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EFF Sues NC Election Board
Kludge writes "The EFF is suing the NC elections board. The board certified several voting machine manufacturers although none of the manufacturers would comply with the state law (passed unanimously) that the machine code be kept in escrow."
now can we look at the ones in ohio and flordia?
Will this stop my dead cat from voting 43 times in the election again?... I know it has rights but it keeps voting republican...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The board certified several voting machine manufacturers even though none of the manufacturers would comply with the state law (passed unanimously) that the machine code be kept in escrow. Not because.
"The board certified several voting machine manufacturers even though none of the manufacturers would comply with the state law (passed unanimously) that the machine code be kept in escrow."
The EFF is worried about e-voting based on the likely possibility of vote manipulations. Those in power of the election boards have an incredible amount of power in abusing the democratic process.
I'm no fan of democracy as all I see in democracy is the ability to manipulate the vote to further the interests of the elite. Democracy is merely a shroud fooling the voting citizens into thinking they don't live in an authoritarian and favoritist regime.
Votes are manipulated in more ways than just electronically:
1. The FEC sets federal campaign finance guidelines. Any restriction in how you spend your money is unconstitutionally limiting your freedom of expression. The primary goal of campaign finance reform is to give the authoritarian political parties great power over non-authoritarian parties. What democracy needs is Real Campaign Finance Reform (group is gone) that gives everyone back their ability to express their beliefs politically. Even if you want to give money to a third party, they can't do much with it and you can't give as much as you want.
2. The FEC gives voters the idea that money corrupts government. Government corrupts due to unlimited power to control, not because of voter donations. If our federal government ran beneath their constitutional boundaries, no amount of bribery or donations would make one difference. Russian could give every Congressman a billion dollars a piece, but the Constitutional would not allow any Congressman to give Russia (or any group or individual) preferential treatment.
3. The school system is unbalanced in teach the Constitution, leaving the majority of the population unsure of the real power of the Constitution -- leaving people free to use the rights they are born with, and preventing any government from walking over those rights.
4. Voters are given completely biased ballots. Proper ballots should force the voter to know who they are voting for and write in the candidate. Offering ballots showing the current office holder or party affiliation provides more power to the two authoritarian parties.
5. Voters are only allowed to see commercials from major parties as they are offered (illegal) campaign matching funds in addition to virtually unlimited campaign budgets. Third parties can not raise the necessary funds as they are limited by finance reform guidelnies.
6. Voters never get to see every candidate in the debates as the debate committees are run by authoritarian parties unwilling to give up their powers.
7. Voters are confused by the colluding media that wants them to vote in order to give the authoritarian candidates the mandates needed to expand the power of government. Voters rarely hear that voting is wrong and that the process setting up the vote is a collusion between the authoritarian parties.
I hope that the EFF can see how short they come when they prosecute only the voting machines, rather than the voting system.
Do what I do. Don't vote for any candidate -- write yourself in for every position.
From the article, it seems like the elections commission certified all voting machine manufacturers despite the fact that none of them were in compliance with the law. How was the elections commission allowed to do this? Wouldn't the logical solution have been to certify none of the voting machine manufacturers until they came into compliance with the law?
Am I missing something here (e.g. time limit)?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
"DOES NOT COMPUTE" The Slashdot summary claims the board certified the manufacturers because they wouldn't put their code in escrow. It's more likely the EFF is suing the board for certifying the manufacturers despite their refusal to place their code in escrow. First dupes, then ads, now stories that don't even make sense.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Robert Sheckley died yesterday.
I don't know if any of you, guys, care. I tried submitting the story but it's rejected.
For me personally this is more important than EFF suing anyone.
There were no big new releases, no TV announcements. But it is not important for those of us who loved his work.
I read my first short story by Sheckley 22 years ago - Ghost V. I was in a hospital in Ukraine and read it in Russian (found it in a Russian magazine: Young Technologist, aimed at people like the ones you will find on this site.) Since than I had to go and find every single book he has ever written and read it.
I just want to say: Thank You, Robert. Rest in peace. I hope one day someone finds the Laxian Key.
You can't handle the truth.
Why doesn't some company start up and open e-voting machine business?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Remember when NC experienced one of the most serious malfunctions of e-voting systems in the 2004 presidential election. Over 4,500 ballots were lost in a voting system provided by e-voting vendor UniLect Corp. Vendors are trying to protect their products.
