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Invading Privacy for School Credit
veryloco writes "Students in Prof. Avi Rubin's Security and Privacy course at the Johns Hopkins University completed a project where they gathered as much public data on residents of Baltimore City as possible. One interesting fact was that 50 deceased persons voted in the last election. Read on to find out what other interesting tidbits were discovered."
You know what that means... Zombies!!!
50 deceased persons voted in the last election
Ah, but did they die right around election time. Could they have sent in an absentee ballot before they died? Or did they die on election day after they voted? Not having all the info can lead to misleading ideas in our overactive imaginations.
Or, it could be like the earlier post... zombies or ghosts.
Evolution or ID?
1500 dead people were registered to vote. But did they join those records on SSN or some other unique identifier? There might be some cases of people with the same name, right?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
The "privacy battle" was over long ago. This article just shows how slow senators can be in figuring stuff out. Sadly no legislation is ever going to put the horse back in the barn. Granted, things like public offices handing over entire databases burned to CD MIGHT (depending on the data) be preventable. However as anyone who comes to slashdot should know, social engineering works great.
So what is the solution? Just prepare for your identity theft now, keep good records and generally don't be a jerk to those you post about and email. Because its all out there.
Rubin has been one of the people screaming the past few years about how easy the elections would be to hack. Now it seems that he's widened his scope, showing how much of a joke is any attempt at precise counting of so many people.
We need election laws that guarantee the margin of victory is larger than the sampling error. In fact, we need a law that requires the office get at least a simple majority (50%) of the eligible voters, or it goes unfilled. With so few eligible voters actually voting, that would force districts to hold runoffs, and parties to get out the vote. Or just get outnumbered by the representatives from districts which do turn out. Put a little competition into our rotten voting system, and cut out the deadwood.
--
make install -not war
once again proves that geek security is compromized by cleavage or the promise that someone likes you.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
No, no... the voting dead are a minority. Apathy about the democratic process is a huge problem in the dead community; most of them can't be bothered to get up and go to the polls.
Hardly a Chicago problem. The basic argument is that most of the "questionable" voters on most states voter roles tend to be the poor, who are more likely than the average population to be minorities (no value judgement here--just statistics)
See, someone who owns a home, rarely moves or changes address, and has a steady job is fairly easy to verify as "yep, we know who this person is, and they're a legit voter."
Someone who moves frequently, doesn't necessarilly have a lease in their own name, works a series of small jobs, doesn't have or doesn't know their social security number, is harder to verify. Some of these "registered voters" are probably illegal immigrants. But some are citizens--many homeless or urban poor. It's extremely difficult to seperate the wheat from the chaff here.
So, the net is we get a pool of "hard to verify" voters. Some legit, some not.
The reason this is a political football is because (again) these tend to be minorities, and minorities in urban areas tend (again, just statistics here) to vote Democratic. So, counting all these "who knows?" voters gives a slight edge to Democrats.
Which is why Republicans shout "Fraud! Throw the votes out!" and Democrats shout "Disenfranchisement! You can't turn away a single legitimate voter! And attempting to fix the system in any way is a blow to democracy!"
I'm sure if the voting record was pro-Republican from this demographic, the positions would be reversed.
Anyways, Chicago's an overwhelmingly Democratic (in the political party sense) town. So don't bet on seeing this any time soon.
This was the major issue with party "challengers" stationed at key poling places in swing states in the last election, and the concept of "provisional ballots" for voters that you heard so much about last November (if you happen to follow US news...)