Slashdot Mirror
Buggy Voting Machines
dkleinsc writes "The NYTimes is running an article arguing in layman's terms that voting machines are inherently buggier (Sperm sample required. Sorry ladies) than most software systems because they are not tested properly. A fun quote: "Extensive discussions are under way at sites like VerifiedVoting.org, CalVoter.org, and the "news for nerds" forum Slashdot.org about inexpensive, practical ways to make automated voting as reliable as, say, buying books online. Their recommendations make sense."" We makese sense? Wah?
Some poor old grandmother is going to read that, type in the url, and end up seeing goatse. Way to go!
stuff
That should have been the headline for this article.
==
no sig
"practical ways to make automated voting as reliable"
Is the winner preselected and 'voting' automated to make it happen?! Oh wait...
Something tells me that NYT reads /. with a +5 comment threshold, and deprecates "Funny".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
George W. Bush have also recommended: James Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Dad.
Sounds like a plan to me...
Saying slashdot makes sense is just a way to discredit the anti-voting-machine crowd. People will check out the dot, and they'll think it's a bunch of kooks complaining about this stuff.
I think this is just silly argument. Just because a system is used for voting can't make it inherently buggier. The problem is more that there isn't an established standart to which the machines are held. There should be a law put into effect that first defines what is expected from the voting machines, second there should be possiblity of independent review of these machines expressed in that law. Perhaps the touch screens of the voting machines could have socket to which a recorder could be attached so that separate count could be made with competitors machine.
No registration required link
While voting machines may be inherently buggy, I think in certain cases, the paper ones weren't much better. It also doesn't help that some voters can't read and/or fill out a paper ballot. For those of you that remember the 2000 election, the process of filling out a paper ballot was just as buggy, where bugs were "incomplete marks", "multiple marks", or "hanging chads".
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
Ever since I was a kid, my mom has been taking me into the voting booth (either to teach me the importance of voting, or for lack of babysitting). This year I voted for the first time, and it felt great. I don't mean emotionally, I mean physically. When I pulled the levers and flipped the switches, I was actually convinced that my vote counted. It was the neatest feeling.
It was rigged. Look at the Berkley paper backed by MIT.
a. The Supervisor of Elections has unreasonably delayed providing information.
b. The certification was based on inadequate and incomplete information regarding the election results.
6. Some or all of the information requested on Nov. 2, 2004 by Black Box Voting is still missing from 59 of the 179 voting precincts, including portions of or all of the voting machine tapes for those 59 precincts, which are a vital part of official paper record of the election results from those precincts.
7. Complete information on problems with the voting machines prior to and during the election has not been provided.
8. Complete information relating to memory card failures during the election has not yet been provided.
9. Only a partial list of the transmission logs from the Accu-Vote optical scan server has been provided. Despite repeated requests, the Elections office has refused to provide to the Volusia County Democratic party the official election results, now stating that those results will not be available until December 1, 2004.
10. The Elections office has provided incomplete data regarding Early Voting and Absentee ballots. The Supervisor of Elections, for example, reported that the total number of absentee ballots and Early voting ballots, combined equaled 89,999 votes, yet the published figures for those totals is 84,100 votes, leaving over 5,800 votes unaccounted for.
11. In addition to the pattern of delay in providing the requested information, the true election results are in doubt because of numerous violations of election law procedure and unanswered questions concerning the results.
12. The polls were opened early and closed late during Early Voting.
13. Many public records, including one signed results tape from a voting machine were found in the trash. Many of the requested records not furnished by the Elections office have been found in the trash. Results from the tapes found in the trash do not match the results of the copies of tapes furnished.
14. An email from Mark Earley, of Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., to the Elections office was provided which asked the recipient for an explanation of why Volusia County had more memory card failures than all of their other Florida customers combined, and then asked why the 17 memory card failures which the Elections office reported on November 3, increased to 25 before November 12, 2004.
15. The reported memory card failures were significant and troubling and included reporting zero votes after one week of voting, requesting permission to upload votes before the voting began, and messaging whether the card should be reformatted.
16. According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections on November 17, 2004, the GEMS computer is not networked, and is "stand alone." The furnished computer logs show evidence of at least two attempts to remotely access the GEMS central tabulator, which is claimed to be secure. A computer screen shot printout on November 17, 2004 (found in the trash) shows that the GEMS computer at that time had two networked hard drives.
From Chuck Herrin's info sec website: It's an amazing demo. Be sure to check out the associated FAQ which is as easy to read for the layman as for the techie, and full of citations. Share it with you friends and family !
For you party-liners out there, Chuck is a Reublican who wants you to understand that this is not a partisan issue.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I think all slashdotters are probably smiling right now. I'm even about to cry. We're sharing a moment.
Zoeith
If you think ladies would have a problem providing a sperm sample, you REALLY don't get out enough.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Slashdotter
Since the New York Times started reporting it. Of course, these are the same folks who also brought us Jayson Blair, so it's not like it's much of an endorsement these days.
If we make sense, then I demand a retraction. Or a fish looking at a melted clock dial. This is not a |.
at least here in manitoba, canada, we use a process where you a) get a piece of paper with straight lines connecting the checkbox with the person you are voting for, b) you place a checkmark on the candidate you wish to vote for c) you feed it into a machine which records your vote, and d) if there are any discrepencies, all the ballots can be counted by hand. all the ballot stations are manned by volunteers representing all parties. I can't understand why places like the ukraine and the USA have made this process more difficult than it should be. It's not like any one party is beter than another. Perhaps its just nations that start with the letter U.. Ukraine, USA, Uganda .. Uruguay.. heh. Uruguay.
I TRUST computers. When I first used A.T.M.'s, nearly 30 years ago, I carefully saved receipts in a folder and matched them with the bank's monthly statement. Now I sometimes stuff the receipts in my wallet, but I almost never look at them again. The only banking error I've encountered in all those years was when a human teller left a final zero off a deposit I had made.
I still pore over credit card statements, but mainly to see whether some person, not some machine, has issued the proper refund credit or made an improper charge. I've sent e-mail messages to the wrong people by mistyping an address or hitting the oh-so-dangerous "Reply All" button, but never because the system routes it where it shouldn't go. When I travel, I assume that the e-ticket I booked through my computer will be valid and that frequent-flier miles will show up in my account.
