Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill

An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.

Comments

Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[smug_lisp_weenie]

Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?

Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.
Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.
Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.

The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.

...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway ;)

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[oirtemed]

Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote. That would eliminate corporate donations, and if some CEO wanted to put up their own money, it would be more visible. While this doesn't address lobbying in particular, it is a start.

The best solution would be more Congressional accountability, but that is not so easy to achieve.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Bios_Hakr]

And cap the maximum donation at $1000. Don't allow Bill Gates to be any more powerful than a mid-west farmer. Each of them can drop their $1k and offer their vote, but nothing more.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!

You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican thing; this is a Big Business vs Individual thing.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are very pro big business, because that's where they get their money. If they weren't both chasing after corporate funding, maybe they would do a better job of representing their constituents.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[anthony_dipierro]

A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.

What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.

Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[mankey wanker]

Don't fall into the rhetorical trap people (although some of you have made very excellent points dancing around the issue slightly).

Corporations are not only not individuals, they are also not even groups! Corporations are legally created entities to themselves that are given certain fictional legal rights to operate AS IF they were a person. Yes, coincidently, most corporations are run by groups of people - none of whom are the corporation itself. In fact, that's the point of it for most people: limited liability through a fictitious front called a corporation.

You see, individuals have rights to free speech. Individuals even have the right to lie - not to perjury, but common lying is perfectly reasonable and protected behavior.

Corporations by contrast can be regulated even to the point of destruction because they are legal fictions in the first place. They have no such right to free speech. They have no right to lie. They don't even have a right to exist unless we as a people allow them to exist.

Let's get that all down before we start talking nonsense.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Dun Malg]

I agree, the construct 'group' doesn't exist in the Constitution as far as I know. But then again, the Supreme Court has been able to find non-existing language in the Constitution before, so it may very well be introduced by judicial fiat.

When it comes to constitutional rights, language doesn't need to exist in order for a right to be protected. Bill of Rights, 9th Amd basically says "Just because we didn't choose to write it down here does not mean the right does not exist". Strict Constructionists seem to always forget the 1st and 9th Amendments, but then the Loose Interpretationists always ignore the 2nd and the 10th....

voting reform

[liquid stereo]

This won't happen. For one, it makes too much sense. But, the biggest reason why it won't happen is because the government has been bought and the owners like what they have.

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

This is an area where reasonable people of all political persuasions ought to be able to come to an agreement. Based on your comment, I'm guessing that you're a conservative and I'd probably disagree with at least three-quarters of your beliefs -- but the one thing we can almost certainly agree on is that every eligible voter who wants to vote should be able to do so in a way that guarantees that vote is counted. We may argue all day about policy, but the mechanisms by which that policy is created and enacted must be trustworthy if that policy is to be anything more than the whim of a few autocrats.

So, what Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and, hell, I don't know, Prohibitionists and Natural Law believers all ought to ask themselves is: if anyone, of any party or stripe, opposes this -- what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?

Re:please

[Fjornir]

Pick up the god-damned phone and call your congressman, and both of the senators from your state. Fax them and email them as well. Then write and sign paper letters. Mail them.

Re:They just can't let it die, can they?

[Waffle Iron]

The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.

That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:

Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible.

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[plover]

Actually, paper receipts are the heart of integrity. They provide the doublechecks to the electronic record, and when the typical contested election degenerates into "we counted x", "no, we counted y", the paper ballots can be trotted out and physically counted by everyone. And these paper records (probably printed on thermal tape) will be sealed inside the machine. Nobody should be able to tamper with them, and there shouldn't be big discussions about hanging chads or pregnant punches.

Strangely enough, Open Source voting code is far less important to me than the paper ballots themselves. Code correctness is only a small piece of security. First, I personally have no way of seeing into these voting machines to validate that they're running the code they say they're running. Sure, you can show me a printout of "OSVote2008.cpp", but what does that prove? It proves exactly that you have a piece of paper with code on it. It does NOT prove that's the code running inside the machine.

Or what if it is? What if I have totally trusted, verifiable code running in the typical Windows machine? What's to prevent a virus or other piece of malware inside from hijacking that code and switching enough votes from one candidate to the other to help throw the election?

Code isn't the answer. Physical tokens (in this case paper records) backed by judges performing spot checks, is ultimately the only trustable way to count an election.

the problems with last years election

[b17bmbr]

the only real problem with last years election is that for most of /.ers, the wrong guy won. the us civil rights commission did two exhaustive studies of florida. guess what? nothing. no fraud, no intimidation, no disenfranchisement. sorry go home. the press did a thorough recount of the ballots. every scenario. guess what. bush still wins. if you want the links, i'll find them, but we're finding voter reg. fraud in ohio, but oops, they'er democratic. and washington state. please. dead people voting, "discovered" ballots, 500 people registered at the same address. recounts until the democrat wins.

i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land. the 1960 election was won by fraud. nixon didn't run around the country for years claiming he was robbed, etc. if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers. oh, and lastly, if you're hanging out at kos, oh nevermind...

Re:the problems with last years election

[MillionthMonkey]

a system which has served us for 200 years

What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.

Re:Good and bad

[cryptoluddite]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".

So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.

The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.

Re:This isn't "open source"

[mrchaotica]

Increased risk of a machine breakdown is worth it compared to increased risk of widespread vote tampering via a single SQL command!

Of course, the background check part is a bit dumb -- they should have people audit the code, and run background checks on them. And I hope they mean they just can't tranfer the final copy of the code over the internet; with GPG the internet should be secure (and if it's not, they could just ask the NSA for some help).

Start with Education

[bill_mcgonigle]

The only reason corporations have power is that they have lots of money. The only reason lots of money is important is that a trained monkey with lots of money will win over Abe Lincoln with a stack of fliers in the back of a Honda Insight.

Now, if you had a well-informed populous with sharp critical-thinking skills this wouldn't be the case. But that's not what we have and it isn't.

So, the only way to get corporations out of politics is to teach children how to reason. Good luck.

Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed

[amRadioHed]

We need to reduce the cost of political ads on *our* public airwaves.

How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.

If we could cut the official campaigning down to less then 6 months, but during that time focus on debates and real discussion of issues we would have both better informed voters and cut the cost of the election down by huge amounts.

Burden of proof

[MillionthMonkey]

Either the election was stolen or it wasn't. Seems that if you cannot prove that it was stolen, it must not have been stolen.

Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:

• Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
• Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.

But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.

They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.

It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.

(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)