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More on the Dangers of eVoting
blamanj writes "A lot of discussion has been focused on the lack of security in electronic voting systems. What hasn't been as widely discussed, is just how tiny the voting manipulations have to be to have an effect. In this months CACM (cite, pdf of original paper is here), some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. Changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states."
First of all, this "study" was done with full knowledge of the outcome of the election. While this makes for a slightly amusing statistical exercise, for it to work right, one candidate would not only have to have unrealistic access to countless voting machines, he'd have had to have guessed WHICH machines he needed unrealistic access to beforehand.
Second, this doesn't show any problem specific to electronic voting. Each of those votes in the "one vote per machine" total could have been "flipped" by countless other fraudulent activities if the aforementioned prerequisite of psychic ability had been met.
Finally - see that horse? It's dead. You can stop beating it. Electronic voting has happened, is happening, and will happen. The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
I suppose that pointing this out to Sims is a waste of time given his history of childish antics and self-serving coniptions, but I'll do it anyway: this sort of nonsense being given face time on Slashdot just serves to stir up a bunch of clueless 16 year old zitheads who go around yelping about a real problem in an unrealistic way which just galvanizes everyone who needs to know about it against the people who actually understand the threat and have a real case to make. Congratulations, Michael. You not only continue to lower the overall level of discourse in the technical arena, you even manage to get paid for it now.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
On if you shifted votes from the winner to the loser? If you shift votes from the loser to the winner, the outcome should still be the same.
I guess it would be something like this (qtd on Slashdot recently)
here's the fixed link
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I'm more afraid of a glitch along the lines of "all diebold machines count an extra presidential vote whenever this combination of votes is chosen" ... or something like that. Some kind of UNINTENTIONAL glitch to fuck up the results.
Jay | http://oldos.org
year...
It should sicken everyone that both major parties are willing to go so far to win that we are now hearing about so many voter fraud problems arising before the election. Voter fraud should be one of the most severe crimes on the federal law books, it should be classified as a form of "attempting to overthrow the United States Government." No less than five years in prison IMO.
That said, America needs a much more comprehensive solution to voter fraud. It is one of the few things that I think warrants having a DNA tag for every citizen. There should be a national voter database that has the DNA of all citizens in it so that instead of having a national id you only have to go to the precinct and get a quick biometric test done to verify your ID.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. I teach American politics at a campus where P. Diddy and crew just came through, and we talked about it in class after the rally. The point isn't simply to vote, but rather to take responsibility for your life. That entails being an educated voter, not a random one. That message is getting through to the kids, so I'm most definitely NOT appalled by it.
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Sorry, I haven't been following up on the whole e-voting thing. Will there be e-voting for the election coming up in a few days or will there not be? If so, link? I haven't seen anything to confirm or deny it, just a bunch of complaints about the system.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
eVoting might be the "wave of the future" but the future ain't here yet!
:) ...now, for this eVoting stuff...It's easy to spoof an e-mail and not get caught, but it's not so easy to spoof an actual letter and not get caught... I apply this same analogy to eVoting. You could attempt to forge a physical ballot (like the guy in Ohio who recently attempted to register celebrity's names as voters), but you would most likely get caught in the long run, whereas if you modify an "eVote" you can slide home-free into office.
One of the most troublesome states to meddle with the faulty "eVoting" system is Florida. In addition to this, there are thousands of absentee ballots missing.
I expect Florida to be somewhat troublesome come this November.
Politics is a crooked business to start with, and this eVoting stuff is just twisting it even more!
Maybe next time, but I hope they lay off of these things this time around!
The Baltimore Jewish Times is reporting that Diebold uses DES encryption in their voting machines, and the key is publically available!
http://www.jewishtimes.com/2435.stm
Sorry, but you need a really, really good reason to convince me that something like that is necessary. The fact that a relatively tiny proportion of people are able to defraud the system is not one of them.
If you can give me a great argument for a national DNA database, I'll listen, but with all due respect, this is not one of them.
apterous.org
In Soviet Russia vote counts you!
And the worst part is that they interrupt the shows for these little messages. Not a commercial, but an actual in-show interruption where you miss what was going on. I need to know what happens on Road Rules/Real World Battle of the Sexes 2!!!
"off by one" software mistakes even more significant. Maybe this has been The Secret Plan (tm) all along.
For what it's worth, this same statistical analysis is what means *your* vote actually counts for something.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
You're right on one count, electronic voting is here to stay. However, since we're already seeing signs of the massive error and possible fraud you allude to, this is a very salient issue. The article is a rather silly statistical exercise in one way, since there's no way a single person could skew all the different machines they would need to if they wanted to fix an election in this way. The difficulty of doing so is compounded by the different types of machines in use.
That said, it does point out a real issue with American elections. Very small shifts in the popular vote have such radical effects on the outcome that we can't afford to keep tolerating all the irregularities in the election process. The relatively high number of "spoiled" ballots with the touch screen systems, the partisan involvement in voter registration that's leading to corruption of the voting register in at least Nevada and Ohio, and the systematic efforts of the Republican party to suppress the vote of people likely to support the Democrats has got to stop. This type of crap is bad enough in countries where elections are mere ratifications of the party in power, it shouldn't be allowed when the election really counts.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but there's a reason they don't catalog all of our DNA or give us all numbers or something like that.
You do have a really good point about voter fraud in your first paragraph. Maybe you should push this point a little more. You just convinced me that voter fraud is a tantamount to overthrowing the US Government.
main(0)
If a single machine were to change all the votes cast there, it would still be just as small a change as changing one vote at every machine, and would have just as much effect (and be a lot easier to pull off)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I think this whole "eVoting" thing has come along as a result of everyone trying to tack the letter 'e' onto everything, even if it's not needed, or we're not ready for it.
Absolutely. But see, there's this little problem: education takes time and effort. If I can't decide who to vote for based on sound bites from TV, then hell, I'll vote for Kerry because Bush looks like an ape. Yes, I am the problem with America today. I watch TV and never hear mention of any concepts covered in, say entry level economics or history courses. I hear tax cuts this, free trade that, but have no concept of the long or short term effects of these policies. I don't know what my senator has done; I don't know the name of my current House representative.
Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is god.
IMO optical mark recognition (aka: bubble sheets), also made by Diebold and others, is the closest thing out there that allows for fairly secure vote protection while allowing for electronic tallying. I know that evoting is also about access to others but at the cost of a honest election?
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Usually I'd agree with you, and I switch between the two major parties fairly regularly, with the occasional third-party vote. But this year, it's really a no-brainer. There's a complete jackass as president, so as long as his opponent is Josef Stalin, there's really only one reasonable choice. What exactly Kerry stands for I don't care; he can't possibly be worse.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
is that each voteing place has at least 2 workers. One is democrat, and another is republican. This was started a long time ago, BECAUSE ppl tend to corrupt. Chicago, Texas, and Tennase were great examples of cities/states that have notorious voter fraud in the past.These days neither party trust each other and will be sueing in huge amounts over the next couple of weeks.
Yet, here is a system that is fairly easy to defeat esp. when a paper trail is not created. And both major parties seem to want to push it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why?
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
The downside: First, electrophoresis probably doesn't scale well to millions of samples. It's a lot better than the old methods, but not really designed at present for large scale work. Second, getting the DNA is going to annoy voters. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swab cheek cells, but still. Third, while I firmly believe this could eliminate almost all voter fraud, this is not some super-secure database. I mean, what method are you using to check whose dna is allowed in? Probably birth certificate and social security card. And as easy as it is to forge those, so would it be to get into the database.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Here in Canberra (that nice little capital city of Australia) we had electronic voting for our election, and it is now probably going to be the focus of a court challenge by a losing party.
Personally, I agree with the time honoured tradition of paper voting...at least there is some physical record of votes.
samuel
In Oberlin, in Loraine County Ohio, voter turnout is exceptional this year. In fact, 117% of eligible voters have registered.
What would you expect voter turnout to actually be, max? Maybe 70% at most? So the rest are fraudulent votes, probably, barring gross errors made elsewhere.
That is just not acceptable.
How few votes determined the last election? In my state, 377 votes called it.
You have two problems when you tolerate voter fraud. The first is that you let criminals choose your candidate. The second is that you turn your candidates in to criminals, as only those politicians willing to pander to fraudulent votes are likely to get elected.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Oh, and adults know the issues? Kids nowadays are more informed than their parents, and there is nothing wrong with a GOTV campaign aimed at young voters.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Are you so naive to believe that the government wouldn't store additional data with your D.N.A. chain? They'd just keep a file of A's T's C's and G's without assigning a person's SSN or name, or both to it?
Learn something new.
1. Can you identify any UI design flaws in the user interface described above?
2. What would be a more reasonable default selection in this case?
3. Are poor UI design and user error mutually exclusive?
We have e-voting because those in control know they can use it to their advantage. There was nothing wrong with a paper ballot with a box that you place a mark in next to the candidate you choose. They replaced it with error-prone punch cards and butterfly ballots because it was EASIER. If they wanted to guarantee the most accurate recording of votes, they'd use a paper ballot you marked with a pen, which was then counted by a human being, then recounted by a different human being. You know, like you had in high school? They don't do it that way anymore. They could, if they wanted to. They don't. And so we have systems that are open to interpretation and manipulation.
I was just thinking.
How scary would it be to go to bugzilla.election.gov.us or something and see "BUG #1212 -- Votes from Slashdot readers weighted based on karma"
Jay | http://oldos.org
I have proposed a database in which that is the only information kept, and in which that is a strict requirement of keeping the information. So, yes, that would be the only information kept in my hypothetical database.