Yet when I went to my polling place in Washington on Election Day, I waited an extra half-hour in line to cast a paper ballot, instead of using the computerized touch-screen voting machine. Am I irrational? Perhaps, but this would not be the evidence.
A columnist in The Washington Post recently suggested that nostalgia for paper ballots, in today's reliably computerized world, must reflect a Luddite disdain for technology in general or an Oliver Stone-style paranoia about the schemings of the political world.
Not at all. It can also arise from a clear understanding of how computers work - and don't. The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.
The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.
When I worked briefly on a product design team at Microsoft, I was sobered to learn that fully one-fourth of the company's typical two-year "product cycle time" was devoted to testing. Programmers spend 18 months designing and debugging a system. Then testers spend the next six months finding the problems they missed. It is no secret that even then, the "final" software from Microsoft, or any other company, is far from perfect.
Today's mature systems work as well as they do only because they are exposed to nonstop, high-stakes torture testing. EBay lists nearly four million new items each day. If a problem affects even a tiny fraction of its users, eBay will be swamped with reports immediately.
Millions of data packets are being routed across the Internet every second. If servers, domain-name directories or other components cannot handle the volume, the problem will become apparent quickly. Years ago, bank or airline computers would often be "down" because of unforeseen problems. Now they're mostly "up," because they've had so long for flaws to become exposed.
The second crucial element in making reliable systems is accountability. Users can trust today's systems precisely because they don't have to take them on trust. Some important computer systems run on open-source software, like Linux, in which the code itself can be examined by outsiders.
Virtually all systems provide some sort of confirmation of transactions. You have the slip from the A.T.M., the receipt for your credit card charge, the printout of your e-ticket reservation. If your e-mail message doesn't go through, there is still the copy in your "Sent" folder. This is the technology world's counterpart to the check-and-balance principle in the United States government. The first concept, robust testing, protects against unintended flaws. The second, accountability, guards against purposeful distortions.
Which brings us back to electronic voting. On the available evidence, I don't believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The appare
I'm not a very experience programmer by any means, but why the hell would it be so damn hard to make a voting machine that works properly? It seems like a simple concept that even beginning programmers could do a decent job of creating.
Sperm sample required. Sorry ladies
/. XX readers to /. Xy readers, I'd think that the remaining 'ladies' would have no problem... er coming up with a sperm sample.
Given the assumed ratio of
Seriously folks, stop worrying about Ukraine and start looking at what went on in your own back yard. The Ukranians seem to be handling things quite nicely themselves, but where are the mass protests in the US?
I heard that if you pressed UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-RIGHT-RIGHT-A-B-A-B it takes you to a hidden screen that lets you put in how many times you want your vote to count
I think that is because a VOTING system has to be designed for ALL kinds of users. From the youngest voter to the oldest, from the illiterate to the PhD'ed. If there were problems with users then it has to be considered that it's the fault of the voting machine or the instructional/assistance systems.
;-)
Regarding that comment about a Kerry win and the docile nature of the opposing party: It also helps that there are actual choices on the ballot too. Though I doubt very much that nobody in the Republican party would have questioned a Kerry win. Logic seemed to escaped YOU.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
When officials refuse to adopt secure voting machines, there are two explanations. Incompetence, or bad will.
In either case, these process by which such officials get themselves into positions of power over the voting system should be examined very closely. No democratic government can rule when it stands of being accused of stealing an election.
Unless of course that is what it has done.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
yeah well here in america actually GW won fair and square. i think we hold the most transparent election process in the world
I can't understand why places like the ukraine and the USA have made this process more difficult than it should be.
On purpose. If an evel candidate seems to be taking over a precinct, despite his evelness, the precinct official can adjust the voting machine to correct for the injustice done by the evel voters of the evel candidate. You can't do that with paper ballots.
Of course, the Soviet Russia solution was even better - they simply put only one candidate on the ballot. Just ONE. This way there was no way for any evel candidate to take the election, ever, because he simply wasn't on the ballot.
This article compares India voting machines vis-a-vis Dieblold.There was also a previous slashdot story on this. These machines are much simpler and hence lesser prone to bugs.As discussed by the article , faith in this machines have been established simply because they have been used over the past few years by over 670 million registered voters in elections at national as well as state levels.
This simple article explains the EVM's used
I will support voting machine reform when those same advocates support registration reform. This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations. From illegal aliens to cartoon characters, the number of bogus registrations was staggering. Lets make sure all votes are counted, as long as those votes are from citizens of United States. I need a drivers license to rent a movie or fly to Vegas, its not too much to ask a voter for a state drivers license to vote in that state and for a drivers license that states if a person is a citizen. Its not intimidation or voter suppression. If showing your ID to a little old lady at the polling place is intimidation, then what is showing it to a pimply teenager at Blockbuster?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Electronic voting should be as easy as standard, non-electronic voting. My parents couldn't buy a book of Amazon if their life depended on it. Why are we making this so hard. Electronic voting should work as follows:
1. The voting machine does not keep track of any votes. A voter will walk up to the machine and be presented with a list of candidates. Next to each name there will be a box. The voter makes a mark in the desired box with an electronic stylus. A write in blank will be available if needed.
2. At the bottom of the screen there will be two large boxes. One will be red and says "I wish to make changes on my ballot." The other box will be green and it says "I am satisfied with my ballot." After touching the green box another screen will come up. It will basically say that by touching continue you will be done voting. A go back button will be provided in case someone got to this screen by accident.
3. After clicking done, your ballot will be printed out at the machine you are at. This will allow you to look over the completed ballot before having it counted.
This system is the best of both worlds. The voting machine itself does not count anything. It is just an interface for making the completed ballot. There is a paper trail with this system. This system will also cut down on waste due to extra ballots that were not used. Finally a change the ballot at the last minute will not be a big deal since the interface is electronic. The ballots won't have to be printed weeks in advance.
For the last two evenings, I've been slowly going through the data on machine problems at EIRS
and I can say that while voting machines in general are not something much more complicated than an application preferences menu, the ones we used here in the U.S. in 2004 ARE inherently buggy.
Even when they were not switching votes, or crashing in the middle of voting, there were fundamental user interface design issues.
For example, a large number of complaints were lodged because machines would not allow a person to vote a party line, and then modify one or two votes. Any sensible designer knows how to do something like this right.
