Slashdot Mirror
Verified Voting
Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone
live with a number of tools
for all you data-hungry election nerds out there. Amongst the goods:
an election
guide for geeks, a voter's
guide to
electronic voting, the Verifier database
of
county-by-county election information and the Election Incident
Reporting System (EIRS) which will be used on E-day by
attorneys and observers in the field to collect data about election
incidents called into the Election Protection
Coalition's
hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The geek community is playing a particularly
active role in this year's eleciton via VV's TechWatch
program. However, we could still use the help of the slashdot
community, and all you have to do is click: We need to test the
resiliency of the Verifier database
and the EIRS
before the election.
ouch, the page is already loading very, very, slow, and i'm getting constant run time errors when i scroll over their map...not a good start...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
While looking around for information on who/what I am voting for I came across SmartVoter which is run by the non-profit organization League of Women voters.
The site is put together nicely, and by entering your street and zip it prints out a full sample ballot of what you'll be voting on and where to vote. It's completely non-partisian and has a lot of information on each issue, with arguements for and against them.
If you're voting in either California or Ohio I'd definetly check it out before you go to the polls next week.
I'd comment on the links themselves but they're dead.
"Why would you risk waiting until the last second to vote?
Umm, all of us people in states that don't have early voting don't really have a choice. I think that is still most of them. Thirty two states offer some form of early voting, but only twenty-three, like Florida, offer early voting to all registered voters. Even in those states, it is not offered in all counties.
Yeah that's really good. Listen, I live in Texas, and the Texas state election site can't tell me where I'm supposed to vote or what precinct I'm in. Luckily I live in a county that's large enough to have a Web site (many in TX don't), but it's almost impossible to use that site to determine my precinct -- the first stage of map that you have to figure out only has bodies of water as landmarks. Also it absolutely is NOT printed on my voter registration card.
Enough with the elitism -- all citizens should be voting as long as they have knowledge about the candidates. That includes people who can't read or write, people who can't drive, people who can't add, people who can't talk, and people who can't do any of those things.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
This guy Shelley they quote on their web site, in addition to the dirty dealings mentioned in the other post, is talking a good deal but not really enforcing the paper-ballot-option requirement. From the Mercury News:
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - The Orange County elections office got the OK from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to keep quiet about the availability of paper ballots at polling places.
All counties using electronic voting are required by Shelley to also provide paper ballots as an alternative to voters who request them. Shelley's office said in a memorandum Tuesday to elections offices that they "must educate voters" about the availability of paper ballots.
But Orange County was allowed to proceed with plans to offer no signs or vocal notification alerting voters about the availability of paper ballots, Shelley's office said Wednesday.
By discussing the issue with the Board of Supervisors and the media, Orange County Registrar of Voters Steve Rodermund had met the education requirement, the state said.
"It sounds like Steve Rodermund has done the minimum that is required," said Tony Miller, special counsel to Shelley. "He has let it be known publicly."
Registrars in Orange and at least three other counties have directed poll workers not to provide information about the availability of a paper ballot unless asked about it, saying they want to encourage the use of electronic voting.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I should probably clarify that I coded EIRS. Database errors on other domains Aren't My Fault. =)
[
I agree it's not exactly clear, but to say it's wrong, wrong wrong is not fair at this point. So their status at this stage is not known, but it raises serious questions.
p losives/
from http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.ex
"News reports during the conflict indicated that troops from the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division entered the Al Qaqaa site on April 4, 2003, finding thousands of boxes of white powder that preliminary tests determined was an explosive. The 101st Airborne Division troops arrived six days later.
No material under IAEA seal was found, but Pentagon officials said the troops were not under orders to conduct a thorough inspection."
#4 Being greeted as Liberators. As far as I can see, we are.
According to a poll taken this May by the CPA (that's the US Coalition Provisional Authority, which has since been disbanded) 92% of Iraqis considered the US to be an occupying force. Only 2% saw us a liberators. I sincerly doubt it has changed much since.
It's one thing to argue that we were "liberators", but it's just plain wrong to assert that Iraqis see us that way.
The poll does not render properly with when viewed with some browsers. Use IE to view it.
If you'd like to do more, sign up with TrueVoteMD to be a poll watcher and report technical or other voting problems - there are still many precincts needing poll watchers. They're desparate for people with computer skills to be poll watchers.
You can choose the precinct and hours... There is still 1 training session left (on Sunday), so its not too late to sign up.
