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
did we just get someone who ASKED for their site to be slashdotted?
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
"Cannot connect to database"
/.
Guess that's what you get for asking to stress test a server from
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
Uhhh... we vote for faster servers and more memory in 2004!
I voted early last week. Why would you risk waiting until the last second to vote? Who knows what could go wrong. You could get sick, your car could break down, you could accidentally go to the wrong polling location, etc...
Funny thing is that on the second day of early voting, the polling location that I went to had a 30 minute wait!!! In 2000, on election day, there was no wait whatsoever! I think this year there is going to be a HUGE voter turnout. I am not sure who it is going to favor, but it is an interesting phenomenon.
The most frustrating part is that my county already had perfectly good voting machines: paper-based scantron-type forms where you mark the appropriate rectangle and a simple scanner tabulates the results. Effective, verifiable, well-understood, and relatively inexpensive. In other words, the complete opposite of what the state just bought for us.
In Soviet russia, only old Koreans profit from pictures of Natalie Portman stored on Beowulf Clusters.
Slashdot 1, MySQL Server 0
Test your net with Netalyzr
They had a nice wizard at www.verifiedvoting.org (one of the sites mentioned in the article) that would help tell you what voting technologies exist in your precinct, and what alternatives exist if you want a paper receipt of your vote. (In some places, absentee ballot by snail-mail is the only alternative to trusting Diebold, in other places there are more alternatives.) But, possibly because of the slashdot link, all the wizard tells me now is that it can't connect to the mySQL database.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Go to Verified Voting site and at the top right click "Edit Preferences" Click OK without typing anything in...
Read the SeCrEt MeSsAgE!
In addition, during this fear driven propaganda-fest, free speech is confused with anti-Americanism. And everything else that has made the US a great place to live has ground to a halt. Even the ill-conceived 'freedom zones' are getting further and further away from this war-happy candidate as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while listening to mouth-breathers spouting Republican talking points, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Republican machine that has run faster from the truth, all the while tossing 'loyalty pledges' and cease and desist orders at anyone who may disagree, despite the millions of people who share the need to be rid of this administration. My Tandy 102 with 32k of RAM demonstrates more resolve and better judgment than Bush most times. From a leadership standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Bush is a superior candidate for president.
Bush addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to vote for Bush over other more truthful, reasoned, smarter and stable candidates.
I find it amusing that the quote on the front page is from Kevin Shelley (CA Secretary of State) who is up to his eyeballs in scandals including misappropriation of federal voting money on Democratic consultants, accepting checks in his Sacramento office (a crime in CA), receiving laundered campaign contributions, etc. For the curious, here's just a smattering of the articles about him:
/ ch ronicle/archive/2004/09/30/MNG9U91ANA1.DTL/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/09/30/BAGPE91B571.DTL/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/07/EDGII94AG81.DTL/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/08/BAG4M95J231.DTL/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/11/MNGID9748P1.DTL/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/24/BAGML9F94221.DTL: //www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/27/BAGGE9FSN057.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
http:
http:
http:
http:
http:
http
Seems like they could have picked someone better to quote.
(My preview is showing odd spaces in the URI - you may have to fix to view the articles)
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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
Not too long ago, I could just drive to my designated polling place, have them check off my name, vote, and a day or so later, I would read the results in the local paper or watch the results on some "breaking" TV special. Simple and easy.
Now, I have to read countless Geek and non-geek election and voting guides so that I can come to the realization that the candidate I had chosen long ago is still the one I am actually going to vote for. Then, I'll have to file appropriate paperwork for a "conditional ballot" should I decide that my designated polling place is "not convenient" for me. Then, once at the polling place, I'll have to dodge international election monitors, and dodge partisan bullies just to get into the polling place. Then, I have to hope that my votor registration has been logged properly so that I can vote. Once on the voting booth, I then will have to thoroughly discriminate the voting process to ensure that the new e-voting machine actually works and make sure a paper copy prints so that the inevitable recounts can be handled properly. Then, when I get home, I have to monitor the countless state-by-state and county-by-county real-time returns, monitor countless voting fraud sites, all the while filtering out sincere, yet consistently contradictory election commentary on main-stream media outlets.
Oh wait. I forgot. I live in South Carolina where President Bush is already locked in as the winner, so would I be better off just staying at home? Besides, some county in Florida will be deciding the election outcome anyway, right?
Time to shut off the PC and go Outside(TM) for a nice walk.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
[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.
[
- 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.]
[