Another problem is that they had a big flashing vote button that turned on as soon as a ballot had any votes on it. So if you were at the first screen, and you voted, the vote button would start flashing. Any sensible designer would know that some users would think that they should press the vote button to get to the next screen, but when pressed, the ballot would be cast and the ability to vote on all the other candidates would be lost.
Finally, there were machines that showed you a review screen, but on the review screen, hitting enter, which is the key used normally to scroll down, to see if there is more, would actually alter the first vote on the screen. On a review screen. Ah and cooincidentally, the first vote on the screen was for president and hitting enter would switch it to Bush.
Whether deliberate or caused by some of the most incompetant programmers on the face of the earth, that is some buggy shiznit.
(P.S. I'll be posting my results when I'm done, probably on daily kos. I'll link that somewhere in the page you get when you click on my signature.)
Someone had to do it.
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
An open-source system that runs on commodity hardware, with an encrypted, anonymous ballot. Definite paper trail to allow for recounts. Why there isn't a clamor to get this off the ground is beyond me. A similar system has been working in Australia for years.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
that is debatable. That is the problem with the black boxes in Ohio and Florida. They are not even translucent, let alone transparent. Everything is hidden and it is unknown as to what the real count is. Since the vote does not align with exit polls at the black box sites, it would seem that something is wrong. Of course, you could argue that people lied, but the problem is t would be at only the black box sites.
It may seem funny to you, but it looks like a troll to me. I'd vote for modding the parent down to flamebait, but there's no paper balloting so I can't trust you to count my vote.
No wonder it's intelligent and no particular surprise it mentions Slashdot -- the article was written by James Fallows, who as a long-time writer for The Atlantic was also a long-time technophile, or at least one who appreciated the productive uses of technology. I venerated him because he was a very public user and proponent of Lotus Agenda, a product which was unfortunately orphaned way back when and whose intelligence and functionality have never been duplicated.
Yeah, well this year if you had gone to vote in queens, bronx, or any other inner city district,
the experience would probably have gone more like this (if you were trying to vote for Kerry)
1) When you get to the front of the line, be told that if you want to vote a straight Republican ticket you can use any of the machines, but if not, you have to wait a little longer because half of the machines are "stuck on the republican side"
2) Get in the booth, pull down a lever, and have it not quite click. Or refuse to go down.
3) Notice that for some strange reason, you can only vote for Kerry as a Democrat, not on any of the other party lines, because the levers are broken (New York allows third-parties to nominate a major party candidate, so votes for that candidate get counted for the purposes of party viability. The Dems hate third parties.)
Someone had to do it.
I followed the problems with these machines on the news and apparently one of the most important problems is that there isn't a way to verify the vote count on each machine. These machines have a function where they print the total votes cast and that's it. No audit trial.
... And at the end of the day if for some reason there is a problem with the voting machines you can always go back to the transparent ballot boxes and count each individual vote all over again.
/obviously this calls for a reliable printer mechanism, like the ones with see on ATMs or Cash Machines, at least!
Why can't they attach a printer to each machine where the voter will see a paper ballot being printed at the same time he/she submitted their vote on the screen? They will hava a last chance to see their vote before it is automatically dropped into a see through box.
If there was a problem with an individual vote the person will call for assistance immediately and with a proper procedure in place, the vote could either be cancelled or approved.
Makes sense?
There's no reason on god's green earth the USA needs electronic voting. eVoting should be eliminated. Why? 1. Because there is commercial (read: political) interest behind all voting machine companies. 2. Any software/firmware anywhere CAN be futzed with. The ONLY reason to NOT go with a nation-wide standardized, paper ballot is to fuck "The People" out of a _verifiable_ election.
Although the machines may well be buggy, other sources of error may be more commonplace and more insidious. A prior /. article shows that some bugs occur in the metadata configuration created by officials of the particular election. Vote counting is really more vote interpretation than simply doing Votes[Candidate]++. And if the people configuring the software for a particular election make a formating mistake, the wrong bits will be counted for the wrong candidates.
These types of errors are hard to test for because it is not testable until the ballot is set and every new ballot demand a new round of testing. These types of errors won't be solved by better testing of the machine or by OSS. At best, the voting machine software designer can provide easy-to-use tools to ensure that the ballot layout and voting interpretation/tallying software is in sync.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
... and in the past it has been correct within .5 percent of the vote before the absentee ballots are figured in.
The rock solid trend diverged in Florida 2000. Now it has strangely diverged in most of the Battleground states.
There is no way to prove that the electronic vote was hacked. Conversely, there is no way to prove that the electronic vote is correct. We have lost the concept of auditability.
As Stalin once said, it doesn't matter who does the voting, it's who does the COUNTING!!!! Well, Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia and other companies led by Republican devotees seem poised to take over the counting in US elections. One can only speculate as to the results and why they differ so much from exit polls.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The world's first national vote in which citizens could vote via Internet took place in Switzerland on September 3. The country, which has a direct democracy that calls on citizens to vote on issues as often as four times a year, has had much success in allowing Internet votes in several cantons over the past several years. Swiss officials, recognizing the success of the local programs, became convinced that it was secure enough to try it out in four Geneva suburbs on a national referendum. Citizens of those regions were allowed to choose between postal voting, going to a traditional ballot booth, or voting via Internet.
Geneva's e-voting system uses a method of two-factor authentication that provides foolproof security. Citizens receive a card which gives them their option of voting over the internet, by mail or in person. The card includes a 16-character personal ID code, and a four-character security code, similar to a PIN number, which voters must scratch off to reveal. The voter who chooses the online option then visits a Web site and types in the personal ID code, and then a secure connection is established. Then, an online ballot form is provided. Before casting their vote, the second authorization factor must be entered, and the voter then types in their security code, along with their date and place of birth.
Because the online voting system is tied to a single register of voters, authorities can protect against voter fraud (multiple voting). The safeguard guarantees that a person can vote only once, whether in person, by mail or on the Internet. There are, of course, no hanging chads, and the results are extremely accurate. It took Swiss officials 13 minutes and five seconds to count the online votes in September's ballot. Twenty-two percent of voters from the test regions cast their ballots online.
You sir, are a fucking idiot. And I mean that in the best possible way. Right now, the biggest obstacle to democracy in this election is the combined work of both the Republican "lose the tinfoil hats" Party, and the Democratic "it doesn't matter" Party.
