else at the moment.
Come on people, live a little, joke a little. Rock on Dave Barry.
you may laugh, but if you really compare, you do get more sides of what a party says when you watch satires about politics than you do with the regular news... of course along with zinger.
With regular news, if something is just too obviously a lie or stupid, they just won't mention it or just focus on the intent, which was backed up by the unmentioned ridiculousness.
Woah there, because corporations don't have political interests? All this would do is make it easier for the corporation to adjust the votes to match their interests.
I've posted elsewhere about the differences between ATMs and voting. ATMs work because if they don't, the bank is screwed. Electronic voting won't work because if it's screwed up, the only people who lose are the voters and the minority party.
There is literally NO INCENTIVE for the people with power to support a fair electronic voting system. There are at least a dozen ways to get crooked code onto the machine and basically no way to find out about it short of taking the machine apart.
By the way, this is a bi-partisan rant. I don't want anybody advocating electronic voting. The concept is not sound.
Politics has always been kind of an ugly business, but I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime that was so bitter, petty, angry, divisive and deliberately misleading. We have collectively sunk to the ethical level of Karl Rove.
Not only do we not deserve a leadership position in the world, we are becoming ugly and pathetic. We are in real danger of turning into the richest third world country on the planet.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I haven't participated in running an voting location, but I believe this is dealt with by having lots of eyes on the paperwork as well as a representative from both major parties. It's not perfect, but you can say this - for all the problems they had in Florida, people replacing the votes with forged votes was not the issue.
So bring back the punch cards + receipts, I say.
Fuckin a man. There is no incentive for the people with power to run a fair election. That's why we have so many eyes on the paper system. When you go to electronic voting, 1) few people understand the technology well enough to appreciate the potential for security breach, and 2) the ability to put a lot of eyes on the voting count is practically eradicated.
"Oh, but you'll still have a paper receipt that you can count!" So why the fuck wouldn't you count that paper receipt in the first place? Technology aside, there is simply no reasonable basis for blindly trusting that the machines will work fairly.
The part I liked best was his rif on 30 second commercial spots. They do nothing to inform the voters, yet they are often the thing that swings the election. They are a primary reason money has become such a huge corrupting influence in politics. Like those Swift Boat Vet adds. They have been completely discredited, but many people will never learn that part of it and only remember the adds themselves. This is why I urge people to do a few google news searches and inform yourselves of the issues before going in the voting booth.
The Bolachek Journals
Canada has always had pencil-and-paper voting and always seems to be able to get decisive results in a few hours. Why can't the Americans do this? Is the missing technology high-school graduates who can read?
So you're willing to accept an invalid result if it saves you a few bucks? No wonder the Republic is in such dire straits these days.
Look at it this way: Naturally enough, you believe your positions to be correct. If you also believe in democracy, then you have to believe that your valid ideas will win out, long run, versus the invalid ones that compete. (If you feel this is pollyanna, fine... but then you don't believe in democracy.) Since you're clearly on the side of goodness and light, if an election were to be improper, it would be The Other Guys who rigged it. These are the guys whom you believe want to raise taxes to 100% while legally mandating all sorts of moral depravities. Do you want them to get in because you wouldn't shell out few dollars?
If you believe in your cause, then settling a contested election will lead to the "right" people being elected
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I completely agree. Unfortunately, I've discussed this with some people who are very concerned about what might result. Specifically, employers, union bosses, or whoever, might demand to get that unique number, so that they can confirm you voted the way they want.
Personally, I would tell anyone who demanded such information to stuff it, regardless of the consequences, and I'd want them thrown in jail immediately. But I do recognize that it's a tradeoff.
A tradeoff, but one we desperately need. I was concerned on September 11, 2001, that the attacks would mean the end of democracy in America (what was left at the time). Electronic voting with Diebold's double booking is a clear sign of the end of representative democracy.
Say you have 10 candidates. So you set up 100,000 voting stations across the country (I am not an American). At each station you have 100 (10 rolls x ten booths to allow 10 people to vote at the same time) extremely large rolls of paper tape encased into a transparent plastic cover. The paper rolls are of different color. The paper tape has candidate's name printed on it over and over again on the face side. On the other side of the name there is a number printed as a bar code binary format and in a decimal format, this is a sequential number that identifies the paper roll, and the position of this number within the roll.
As a person enters a booth, (s)he sees 10 buttons, of which only one can be pressed at once and once a button is pressed the other buttons are deactivated until the next person enters the booth. Once a button is pressed, the voter can see a candidate's name cut off from a corresponding tape, the piece of paper falls into a box.
