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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!
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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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
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)
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
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
If you shift votes from the loser to the winner, the outcome should still be the same.
If there is any shifting of votes, then we *all* lose.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'
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
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
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
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
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?!
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.
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
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
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
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
It's not a bug. It's just an easy way to misuse the eSlate tablets. After selecting a straight-ticket, it takes you to the next selection box, which it the presidential race. Ol' Dubya is first on the ballot, so he gets highlighted. Pressing the selection button instead of the "Cast Ballot" button selects him.
I'm familiar with the issue because I work with the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, Texas, the headquarters of eSlate and a county that exclusively uses eSlate machines.
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
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.
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?
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
"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
If it's not a bug, it's certain very poor design. There should be no default choices. What if I didn't want to vote in the presidential race?
Besides, I don't get why after voting Democrat for every race, I would have to go to another screen, and reselect Kerry. It doesn't make any sense.
It sure sounds like whoever designed these machines intentionally made it so that people would "accidently" vote for Bush.
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...
I didn't mean to imply that there was an official "popular vote" - but it does exist. You can find out how many voters in the entire country voted for a specific candidate. You can find out the total number of voters in the country. You can thus find out the percentage that voted for a specific candidate in the entire country.
While there are differences in choices posted to voters at the state level, you can still find out the percentage that voted for a specific candidate, regardless of whether or not they available to be voted for.
Is it meaningful? Not particularly. Especially not in any legal or official way. But if a president was elected by 1/3 of the population that voted, and did not even have a plurality of the population that voted nationally, I'd say it might be an interesting case and should start (or enhance) discussion on whether or not reform of the electoral system is necessary.
Then consider that one of the stated benefits of the electoral college is that it helps prevent candidates from focusing on a few highly-populated metropolitan areas to win the election. But of course, it results in the candidates focusing on a few "battleground" or "swing" states.
(I'm not really against the electoral college, but I find the whole subject quite fascinating...)
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