Yeah well, guess what. The President wasn't the only question on those ballots. Volusia county wouldn't have changed the outcome of the presidential election if it had voted 100% Kerry. But what about state elections? County seats? Mayors? Democracy must happen at all levels!
Why don't you get over your obsession with Kerry and Bush, and look at the big picture here? Accept that the truth is that Volusia county for certain has MAJOR human-created voting problems (or are you going to tell me that a bug in the machine made the election officials "forget" to sign the forged results that Volusia has been giving out as real? BBV pulled the real signed results out of the trash. Or are you going to tell me that BBV has a forgery, that they successfully forged the signatures of ALL of the election officials and the real document was accidentally signed in invisible ink?) and other counties may have had problems either human-made or machine-made.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
In any case, you can trust the individual vote totals on the machines (with manual central tabluation) just so long as you do random audits, or targeted challenge audits to check for irregularities.
Any audit that turns up a problem would trigger a manual recount of all precincts.
BTW, I don't think there is anything wrong with hand counting. You may think it's too expensive. But what is Democracy worth to you???
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You assume that exit polling is a scientific process. Fact is, political groups have picked up on exit polling as a way to attempt to skew elections, if they can get major media to pick up their story (or, alternatively, if major media is doing the exit polling). Example:
10am-
CBS News: Exit polls show that Candidate A has taken a COMMANDING lead in Ohio.
Supporters of Candidate B: Well, shit, there's no use voting, we're going to lose anyway.
Exit polling also requres honesty out of those polled, which may or may not happen. This IS politics, ya know.
Comparing exit polling with actual voting results, and claiming something is wrong with the voting results if there's a discrepancy, is just stupid.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The *counting* portion of any voting system *MUST* be wide open, and subject to public scrutiny, and there *must* be a physical (paper being the most logical) record of an individuals vote, that *that* individual can verify correctly recorded their votes.
The mechanism used to *create* that paper record doesnt matter, so long as it remains in the posession of, and can be inspected by, the individual casting the vote, after it is created and before it is counted. It can be done by hand, or with the assistance of some ATM-like machine that then *PRINTS* the paper which neither does any counting, nor keeps any record of who is voting. In fact other than the printed output, it should keep no records whatsoever. It should not even know the identity of the voter.
The paper vote record itself, should also not have any sort of information which could identify *who* the voter is. The machine used to read and count the paper record *MUST* be open, auditable and its entire process and function must be fully and publically documented. After counting, the paper ballots should drop into a box, or otherwise be retained to allow for recounts.
It's been pretty well established that we won't have a fair and functional voting system until we have a considerably greater level of transparency and accountability.
You won't have transparency until every part of the voting process has been moved into the open source domain for thorough examination and auditing. The current systems are all closed source, and the system which "prevents" cheating is controlled by the same people responsible for gerimandering, and is readily bypassed via "emergency" updates.
Furthermore, we shouldn't have to file Freedom of Information Act requests in order to have ballot results released. This information should be freely available, preferably on the websites of the various counties that do the tallying.
Also, a person's vote absolutely must be recorded in a non-electronic manner at the time of polling. Paper ballots are essential. Even if those paper ballots are printed by the voting machine after the voter casts their votes, it must be produced. Otherwise, a recount is no different than refreshing the calculations on a spreadsheet.
While this is all a good idea, it isn't like a system like I described actually exists. I believe MIT formed a group to produce such a system, but four years later they've mostly just produced research papers. There is a group which is currently working on such a system, but they are currently suffering from severe under-funding and various bits of social blockage. They're the Open Voting Consortium. I strongly urge everyone to go check them out.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
The huge irony here is that a "voting program" is about the simplist thing you could write. Thousands of people have written RPG character generators that are more complicated than a voting program.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Easy, I'll soon have a low ID#, and you'll have a godolithic one....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
What OSCE thinks about it: http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2004/11/3779_e n.pdf.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
You don't have to be a republican or a democrat or a supporter of a third party to want everyone's vote to count. That should be what everyone wants. And the only way that will happen is with constant vigilance.
Apparently there's already proof of voting fraud in Ohio. Both of Ralph Nader's votes have been disqualified
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Voting may seem similar but it is VERY different. You get a statement every month to reconcile against your personal records. There is an individual trail that you can take to the bank and say "see, you fucked up!!! Give me my money back!!!"
No such burden exists for voting systems. The customer does NOT receive a statment in the mail.
Furthermore, I would suggest that the "once a year" model of "use" should NOT be a problem since these systems are SO FUCKING SIMPLE!!! Any developer worth his salt could design tests to find errors. And any company worth it's salt would EXTENSIVELY test their software before deploying it to the field.
The "private" nature of voting means that any system designed to allow a voter to "check", will probably allow others to "check" as well. The best solution I could think of is smartcard driver licenses that digitally sign your vote. But even then, the motor vehicle dept will have your "private key" as well as any other personal parameters.
I guess one could add randomly seeded keys to the voting machines and randomly generated numbers to hash each vote ID. But those to seem succeptible to precinct worker mischief.
In the end, the easiest solution is to BAN, the on-screen vote verfication phase. Vote verification takes place after a ballot is printed behind glass. If the voters rejects the ballot it is visibly voided in some way and the voter get to change their choices. If it's accepted, it's automatically placed in the ballot box.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The best e-tally I've seen in the last while (and I've voted in 3 general elections in the past 5 months) is a paper ballot which you put into a cardboard sleeve when leaving the polling booth (so no one can see your vote). The sleeve with ballot is taken to a counting machine. It looks a lot like an electronic sheet feeder. You place the sleeve with a bit of the ballot sticking out face down into the feeder. It pulls your completed ballot out, and electronically records your vote. There is a small digital display showing your vote for 3 seconds. You can confirm that it scored your ballot correctly. The display blanks, and the paper copy of your ballot is stored (the machine sits on top of a large box which holds completed paper ballots). Electronic reporting is complete and exact, and there is a paper trail for recounts if necessary.
Actually, the fraud was so obvious in some places you don't need a CS degree to know something was wrong.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Not much of a point of choosing any candidate if your opponents control the voting machinery, is there?
I have a low-tech solution to the voting problem: Use paper ballots.
Here is the process:
- A voter arrives at their polling station.
- An election official confirms that the voter is eligible to cast a ballot.
- The official hands the voter a paper ballot and is told to make their choice in private behind a screen or inside a booth.
