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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.
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
Will wonders never cease?
Something I agree with Kerry & Clinton on?
I don't read AC A human right
Why should the manual count paper of paper ballots be the official recount. Why would there be a recount of a machine tabulated vote? Does someone think the machine miscounted? And why why why do people keep thinking that a hand count done by humans would be more accurate than a machine count?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
for the love of god, please please please let this happen. just this once let a good bill pass.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The article indicates that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are the primary proponents of this bill - though I'm sure Kerry also supports it.
The coolest voice ever.
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.
Two TWO YEAR OLD BILLS that have already been introduced in the House and Senate would do JUST THIS, namely, require permanent, voter verified receipts and open source all code on e-voting machines. See my post here.
Also, Diebold already has the capability to add paper receipts, WHICH WERE NOT REQUIRED UNDER HAVA, to all of its e-voting deployments. They're just a contractor. They'll build and deploy whatever local governments will buy. But if you're one of those people who thinks that Diebold, a multi-thousand person corporation that prides itself on reliable customer interface systems, is literally conspiring to rig US elections on the basis of offhanded campaign quotes in the context of GOP fundraising by Diebold's CEO, however inappropriate they were, then I suppose none of what I just said will matter to you.
"Is that a zero or a one, I think they meant to vote THIS way"
"Paper records of electronic voting:" Good, as long as voters can't prove to somebody else who they voted for. That would facilitate vote buying.
"Election-day registration": Need to read the bill. If volounteer (partisan) groups get to haphazardly register people at the polls, that's a bad thing. Registrations should be in order some weeks before the elections.
"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
"the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public." Definately good. The many-eyeballs approach to security validation is perfect for this case, since it's an application with such a huge number of interested parties.
Now, how about non-citizens voting and proof of identification? Anything on that?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:
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...
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I read you post and checked the status of the previous bills. They both died in committee two years ago.
It looks like someone did let it die, and Clinton and Boxer are now trying resurrect the protections in the bills.
I guess that renders almost your entire post as both FUD and moot.
As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way. All this paper handling adds a lot of mechanical complexity to the machine, making breakdowns more likely.
Here's the text of the bill calling for programmers to have background checks (p. 10):
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).
Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.
And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.
Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence of communist activity and success in the democratic process.
Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
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.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.)