The government might like to have a repository of names connected with in DNA, but I do not think hypothesizing on the existence of one in which that would not be allowed makes me naive....
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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In my home province of Otago, in New Zealand, we used an electronic voting method. The question that was later asked: why did our elections go worse than Afghanistan's?
I don't know if this has been brought up before or not, but either way I will bring it up.
How can electronic voting ever be trusted? (Surprisingly, my mom of all people, who knows nothing about computers brought up this point with me.) Even if we use open source voting software, we still have a major problem. How do we know the open source we saw is actually running on the machine? It would be more than easy to get the GUI to SAY that it was running "so-and-so version X.X". How do we actually KNOW it's running that though?
The only viable solution I see would be to actually have every voter load the software onto the machine, and the machine interface somehow, but then again, this has some major downfalls. How does the community feel about this? What solutions do you propose, in this election, and in future elections?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Uh, how exactly is this different from the rhetoric coming out of Bush/Cheney and the Republican convention. Remember how they said if you elect the wrong person you risk another 9/11 attack, how you and your children are in grave danger if you make the wrong choice, or the wolves lurking in the forest. Humans have a strongly imprinted fear of wolves, using them in an add is designed entirely to stoke primal fear.
So, are you equally upset about that rhetoric or are you only upset when liberals engage in these tactics.
This is called the politics of fear, both sides are doing it on a range of issues, and doing it so much many Americans are voting entirely out of fear. The Republicans are almost certainly benefiting from it and far better at it than the Democrats. It sucks, but unfortunately it tends to work really well.
I assure you there are plenty of ill informed voters of all ages and many of them are voting out of fear and not on issues, so don't try to hang it on young people. Numerous studies of Bush voters show they consistently have no clue what Bush's actual position is on most key issues, and frequently get his positions exactly backward. They are just voting for him because he says he will make the "safe" or because he is God's chosen one, or at least so he says.
I'm not sure mandatory training of all young voters to be good Republicans or good Democrats before they are allowed to vote is how these democracy things are supposed to work. Its a personal responsibility to educate yourself, and unfortunately most Americans are pretty bad at it.
As for the whole draft proposition there is a reasonable chance the draft is going to come back real soon now, and it may come back under either Bush or Kerry. Unless the U.S. pulls out of Iraq soon or slashes its troop commitments elsewhere it is going to run out of bodies to put in the boots on the ground. The volunteer army works a lot better when you just get great benefits and aren't volunteering to drive a truck in Iraq and get your ass blown off, literally.
Indications are volunteers for the Army and Marines are in fact slowing and the U.S. can't use the current tactics indefinitely(calling up the guard and reserves in perpetuity and using stop loss to keep people in the military indefinitely). So there is a pretty good chance young voters may be voting over whether they are going to get drafted after the election. The only catch is Kerry is about as likely as Bush to reinstate it. Kerry after all has said he is going to put about 40,000 more bodies in army boots first thing and I doubt he is going to do that with volunteers if it entails combat duty.
@de_machina
How educated must voters be with regard to the issues when they only get to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich? Personally, I prefer the votergasm campaign.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It gets the kids interested. Once registered, they usually talk about politics with their friends and sometimes even do research. Most people, even kids, feel kind of stupid showing up to vote when they haven't done their homework.
The hope is that they will come in and vote even if they aren't completely knowledgeable on every little issue. It's not a test, they can skip over anything they know nothing about. The typical American ballot is quite intimidating especially since you must vote for a variety of people and referendums both statewide and local. Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom where we get to vote on the definition of marriage and who should be the official local land surveyor. This can take you long time and if you are the kind of person who usually gets in the 90% on tests, it can make you feel kinda stupid.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Except the Vote or Die campaign carries a political agenda along with it. Propaganda and education aren't the same thing.
I didn't attend the Vote or Die rally at my school (mainly because I greatly dislike P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mary J. Blige somewhat), but the reports I've heard indicated that DiCaprio fully admitted his support for Kerry during his speech, and Blige's incoherent ramblings were something to the effect of the war in Iraq being bad because it leads to a cycle of domestic violence. P. Diddy at least spread around the criticism by noting that neither major candidate spent much time politicking to large urban centers.
None of this even mentions the serious problem that one of the people running might actually get elected.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I heard that in Texas there were reports that selecting a straight democrating ticket down the line would still select Bush for president. I wonder how many people "accidently" voted for Bush.
Kids nowadays are more informed than their parents
Well, the kids think so, anyway. Their parents might disagree... and might remember when they thought the same.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You know, I'd be fine with a national DNA registry, and I live in Canada. It's not like taking photos of my genitals and tattooing me on the forehead, come on.
Benefit of this is, whenever anyone leaves DNA at a crime, you know who they are.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Saying that kids nowdays are more informed than their parents is almost exactly as idiotic as saying that they're going to vote randomly.
There IS nothing wrong with a campaign aimed at young voters though. It's hard to disagree with that.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
A massive nationwide database is a scary thing. It can start off for one little purpose, but it is very convenient to hang new uses onto it. Look what happened to Social Security.
If I could be assured that names and other personal information would never be added to it, this seems like an ideal system to eliminate voting by dead people and Operation Snowbird participants.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
A good illustration of this came in the inability of the far-right party that held power in India till this year to execute the agenda of their core base, and hew to a 'Common Minimum Programme'
To remind one of the reality of direct voting through electronic machines that did not get hacked in India might be to belabor the obvious, yet it is what happened. The close similarity of the Republicans and Democrats makes one feel they are 'oppo-sames'
Security for E-Voting in Public Elections (Realplayer video 01:23:34) Avi Rubin (AT&T Labs-Research) discusses the security considerations pertaining to remote electronic voting in public elections and examine the feasibility of running national federal elections over the Internet. The focus of this talk is on the limitations of the currently deployed infrastructure in terms of the security of the hosts and the Internet itself.
The message that the students should get is that if people as moronic as diCaprio and incoherent as Blige can participate, then surely the cream of the United States educational system should not allow themselves to be intimidated by scary politicians and ballots. Heck, knowing which way DiCaprio is planning to vote might send the more thoughtful students running to the other parties.
If after seeing this dog and pony show they still feel unqualified and unmotivated to vote, maybe they are right. Much as I want people to come out and vote, I don't ever want anyone to vote against their will.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Just because Diebold has said they are committed to delivering votes to George Bush and they make e-voting hardware without an auditing system that a monkey can hack is no reason to suspect everything is less then on the up and up.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Why is a brainwashed person who listens to news from the radical (right/left) more informed than someone that just watches Oprah/MTV and the local news, and otherwise wouldn't care to vote? Yet the radical right/left person will definitely vote for their cause, why is the vote of the Oprah/MTV fan less important?
Shouldn't political education be placed in front of political mobilization?
I actually think that political mobilization will encourage political education.
Many countries (eg Australia) actually fine people for not voting. The point of the campaign is to get people involved with the political system, which is the whole foundation of democracy to begin with.
By going out and voting, whether you do for a major candidate or even if you write-in 'mickey mouse', you get involved with the system. You begin to get some sense of not just the presidential candidates, but of state and city government, and many other proposals which you might not have otherwise known existed.
For example, if you own a pizza shop near the waterfront, and you go to the polls and learn there's a proposal for the city to borrow/spend $5 million to enhance the waterfront area, that resolution will definitely impact you greatly.
make world, not war
You just don't get it, do you? Bush is going to CLEARLY win this election. As much as we may hate it, a lot of people really believe that Bush has done a great job. Bush is going to win, Slashbots are going to whine and complain, and life will continue. I hate Bush as much as the next guy, and I'm voting for Anybody But Bush (i.e. Kerry), but in the end Bush is still going to win. We live in a sad world.
The signature system would need to be public-key based, so that the signing key was different and undeterminable from the verifying key. The verifying key could then be made available to all election monitors and the vote counters.
All monitors would then be in a position to validate that each vote was cast by a real voter (ie: the digital signature matched up to a key in their posession), which means that ballot-box stuffing would be much harder to impossible. If one group has keys that another group doesn't, then you've pretty clear evidence of an attempt to create fictional voters.
It would also prevent vote tampering - the changing of a vote once cast - because the signature would no longer match up to the document.
Although I can't quite see how you'd do this, it may allow voters to validate that their vote did get through. Such a system is essential, if we're to prevent the fiasco of 2000 where ballot boxes regularly got misplaced. Nobody can be 100% sure that all votes actually made it to their destination, because nobody can be 100% sure what happened to the boxes during the time they were missing.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. We all know that. (We do, don't we?) What is needed, then, is to take the obscurity out of elections whilst preserving anonymity. If, in doing so, it becomes possible for anyone and everyone to "independently monitor" the election process, we can apply the "many eyes" doctorine to elections to cripple corruption. If we can also, again whilst preserving anonymity, find some way of allowing voters to verify or repudiate a vote in their name, it would be possible to make voter fraud so difficult and so easy to catch, that we might have elections we can trust.
Then all we need is some politicians we can trust. Y'know, that might be tougher...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Very little discussion has taken place on the wholesale repeal and replacement of several election laws in states like California, where people line up to vote at the entrance to grocery stores.
...until now.
Under the old laws, which were repealed in grand fashion without so much as a whisper from the press, such voting would be flagrantly illegal. Voting less than 40 feet from a newsstand, for example, or voting on a day other than election day was unheard of...