- The voter takes the ballot, goes into the private area, and makes their choice by placing an X next to the candidate of their choice.
- The voter returns with their folded ballot and deposits it into a sealed ballot box.
At the end of the night, the official opens the ballot box, tallies the totals for each candidate, and reports the totals to the main office conducting the election.Elections held this way are simple and secure. There is no worry about paper trails or verification, because the ballots themselves are the proof.
As for the ballots themselves, they look something like this:
I guess what I am trying to say is that elections do not need to be complicated by technology. The method I am proposing there depends on the ability of people to count, nothing else.
The method I propose here really works too. Where I live, it is the standard for both my provincial and federal elections.
I really hope that the voting method throughout every county in the U.S. is reformed. Personally, I know it is hard to accept election results when your preferred candidate loses, but at least where I live, I know that the vote itself was fair.
I've got a hunch that if Kerry had won, we wouldn't have heard anything from these groups.
Of course not, if Kerry had won we would now be bombarded by every born-again christian and neoconservative with an access to a TV transmitter, radiostation or an internet website about how the American people is about to be smitten by the wrath of the lord like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah for electing John "the antichrist" Kerry as president. Same whining, different theme. You can point at alot of things that have come out of the Democrats corner as being less than honorable. However, It's not as if the Republican partisans have behaved entirely honorably throughout the election and its aftermath either. The swiftboat veterans alone took mudslinging and character assassination in American politics to a new low.
Yes, they performed an AUDIT, not a recount. And the headline was spun to "legitamize" the election. Indeed, if you knocked out all the ballots that the machines ignored, Bush DID indeed win the election.
If you used the standards of counting a hanging chad where no other chads were displaced, and you counted obvious write ins, Gore was the winner.
But I am glad to see a Republican who mistrusts these machines. Primaries can be hacked just as well as genreal elections
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Noooo! A girl might read it and come here!! Won't someone think of the children!?
I like muppets.
If Kerry had won, would the voting machines still be buggy?
Just a thought.
Will the person with the funniest political signature I have seen all year please step forward and reply to this?
IIRC, it went something like:
"Now that the election is over it is time for Deomcrats to put aside partisan differences and support our commander in chief.... just like the Republicans did for Clinton"
Someone had to do it.
Folks its time to move on. George Bush did not win because of some evil Diebold exec or magical vote changing election booths. He won because over 61 million Americans pulled the lever for him.
Erm. How do you know that? I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, I'd just like to know what special information that you have access to that, say, the New York Times doesn't? If you've got some sort of audit logs from all of the voting machines, please, by all means, share with the GAO.
This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations.
I call bullshit. There two -- two -- known incidents of people being registered fraudulently, according to the Republican National Committee Vote Fraud group. (Listen to This American Life's November 1 episode, "Swing Set," Act 2, which is 21:10 into the episode.) Not only were both of these committed by petty criminals paid by the registrant to sign up voters (that is, it was not systemic, just a pair of dopes), but it doesn't matter, since there is, in fact, no way for Mary Poppins to show up and vote. The other case was a Colorado man who registered 35 times. He can only vote once, as you can imagine, so, again, it doesn't matter.
Your implication that there is any parity between two isolated incidents of greedy workers signing up people wrongly and the massive, jail-time-yielding Republican work to suppress the vote or, worse still, systemic Diebold/ES&S fraud is well beyond ludicrous; it is, simply, stupid, and I am embarrassed on your behalf, because it seems that you don't have the good sense to be embarrassed for yourself.
-Waldo Jaquith
My favourite excerpt is the following:
Of course, there is no proof that these gentleman have continued their illegal ways. They could have become completely reformed, law-abiding citizens by the time they started work on the Diebold voting systems.
By automated voting you mean, the candidate is selected for you, automatically, right? Hey, I call it like I see it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
What a cynical view you have of the world? Yes, the machines would still be buggy. The editorial on their bugginess, however, would have been in a neo-con leaning newspaper. The complaint would be the same. The metaphors would be the same. Only the writers and the publication place would be different.
http://thehighroad.org/attachment.php?attachmentid =18516
...it'll auto-start.
.AVI :).
It's a 158meg Bittorrent file (GEMSDEMO.avi.torrent) - if you have a client installed such as Azureus:
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php
Playing time is only 15 minutes. File size is that big because it's in 800x600
I "filmed" it with a screen record utility with audio commentary voice-over. Sound is a bit low, but crank the volume and it'll work. It uses the Intel Indeo codex which I understand is problematic on Macs...sorry. Windoze Media handles it and I would suspect there's some Linux player available?
If anybody here doesn't "get it" yet about how screwed up their "security" (ha!) is, this will do. Makes sense to most non-techies, too.
Ok so you put voting machines in a buggy to harvest the Amish vote...
FOOLS! Amish won't use a MACHINE to vote!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people. If this is in fact true, the various exit polls likely underrepresented many Republican candidates. Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system, and politicizing the issue by making claims against one particular candidate only stands in the way of getting our political leaders to support the election system we need.
If Kerry came up a winner, they Republicans would have done the SAME thing they'd done in 2000. They would have voided the results of an electronic voting machine (Volusia County 2000) and taken votes AWAY from Kerry.
This time, their vote theft was so overkill as to avoid that unfortunate event in 2000.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush fan (I voted for McCain in 2000 and while I wasn't a fan of Kerry either, I voted for him to vote against Bush this year) but I'm getting sick and tired of conspiracy theorists on Slashdot. If you check out my signature, you'll see an insightful speech made by Bill Clinton on why the Democrats lost this election but I will expend on it here. Also note that I used the term "left-wingers" to describe far left liberals, not the Democrats in general.
1. Democrats relied too much on young voters: Problem is that while the 18-24 year old age group makes the most noise, when it comes to voting, they consistently turn out to have the worst voting record. Hollywood celebrities and singers backing Kerry (in hopes of getting young citizens to vote) probably harmed him more by alienating the older voters. Bill Clinton didn't win the election by capturing young voters' votes, he won by capturing the older voters' votes. Now back to Bush vs. Kerry. Majority of voters 65 and older voted for Bush. Majority of voters 24 and younger voted for Kerry. And guess who won?
