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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."
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.
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?
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.
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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.
Pay up, sucker.
ATMs work because the institution has a vested interest in keeping everything on the level. Electronic voting will fail because the institution has a vested interest in making sure the results are "adjusted".
Spin the tables - tell your bank that you're going to withdraw $100 and demand unrestricted access to the vaults for 5 minutes. If you think that's a dumbass idea, then you think electronic voting is a dumbass idea.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.