The election of the people whose responsibility it is to run our government is now treated with the same level of consideration as a sale on ground beef in the frozen food aisle. Naturally, this is fine, since everything in our society is evaluated based on the convenience factor for the SUV moms, and whether it can be scheduled between trips to the dry cleaners and the bank. More thought is invested in the right windows for the breakfast nook and the new countertops for the kitchen renovations at Home Repo than is invested in the sober consideration of who should run the country.
Selfishness, greed, apathy and laziness are great criteria for elections.
It was possible to vote before the most recent debate. It was possible to vote before several very lengthy and comprehensive articles on various propositions were published in newspapers. It was necessary for the legislature in California to repeal no fewer than EIGHT election laws in order to make "election month" legal, and nobody pays it a second thought. We did just fine with election DAY for 228 years, but now, that doesn't seem to be enough.
The potential for fraud and inaccuracy is immense, but there wasn't even the most rudimentary opportunity to even COMMENT on this before it showed up next to the paper towel display weeks before the election.
Election without representation is even worse than taxation without representation. We had better turn off the fucking high-definition entertainment center and develop some reverence for the democratic process, and soon.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
While I disagree with the idea that kids are always more informed than their parents, I do think it is valuable to get anyone the least bit interested to register, research, and vote. They should get into the habit of voting while they are young and more likely to get into meaningful debates with their friends. If they can't find the time to vote when they are in school, they will never find the time when they are employed.
They all have internet access, so they have the means to be very informed voters if they only have something to motivate them. Being registered is a motivator. If you are registered you are more likely to research. If you research, you are more likely to vote. If you aren't registered, research is a waste of time. When young people couldn't vote, they had to resort to mass demonstrations that were a much more dangerous way to express their opinions.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
You have already illustrated one case where names are tied to the DNA.
How are you going to prevent voter fraud unless you can determine that the voter lives in the precinct they are voting in? The voter will have to submit a sample at some point. When they do, they have to identify themselves.
How are you going to make sure a voter switches to their new precinct when they move? Will they have to submit another sample?
How are you going to deal with identical twins? Or triplets? Or...
"... some Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election. "
Yeah? Well, George W. Bush and John F. Kerry were some Yale students. I bet they knew this all along. The fix was in from the start.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
And as to the GPP point about it being minimum of 5 years, i say: Not even close to being good enough. It's treason, and the death penalty is warranted. Again, the problem with that is, how can that happen if the government (that 'enforces' the laws and penalties), *IS* the government that is committing the crimes?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If you know nothing about the issues, then your vote is a wasted vote. You might as well just write a computer program to randomly select the candidates and the propositions (in the state referendum) to support.
Furthermore, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the paper ballots. The problem is not the ballots. The problem is the fool who cannot understand the simple instructions about how to properly complete the ballot. Because the fool did not follow instructions in 2000, the tallying committee discarded the fool's ballot.
If a voter is so stupid that she cannot complete a ballot properly, then the loss of her vote is no loss to democracy.
Voting Machines, including DREs, are only a small part of the reason why this election will be a train wreck.
There are a few others of pressing concern.
1) Provisional ballots: The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress to prevent some of the nonsense from Florida in 2000, requires that a voter who tries to vote but does not show up on the list of eligible voters be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which will be set aside to be later verified and counted, if valid.
There are a number of legitimate reasons why this may happen -- a voter shows up at the wrong precinct for example, or has moved to a different precinct in the same county, or a different county in the same state, or their registration wasn't properly processed, etc.
HAVA, however, only requires that these prospective voters be given a provisional ballot; it does not require the states to count provisional ballots. In Ohio, the Secretary of State issued an order that provisional ballots will not be counted, and instead errant voters are to be directed to the proper polling place. This order was upheld, overturned on appeal, and overturned again in Federal Appellate Court about a week ago -- meaning the secretary's original order stands, and provisional ballots in Ohio may be collected but not counted.
Expect more lawsuits, especially if the vote is as close as it now appears it will be.
2) Absentee Ballots: All states allow for voting by absentee ballots, but most require that the ballots are returned by the close of polls on election day. Not postmarked, but returned.
A state cannot even print absentee ballots untill all primary election results have been certified by the state. Some states (can't remember which off the top of my head) have primary elections as late as October, meaning there's less than one month to certify primary results, print, mail, and recieve absentee ballots.
I suppose most of you heard about the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida. They were supposed to mail out new ones on Friday, but even with overnight mail, there is no way those can be returned by Tuesday, 7:00 pm, at least by mail. There is talk about extending the deadline, but one can expect quite a few gripes in the coming weeks about lost ballots. Again, expect lawsuits.
Also of note, though purely anecdotal, is that in 2000 I was living in a former Warsaw-Pact country and requested an absentee ballot (Cuyahoga County, OH) through the US embassy in September. I never got my ballot. Expect more complaints, and yes, lawsuits.
3) Multiple voting: In most states, it's piss easy to get on the voter registration rolls, and much more difficult to get off them. This issue has already been raised in Florida this year, particularly concerning 'sun birds' who have residences there and in other states, notably New York. It is not difficult at all to cast valid votes in both states, provided one is registered in both states. This shouldn't be possible, but it is not unusual.
4) Experience. This is something that has largely been ignored by the media, but an unprecedented number of county-level election supervisors will be running their first national elections.
There are an awful lot of county clerks, board of elections chairmen, recorders, and elections supervisors who saw the writing on the wall after November 2000, and who opted for private sector jobs or retirement, early or otherwise, to avoid a Florida-type scandal. Not that their replacements are not competent, but they are rookies. Check with your local government to find out who is running this election, and how long he or she has been there.
All this is not to say that DREs are absolutely acurate and foolproof, but there are many more problems besides the physical mechanisms of voting, just as there were in 2000. Problems 2 and 3 happen every four year, for example; they just don't matter unless the vote is close.
This has been all well and good in the past because the margin of victory has been
oh wait, yes I am
right. because we all know that the underfunded, understaffed registrar of voters never fails to remove everyone from the voting rolls when they die, move away, etc. without telling them about it.
and populations shifts don't happen.
and no political party would ever stoop to coming up with bogus statistics to justify a massive campaign to disenfranchise their opponents.
-esme
You need to know where people live for state and local elections. Personally I think a drivers license (or create a special picture 'voter license' for free if you can't afford/get a drivers license) check would be enough to make me happy.
and I live in Canada.
For those of us down here who still value basic privacy and lack of government intrustion into basic affairs of life, I can definitely say the government will only get my DNA from my cold pallid body. Don't even think of getting near my children - if that means delivering babys outside the hospital environment, so be it.
It doesnt matter whether they are educated or if they vote randomly. The point is, the more urban youth that vote this election, the more important this group will be viewed by politicians. Right now politicians widely ignore urban youth because they dont vote in large masses. If, this tuesday, 20 million go out and vote (even if they vote completely randomly) and all it takes is 5000 votes to change the output, then next election you WILL see politicians focusing on issues fundamental to urban youth.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I would go for something like this:
The voter goes into the booth, makes their choices and pulls the lever. The eVoter(TM) prints out two (or more) identical bar codes on separate sheets of cardstock (or thin plastic or other similar material).
The voter then goes to the next booth and puts one of the bar codes into the eTabulator(TM), keeping the other one.
The eVoter has encoded all vote info, including write-ins and a unique session ID (not attached to the voter) into the bar code. The barcode specification is published and freeware readers will be supplied by the manufacturers and the government, as well as installed on computers in every public library.
The engineering specs and software source for the eVoter and eTabulator (made by two different companies by law) will be published and open to review. Voters will be able to check their votes on any computer with a bar code reader, and the unique session ID (identical on both bar code slips prevents a voter from putting both bar codes into the eTabulator and getting two votes). The session ID could also be used to make sure the same number of sessions were created in both eVoter and eTabulator to prevent people from printing their own votes before hand and stuffing the ballot box (eTabulator).
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
I think voting fraud has been around a long time. When discussing electronic voting, I think it's important to distinguish between fraud unique to electonic systems (such as recording the wrong choice, intercepting votes, etc.) and fraud that could have been used in the past (stuffing the ballot box). Adding one extra vote/machine may be easier to do universally with electronic machines, but casting fraudulent ballots has always been possible.
The real shame is that in the move to e-voting, we rushed into it initially and let vendors dictate the terms instead of designing a better system from the ground up. Not generating a voter-verified paper receipt is just stupid, no matter what excuses (Paper jam! There's a paper jam!) are put forth. Sadly, the early critics of the early e-voting pushed solutions like a receipt that the voter kept with him. That just created a nice strawman which was beat up on for 6 months before the movement got smart. And 4 years later, we are at best no better off than 4 years ago. I'm sure there will be an electronic version of the butterfly ballot next week, and that will only be the start of it.
Double books work for accounting, why not double accounting for machines?
Have 2 companies running software out of same machine, takes two touches to complete single vote, one on company "A" software, one on "B". If they match, good. if not..recount the paper! ATMs give a paper trail, why not these things, only they loop inside. It would show if someone starts rigging when the count is messed up. Just make a note of it, keep voting! If one set of numbers suddenly changes, the other machine takes note.
Reminds me of, "If I ask the other door...."
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
This seems like a no brainer to me, how can there be any resistence to having the ability to verify the computer records?
Yale students show that altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election
You mean Bush would have won?!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well said.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Jeb Bush had 50,000 thousand African American names purged off the voting rolls in Florida (under a pretense) in the 2000 election. We know how THAT election was stolen.
This article really isn't meant to harken back to 2000. No one out there, that I know of, is really accusing that this sort of fraud took place 4 years ago.
The reason it's news is because we worry that it may take place in the future -- and let's face it, the Republican party's track record when it comes to lying, cheating and stealing to win is pretty clear.