Right now, the Libertarian Party is also suing the NC State Election Board because the Election Board is only allowing residents to register as "Democrat", "Republican", or "Independent". More importantly, they're also suing because NC has taken all alternative parties off of all ballots. I can't even vote for a Libertarian or Green or Reform Party candidate in the state of NC. The gizmo they use to count the ballots is just red herring. That debate is fabricated to keep people's wheels spinning about relatively unimportant things, while the big problems are being ignored. The real problem lies in the fact that choice has been removed from the process. Now, citizens get to vote for Bad or Worse, with both sides (Bad and Worse) colluding to keep the status quo.
I don't respond to AC's.
Read the guys explanation as to why he was certifying them, it was because none of them were prepared to meet the escrow requirement that he certified them.
If one of them had broken ranks and put their code in Escrow, he would have certified just that one.
My gast was totally flabbered by the explanation, and you don't like to say such things, but I recall Diebold and the American association for the blind, suddenly demanding electronic voting, while at the same time getting a new $17 million equipment centre as if by magic....
This is an interesting change of pace. Not too long ago, big interests would spend a lot of money buying voters and pressuring them to vote their way.
Now they just cut out the middleman! Why mess with voters when you can just mess with a couple of voting machines?
Genius!
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
There are no problems with electronic voting machince, except maybe for this minor glitch.
Doesn't the fact that we are asking government officials to verify the security of computer code strike anyone as a little odd, or am I alone on this one? Do they have any training in debugging, or even reading code?
If you were to go up to a Political Science major and go, "Here, take a look at this code I wrote, and let me know if it's secure," I am fairly confident that they would have no idea what to do.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have the code reviewed, but if the officials on the board are the actual reviewers and have no prior experience, how can we expect them to do a good job?
The EFF has a lousy litigation track record. This could set back verified voting.
Eff off!
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
North Carolina law requires the Board of Elections to review all voting system code "prior to certification." Ignoring this requirement, the Board of Elections on Dec. 1 certified voting systems offered by Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software (ESS) without having first obtained the system code.
This strikes me as a golden opportunity to start a company. None of these companies really want to deliver the goods that states are asking for. In fact, this would make a perfect opportunity for Novell/Redhat/Mandrake/etc. to create an open voting system and then push all the states to certify only open systems with print methods.
The costs of developing the voting software is far less than the costs of the underlieing OS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As a North Carolinian I was a little shocked to see the EFF was suing the state elections board. Then I read why. Why does the elections board think they can just ignore the law? I am all for having electronic voting and I imagine that it will help out the process considerably but we certainly shouldn't add more risk for fraud and error. Voting accuracy should be priority #1.
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
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It was too early. When slashdot's reputation is at stake editors gotta be careful.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
6. Voters never get to see every candidate in the debates as the debate committees are run by authoritarian parties unwilling to give up their powers.
I'm amazed out how many people don't realize that, in the last presidential election, two minority candidates who were on the ballot were arrested because they were trying to participate in the "non-partisan" debates (they'd gotten as far as getting a court order before they were stopped).
--MarkusQ
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One of the restriction NC puts down is that they need a list of developers of **all** of the code on the machine - that would include the Linux kernel. Can you list beyond a shadow of a doubt the name of every developer that has contributed in **any** capacity to the kernel or any related project? dd? g++? X?
Part of the problem is that the rules are way too overbearing. It would actually be a lot easier to do the job in WindowsCE (the source is available... Microsoft keeps a paper trail of developers)
-everphilski-
That's what Web 2.0 is all about!
It was too early. When slashdot's reputation is at stake editors gotta be careful.
Oh, right; Slashdot wouldn't want to accidentally become known for posting timely, accurate stories, with insightful editing, and for posting such stories once and only once. Better to be known as the place where old shit is posted as news, and then posted again and again and again, and preferably with as many spelling and grammatical errors as possible.
What was I thinking???
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There are reasons arn't run as you state above you know, free banking was eliminated cause it was a threat to the economy. Believe it or not, but banks have poor long term vision, leading to bad loans and eventual collapse, not saying the goverment is much better, but it does have a track record for atleast slightly longer term vision then banks.
As for the arguments against money, well it is nonsense, modern money is probably one of the best trading items ever devised, things like gold are pretty shitty cause they are as arbitrary while being expensive to get at as well, plus that this wastes a resource usable for other purposes muchb etter, like in chip manufacturing.
Education can be done by private, but only to a point, it isn't profitable to teach the poor, so it never happens. Leading to poor stay poor and rich stay rich, in the end you waste the labor resources of a vast portion of your population, which requires you thuswise to fund basic schooling for everyone to atleast get more of the potential ability out of everyone. Now you can argue up and down over mistakes and stupidities in that, but it remains a fact that it is thus a logical thing to do.