So now by the end of election with this particular setup you have the following:
1. 100 boxes with papers on them in each voting location.
2. 100 tape enclosures with some tape left on them.
So now to count just look at the end of the tape, the last sequential number must tell you how many votes were cast for this particular candidate.
The boxes and the tapes must be stored seperately for a recount purposes.
-----
Here is how to make counting of the totals possible:
Have a website where the people doing the local counts login into and post their numbers against their voting location.
These numbers must be accessible by all, the person who just submitted them will see them on the site and if something funny happens to them (like they change one way or another) then have the local news notified.
This website should be well secured though. Please.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually I'm pretty sure it would result in the election of Natalie Portman...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
You do know that some of the people making these purchasing decisions have (a) very little computer knowledge and/or (b) are going to believe anything the nice salesman tells them becuase they've been mandated to pick an elecronic voting system by politicians who are deathly afraid of a manual-vote-count failure like FL in 2000.
The fact that he knows that the system is vulnerable puts him in the 80% percentile of voter knowledge.
Yes, he's a humorist, but he's a fairly smart guy Actually, to write mainstream/topical humor you have to be reasonably intellegent. Being on a selection commitee in a government office simply means you've been there long enough to have seniority to get to make decisions.
Nope.
Giving receipts out encourages vote buying - people standing on street corners promising $50 in exchange for a Bush receipt. When elections can be called by a couple of hundred votes as in Florida, and with the level of voter apathy, vote buying becomes highly feasible and not too expensive.
There is one way that works and has worked for centuries - a ballot paper, and a pencil to put a cross by the candidate's name. And all the ballots counted by hand, in full view of multiple representatives from all parties - and the press. Yes, it's inefficient, but you can't put a price on democracy.
Yes, you're right, but that is not the problem.
The problem is that there is no feasible way to prove that the instructions in main memory on every voting machine corresponds, without exception, to the source code on a piece of paper.
You can't trust the compiler:
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Back_door
You can't trust the hardware - it would be trivial to implement instructions that dump the "right" code from memory while running something else.
Never in history has society had a need to mistrust their computers. They have always been tools built and instructed to help us out. If it fucks up, well we must have misused the tool. Electronic Voting is an entirely different use for computers and very few people understand the subtle difference. This is the first time in history where something critical is being trusted to computers while someone else has something to gain by misusing the tool.
A hammer is a hammer, but when for the first time I'm holding the nail with my fingers and giving you the hammer. And what the fuck for? Because a handful of people can't handle the paper system? Hell, let that handful of people use the electronic voting system. I'll be voting by paper (absentee if necessary) until I die.
This is the worst argument against reciepts I've ever heard. Unfortunately, it is also the most common, and also the "offical" objection. Let's drive a stake through it right now, shall we?
On the one hand, if we give receipts, someone might buy some votes. Now, in order to have this effect the ellection, they have to let people know about it before they vote. Otherwise they are just paying people to vote for X when they would have (and did) vote for X anyway. They would just be wasting their money. Likewise, they'd have to let their offer to buy votes for X be known to people who wouldn't have otherwise voted for X--just telling the faithful doesn't help. And to make any difference they would have to tell a large enough number of people to swing the vote--and they don't know beforehand how close it will be, so they'll have to err on the side of "caution" and tell lots of people.
On the other hand, without receipts, an electronic election can by twisted any which way by just fudging the data in the system--with closed source software, this could be done by a single individual or a very small group of people, with no need to tell anyone who isn't already commited.
So, on the one hand, we have the possibility of a conspiracy that can only work if it is announced beforehand to a large number of people at least some of whom probably don't agree with its goals, and on the other hand the possibility of a conspiracy that can be carried out in secret by a very small group of insiders.
Which would you be more worried about?
-- MarkusQ
If they were smarter, they wouldn't vote for Bush. But dumb people need representation too, right?
Aside from the parent being an obvious Troll, this is a perfect example of what is wrong with most politicians. The parent is likely a Democrat, but in truth you can probably find it in each and every party.
These type of politicians automatically assume that their personal experience and knowledge was arrived at through flawless logic and insight. Subsequently their view points are the only correct view point possible.
Then they go on to extrapolate that anyone who has a different opinion obviously is less intelligent and thus unable to achieve their own level of flawless logic and insight. And in short, patently wrong-headed (because they don't agree with "me").