Sign up to be a pollwatcher with truevotemd.org. I think they're still looking for people to help observer polling stations and record any annomolies. It's non-partisan and you aren't there to yell at anyone, simply to observe and record any information that can be used to discredit the machines or maybe even sued Diebold "out the yin-yang" and get some of our tax money back.
We also had perfectly good systems in Montgomery County, Maryland. Punch cards. No, not the crappy scored junk like they used in FL but cards that were clearly printed with the ballot question or candidate which, when placed and aligned in the special ballot card holder, used an aligned mechanical punch to make the hole. It was pretty clear when you took the ballot out what you did or didn't vote.
Mess up the ballot? Yep, I did that once. Took the mangled ballot in the special holder (so nobody knew how I voted) to the election officials who discarded that one in a special sealed "bad vote" box and gave me a replacement, which I voted.
Recount? Just run the cards through the card reader again? Don't trust the reader? Have opposing parties recount the things by hand. Remember that these cards are NOT prescored so there is no problem of chads "just falling out". There's a hole only if the mechanical punch was pressed.
FL was a fiasco in more ways than one. The obvious one was the screwed up elections there. The not so obvious consequence is the screwed up elections that the rest of us are going to have to live with because of misguided legislation at the federal, state, and municipal levels.
Blindly throwing money at a problem is NO substitute for proper problem analysis and careful design and engineering for its mitigation.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fedora
fedora
n.
A soft felt hat with a fairly low crown creased lengthwise and a brim that can be turned up or down.[After Fédora, a play by Victorien Sardou.]
A RedHat Linux distribution http://fedora.redhat.com/
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
https://voteprotect.org/?display=EIRMapNation
The 1-866-OUR-VOTE election hotline is open today, so you can watch incidents come into the system in real time. This system will be used on election day to dispatch lawyers and techies to trouble spots in real time. Go to http://electionprotection2004.org or send mail to volunteer@verifiedvoting.org to volunteer.
[I am the lead programmer for EIRS.]
[
Even if you are voting contrary to your state majority, you should still vote.
Why?
Because you know they are going to count the popular vote anyway, and if once again a candidate wins the electoral college and the presidency, but loses the popular vote, it is that much more impetus to finally change that system.
Mike
[I'm the lead programmer for EIRS.]
The EIRS site seems to be holding up fine for me, with a surprisingly modest hardware investment.
Yes, there are a lot of things I would structure differently if I were coding this from scratch -- but that's not how the Real World operates. This site was developed primarily by a single developer (me) over a period of a few months. I didn't have the luxury of starting with a clean slate; I had to build on existing tools.
Furthermore, with no budget (because this is a non-profit) hardware is *always* difficult to come by. I would have liked to roll out a lot more machines, but it was not to be.
The current EIRS site is two web front ends talking to a single database machine. And it's currently quite usable for me, at least.
[Although I'm noticing that DNS seems to be very slow -- unfortunately that's out of my control.]
Feel free to disabuse me of my naivete. And check out https://voteprotect.org/?display=EIRMapNation while you're at it -- this is a real-time map being filled with incidents being reported at the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline (remember that number, if you need it on election day!). The core of EIRS is the ability to respond in real time to reported incidents and dispatch lawyers and technologists.
And, yes, the machines serving the hotlines are entirely distinct from the ones which slashdot is digilently trying to take down.
[
Might want to take a peek here and see how it fits in with what you say.
Here's another site that works for all states:
vote-smart
A lot of information here about candidates for both state and federal offices, including finances, voting records, and interest group ratings. Unfortunately they don't have information about state/county/city level propositions.
- Collect background and testing information from state & local election officials
- Compile and track election irregularity data before, during, and after election day
- Organize and manage teams of people and tasks
- Dispatch attorneys and technologists rapidly to resolve election day incidents at voting places
- Provide an on-line collaborative environment for rapid communication among advocates, attorneys, technologists, election officials, media professionals, and others
- Support subsequent research for election policy-making
Most of the features are for internal use. But the most visible public feature is the Real-time map of election incidents which is updated within seconds as incidents come into the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline. Reported incidents are acted on by our lawyer and techie volunteers, to correct those issues which can be corrected and prevent voters from being disenfranchised.[I'm the lead coder for EIRS, fwiw.]
[
Yes, and yes.
However, we don't have it normed per population. We discussed a number of such display options, but time didn't really permit their implementation.
What is really wanted is some metric for the # of people affected by each incident (rather than having all incidents count the same). But the reporters were very inaccurate in their estimates of this.
[
I know you're desperate to justify Bush's continued existence, so you probably don't care about evidence, but here's some pictures anyway. Knock yourself out.
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1
Visit the