So what's the impetus behind eVoting? There is no valid need to do so. I think the public has completely lost sight of the fact that they don't know why they want to eVote in the first place. Maintaining the analog process of voting, IMHO, is CRUCIAL to keeping our elections fair.
Once upon a time many people thought they'd be voting from home - but we all realize that isn't safe whatsoever. Even if it was, what happens to my packets after they are received and who has access. I don't even know who has access to the ballot box or responsibility for transporting it now.
The next large scale delusion is that it will expedite the results. Sure, the Electoral College rarely votes differently than the popular vote predicts - but they do not do so until the third week of December in their respective state capitols. Do we really need to know the results any sooner than that? and haven't we been capable of it thus far?
Accuracy. While hanging chads are a real problem, this and other physical problems could easily detected before a person drops their ballot in the box. What's missing from the current system is a way to see how the ballot will be interpreted by the system before we cast our vote. I think that is where we ought to focus our mindshare. An optical card reader something like Mr. Spock would look into could verify the selections for the voter and when attached to a printer could create a souvenier hardcopy.
The 'problems' that keep cropping up with eVoting just seem to be obfuscating the real issue. This whole thing just looks like a way to create more demand and sell products that really can only introduce more problems into the process.
As a nation, "We" need to work on the logic of resolving ties, the granularity of the Electoral College, and uniformity of ballots accross precincts. We need to make Election Day a national holiday for heaven's sake, or we need to stretch voting out over a weekend. And in my not so humble opinion we need to mandate that the only way you're allowed to have Cable-TV is if you are registered to vote!
Stuff that matters.
Or as is often the case moderate major parties have to pander to the wishes of extremist parties in the name of coalition building.... but I'm sure you didnt omit that on purpose.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
Many countries (eg Australia) actually fine people for not voting. The point of the campaign is to get people involved with the political system, which is the whole foundation of democracy to begin with.
By going out and voting, whether you do for a major candidate or even if you write-in 'mickey mouse', you get involved with the system.
Just wondering - Do they count and report protest votes such as the ones for Mickey Mouse?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Umm, if you're going to make allegations of this magnitude, you should cite some references. What you're describing is a lie.
Here's my voting campaign: If you're too busy to study the candidates and the issues, you're too busy to vote. So stay home.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Diebold-Haliburton Joint Venture Voting Interface
Table-ized A.I.
Is anyone else a little apalled at the "Vote or Die" campaign put on by MTV to try to encourage kids to vote? The fact is, they are getting pushed to head to the polls, but often don't know anything about the issues at hand and will just vote randomly.
How is this different any other group of voters?
> They should get into the habit of voting while they are young
> and more likely to get into meaningful debates with their
> friends.
Certainly. I've noticed that among so many of the young people I know (under 25s, or around there) there is a lot of political opinion. A lot of discussion about issues relevant to them, relevant to the bigger picture, relevant to a nation as a whole. People who were quite capable of voting, but also quite capable of complaining about the outcome of the last election.
Did they bother to vote though? Hardly. Talk is easy.
Reminds me of the classic Salami Attack that some savvy programmer did to siphon a penny from every bank account into their account.
"Uh, how exactly is this different from the rhetoric coming out of Bush/Cheney and the Republican convention."
Because everything said at the Republican Convention wasn't said in a rally for a supposivly (last time I checked) non-partisan groups.
Rock the Vote and Vote or Die aren't even making any effort in their rallies (AFAIK, this is only from what I have read, I have not attended either) to be non-partisan.
"As for the whole draft proposition there is a reasonable chance the draft is going to come back real soon now, and it may come back under either Bush or Kerry"
This arguement has a lot of merit, but unfortuently not everyone is seeing this as clearly as you. As a lower middle class sixteen year old, nothing makes me want to move to Canada anymore than the thought of a President pushing for the reinstation of the draft. But so far that hasn't been the case. What is happening is that two democrats have backed two draft bills (one in the house and one in the senate) and Vote or Die and Rock the Vote have been saying this, but leading people do believe (again, this is hearsay) that Bush wants to reinstate the draft. It's this kind of misinformation that scares me. It's fearmongering, but that's just a case of the Democrats doing it. The Republicans do it to, and you mentioned it. And there is a good chance of what you mentioned happening too, and it doesn't really matter who is elected.
It's nice to see someone here who can see both sides! (That isn't sarcasm).
Is that you?
I did not - valid point. Care to cite any references if known?
Then all we need is some politicians we can trust.
Our voting system should never rely on unverifiable trust of our politicians, the poll workers, even the voters. There are many motivations to cheat and it only takes a very small number of successful cheaters to throw an election. Even if we live in a society where only honest people participate in the manufacture, programming, and operation of voting apparatus, we have no way of knowing it will always be that way. Who knows, this could be the beginning of the end of the American Era. All great powers of the past have collapsed, maybe the best we can do is postpone the inevitable.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
And I'm sure their parents' parents realize just how little the parents still really know.
Bush is getting his 50% approval rating from somewhere, and I don't think it is college campuses. If I had two kids, a morgage, and a carreer, I doubt I would have the time to follow the hundreds of millions of dollars that is getting funneled to a company who is openly paying the vice president.
The ______ Agenda
My own experience is that I was definitely more informed about the issues (overall) when I was 18-24ish.
Being a "grown-up" gives me a better perspective on experiencial matters like taxes and health care, but when it comes to global warming, wars halfway around the world and other issues that require genuine study and research to fully grasp, I simply don't have the time to do as much independent research as I'd like to.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Sorry about the AC, I've already modded in this story!
In Australia a Mickey Mouse vote is counted as informal. It is legal to vote informally, but get this---it is illegal to encourage others to vote informally, even though it is legal.
This had consequences a few years ago when somebody thought they found a loophole in the voting process. In Australia you are given a list of candidates which must be numbered in order of preference. This guy, who was not a lawyer, believed that there was nothing in the law that said you had to number all the boxes, meaning you could leave out any candidates you specifically didn't want.
Now this is a good idea. In some places you can actually vote for 'No Candidate' and my uni had a voting system very similar to what this guy came up with. It means you can get round having to vote for one of the major parties (please, nothing about Condorcet...!)
However, he court decided he was wrong, and because he'd done a lot of work to persuade others to vote this way, he actually spent time in jail.
Talking about being fined for not voting, the fine isn't much---only (I think) $50. You just get a letter saying 'give us an adequate reason or pay us fifty dollars.' You get a few idiots who would prefer to go to jail (fine defaulters aren't treated kindly) but most just do it. At the end of the day, you don't get to make any great statement. It's easier to just vote and be done with it.
in US there is no democracy becase there isn't the plain vote results.
1 head = 1 vote
who gets more votes wins
simple
News reports in south Florida (channel 5 WPTV) say that people are reporting that votes for Kerry very infrequently appear as votes for Bush. Voters have so far been able to go back and correct the vote.
Rick DeBay
Israel comes to mind: due to the very small threshhold that a party has to cross to get representation, you have extreme parties in the coalition governments, and they can (and will) exit the coalition, causing the government to crash, if they do not get their way.
Here is a link and a blurb. I am not sure if this is what the parent was talking about. Go to the link for more information to decide for yourself.
e le ction,_2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_
57,746 voters were listed as felons on a "scrub list" and removed from the voting rolls, but later analysis shows that many were incorrectly listed. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, and some erroneously listed felonies were dated years in the future.See bullet 2 on this screenshot (http://www.gregpalast.com/Harpers_img.htm)) These persons were disproportionately Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent. In some cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and many successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, in many cases no effort was made to contact them before the election.
Do you think the GOP drive to get out the vote among evangelical Christians is intended to neutrally educate people on the issues? This is how things go during campaign season.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2004/1
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
There are generically called Informal Votes, and yes, statistics are kept on their number
http://michaelsmith.id.au
any techie who's worth his salt will tell you that when it comes to protecting data, doing everything in your power meand redundancy, off site backups, and hard copies if possible...
is risking democracy worth the slight time/cost savings of going digital???
All the torrents you could want.
I'm not sure what you mean by "shouldn't" here. If you are suggesting that in an ideal world, the opinions of the stupid should have as much weight as those of the smart, then I strongly disagree with you.
If you mean that we, the intellectual elite, require the services of the imbeciles on our side of the political spectrum to cast a ballot to maintain the facade that they have control over their political destiny, then yes, I agree with you. It would scarcely be fair if the far right got to tell their religious nutjob Rush Limbaugh-listening, Bill-O'Reilly watchers who to vote for if we couldn't get our MTV-generation, pot smoking, hippie youth, and unemployed black female Oprah watchers to get out and vote in our general direction.
Don't fetishize democracy too much, buddy. It's just the least bad system we've come up with so far. That doesn't mean it's good, or that dumb uneducated people really deserve a say what the government is doing.
I'm not sure mandatory training of all young voters to be good Republicans or good Democrats before they are allowed to vote is how these democracy things are supposed to work. Its a personal responsibility to educate yourself, and unfortunately most Americans are pretty bad at it.
No, I'm not sure structured education will solve our problems either. However, how can you honestly hold individuals directly accountable?
The fact is that the United States is the hardest working population in the world. On average, we work longer hours with less breaks/vacations than any other country in the world. To expect someone who just got off a 10-hour shift to try to weed through the complicated mess that is modern American politics is a bit unfair. The infotainment media and deceptive political campaigns are the real ones to blame here.
Practicalities aside, however, what if they want to spend their time (what little they may have) doing something else worthwhile like spending time with their children, who are you to tell them their priorities are amiss?