2. Democrats did not learn form the Austrian elections: The Australian Prime Minister Howard took a lot of heat for supporting Bush and his war in Iraq. The media expected a big loss for Howard on the last election, but Howard ended winning by a good margin. When the Austrian voters were polled, most of them responded that they voted for Howard because economy was a bigger issue than the Iraqi war.
3. Michael Moore and Bin Laden: Telling you that those two guys dislike Bush would be an understatement. However, their messages probably ended up helping Bush more than hurting him. I like Moore's movies because they are entertaining, but unlike the left-wingers, I find his movies highly biased. What Fahrenheit 9/11 did was it ended up causing Bush supporters to work harder to get Bush fans to vote. It's the same thing with the Bin Laden message before the election. Most Americans hate Bin Laden so why does he believe that Americans will listen to him? If he came out and told the Americans to drink milk on Mondays, most Americans will stop drinking milk on Mondays just to spite him.
4. Democrats relied too much on minority voters: Minorities tend to vote Democrat but Democrats didn't realize that minorities can be religious as well and the religious tend to vote Republican. The Republicans pushed the gay marriage and abortion issues to successfully split the minority votes. Why do you think that 44% of Hispanics voted for Bush? Kerry realized this and pushed the fact that he is a Catholic but that fall short of Bush and him pushing the religious agenda for the past four years.
5. Democrats discounting the gun owner voters: There is a good reason why the 2nd Amendment has not be abolished; many Americans own guns or believe that they should have the right to own a gun. (BTW, commander-in-chief for the National Guard is still the President, thus making them more like a federal troop than state militia). Kerry knew about this and pointed out numerous times that he's also a hunter and he'll never take the guns away. However, his voting records betray him and the Bush camp used it to win the votes of the gun owners.
6. Democrats pushed the draft issue: Another issue pushed by the left-wingers was the draft, when only draft bill presented so far was by a democrat and only one other democrat voted for it. Now with Bush reelected, where's the draft? Do the left-wingers honestly believe that most Republicans and Democrats will cast a career ending vote for a draft bill even if one makes it to the floor?
I stayed up on the election night to track the results and the exit polls in general seemed to give Bush an edge so I really wasn't surprised that he ended up winning and Kerry conceding rather early. I'm pretty sure that there were miscounted votes and other voting difficulties but I'm pretty sure those issues exis
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
For me anyway, it's not about who won or lost THIS election. It's about making sure the next election, and the ones after that, are fair. The best way to do that is to do a deep analysis of problems with THIS election, find the reasons for the problem, and figure out how to fix them without causing more problems.
Theoretically, an infinite percent of registered voters could've voted in an election:
If there was nobody registered until election day, even if 1 person registered, the ratio would be infinity.
What actually happened in Washington is that a lot of people registered on election day.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Potential problem: The vote isn't anonymous, which means that voters can possibly be intimidated into voting differently than they would otherwise.
"Look, Joey, we told you to vote for Mr. Smith. Now, our man in the voting office says you voted for Mr. Jones. Say goodbye to your kneecaps, Joey...."
Got mead?
I read that as relating to the voting needs of people who can't actually walk normally into a polling station.
This happened once when I was telling at a UK election. The voter was driven up in a car, but was unable to walk into the polling station. The presiding officer then asked the representatives of the candidates if we would object to him taking a ballot paper out to her car.
Of course we didn't object, he took a ballot paper out to her car, she marked her cross, he put it in the ballot box. Quite possibly illegal, for all we knew, but there was a clear agreement between the election official and representatives of all the political parties that this was the right thing to do.
How would she have voted at a polling station that used machines rather than pencils and pieces of paper?
Bush is a lying hyprocrite who doesn't mind sending our sons, daughters, fathers and mothers to their possible deaths, when he pulled every string in the book to avoid dangerous service.
But but but Bush is such a sweet Christian man! He saves our babies from abortion and gayness and taxation, so he can then send them into a war to save us from the terrorists! I just read all about it on the internets!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
That attitiude of you are either with me or against me gets REAL old. People need to know that their government is honest and that the people elected are honest. We have not had an honest president since carter. Hence the reason why this election was most likely stolen.
Hitler, USSR, etc. all got started by groups of people with the same attitude. We are far more fasicst than people are willing to acknowledge. Worse, we are killing our country with huge deficits and unjust wars.
I suspect that if the exit pollers gave the true results, you'd have had the networks reporting that "None of your fucking business" held a huge lead.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It is also the non-partisians who's vote is effected by misleading or biased exit poll reporting.
I know it's dumb, but there ARE people who feel compelled to vote for 'the winner'. Thier ego's are so week, or they so desire to be on the winning side, that they vote for whomever is ahead.
Also there are people who honestly can't decide who to vote for, but feel they must vote, so the assume if one candidate is significantly ahead then they must be the better candidate or so many wouldn't be voting for him.
Plus Both sides have reason to fear "oh we've lost then no point trying" or "Well we've won, no point wasting my time if we got it so in hand." Neigther side is willing to lose a vote through eigther circumstance. This is why exit polling was so downplayed this time around, after the debacle on the calling of florida last time.
Plus the demographics for not voting because "we/they already won" is not necesarily and even distribution for both parties in every precinct. In some party A) will lose or gain votes from thier side more than party B) and in others it's the other way around. This happens in the wrong precint in the wrong state and a lot of electoral college votes could shift if it's a close race.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Actually Kerry's records are not, last time I checked, open for examination. He's refused to sign the form allowing full public disclosure of his records.
Bush has signed this form, however some (NOT all) of his records are missing or incomplete.
I suspect BOTH are avoid unpleasant items in thier record.
Oh yeah, those 'lies' you are talking about I assume to be the wmd screwup? If so please note Kerry also supported invasion on those grounds, even to the point of advising people who did not believe him to NOT vote for him. He changed his tune later for political convience.
Kerry and Bush are both Yale graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society. If you honestly think thier not in this as co-conspiritors (so to speak) your exactly thier kinda sheep, keep up the good work. At best this(the presidential race) was just a friendly competition. At worst it was sham to deprive the people of a real choice in the election.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Who the hell cares if Bush or anyone else tried to get out of being thrown into the slaughter pit that was Vietnam. Bush dodged the draft by joining the reserves and doing everything in his power to get out. I don't see a damn thing wrong with that. I would have done the exact same thing. If I couldn't have gotten the family doctor to find an excuse for me to not get FORCED by the government to go fight in a war I didn't want to fight in, I would have merrily joined the reserves and then done everything to keep from being shipped out.