I'll grant that your view point may be logical arrived at considering your limited experience. But to claim insight requires one to consider diverse view points in a fair and critical manner of some lenghty temporal span. And from your use of language I am unable to identify any such insight.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
You can buy votes for a lot less than $50:
Cigarettes Distributed For Gore Vote
From the article:
Campaign volunteers for the Democratic Presidential campaign were discovered distributing cigarettes to homeless voters after the volunteers had recruited the homeless specifically for their vote Saturday.
In all fairness, the Gore campaign responded:
"This kind of activity described by Channel 12 is not the kind of help we ask for and it's the kind of help we flat-out reject. These volunteers were from out of state, acting on their own and this was not part of any official Democratic 'get out the vote' activity in Wisconsin. They have left the state and we will not invite them to return," wrote Susan Lagana, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Coordinated Campaign.
Argh, I fail to see how GWB is making the US a safer place. The US has now gone 3 years without a terrorist attack. Gee, I think there wasn't an attack between 11 Sept 1998 and 10 Sept 2001, was there?
There were a bunch of attacks against the U.S. between 11 Sept 1998 and 10 Sept 2001. The Kenya Embassy bombing, the Kobar Tower bombing and the USS Cole bombing all come to mind. And lets not forget that the World Trade Center was a frequent terrorist bombing target (with some success) around and prior to this time frame.
To play devil's advocate, U.S. troops have been targetted targetted post 9/11, so I think its difficult to show that we haven't experienced terrorism as you seem to say President Bush says we haven't (assuming you haven't mischaracterized his statement).
But it is does seem to hold true that we haven't experienced attacks against civilian structures like those similar to the World Trade Center and the U.S. Embassy in Kenya since 9/11.
Though I think having our men and women fighting these same terrorists outside military compounds in foriegn countries is probably insulating us here in the civilian world. What will be telling is whether or not terrorism incidents resume against civilian targets after we decrease our presence in Iraq/Afganistan.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
I like shiny new things as much as the next Slashdotter, but, give me a break. We love shiny things because they're cool to toy with.
Elections are something you don't toy with.
It's all about being trustworthy. When there is a recount, you damned better well be able to take a hand count of the votes observed by both canidates. With an electronic system, you're left with what the machine says, and thats it. Thats just not acceptable.
It might not be kosher to say, lets step back to something not bleeding edge, and full of buzz words.. Here in Wisconsin we use optical scan machines and they work excellent. The elector gets their ballot, and for every office theres the list of canidates. To select one, they just complete the aarow on the side of their name. They slide the ballot into the tabulator, and the tabulator counts (or kicks it back if its an undervoted or overvoted ballot). There is a permenant record of their vote--the actual ballot they filled out. In the case of a recount, its very hard to argue that the voters intent lies elsewhere.
This would be bad. In areas where you had a largely one-sided party afflilation, you would have that party somehow always getting 100% of the votes.
Why? 10 people count the same 10 ballots a total of 10 times. If 9 out 10 ten where in the "Shamelessly Corrupt Party", all of the sudden 9 out of 10 would say "we got 100% of the votes", instead of, say, 90%. The one person in the other party comes in and says it was 9-to-1, and all of the sudden his count is the outlier and gets tossed.
It wouldn't have to be a 9-1 situation either. Let's say it 60/40 for one party. The "40" side would say they were the "60" side. All it would take for this to happen is for someone in the actual-60 party to miscount two votes, and then suddenly the 60/40 switches, and bamo. Tainted election.
I've often wondered how the legally blind vote in Canada. I've yet to see a ballot with any raised markings.
Do they just take a friend with them?
Rod Taylor
So what you're saying is, there are no Iraqi terrorists?
No, I'm pretty sure that the parent was saying that there is no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaida.
(In case you don't know, Al Qaida is the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11. Also, Japan caused Pearl Harbor and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by an American. Iraq isn't connected with any of these events.)
The idea behind anonymous voting is to ensure that, even if they paid you or something, people don't know who you voted for. So they can attempt to buy votes but not know how it pays off, or not bother trying to buy votes at all. However, if you are provided with some way of seeing what you voted outside of the voting booth, then you can show someone else that you did indeed vote for Mickey Mouse as president like they told you, and they will pay you.
The trick is that you have to keep the voting districts the same size in the US as in Canada, so that the physical vote counting takes pretty much exactly the same time in both countries. Then any additional time in the US comes from the fact that they would have either more levels in the hierarchy of voting areas (unlikely), or results from a larger number of districts to add up on each level. It's not rocket science.