And trade well, free trade only works when you assume everyone has perfect knowledge, this is not true though in reality and the moment you add unreliable information into your free trade formulas things go apeshit bad. As you can also see in reallife, unregulated buisnesses eventually ruin your economy as they form monopolies do highly bad things to lower costs etc etc. In the end buisnesses move to benefitting themselves the most at the detriment of everyone else. To stop ths you must thus regulate them or devolve into a latin american like country.
This all does bring up one extra point though, which is that the goverment really isn't an all that good protecting institution, not to say that it is all bad, but it could be a hell lot better then it is. So I figure that ways to improve the goverment or finding ways to offload these protection issues to other organisations with long term vision that are more effective, might lead to great improvements to society.
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The Board of Elections certified Diebold despite its admitted inability to comply with the law.
But I thought people were supposed to obey the rule of law?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I wonder what it would cost to put together an open-source consortium to design the thing from the ground up. These things aren't exactly rocket science, and I bet that most of it could be done with off-the-shelf components. As for the software - I don't see that as a terrifically complicated piece, and I'm willing to bet that a few good coders could put the likes of Diebold to shame.
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The election commission does whatever it wants. Their only interest is to make sure only the big two parties stand a chance at any election. My state is the hardest state to get a party onto the ballot, and because of this there's only two choices on any state or federal level ballot in NC.
Consider all the lobbyists, state representatives, and state senators you have to buy.
paintball
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Two step process. Machine one, inside the curtain, has a touchscreen. You push where you want to vote. It prints out a nice ballot, with your vote clearly marked. If you don't like what it did, you crumple it up and do it again. That machine is dead simple: display, read, print. If you didn't use a touchscreen, but had buttons, it would be trivially easy to program. The touchscreen is better for ease-of-use and will impress PHB's with its full-color moving graphics of waving flags and fireworks.
Second machine is the counting machine. You take your just-printed ballot, fold it in half, walk to the counting machine, unfold it, and feed it in. The machine scans it and saves the paper ballot, while tabulating your vote. Every now and then it SSH's into some central server and deposits its results.
Everyone has a ballot that is printed, clearly. It is retained after the vote for recounts. There is no way the display machine can be made to falsify the ballot, since it's printed for your approval. The display machine has no I/O other than a touchscreen and printer, and a hardwired interface to load in the options list, which is not connected during voting. If it were me, I'd require that the scanning machine has no I/O other than the scanner and the network card, so it can't be jiggered: all it does is scan, and every 100 or 15 minutes, whichever comes first, it sends in its results. At that point, the only way to rig the vote would be at the central server -- which is not to say that that couldn't happen, but then again, that's no different than the system as it currently stands.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way." "Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution." "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!" http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/arti cle_7779.shtml
There's a reason why those were attached to other 'democracies'. And they should go further.
You know, living on the east coast, I cheered when Davis was recalled from California. Not because I give a rat's ass about California, or because the Predator was a kick ass movie. But because it was a damn sight nearer to actual democracy than this country has seen in years.
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in NC. We can register "Republican" "Democrat" or "Unaffiliated." "Unaffiliated" is not "Independent," which is its own political party. A voter who is registered "unaffiliated" selects his or her primary ballot - R, D, or U. All the non-R and non-D candidates are on the U primary ballot.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
your mother
For me personally this is more important than EFF suing anyone.
... [of his when] I was in a hospital in Ukraine
Oh yeah, an author's death is so much more important than democracy (rolls eyes).
I read my first short story
Ok, perhaps you aren't an American, so the story doesn't interest you as much, but let's say there was a story about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and someone posted, "Yeah, whatever, I really don't care, but why isn't there a story about this little-known basketball player who died of old age? He really influenced my life." Do you think that would be appropriate?
Hey, I'm glad you liked the guy's work, and it's probably sad he died (at 77, not really tragic), but this story really isn't the place to bring it up.
Even though it says most stories should be submitted to index, I hardly ever do. I suggest you do the same.
Everyone concerned about the future of our electoral system, Diebold, and electronic voting machines in general NEEDS to watch this movie (available for download from the site): Votergate.tv
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This claim is brought up and bandied about right after every election. Yet no proof has ever materialized. Either back up your claims with some evidence, or stop spreading lies.