-Grym
Brand new, expensive voting machines are more likely to be found in suburban and well to do areas, which are also likely to be Republican. I think that these counties are likely to face the brunt of the 'bug' disaster that may ultimately result in the evolution of state certified software engineers, and cost a few republicans their elections.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
What is happening is that two democrats have backed two draft bills (one in the house and one in the senate)
There is a lot of misconception about these actions, predictably spread by right wing propaganda. They are actually trying to clean up the draft legislation so that rich boys with sugar daddies in powerful places can't dodge the draft as easily as our current president did. This is a genius move because its popular with the majority of americans and it puts pressure on bush in an interesting way... I'll explain.
Now, I doubt very much that Bush really wants to reinstate the draft except as a last resort, because if he did it would crush his campaign entirely -- however, as a consequence of his abysmal foreign policy (e.g., inability to cooperate with other nations who also have large military forces available) has made it such that, in order to stablize iraq, it may be necessary to reinstate the draft to get sufficient manpower. However, if the draft is reformed so that rich boys can't dodge it, then bush will be in a really tight corner because the draft would hit his base hard -- essentially it will force him to reconcile and cooperate with the UN to get the necessary troops from other countries.
While it is unquestionably scary, I don't think its fearmongering, simply because the threat is quite real -- everyone with a clue was predicting a massive shortfall in manpower before this war even started. Iraqi troops might have outdated equipment, but they outnumbered the size of our invasion force by nearly 4 to 1 -- if they had bothered to put up a fight, this war would have been a LOT more bloody, most likely, we would not have ever gotten into bhagdad with so few men. Bush et al. were betting that they would not, due to the unpopularity of saddam, and due to the incredible US air superiority (useful but highly leathal to the civilian population), which turned out to be mostly correct ("mission accomplished"). Where they went wrong was 1) assuming that things would remain relatively peaceful without much work, in fact crime spiked uncontrollably which led to an atmosphere of lawlessness, 2) that us unilateral action against iraq was viewed positively by the middle eastern populace, dead wrong -- iraq is the world's hottest spot for extremist organized terror, and 3) that iraqis would unquestionably embrace democracy as america envisioned it -- wrong, they envisioned it their own way, and thus the rise of local leaders such as al sadr and the insurgency. bottom line is that the war was a big gamble, and at first it looked like we got lucky, but that luck went sour quickly (and if you ever go to vegas, things will probably turn out the same way).
This is getting to be a rather long post, but I want to mention one more thing. There is a reason that the democrats use "non-partisan" groups to repeat their platform points, while the republicans do not. The republicans platform is "pro-business", that means they take huge contributions from corporate interests, and correspondingly support tax cuts and other give aways to support their funders. The dems, are "for the people", but in reality they take almost as much money from big business as the republicans. The problem for the democrats then, is that there is an inherent conflict of interest -- they solve this by creating those "non-partisan" entities to repeat the pro-people messages, which puts some separation between their two sides, thereby relieving the stress somewhat. The republicans, on the other hand, simply don't view the corporate money as a conflict of interest, therefore they don't have to create that separation. Now, there are some instances where the republicans use "non-partisan" groups to promote their message, and more or less for the same reasons that the dems do, and in their case probably to capture support from more moderate voters, but its just not as important because their base is with the rich business owners.
There is another side to this also, which is that in this election season w
You've just created the perfect system for my EVIL TWIN to ruin my life, again! :)
Ask for your favorite elections departments software programs...
4 \
10b&L=archives#45
4 \
10c&L=archives#58
4 \
10d&L=archives#47
4 \
10e&L=archives#11
See also RAIN 1010 Records and Archives in the News
Scroll down to
rain
at
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind0
RAIN 1015
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind0
RAIN 1022
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind0
RAIN 1029
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind0
No political education is required when the kids vote Republican. Political re-education camps will be established for those likely to vote Democrat.
The existing one basically bins up to 49% of the votes. You might find more people vote then, that does appear to be the experience from European countries with better systems.
Deleted
Just more on the "give us good reason why you didn't vote"
Good reason is very flexable, a post election issued doctors certificate will be fine. My friend didn't have to pay becasue she didn't know when the election was (its not hard to miss it if you don't watch tv or listen to the radio, for some reasons candidates never put dates on their propaganda). Also in the recient local elections no fines were collected because the amount to be collected would cost more to chase up.
They most certainly do.
linky
As a little side note:
Can someone please explaint to us non-USAians why convicted felons aren't allowed to vote?
How can voting possibly have been made so controversial?
PUT AN X IN THE BOX ON A PIECE OF PAPER!
Simple, effective, auditable. It's worked for the UK for hundreds of years, it worked on the EU elections with hundreds of millions of voters. IT JUST WORKS!
Deleted
( age=0x15; )
I'm not sure about your parents, sir, but my parents couldn't say, find a news item in a british newspaper on a genocide currently taking place as you read it, check out the CIA world factbook's opinion on sudan, the united nation's view on genocide, read multiple-viewpoint reports from four continents on islam, and make a point about doing so to a room half-full of a few-thousand intelligentsia who have little better to do with their time than point out any error you have made in your reasoning or research, all in a single night, all at a complete whim at no observable cost. My parents never got to interact with people within communist countries, or even have enough money to go to a university to become educated and whatnot. concequently, My parents 'don't care about poletics' like most of their generation.
I can probably point out fourty or fifty things that bush has screwed up on, and I specifically try to avoid any news critical of bush. I can only ponder what people who live in america and actually have to know about him would find, given enough time and a connection to the marvel that is the internet.
Of course there's garbage on the internet, too. but that goes without saying.
Although I must admit, my parents probably could spell a hell of a lot better than I could, at my age, and my dad definitely could get a girlfriend at the time. Am I way out on a loop here? Does this make sense?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I'm part of a set of identical triplets.
What do you suggest they do if one of my brothers does something?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
It should sicken everyone that both major parties are willing to go so far to win that we are now hearing about so many voter fraud problems arising before the election.
Which makes rather a farce of any claims about the US "exporting democracy"
Voter fraud should be one of the most severe crimes on the federal law books, it should be classified as a form of "attempting to overthrow the United States Government." No less than five years in prison IMO.
Unless the people involved were government officials. The traditional punishment for "high treason" being execution.
Either way implimenting such a law would result in a round of elections, due the number of incumbants being "indisposed".
That said, America needs a much more comprehensive solution to voter fraud. It is one of the few things that I think warrants having a DNA tag for every citizen. There should be a national voter database that has the DNA of all citizens in it so that instead of having a national id you only have to go to the precinct and get a quick biometric test done to verify your ID.
This wouldn't be of much help when the people who are administering the elections are those perpetrating the fraud.
The simplist solution is to have people who are independent of all candidates and political parties administering all aspects of the electoral process. Including boundries, voter registration, candidate registration, voting and counting.
This is the way things are done in most of the rest of the world.
An we git betr grades speling becuz R techr yousus outcome based spelling. The old geezers akchully had rulz 4 spelin -- wut a laff. Then thay cumplane that thay cant unnerstan us -- thair soo stoopid.
(Teacher, how do I maek a hole in my ballot card?)
George W Bush. People will and have died because of voting based on misinformation and ignorance.
TWW
There are many things we need to do in this country to improve our democracy.
As far as Number Three, above, is concerned--clearly, we need to enact an amendment to the Constitution that will provide that all election methods must be "open source". We simply must apply the "many eyes" doctrine to our elections. Only through transparent, independent, repeatably verifiable means can we ensure the validity of our elections. This clearly requires open source methods and rigorous accounting and auditing standards. As this is a fundamental aspect of our government, it must be codifi
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/200 4-10-22/pols_feature18.html/
m l/
Travis County election officials have responded to complaints that voters casting straight-party Democratic ballots are discovering, when performing a final check of their ballots, that their votes for president have been changed from Kerry/Edwards to Bush/Cheney. The officials say that, after trying and failing to replicate the problem on its eSlate voting machines, they have concluded the vote changes are due to voter error rather than mechanical failure.
I did a search for "eSlate voting machine" and found the website of the company that makes it. Apparently the company name is "Hart InterCivic". They have a demo on their website where you can try out the eSlate, though I don't know how true to life it is. I really don't like the interface at all, and would prefer a system with a keypad, where you punch in a number on the keypad that corresponds to a choice of candidate (e.g. "1. Bush/Cheney 2. Kerry/Edwards), and their system seems needlessly complicated, but maybe that's just me. Well, I tried out the demo voting. Attempting to duplicate the problem, I voted for "George Washington", the second presidential choice, instead of the first choice, "Susan B Anthony". I then proceeded to check the box for the other positions. When you have selected a candidate for each office by hitting 'Enter' for each one, it automatically takes you to the finish screen. If you hit "Cast Ballot" at this point, the process is done, and it's all good. However, if you hit Enter again like you have been for all the previous choices, then you go back to your presidential candidate, which it shows as being selected. Hit Enter again, and it takes you back to the finish screen. However, for President it now says "No Selections", which, as a side note, I find ironically appropriate when applied to this election, but that is neither here nor there. Anyway, select 'Cast Ballot' at that point and you didn't vote for anybody for President. So I do see where there could be a problem there, if people weren't paying attention or got confused by the technology. Seeing as how I frequently have to help my coworkers with things like taking screenshots, saving files, finding the files they saved, and so forth, I can definitely see getting confused by the technology as being a problem.
