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Diebold Flops in Alaska
lukej writes "From the Anchorage Daily News, During yesterday's preliminary and ballot measure election across Alaska, Diebold built voting machines failed to 'phone home' causing a hand recount. As a party spokesperson said:
"I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts."
Additionally, the state itself has mandated some hand counts of all electronic results, and the Democratic Party is simply suggesting voters request paper voting."
From an outsider looking in, and knowing nothing about these elections, will this potentially affect sen. Ted Stevens in any way? Is there any chance that his hold will be weakened by this, or is he too popular up there for it to be an issue? (or is he completely unaffected by this election and it is the next one that involves him?)
Warhammer forums
He later said: "Of course, they contribute heavily to my party, so its not like we're going to revoke their contract or anything."
Diebold voting machines are like electronic toilet without papertrail.
how hard can it be? I could rig up a basic voting system in an afternoon and it would work "pretty good". A large company, on a multi-million-dollar contract, with years of work should be able to produce a flawless machine for something as simple as tallying some votes.
All I can say is, those secret election-rigging backdoors must take a lot of work, because what else have their developers been working on?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Diebold's still in business? How?
Help us build a better map!
I see the Title "Electronic Toilet" and then the words "paper voting"...
and the Demcratic Party is simply suggesting voters request paper voting
Those durn demcrats, always suggesting this and suggesting that.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
Concern over the machines led the Alaska Legislature in 2005 to pass a law requiring a mandatory hand count of ballots in one randomly selected precinct in every election district.
Be interesting to hear about how those random hand counts compare to the machine tabulations.
By the way, it'd be nice if slashdotters took notice that a number of the failures were related to phone lines (probably people plugging them into the wrong jacks, digital lines, or lines requiring special dial-out numbers, etc.)
Last but not least:
The Diebold electronic voting machines nationwide have been criticized by voter groups and computer scientists who say they are vulnerable to fraud. Diebold has defended the machines, saying they are secure when elections officials follow proper procedures.
That's the whole point, Diebold: you shouldn't have to "follow proper procedures." The machines should make it impossible to do so, just like I punch a ballot, place it in a box, which is locked and sealed, and taken by police to the counting facility, etc. The current system requires a fair amount of work to interfere with; the Diebold machines seem to require a fair amount of work to NOT interfere with!
Please help metamoderate.
I am of the opinion that hand counts of paper ballot receipts (printed by the voting machine, verified by the voter, then dropped in a box at the site of the election) should always be done, regardless of whether it was a close race. Otherwise, Diebold could avoid a recount by fabricating a landslide. From the perspective of avoiding vote fraud, I can't think of a better method of running an election than forced recounts, though for convenience sake its nice to have a quick, initial electronic tally which can be verified later.
for the morally challenged, that is. Until this bug is rectified, your technically superior solution is useless.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
How can the system still be buggy? I mean, seariously? Haven't they had several years to complete it in now? A voting system seems to be such a simple application, even if you spiff it up with loads of extras, such as automatic reporting to a central database, security features etc etc. Have they had to invent the transistor and the binary computer all over? I know I'm a brilliant programmer (and sexy as hell too), but I would have thought that even lesser mortals would have big problems stretching the coding of a voting system out over several years, let alone leaving it full of bugs.
So how come they are able to stay in business? Is it the power of the free market?
If a format for voting has been used for years, with little inaccuracy or error, such as paper ballots, then surely they could just not adopt the new method of computerised voting? A little tradition can sometimes be a good thing, especially if it works. What's next, the papal elections are done through MSN messenger, no need to go to Vatican City anymore. (I suppose that was a bad example as Chrisitian traditions are often more about being luddites than keeping with proven methods, but you get the idea.)
Must have been a clog in Ted Steven's series of tubes causing all the problems.
I'm part of the Open Voting Consortium and we've been proposing a system in which the voter uses a machine to produce a paper ballot. That ballot *is* the ballot, not some copy, not some receipt, but the actual ballot. And it isn't good until stuffed into a ballot box.
The paper ballot is the core - it's in a form and font easy for machine readers to read, but it can also be read by people.
Now, that vote-printer machine can be any machine that has an interface appropriate to the needs of the voter - such as audio driven for sight impaired voters. (A ballot reader would be available to do an audio readback.)
Our proposal is to do this, plus a canvassing system (that's the part that aggregates the precinct counts into the grand totals.)
And we feel that *all* code, and all machinery, should be inspectable and testable by anybody who wants to run a test (and they should be able to publish their test results.) That's one step short of full open source - which doesn't mean that the code couldn't also be open source under one of the licenses.
It is a mistake to think of these things as a software issue - it involves machines (even if they look and smell like PC's, although I personally tend to prefer smaller/lower power engines like the WRAP or Soekris machines) and procedures, lots and lots of procedures (like what to do if a voter walks out in the middle of casting his/her vote - there are laws that say what to do, and they, of course, vary from state to state and even county to county.)
