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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
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!
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.