I do have a suggestion, however. Have the voting machine companies prepare a brief, simple, 5-15 minute video tutorial on how to operate the e-voting machine. Set up an area at the polling place to have groups of twenty or so watch it before voting, or having it playing on monitors next to the lines people will be waiting in to vote. This should hopefully minimize or eliminate most of the user error problems with electronic voting, although it doesn't adress issues like corrupt e-voting machine companies (*cough*DIEBOLD*cough*)or electronic manipulation of the vote count or the very real need for a paper trail. When you go to the ATM, you get a receipt. You should DEFINITELY be able to get a receipt for you fricking vote.
eSlate voting machine: http://www.hartintercivic.com/solutions/eslate.ht
~~"How can you have a war on Terror? It's not even a noun!" -Jon Stewart~~
Well, not really.
Traditional election fraud, conducted by low-tech means, is available to everyone, of either party. How much occurs is dependent on the energy and venality of the party's local organization and the degree of incompetence, corruption, and bias of the local officials. That means it cuts both ways. And it cannot be kept secret. It may not be possible to stop it, but people know that it is going on. And it happens "retail," on a local level, precinct by precinct.
Terrible as it is, a small amount of traditional fraud does not imperil the entire system. If party A and party B are roughly equal in power, then the amount of fraud perpetrated by party A will be roughly balanced by the amount of fraud perpetrated by party B. It is in effect just an intensification of legal methods of influencing elections, e.g. by spending money on advertising.
The difference with electronic voting fraud is the possibility that a single entity, such as a voting machine manufacturer in cahoots with a political party, could create systematic and hard-to-detect vote fraud on a national scale.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm trying to think of a recent get-out-the-vote effort that didn't have a partisan agenda, and I'm stumped. There aren't significant truly non-partisan efforts to do that these days, in large part because groups within the American population tend to vote in predictable ways. The "Vote or Die" campaign is certainly partisan, but since college students tend to vote Democratic it makes sense for those who support the Dems to sponsor that effort and for Republicans to piss and moan about it or even try to actively surpress the vote, as they've been doing with minority areas in close states.
on people's faces whne they stand in front of the e-voting machine and are offered a choice of A. Skynet or B. Skynet. What a hack!
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
Call me old fashioned, but I would never trust a system that
a) didn't give me a paper confirmation of my vote
b) wouldn't give a visual printout to be put in the ballot
Given the past election, I can't understand how the land of the free can put up with a system that doesn't provide either. I've heard the reasons for not providing printout, they were plain stupid and not technically challenging at all. OK, I prefer a paperless office, and quite like trees, but still...
And why oh why is voting not compulsory? Democracy is not a right, it's a hard-won system of self government that implies some democratic duties to its part-takers. One of them is to go out and f*cking vote once every four years. If you don't, you don't participate and forsake your rights. Which is exactly what is happening now, but that's another story altogether.
Imo the US of A spends too much time defending its right to be ignorant and stupid.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I sure hope they don't. It would mean that a vote can be traced back to a certain voter.
Bush is getting his 50% approval rating from somewhere, and I don't think it is college campuses.
Bush is getting his 50% rating because the country is literally split down the middle. Far too much time has been spent wasted on trying to change the election system, and far too little spent on trying to change the minds of the electorate.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
diebold.com/unbiased_analysis_of_voting.htm
So, are you equally upset about that rhetoric or are you only upset when liberals engage in these tactics.
Foaming at the mouth is foaming at the mouth whether it be by a conservative or a liberal. We are supposed to be the ones who think before we act.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
in another words, eVote is laugh in face of a average joe and democracy. human beings was (finally) removed from the equation, especially those
poor humans that interfere with our good old-fashioned conservative america.
we will NOT pass the power and tax money to some weak immigrated geeks, hispanics, negros or other left-wing pant shitters.
evote is (of course) fraud, [unless is made fully transparent (per ID) that is (sure) not gonna happen], but those poor geeks will never clue it out anyway, thats good for us, it's the only way we can stay strong on course, even in times when we are being outnumbered by our $$$ hungry foreign incomers.
the bottom line is: those tax draining locus will bump back being outsourced soon anyway
That's just silly. People don't become less informed as they become more experienced. I think kids always (not just nowadays) are more convinced they know more simply because they don't have the experience to understand how little they know. That's the old arrogance of youth. I know I had it.
Shouldn't political education be placed in front of political mobilization?
Drop the "shouldn't" and the question mark and I believe you have quoted Chairman Mao very good comrade.
Can you offer any sensible reason why a vote from an allegedly uninformed person is bad?
If they are uninformed, given more than two candidates, it is probable that they will vote against the person who is most representative of their views.
If they are uninformed, then they are likely to vote for whoever they have been exposed to the most. This biases the results towards whoever has the most money to spend on their campaign and against third parties.
What is the benefit for an uninformed person to vote? They certainly aren't expressing their political views, because they don't have enough information to form one.
Why is a brainwashed person who listens to news from the radical (right/left) more informed than someone that just watches Oprah/MTV and the local news, and otherwise wouldn't care to vote?
Who said that the alternative to ignorance is brainwashing? You're arguing against a straw man argument there. The alternative to being ignorant is being informed. If all you are exposed to is brainwashing, then you are ignorant, not informed.
Let me paraphrase a lot of people who said roughly the same thing under different circumstances:Turns out that that movie was anythnig but anti-Christian, but even to this day (last time was actually a few months ago) I hear from Christians who think it's a movie that was designed to make them hate their faith or some such foolishness.
Now, I have no idea what that rally contained, but I can state as fact that people who didn't attend it like you and me are not authorities on what it's about. Go find a town where they're going to show up, go in and listen to them. Hear them out and think about what they've said. Wouldn't you expect the same?
I fail to see how an entirely electronic voting system, as is used in Florida, is any less secure than any paper system. All systems place a great deal of faith on the counters! It's not much harder to forge a bunch of anonymous paper ballots than it is to alter the total in a electronic counter. For example: could all of the "hanging chads" in Florida have been the work of volunteers forging ballots by hand or with a machine? It seems that one way this could have happened is carelessness if you're punching a bunch of ballots at once.
We need someone to exploit one of the many Diebold machine vulnerablities and use it to report every single vote as being one for Nader. They'd only have to hack a few machines to make the problem glaringly obvious. Bonus points for doing it in a "dead-heat" state where the effect on the final election outcome will be impossible to determine.
The point isn't to throw the election, but to show the world unequivocally that we aren't talking about theoretical possibilities, but a serious practical threat to American democracy.
The outcome would be short-term chaos, as the whole U.S. electoral process would be thrown into disrepute, but the long-term result might be to get all major parties to insist on voter-verified, re-countable paper trails, as were used successfully in the recent referendum in Venezuala.
On the other hand, the long-term outcome might be to round up and shoot everyone with the skills to exploit such e-voting vulnerabilities.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Bush is getting his 50% approval rating from somewhere, and I don't think it is college campuses.
I think support for Bush is largely a side-effect of mental illness, a very severe lack of cognitive processes, and/or such a burned-in zeal that the sky is pink and the earth is flat no matter what. There was this senile woman at the grocery store the other day, and she asked us if we were going to be "good Republicans" on Tuesday. Then there are the people who only care that Bush isn't a "baby killer". Then there are the people who think Bush is some sort of prophet. Then there are the people who vote for Bush, because the Democrats are commie pot-headed socialist utopic beatniks. Add up all those edge cases of humanity, and you could very well get most of that 50% (or 25%, considering how many people vote).
One very interesting trend I've noticed, is that intellectuals seem to be supporting Kerry, and that the people supporting Bush are either in favor of the war-mongering, are fundamentalist christians, or are people who believe that Republicans are more "capitalist" (highly debatable--see history of government balance sheets).
Before Tuesday, people really need to consider whether the words "Republican" or "Democrat" mean what they used to. It is very odd that the deficit shrunk under the Clinton administration, yet ballooned under Bush. It is very odd that Kerry mentions free trade for pharmaceuticals, yet Bush managed to evade that question in the debates. Only Kerry mentioned that the Patriot Act needs to be reviewed. Bush says that he wants to limit government intervention, but in the next sentence supports amending the Constitution. Bush is often anti-science, when science is the foundation for business growth. Note that Kerry's health care plan keeps the insurance industry in the loop--it is not a socialist pit like many people claim. I urge people to think about whether the historical definitions we are all used to matter anymore; I'm not convinced they do.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
just a simple statement... shouldnt the number of votes per candidate be a far more reasonible method of electing the president/vice. in the 2000 election it was clear that gore/lieberman had the most votes showing that he was the popular choice yet bush won because of the e-college system... having less votes bush should not have won
That works both ways - if a "majority" of the population voted for an "extremist" party (say, 40% - enough to pretty much sweep the parliament in Canada), a small (11% of the vote) party could counter the majority. In other words, the smaller party would have, effectively, 4-5 times the power that the population gave it. Regardless of which direction it's coming from.
"Because everything said at the Republican Convention wasn't said in a rally for a supposivly (last time I checked) non-partisan groups."
The same rhetoric has been coming out of the White House in state of the union speeches, addresses to the nation, policy speeches, and from Fox News. Remember the prewar rhetoric, supposedly backed by America's vast supposedly non partisan intelligence apparatus, that America was in imminent danger of seeing a mushroom cloud and Iraqi UAV's spreading Anthrax over their cities. Which is worse your government stretching the truth or MTV.
So these groups are just countering massive, state sponsored, deceitful propaganda. Somebody has to do it. An incumbent party, especially one with control of all the branches of government has an enormouse bully pulpit and the Democrats would be nearly powerless to counter it were it not for all these outside groups and money.
"...thought of a President pushing for the reinstation of the draft. But so far that hasn't been the case."
