Slashdot Mirror
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.
I also addressed both of those in my post. Apparently no one's read it beyond the first paragraph:
[1] In fairness, this bill does have a couple of minor differences: it proposes that election day be a federal holiday, and makes doing things that liberals would like to make people believe are routine and widespread, like intimidating minorities and passing out fliers with incorrect voting dates, a felony. It also prohibits executives at voting vendors from being politically active, likely to pander to the people who think Diebold's CEO stole the election for Bush, completely ignoring the impossibility of actually executing on such an allegation statewide. In short, a shameless pandering publicity stunt, which ignores the completely legitimate bills already proposed two years ago above by respected members of Congress that would have addressed the two very topics discussed by Kos and noted in the article summary (namely receipts and open source).
whoops, I guess the first one did go through... that's OK, the second one was better... freakin dial-up...
They will never stop until somebody makes the
Whether they are epidemic or not, small scale examples of election fraud did happen all over the country. (too many examples to enumerate here) Are you objecting to the principle of punishing people who commit this sort of fraud?
No, I'm objecting to introducing a bill that almost duplicates the major features of other bills introduced before even the 2004 election.
I'm objecting to the sponsors of these bills not strongly supporting the previous bills. Read them. They're very short, and to the point, and didn't have anything objectionable in them. They simple required voter verified permanent paper receipts, and open source software on all e-voting equipment, period. Why did they not support them?
I'm objecting to liberal news outlets, and indeed most of the posts here, ignoring the fact that these previous bills even existing, and not mentioning them at all.
I'm objecting to the article summary ONLY mentioning receipts and open source, the two EXACT things the previous bills would have done. Hmm, perhaps if more energy had been put into their support by the people who are doing the pandering now, or by the oh-so-cool DailyKos?
I'm objecting not to punishing people who commit election fraud - because all of these offenses are already egregious and are clearly punishable. Whether or not they're felonies is beside the point! Doesn't the slashdot crowd disagree with the creation of new laws, and think that we should simply enforce laws we already have instead of making more?
"when you talk about "communists", you're really referring to stalinists."
No, I was referring to people who ran under the banner of the "communist party" of whatever country they're in. Kim Jong Il is one (but he'd be absolutely nothing if he didn't have nukes, North Korea is not even on the radar screen of world powers), Fidel is another (and he's pretty much emasculated at this point).
They will never stop until somebody makes the