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OSS Election Systems Desired, but Not Ready
An anonymous reader writes "Even though many American voters are ready for open source systems at the polls, Newsforge (a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting story about why open source may not be ready for the polls. From the article: 'The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin [an e-voting expert] noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). "I don't agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source," Rubin said. OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"
Here in Australia we have a system that works, and has been used already.
http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evoting
Common sense is not so common
EVACS started open source under the GPL - but closed the source at a later point.
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html
It is made in Australia, and I was of the impression has been used in elections already.
LetterRip
The method used in Canada scales very well. What you have is this.
... Standards and Practices !
Each voting district has an elections officer who assembles the hardware. Then groups composed of all parties do the actual work of taking the vote and counting the results. All the parties involved are at the count and it's pretty well impossible to spin the result.
As this happens at an individual poll level it will scale effortlessly. We get our hand counted results about 3 -4 hours after the polls close.
It'll never catch on in da USA as it makes it pretty well impossible to cheat.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
...my apologies for forgetting Slashdot used HTML formatting for posts by default. Let me repost that entire post, since it's nearly unreadable.
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:
- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004.
- Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found.
- There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists.
- Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats
- Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans
- Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans).
- Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans.
This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Elections are complicated, even the simple things can get really broken. Again, another example, here in central ohio, polling stations which served a lot of people (the inner city ones) ended up with a severe shortage of voting machines. This is a really easy oversight to fix (which is why there were so many accusations of rigging), but it still went drastically drastically wrong.
Referring to this as an oversight is tremendously rich, given that the County elections boards and the Secretary of State's offices were advised of this potential problem repeatedly prior to the election and took no action to correct it. Furthermore all of the precincts affected by this problem happened to be precincts that voted for the opponent of the candidate for whom the highest ranking state elections official (Sec of State) held the position of co-chair of re-election campaign.
BTW, in Canada, we generally discourage elections officials (with the weight of the law) the practice of engaging in partisan activities (like, say, acting as co-chair of the election campaign of one of the candidates in the election you are running).
3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This used to be the standard, until they caught on to Big Business asking their employees to show them their voting receipt to make sure they were voting for the right candidate. Especially around the turn of the century, this became an effective way to abuse immigrant workers, who had little choice in employment and didn't know much about the political system.
AKA the world's biggest democracy...
"Elections in India are events involving political mobilisation and organisational complexity on an amazing scale. In the 1996 election to Lok Sabha there were 1,269 candidates from 38 officially recognised national and state parties seeking election, 1,048 candidates from registered parties, not recognised and 10,635 independent candidates. A total number of 592,572,288 people voted. The Election Commission employed almost 4,000,000 people to run the election. A vast number of civilian police and security forces were deployed to ensure that the elections were carried out peacefully. The direct cost of organising the election amounted to approximately Rs. 5,180 million.
"Voting is by secret ballot. Polling stations are usually set up in public institutions, such as schools and community halls. To enable as many electors as possible to vote, the officials of the Election Commission try to ensure that there is a polling station within 2km of every voter, and that no polling stations should have to deal with more than 1200 voters. Each polling station is open for at least 8 hours on the day of the election.
"On entering the polling station, the elector is checked against the Electoral Roll, and allocated a ballot paper. The elector votes by marking the ballot paper with a rubber stamp on or near the symbol of the candidate of his choice, inside a screened compartment in the polling station. The voter then folds the ballot paper and inserts it in a common ballot box which is kept in full view of the Presiding Officer and polling agents of the candidates. This marking system eliminates the possibility of ballot papers being surreptitiously taken out of the polling station or not being put in the ballot box."
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.