Thats only because he is trying to get elected. If he gets elected and especially by wide enough margin he thinks he has a mandate he is going to do all kinds of pent up extreme things he's been reluctant to do before an election. Instituting the draft right before an election would be political suicide. Is telling in a Freudian slip a week or two ago Bush said he was going to end volunteer army and someone in the crowd had to correct him. He is a recovering acute alcohol, his slips of the tongue are far more telling than the carefully crafted lies his speech writers put in front of him which he just reads.
Bush didn't have a mandate in 2000 and he still followed the election with a binge of extremism. The Republicans rushed in to Iraq as fast as they did in hopes of winning and it being over before the election season started which didn't happen.
Something is going to have to give after the election, either they are going to have to stop throwing the military around as their tool of first resort or they are going to have to put more young people in army boots. The fact that a crisis is looming in Iran in 2005 when they try to bring a nuclear reactor on line tends to indicate more feet in boots will be required.
The Pentagon has figured out they have way to many people in the cool, volunteer friendly, relatively safe Air Force and Navy and nothing close to what they need for the new era in the down in the mud Army and Marines. They were trying to transfer Air Force and Navy truck drivers to the Army, with limited success because no one wants to drive a truck in Iraq because its suicidal. Again there is a high probability they will have to offer obscene incentives to volunteers, I heard recently the incentive package is up around $80,000 or restart the draft and use the power of their police state to suppress the dissent that will ensue.
@de_machina
eVoting is obviously insecure in America. We now depend on eVoting to elect presidents, congressmembers, and other politicians. We have to do something about it. We need to know specific scenarios to convince nontechnical people that they're threatened by the insecurity. So we talk about scenarios on Slashdot.
*You* have so many ways to excuse an accept this severe problem that will be played out to disastrous effect TWO DAYS FROM NOW. You're like the Bush National Security incompetents who ignored the presidential briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" before he planebombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Your flimsy rationalization of complacency when our democracy is threatened by these machines is inexcusable. Why do you hate America?
--
make install -not war
"Iraq has WMD"... "Smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud"... "Cakewalk"... "Throwing flowers"... "I declare an end to major military operations"... "Second anniversary of Iraq invasions sees over 1000 dead American soldiers, over 30,000 gravely wounded"... "We invaded Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people"...
These powermad sleazebags don't care about getting caught. They've been repeating "Nixon was guilty only because he got caught" for 30 years, so they've decided to just ignore getting caught. Their incessant shocking crimes have pushed everyone past disgust, into expecting fraud at every turn. They will do their worst, without even blinking. Expecting common decency from them is asking to get raped.
--
make install -not war
No law is compelling people to sit and listen to these either, because it's in college. Nobody does get out the vote campaigns among high school students, because almost all of them are under 18.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Consider the amount of shenanigans going on right now in the present system... disappearing votes, voters voting twice.. I strongly believe that an eVoting system will have far fewer problems than what we're presently dealing with.
Remember... if you don't vote, don't complain.
Benefit of this is, whenever anyone leaves DNA at a crime, you know who they are.
In other words, all you need to do is define something as a crime, and load the citizens up in their respective wire cages.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
right. because we all know that the underfunded, understaffed registrar of voters never fails to remove everyone from the voting rolls when they die, move away, etc. without telling them about it.
In Indianapolis this year, the registar tried mailing out postcards to try to clean out the stale and inaccurate voter registry.
As a result various predictable interest groups rolled all over on the ground pissing all over themselves in fury.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Get them to commit voting first and they'll learn about the issues. If they already decided to vote, they'll be pissed to learn about Diebold.
However, if you start by telling an 18 year-old kid that hasn't considered voting yet, talk about electronic voting fraud is going to bore and alienate them.
In my long years of activism, if there is one lesson I have learned it is this: mobilization always precedes education. I might not agree with their first vote, but the odds of them becoming responsible voters increase if they realize now how important it is to be involved.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
ignorance != mental illness. It's quite normal.
Yours is the funniest mindset of all. If they're going to round people up, they don't need your DNA to do it. The gestapo did just fine in 1930s Germany with non-photo ID and badly documented addresses, thank you very much.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Well, the Germans were efficient about it, but there's always room for improvement.
Once the gates and bars are in place, only the rules need to be changed. I thought that was obvious. Perhaps it's not.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Some people need to get out of college campuses and into the real world. Judging by the bumper stickers and conversations I'd say that 70-80% of the people I work with are for Bush. I may be a bit biased but from what I've seen IBM doesn't hire and keep people with mental illness or a lack of cognitive processes.
I think the saddest thing about this whole election is all the hate you hear for Bush and yet Kerry can just barely make it a close race? That there tells me that Kerry has problems
I think it will be a great day when the Republican party loses the Christian Fundamentalist because they are just too extreme. Funny now that more information is coming out about Iraq that Democrats have pulled supported from the war in Iraq. I'm sure someone will point out the flawed intelligence but we had no reliable way to verify it. Iraq had kicked out the weapons inspectors and/or prevented them from doing their jobs. Still seems fishy to me that if Iraq had no WMD's, why did they interfere with inspections so much? Also don't forget that Iraq is one of the few countries who has used WMD's since modern knowledge and ethics have evolved.
About the only thing that makes sense in the parent is that classic definitions of the parties no longer apply. Republicans used to be for less Government and very pro-business. Now they are for more Government and selectively pro-business.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Why was P. Diddy the one that you left out of the "doofus" category?
They tried to do the same thing this year:
Let's recap:
Say "2000, never again!" Come up with a new felon list
Refuse to show the list to anyone
Refuse to show the list to anyone under public pressure
When forced to by a court order.... admit that horrible, horrible "mistakes" were made, and by some incredible coincidence, the list was again totally slanted against the democratic party...
Election's only a couple days away now...
And how do we know that they work?
Any system of government should be based on trust.
If you 'tag' people like they are cattle and treat them as such by dehumanising them by makeing them use DNA ID's the effect will be that the runners of the database will have all of the power.
It isn't that corporations care if we can be identified, they want to sell the equipment to do so to the government. After they sell the equipment they don't have to care if it works or not.
They make their money and that is what it is all about.
I would rather use the money for real problems like getting food and health care.
If it costs more to identify the person than to give them healthcare, then the identification is a burden on that person.
It creates a fuedlistic system where the owners of the ID equipment get rich.
And they can never verify that their system really works.
I'm trying to think of a recent get-out-the-vote effort that didn't have a partisan agenda, and I'm stumped.
Even the ones that _say_ they're non-partisan seem to have hidden agendas - witness the "Voter Outreach of America" program (in Nevada, now in Oregon), who is running from accusations that they accept registrations for everyone, but submit only Republican voter registrations & tear up Democratic ones.
In the US voting is local. While I agree that the current Washington Rebuplican leadership is ghoul-like in their behaviour and seemingly undemocratic, I do not buy that small town Republicans all over the United States are currupt like that.
If you consider traditionally Republican states like New Hampshire or Nevada, there are many honest local officials who are Republicans. I do not buy that the Republican Party is that currupt even down to the local, small-town level.
That is just not true.
Terror is a noun. It's not a concrete noun - you can't hold terror in your hands - but it's a noun.
;)
Not that I think the "war on terror" is a meaningful or valid pursuit, but there are plenty of reasons to reject it without having to reject grammar into the bargain!
While I'm skeptical about electronic voting machines, this "proof," against them is far from it. There's just as much, if not more, of a likelyhood that the previous method of voting would be vulnerable to errors on a much greater scale than one or two per machine. We all saw what happened in FLA, and we understand how much of a difference one vote can potentially make, but this isn't any sort of argument against computerized voting -- it's an argument to get out and vote..
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Voters can run, but they can't hide from these guys. Meet the Urosevich brothers, Bob and Todd. Their respective companies, Diebold and ES&S, will count (using BOTH computerized ballot scanners and touchscreen machines) about 80% of all votes cast in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
2 33 .htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0404/S00
The system will only work when the public trusts the process.
Paper might not be the answer.
Diebold shouldn't have a closed system.
We can't trust a closed system.
It doesn't matter if the system 'works' if the public doesn't trust it.
Given the general respect for politicians in the public (somewhere around the level of town pooper-scoopers), I doubt highly you will convince the typical American taxpayer to give politicians free money. I, on the other hand, would _love_ to see an absolute campaign transparency law - let people donate all they want, but anyone from the public gets to follow the money trail - and anyone who tries to _hide_ the money trail gets thrown into jail.
Also, candidates for public office get a publicly-available dossier started on them WHICH THEY DO NOT CONTROL THE CONTENTS OF - where their lives, history, political views, actions, voting records, speeches, promises, etc. get described in detail, and updated as new information is uncovered (with indications of the source/reliability of the information). Controversial issues get investigators thrown at it until all the evidence that can be uncovered gets uncovered (and people attempting coverups get thrown into jail).
Even after they get into public office, I'd want that information source kept updated so that I can keep track of what they are doing compared to what they promised they were going to do. And _after_ they left public office, I'd want to make sure that they didn't take advantage of some kind of thing they setup while they were in office.
If the zitheads don't trust the system then
there is a possibility that they will turn into
revolutionaries.
Or is it better for your power mad friends to retain control and the cash flow from their untrustworthy system?
Privledge or Revolution?
The sane person wants to build trust.
The paranoid rants about 16 yearold zitheads.
I believe that the rationale is: "If they don't have respect for the laws of society, then society doesn't have to give them any rights."
Personally, I feel this is bad public policy reasoning from a system-design perspective - allowing "criminals" to vote (even if serving time!) provides a negative-feedback mechanism on the law-creation part of society.