As a canuck who has never voted in the USA, I had the same question as you. This question is addressed in the MIT Voting Technology Project's report from circa 2001 with a picture of Jean Cretien putting a ballot in a box. The thing is that elections in the USA are *WAY* more complicated than they are at home. You vote not just from your MP and MPP, but for the sheriff, judges, senators, congressmen, etc, etc. Some counties can have over 100 races on the ballot.
Also, other regulations make the process more complicated. Consider LA County, which is one of the largest in the USA. They are required to randomize the order of the candidates in each race across the polling stations, plus they put out the ballot in seven languages. Not only are the ballots huge and complicated because of the number of races being contested, but they have dozens of different ballot configurations.
Keep in mind that the Chairman of Diebold stated prior to the 2004 election that "we are going to win this one for George Bush"... Diebold is headquartered in Ohio... Go figure...
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
As a Christian and a scientist I am of the opinion that "Intelligent Design" is bad science and bad theology.
As for the "poser intellectualts"...there are idiots and assholes at every point of the compass and everywhere on the spectrum from left to right.
I think what most people are frustrated with is the complete absence of dialog and debate. I personally think that the likes of Karl Rove and his Democratic counterparts have done this. It seems nobody has the time for a real debate any more. We see our President in front of a banner with the "on message" catch phrase of the week. We hear some hand wringing wimp from the democratic side whining...
So, getting back to the topic of the article, TRANSPARENCY is the key. I agree the President should ability to receive candid input from whoever he wants it from....but if Enron execs ghost wrote our energy policy (as is likely the case) the voting public deserves to know and make an informed decision. The news media is so busy reporting on each other that they can't be counted on for that....but there is still hope unless our voting machines can't be relied upon as unbiased (not to claim they were ever perfect), it is that much easier for the cynical and power hungry to ignore the frustrated voter...and in turn it is easier for the frustrated voter to tune out.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
FYI, I'm not the grandparent. But, here's a little info.
Richard J. Daley
You'll notice it's actually a bipartisan effort, dispite the popular myth of it being a strictly Democrat problem. Regardless, the issue the grandparent is posting about is actually a dead horse, as Daley is no longer in power. His son, Richard M. Daley, however, is. There are rumors of corruption in this Daley's administration as well. Although, I haven't heard anything about voter fraud per se. If I remember correctly, Patrick Fitzgerald has been going after elements of the Daley regieme. This is probably why the Republicans picked him to investigate the Whitehouse treason case.
If you want current Democrat vote fraud cases, you can look up the Saint Louis cases and the problems in a few counties in West Virginia. Small potatoes compaired to the apparent national and state wide Republican machines, but they exist, regardless.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I get sick days and don't have to pay the substitute. I get one personal leave day on which I don't pay the sub. I even get a free sub if my son is sick and I have to stay home with him.
However, in the district where I teach, homes cost so much that you can teach 8 years before you can even get close to buying a home. All of the teachers I know who are sole breadwinners are either a) a principal, b)administrative personnel on a full-year contract, or c) living in subsidized housing (either subsidized by their parents or by the government).
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
When the elections board voted on certifications, they used Diebold machines to tabulate...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
"Also, it's moron, not maroon"
1 9970731
i on_forum/ for the use of still another variation of moron, specifically "moran."
You've got to get a better dictionary, if that usage of maroon isn't in the one you have.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=
Also, see http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actuarial_discuss
This is what you get with a toolbag like Jim Black running our state, spending 65k for a teapot museum in western carolina, gotta love democrats.
Shouldn't the State's Attorney General be doing something? Like filing suit on the behalf of the state. I mean it is 'his' job.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I attended 4 elementary schools, one high school, a small junior college, a large community college, a large university, and a small university.
The elementary schools were in 3 different states, and were different sizes.
The high school was very small (350 kids, 6 grades) and the same teachers taught both "regular" and "honors" classes.
The colleges were in 4 very different communities, in two states.
I have also taught at 3 different colleges (a tech/trade school, a small university, and a community college).
I know it's a small sample, but in my experience a larger percentage of teachers excel in their professions than in any of the other jobs that I've had (construction, actuarial, IT, farm, etc.).
Still, I generally agree that education isn't what it should be.
And I'm convinced that the nearly the entire fault lies with the parents of elementary and secondary students.
I think:
If parents involved themselves with their children's education more (I mean personally worked with their own children more) almost all the problems would go away. Teachers would get better. They would be able to concentrate more on teaching and less on babysitting. There would be more time for individual attention. Schools would be safer. College (and high school) students would arrive at college (and high school) knowing how to learn, and liking it. Funding would be adequate for schools and spent where it's needed, instead of where it makes politicians look good.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.