The political environment is obsessed with one-upping each other with stupid minor political victories. For a politician, a single slip of the tongue or off handed comment that any human would make could be the end of their career. This dumb shit about who tried to dodge what or who said what after they got back is fucking childish and completely irrelevant to real issues.
Kerry came back from his four month tour in Vietnam a left wing nut who wanted to freeze the nuclear arms build up leaving the Soviet Union with the advantage. Bush did just about everything to get out of being shot at, and in the ended succeeded.
Who the fuck cares? They were both CHILDREN. You are talking about two boys who were not old enough to fucking drink. Who gives a shit if Kerry jumped off the left end of the pool and Bush ran away? Hell, I know people who grew up in the 70's that were self declared communist who stuffed every drug into their body they could find, and who are now soccer moms and hold management positions in corporations. No one would dig up their childhood to find all the dumb shit they did before they were men.
Who Bush and Kerry were as CHILDREN is utterly irrelevant. There are a lot of good reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry. I could make a big list for both of them. No where on that list would I bother to mention what they did 40 years ago when they were.
The Swiss system doesn't provide propper 2-factor authentication, as both pieces of information are something the user knows. No biometric or hardware token authentication is invoved. Itercepting the card and knowing a little about the person will give an attacker access.
Even 3-factor authentication doesn't provide foolproof security, unless you mean secure against fools as attackers.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Maybe the US is becoming complacent to democracy. The Ukraine hasn't been free for that long and so its people know what the alternative is like, and will fight for it. To be honest, from the outside, it seems a lot of people in the US and many other democratic countries just don't care...
Historically, I bet there have been tons of screwed up things that happen in US elections with noticable rates of error (not this few thousand votes type crap, like 10% not counted) How many electronic voting machines were used in the swing states? Ohio was something like 98+% non-electronic.
There are solutions but they aren't technical, first step, do away with the secret ballot, register a voter to a vote, record that, maybe even make it a public record. How's that going to make the people that are convinced of fraud feel? They are already paranoid, that would kill them. Regardless of the technology, methods of recounting only provide fuel for the masses to get pissed off. Electronic machines with a paper trail, well what happens when a recount changes the outcome? You do another one. You'll never get the same results (counts) from multiple recounts, even a hand recount, humans screw up, ballots may become corrupted by the recounting process and being handled. At best it will confirm the outcome of the election multiple times with different counts of the votes. As has been mentioned many times, what if they change the software that counts them? In Boulder colorado they had that problem, the printer had different specs for the scan sheets than the scanners, the good thing was that they couldn't read the ballots rather than miscounting the results. So the actual votes themselves are questioned, then the reciept can be questioned, then the machine that recounts the reciept can be questioned, then if there is a recount everything can be questioned again.
The real solution is to have some ideas and generate support for your candidate without snap polls. Right now they are using all the same data to formulate their "opinions" that the elections have to be close, it's not that the country is divided, I think they want us to believe that, it's that they are feeding us a bunch of bullshit ideas and at the end of the day both parties are in the pockets of a few big corporations, we can't vote for a different party to cause change.. As long as the American political process is this way, all future elections will be close like this until the electorate becomes jaded enough to stop showing up again.
I think the issue of Bush being a draft-dodger comes to the forefront when he sends *other* people's children to war.
To force others to fight for your country when you were not willing to is hypocrisy, and it's relevant to know that about one's president.
Kerry got a record number of votes too. Frankly, Bush's support came primarily from the religious right and is therefore based on ignorant issues like opposition of gay marriage.
I saw many emails being circulated before the election, people urging the religious to gather up every religious person and drag them to the polls, in order to prevent the terrible evil that the democrats would bring.
Third-grade scare tactics. And if you look at the statistics of who votes, you can see that it's the ignorant (less schooling) and religious (christian only) who voted for Bush. Yay, the ignorant masses have grunted.
In other consipiracy smashing news (that doesn't get due press)... try this debunking of the myth that Bush's wins in democratic counties was statisticly impossible.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I think you miss the point entirely. Draft dodgers elected to their position have the right to send a volunteer army arm into war. The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, and this is a stark difference, is that the army fighting in Iraq is made up of men and woman who volunteered to fight in the US armed services. They made a conscious choice to their life to whatever endeavor that the US puts them too. In this case, the congress gave the president the power to go to war, and the president used it. The system worked like it was supposed to. You might not like the outcome. Hell, I don't like the outcome, but the simple fact of the matter is that Iraq is a far cry from being anything like Vietnam so long as it is fought with a volunteer army.
The draft is a disgusting practice. I can't think of anything more revolting then a nation demanding that its citizens surrender their lives against their will. I don't care what the cause is. If the cause is so good and so great, they will do it willingly. If Bush or Kerry dodged the draft or came back to speak against it, good for them. Decrying this disgusting practice or dodging it all together - especially when they are still CHILDREN - doesn't cause me to lose any sleep. If Bush wanted to reinstate the draft, you would certainly have flimsy, but at least credible argument, if you utterly ignoring that you are judging the actions of someone who was just barely a man, some 30 years after the fact.
Dredging up what those two did as children when the government was using violence against its own populace to compel them to go to war is stupid and childish political banter. There are a lot of reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry, but none of those reasons have anything to do with what either one of those children did in Vietnam
The United States is going down the flusher; economically, militarily, socially, politically. You name it, Bush is deliberately trashing his country, and he's only getting started. It takes work to do so much damage so quickly.
Looks like someone forgot to put on his tinfoil hat today. The recent bust was no where close to the Great Depression or even the crash of 1973 or 1987.
And where Bush would never, never cheat to win an election.
I never said Bush would never cheat. Do you have some sort of solid proof that Kerry and his team of lawyers don't have? So what if every single one of those voting machines left a paper trail? You'll simply argue that the Bush camp shredded the paper records and replaced with counterfit copies.
Stupid people are the reason the world is going to hell. Thank you for your contribution.