My basic reasoning is this: if the legal system is made up of good, common sense laws which most of the society members agree with, then there won't be very many criminals, and it won't really matter which way they vote.
On the other hand, if the legislators are going nuts & trying to criminalize everything they can think of (because they've lost connection with society, they're pandering to special interests, or because they're deliberately trying to make it so that law enforcement can use "selective" enforcement to control the public), then the "criminal" voting block will grow sufficiently to affect the outcome of elections.
Either way, it works to the best of the overall society.
Unfortunately, the usual reaction I get when describing my reasoning: "Well, it sounds logical, but damn criminals shouldn't be allowed to vote!" *Sigh*
You make a lot of good points, and there are really only two that I want to address.
"that means they take huge contributions from corporate interests, and correspondingly support tax cuts and other give aways to support their funders."
According to my latest issue of Wired (12.11), on page 082, they list candidate funding, and give nice little pie charts. Very informative, anyways the point I'm trying to make is that they state that only 2% of Bush's funding comes from corporations/groups (They list his total funding as 242 million, so that should be... 4.84 million) while Kerry gets a whopping 10% of his funding from corporations or groups (They list his total funding as 223.4 million... so that should be 22.34 million). I'm not good with numbers, but isn't 22.34 million a lot more than 4.84 million?
"well known to have a rightward slant"
Oh yes, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather - all staunch Bush supporters.
Now, I have no idea what that rally contained, but I can state as fact that people who didn't attend it like you and me are not authorities on what it's about.
/. readers are intelligent enough to take the requisite grain of salt without being prompted to do so.
I never claimed to be an authority. In fact, I disclaimed my remark by indicating that the information I was providing was second-hand. Hopefully,
Looks like /. is off jumping the gun and running into wild off-topic "discussions" again. I tried to read the article, but became disgusted with the poor quality of it early on. Just a couple of points that made me give up are (1) a blatant lie claiming that Georgia doesn't have absentee voting and (2) their wild and faulty assumption that 90% of all votes cast are cast on electronic machines. North Dakota is finally getting optical scan ballots state-wide, and I think they're likely to stay with them a long time, because they're cheap and reliable and not such a big change. Lots of other states are in the same situation, so assuming 90% is ludicrous. Also, an increasing number of votes are being cast early using absentee ballots or paper early ballots, so it's unlikely that in the future 90% of votes will ever be cast on election day.
I applaud these Yalue undergraduates for trying, but there's not much to see here. Let's move along.
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
This is pure troll and flamebait.
...from what I've seen IBM doesn't hire and keep people with mental illness or a lack of cognitive processes.
I'm actually suprised by the moderation, too, although I feel it is more flamebait than troll. As a consolation, I have gotten one "overrated" moderation, so far.
Nearly every defense contractor I've met is a hard-core Republican, too. The reason is that they like to eat pork, no matter the cut. Many people at IBM probably are of a similar mindset, where biased corporate tax payoffs are good for stock options. I classify this as a mild mental illness, as money drives people to make strange choices, such as voting for a selectively pro-business canidate regardless of all the other baggage carried by the current administration.
There are a lot of very good research scientists who work at IBM, too...what do they think?
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Really? Kids prefer the internet for news, while their parents rely on TV news. They socialize with their peers more than adults do, so information spreads more rapidly. Care to back up your baseless assertion of idiocy on my part?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
If I had two kids, a morgage, and a carreer, I doubt I would have the time to follow the hundreds of millions of dollars that is getting funneled to a company who is openly paying the vice president.
Then you would be wrong. Cheney's deferred compensation from Haliburton is a minor concern. The bigger problem is that the President of the U.S. seems to be the willing puppet of a group of neocon advisors while ignoring advice from people with real experience, like Powell. That's why this Republican with a mortgage, two kids, and a career already voted -- and it wasn't for Bush. A 50% approval rating for an incumbent isn't really good, and considering all the Young Republican activities on campus recently, some portion of that rating is coming from college campuses.
When young people couldn't vote, they had to resort to mass demonstrations that were a much more dangerous way to express their opinions.
Not totally true. What a lot of us did was work very hard for passage of the 26th Amendment. The thought was that if you could be sent to war, then you should have the right to vote, and the country agreed. The disappointing thing is that since the 70s, the percentage of 18-25 year-old voters has been declining steadily until this election. You're right about motivation. The question is why have younger voters been so apathetic?
A simpler way to eliminate Operation Snowbird is to eliminate the electoral college; the fact that your vote for a particular candidate has a different value depending on what state you live (excuse me, vote) in is what leads -- utterly predictably in this day of cheap long-distance travel -- to stuff like that.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
So, this becomes then a national database, where you know what your DNA "hash" is, right?
Well, in most districts, there is a requirement that you are qualified to vote in that district, whether it is the local city council seat or federal Representative district. So they will need to correlate DNA hashes to meat-world addresses. So you haven't really solved anything.
Besides, it would then be entirely feasible that Experian, et al., would get access to this database, one way or the other (cross-check addresses with credit reports, and then figure out likely DNA hash matches). I would be suprised if it isn't farmed out to them in the first place.
So then we will need point-of DNA verification, where a machine samples some swab (hair follicle? cheek swab? anal probe?) of your DNA to verify your presented DNA hash before you can proceed.
So instead of presenting documentary evidence to get a voter card, you replace it with a very expensive and complicated system, that does nothing to improve accuracy?
They don't realize that there is enough of them to swing an election? they are too idealistic to vote for the lessor of two evils? no draft? too busy?
I'm sure they can come up with too many reasons not to vote. It's a shame, but it's been awhile since we've had some truly engaging issues. They need to latch on to electorial reform or something, like a younger hipper Nader.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
but isn't 22.34 million a lot more than 4.84 million?
Its a good point, and the republicans often use this argument to say that they have more "grassroots" supporters than the democrats. However, we also see that the bulk of that "grassroots" money comes from folks who are cutting checks right at the maximum allowable limit, $2500 each, and they give sizeable sums to other candidates in other races, too. The people that can afford to blow that much cash are generally wealthy business owners. We also know that the IRS is very lenient with allowing top execs to take home HUGE salaries. The result is that most small-to-medium size companies try hard to payout all their profit in salary to avoid double taxation. What I'm trying to say here is that I think the distinction between business and personal contributions is really quite blurry. The other issue I have with this sort of statistic is that the presidential race is only one piece of the puzzle. There are hundreds of other races going on, even a mayoral race for a big city can rack up spending in the millions, not to mention the senators, congress, etc. Is there a database that combines all this info nation wide? If there is, I'd love to look at it.
Oh yes, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather - all staunch Bush supporters.
I think NPR is dangerously conservative -- but I can respect a difference of opinion on that point.
Then you would be wrong. Cheney's deferred compensation from Haliburton is a minor concern.
Cheney's deferred compensation is a gross violation of ethical standards. Can I help it if this administration happens to have worse ones?
The ______ Agenda
Gladly and with relative ease.
Lets look at the idea that getting your news from the internet as opposed to television makes that news somehow more informative. That's absolute rubish. The vast majority of internet news services are nothing more than websites that ape (and advertise) the content that the networks are running on their own news broadcasts. Of course not all of them do this but a majority of them do. News websites from newspapers (adults read lots of newspapers) are word for word duplicates for the most part. The exact same content.
Internet news isn't better or more comprehensive than the news found on television and in the newspapers. It's the same damned thing. Add to that the 24 hour news channels and you can gorge yourself on news if you wish without ever going online. News stories appear on the internet and on these 24 hour news channels at almost the exact same time so Internet based news isn't even more timely in most cases. It's convienient and it's useful but it isn't in any way better.
None of this clearly states that kids are more informed than adults nor does it say that adults are more informed than kids. All it says is that news is available from a wide variety of sources for both groups to access. You say that kids socialize with their peers more than adults do but that's not based on anything either. It's an opinion. Show me a statistic, any statistic from anywhere other than off the top of your head, that says kids spend more time discussing the issues than adults because "socializing doesn't meant they're talking about anything more important than last nights episode of "The OC".
Adults don't socialize at work? How do you know which group spends more time talking about upcoming elections or politics in general? You don't.
If you're "a kid" then you have no idea what percentage of time adults spend discussing political issues at work and if you're an adult (as I am, about to turn 40) then you can't really say how involved kids today are with current affairs, the upcoming election, or politics in general. You just don't know because you aren't spending any time at all in their circles. If you are then I'd call into question how well you are qualified to comment on the adult side of the issue regardless of your actual age.
It's not something that you're qualified to comment on. You can if you want but you don't know what you're talking about and someone (like me) is going to call you an idiot for doing it unless you can produce a reason with some facts behind it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
slashdot has warned us twice about voting machines...do we listen?
And which nations would those be? And just how large are their militaries?
I think if you went to the trouble of checking, you'd be rather surprised at how little spare military capacity exists in the world today.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Cheney's deferred compensation is a gross violation of ethical standards. Can I help it if this administration happens to have worse ones?
The current administration did not write the tax laws that make it legal and accepted. Take it up with previous Congresses. John Elway (and his grandchildren) will be getting paid by the Broncos for some time. It doesn't seem unethical to me. Once a company has made a deferred compensation deal, it has an obligation to pay it without recourse. Pick a real issue. How about Cheney's lobbying for a war with Iraq even before 9/11? There's something to get upset about.
fish and pipes
According to an exclusive report at Drudge, there has been massive fraud in Philly. In many machines around the city they found, nearly 2000, votes already in the machine before voting even started. Nobody is reporting to who the votes belong too, but I guess the concerns (here and here) were valid ones.