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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."
It worries me no matter who they are predicted to vote for. Consider:
The basis for democracy is that, in exchange for an opportunity to vote freely and fairly, we all agree to accept the result of the election, even if the candidate of our choice does not win the election. Reasonable people are willing to accept this bargain on the basis of the elections being free and fair.
The subtle upshot of this, which many people miss, is that an election can be rigged even without compromising a single vote.
An election is definitively won by a candidate when the number of votes received by a candidate exceeds the number of votes received by his next-nearest competitor plus the margin of error. This was the crux of the problems in Florida in the 2000 election: initially the amount of uncertainty in the vote counts exceeded the difference between Bush and Gore. What ensued was a remedial process to reduse the uncertainty through re-examination of ballots, lawsuits, and ultimately courtroom decisions.
It's interesting to note that no part of this remedial process was under the control of the voters. Clearly, you wouldn't want it to be under the control of anyone, but it explains one strategy for rigging an election under circumstances where it's too risky (or you simply have no means to) swing how the voters will actually vote. Control of the remedial process can be leveraged into control of the election itself, but only if the difference between the two candidates is small enough. Or, put another way, only if the uncertainty is large enough. Anything which raises questions about the freeness and fairness of the election process introduces uncertainty.
So, yes I'm a little concerned that some uber-hacker will root the electronic voting machines and change a few votes, but I'm a lot more concerned that confidence in a whole lot of votes will be lost simply because some uber-hacker could root the machines.
I'd lump this article in the same category. Every time I hear a story about how the election process is being skewed one way or another, I can't help but think it's because someone has already rigged the remedial process in their own favor, and all they need to with the election now is enough people questioning the initial tally.
Which is not to say I think we should stop discussing the vulnerabilities of the system, but rather to point out that we need to do more than just discuss them; we've got to ensure that the vulnerabilities are corrected. We need to send a message (from both sides of the political spectrum) that we believe our candidate can beat the opponent in a fair fight, and we won't stand for any of this crap which makes the election appear to be untrustworthyi, if for no other reason than because it calls into question the legitimacy of an election we clearly won.
I have my favorite candidate. I accept the possibility that the other candidate could win. I am of the opinion that if the wrong candidate gets elected, he could prove very bad for this country, but I don't think either/any candidate is so horrible that the damage couldn't be pretty much undone by electing the 'right' candidate in another 4 years.
But if we wind-up with an untrustable election system (no paper trail electronic voting, Internet vote casting, selectively disenfranchised voters, etc.) we might never see the chance 4 years down the road.
So I'm predicting now that the 2004 race will be close (no brainer) but I'm hoping there won't be another 2000-style fiasco in the vote counting. If there is, I hope we will all look at the resolution process with a very skeptical eye, a critical eye, an eye to the possiblity that the November vote may have already been rigged.
And that holds true no matter who wins in November.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
I love the governments response... Block overseas ISPs for overseas voters and then if you RTFA, you will see the government response to that is to have them call a Toll Free Number. Why would the government have a toll free number in the US for overseas voters?! Don't they know that when you call from overseas the numbers aren't toll free. In France, you have to totally dial the number another way and in fact, most Toll Free Numbers don't allow international terminations without special provisioning. I can only assume they have done that.
Yes, Virginia there are Americans who don't live in America!
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
A Military Times survey last December of 933 subscribers, about 30 percent of whom had deployed for the Iraq war, found that 56 percent considered themselves Republican - about the same percentage who approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. Half of those responding were officers, who as a group tend to be more conservative than their enlisted counterparts.
... From my time in the service (1987-1997) I'd say the numbers are very different for officers and enlisted. The officer corps is strongly conservative and Republican, and becoming more so all the time (and I consider it deeply unhealthy for the nation to have an officer corps that subscribes overwhelmingly to any particular ideology, but that's a matter for another time ...) while enlisted personnel follow roughly the same split (1/3 D, 1/3 R, 1/3 other) as the rest of the country. The article pretty much says this:
Not sure what "considered themselves Republican" means -- presumably all the registered R's, plus independents who lean strongly that way. Anyway
Among officers, who represent roughly 15 percent of today's 1.4 million active duty military personnel, there are about eight Republicans for every Democrat, according to a 1999 survey by Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver. Enlisted personnel, however - a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, a population that tends to lean Democratic - are more evenly split. Professor Feaver estimates that about one third of enlisted troops are Republicans, one third Democrats, and the rest independents, with the latter group growing.
This isn't surprising, since officers tend to come from much more priveleged backgrounds than do enlisted personnel.
I also suspect that the numbers vary by service, with the Marines being the most conservative, the Air Force being the most liberal, and the Army and Navy -- largely by virtue of being bigger, and therefore more diverse -- being somewhere in the middle. I'd be interested to see hard numbers on this one of these days.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.