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Overseas ISPs Blocked From US Voting Website
An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Defense is blocking many of the world's major Internet service providers from giving access to the web site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which allows registered American voters to vote from abroad. The Pentagon is blaming the risk of hackers, but Democrats Abroad aren't happy."
Big deal. They also made http://www.overseasvote2004.com/ page. Get over it. What's to be upset about?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
This site provides information about voting absentee. The summary and title makes it look like they are letting people vote online, and I almost flipped out before I RTFA.
I know others won't RTFA so I wanted to throw that out there. I hope they never allow voting online, as this is the most sacrosanct privilege we have and I don't want anyone to have the ability to intercept my or anyone else's vote.
It's not a big problem to drive to the nearest school to punch a few buttons and hit "cast vote".
Chris
Well, Netcraft says it's running Solaris 8 machine running Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1.
How about putting the webserver up on Trusted Solaris and locking down the webserver to have fewer privs, like no write access (enforced via MAC, mandatory access controls) to the pages that you're worried about getting defaced?
But, teh intarweb isn't the only way to get info for overseas voting. From the article:
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
My former roommate subscribed for the T&A, and often left his copies lying around. I was often amazed and impressed with the level of journalism present in the magazine. Good hard-hitting interviews with some fairly big names, insightful exposes, and so on.
No, because I read the whole article, and saw the part mentioning that "The US Department of Defense ... runs the Federal Voting Assistance Program." The DoD is the agency that "owns" the site.
And this whole thing is much ado about very little. The website is just a place where you can get info on how to vote absentee and download an absentee ballot request form. People have been voting absentee long before this website was around, and they can continue to do so. Your local US Embassy will have the ballot request form, for example (and they'll even mail it for you free there). Also, most (perhaps all?) states have their own absentee ballots that you can apply for.
but is the military vote really republican?
the christian science monitor today is running a story on anti-bush troops in iraq. give it a read -- and remember that the last time the u.s. was involved in a major land war a lot of the vetrans and enlisted men wound up developing strong anti-war stances... john kerry, for instance.
2 1337 4 u!
but is the military vote really republican?
Read the headline: "A Strident Minority". The same article mentions this statistic: 56% of the military is Republican. One would assume there are some independents that lean (R) as well, and with an over representation of rural southerners in the military there is probably a fair number of Democrats more along the lines of Zell Miller than John Kerry. Sure you can find a statistically significant group to write an article about. Those (maybe 25%?) that opposed the war but end up over there are obviously going to be alienated & further polarized by the experience, thus the "strident" part of the title. Democrats can try to mine this 30-40% for a few extra votes, they have an opening for some counter-intuitive outreach, but the Republicans are still going to work hard to try and get this demographic to the polls in November.
Probably because he's been outside the USA.
I've traveled to Europe, Mexico, Canada. I know dozens of people who regularly travel to Singapore, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, South America and a host of other regions.
All of them are far more liberal then I am.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act