No,no, no, it is I who have to thank you for your contribution as you add ignorance to your reasoning formula. You'd better watch out because Bush's going to send the FBI after you for talking smack about him and he'll personally draft you after you are released. And you'd better stop using your computer because those evil Republicans can see you using your very own computer monitor.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I wasn't talking about Kerry vote, (he says didn't mean to actualy USE force, well he shouldn't have voted that way then IMHO) I'm talking about what he actually said. He actually said that we shouldn't vote for him if we didn't believe Saddam should be removed because of his wmds. He said we should take him out. then when Dean got so much traction with jis anti-war crusade he adopted it. Conviently forgetting that he was for removing Saddam and considered, or at least apeared to consider, Saddam a real threat with wmds before the invasion as well as voted for the authority to invade.
Also getting Saddam removed from power started as a Clinton administration policy. Not that Bush wasn't ready to go ahead with it.
There are a lot of things you can point out that don't exactly show Bush in the best light (to put in mildly), but somehow claim the Iraq invasion and the WMD scandle isn't one shared by Kerry is false, the best you can say is that some of the time Kerry left hedge words, or worded things to give himself semantic loopholes should he change his mind.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
"I know it's dumb, but there ARE people who feel compelled to vote for 'the winner'. Thier ego's are so week, or they so desire to be on the winning side, that they vote for whomever is ahead."
I'd give you an insightful, I actually have mod points too, but I just have to reply: This phenomenon is much, much more common than people believe, mostly because it doesn't work as obviously as it may seem from your argument. It's a little like women preferring rich men. Few would admit it, it's just that when Bush leads on the polls his speeches sound so much more reasonable, and his politics just become so much sexier!
This becomes especially apparent after one side has won. I haven't looked at any hard statistics for this, but judging by the media, Bush's popularity _soared_ after the election.
The more popular a position is, the easier it is to hold it, and vice versa. You don't have to have a weak ego to go with the winner.
This phenomenon has a more sinister side, which is called 'Contempt for weakness'.
I'd say this is a very important thing to remember in any election, but perhaps especially so in states where the population is sharply divided, or the political climate in general is very populistic.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Well, in a way the cycle is inevitable. People grow content, resign their rights, then end up with a dictatorship.
The Weimar Republic didn't even take too long to be replaced by the Third Reich. The French Revolution produced... emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The Romans killed Caesar to keep him from becoming king, and preserve their precious republic. Then named his successor, Octavian Augustus, _emperor_, high priest, tribune of the plebs, and half a dozen other titles. (And FFS, a noble as tribune of the plebs is freakin' ridiculous.) Ancient Greece, that was the birthplace of democracy (and gave us the word for it too), and... periodically some of the worst dictatorships in history. Etc.
Human civilization itself, was born of the water despotism of Messopotamia. I bet those people felt very secure at first knowing that those nice people are operating the water dams for them. Then it became a case of "pay up and obey, or we'll cut off your only water supply and laugh as you die and your crops wither."
Had some of the most fun ancient empires there too. The Assyrians for example. Now those were fun. That was an empire ruled by sheer terror. Fun stuff like not only having the most horrible executions, but then also burrying the bugger near a road and detailing the execution on the tombstone. Just so the others know what's waiting for them if they don't obey.
And so the wheel of history goes on and on. People become free, grow complacent, take democracy for granted, then they become slaves again. I suppose it can't be helped. The US is more of an exception, having lasted this long without a proper despotism. But, heck, they can't last for ever either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The 'backdoor draft' as those articles put it is no secret. When you sign up to join an armed service, you sign a contract. Included in that contract is an agreement that you can be called upon even to serve again even after your tour of duty. When you sign up for an armed service, you sign up for everything that comes with it. That includes being sent places you might not want to go, to do a mission you might not find worthy, at a time you find not to your liking. I would suggest people who find that thought that they might be pulled back into service unthinkable NOT sign up in the first place. If you sign a contract that with the US government that says you agree to be called upon at any time to serve, even after your service is over, don't be surprised when the government comes to collect. I personally could never live under such terms - hence I never signed such a contract.
Next, the president does have the power to instate the draft WITH the approval of congress. I absolutely would laud Bush a hypocrite if he ever did such a thing. The point is that he hasn't ever even proposed reinstating a draft. If anything, I think Bush clearly understands the implications of the draft, as do most Americans who grew up in that time. Bush decided to dodge it. I don't see how doing everything in your power to not get drafted is proof that one doesn't understand the implications of it. On the contrary, I think it shows a clear understanding of the implications - getting sent to fight war you don't believe in and potentially being shot in killed without ever once having agreed to such terms. If your argument is that only people who have been drafted understand the implications of the draft, and therefore are the only people who should be allowed to serve as president, then I shouldn't need to point out that none of the presidential contenders on any side had ever been drafted, Kerry included. If your point is that you need to service in the military in order to be able to command, then again I should point out that most presidents and most politicians have not done this, including ex-president Clinton and the vast majority of congressmen and woman.
Finally, I didn't say that young people should not be held to their decisions. I said that there decisions at the age of 18 (17 for Kerry) shouldn't be considered the end all and be all of their existence. Most people change their opinions radically over those years. Kerry was practically a communist by the time he got back from Vietnam, but I sure as shit wouldn't hold him to everything he said. He was a young left wing radical, like many young people are. If their opinions change after 30+ years, good. Dredging up Bush's attempts at the age of 18 to get out of being sent over to fight a war he didn't want to fight in against his will, is like dredging up the ultra-leftists crap that Kerry said at the same age and calling him a hypocrite now for being a moderate democrat. It is stupid and an example of dumb political game where each guy tries to one up the other on some dumb and minor point, instead of focusing on a real issue.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Bush or Kerry that actually has relevance and meaning. The dumb shit they did when they were still just teenagers doesn't need to be dragged into it - 30 years after the fact. For fucks sake, I hope I never run for presidency. Someone might find out that I played D&D a few times in the sixth grade, which as everyone knows is a clear sign of Satanism.
That's like saying that voting to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War is the same thing as voting to nuke Russia. If you build nukes, it's obvious that you're putting it on the table as an option, but it doesn't logically follow that you automatically support excercising the option to bomb the Soviets back to the stone age. The point of these weapons was the threat they posed; likewise Kerry's position was always that he supported force as an option which would improve the leverage of the United States... which would be available when all other options were exhausted. But from the beginning of the situation, it's clear that war was Bush's first choice.
Yeah, Kerry was too much of a politician- trying to please all Americans simultaneously- but in my mind that would have beat the hell out of W. trying to please just the warmongering neocons, bigoted Bible-thumpers, and greedy Halliburton execs.