But it is harder to do than one thinks - the machines themselves can't just be any old junk PC. They need to be robust in the face of voter use and tampering behind the scenes. And they need to have lots and lots of places where they can be locked-down (often using things as simple as lead-and-wire tamper seals) to prevent hanky-panky by warehouse or precinct people.
They need to be power-conserving (imagine a precinct with a single circuit breaker/fuse and a flakey or non-existant ground, and that the voting is occuring during a thunderstorm.) UPS's are a pain - they have a high failure rate and given that they often contain a lead-acid battery, are neither lightweight nor quite innocent should they leak. And it's important to keep the fire marshall happy.
And printers are a pure pain in the rear - they can draw a lot of power and are generally the most failure prone part of the system.
And there are lots of legal requirements - like protecting the privacy of the vote. You can, for example, potentially reconstruct which voter voted which way by looking at things like sequencial files used for audit/error-detection or for ballot tallies.
And the stuff has to be easily configurable en masse - counties tend to need hundreds, thousands of these things, and they better all be the same. And they need to be able to be transported by folks who aren't necessarily gentle and set up by people who make your grandmother look like a tech support wizard.
We were planning on doing a project to produce a reference model for such a system via the University of California (multi-campus project with UC Santa Cruz in the project lead position) but we got cut out of California's HAVA (Federal voting act) funding when the previous California Sect'y of State got caught up in a brouhaha on other matters. It's still worth doing - every state would benefit.
Speaking as a Euroweenie, I just don't understand the apparent apathy in the USA with regards to the very serious issues surrounding vote counting machines. In a democracy, could anything be more important than making sure that votes are counted correctly and fairly, with a transparent process that can be verified?
Have you seen this, for instance?
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/
That was a computer programmer testifying (two years ago) that he'd been asked to write vote rigging software for the Ohio elections. What was the outcome of that? Was there a formal non-partisan enquiry into the elections in Ohio? Was there a huge public protest there? What am I missing?
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/
Summary --
Computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis testifies under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Members in Ohio. Stephen Pizzo writes:
A partial transcript:
Are there computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?
Yes.
How do you know that to be the case?
Because in October of 2000, I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]...
It would rig an election?
It would flip the vote, 51-49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.
And would that program that you designed, be something that elections officials... could detect?
They'd never see it.
Without a paper trail there's no way to question the electronic voting or do a recount so in effect Diebold controls the swing vote. We can trust they are honest but why should we? Corporate america has a miserable record. I'd prefer not having them incharge of electing our Presidents. That sound you hear is George Orwell screaming in his grave.
I am constantly in awe at the failure of implementating of IT within (the) public sector (services). Governments/states spend millions on the lowest bidder, with costs often spiralling to beyond that quoted by the highest bidder initially, and it increasingly seems as if you get what you pay for.
At least in this case lives were not at risksee here, here and here.
It could be argued that selection of companies such as Diebold comes from a lack of awareness of IT by governments, and is simply a cost/saving excercise, but even so- sensible questions should be raised about all contractors- have they got a track record, how are they trialling the product, are their guarantees more than verbal...do we have a backup?
Sure DIebold cannot make excuses...but can the government either?
How else could I justify to other people that we elected Dubya TWICE? :)
This company's motto:
To Boldly Die where nobody has Died Before.
First in public perception, now in reality.
Man, I sure am glad I don't have to trust them with my money. Oh wait. Dammit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How is it that the largest democracy in the world manages to get it right while these guys foul up. I imagine they didnt test this properly at all. Classic case of 'someone effed up' and didnt test the most basic function of this machine properly.
As as Canadian I am mystified by what seems to be a complete lack of outrage regarding the accuracy and transparency of electronic voting systems. You'd think with all the controversy of the last two presidential elections that Americans would sit up and take notice, but it doesn't appear to be.
We have an almost quaint system of voting here that requires only a few paid volunteers, some paper ballots and a pencil. It's quaintness is offset by its efficiency; I have never waited more than a minute or two to vote and the results are known within a few hours after the election. I believe the UK and many other European nations follow a similar system. There is no reason why a process like this would not work in the United States, save for the almost religious reverence for technology, as all the votes are counted within minutes of the polls closing, whether it be in a city as large as Toronto or as small as Dumbfuck, Saskatchewan. I know it's not as sexy as a flashing machine, but it's transparent, verifiable, and relatively fool proof.
A few hours after we proudly have a story on the electronic toilet, we have a story about the failures of electronic equipment that should be more accurate and reliable than anything else...
Ever think we spend our time perfecting the wrong equipment?
Funnypics
Darn, I just read the headline and thought this story was about the 2004 presidential election..
Diebold and the State of Alaska still hasn't released the data files that could show wtf really happened there.
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=101
--
What brought down WTC-7?
well i guess on MS WinXP SP2, with most of ports blocked by default :)
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
The sum of this problem is taking a number, and incrementing it. You must add a pretty, easy to understand interface, and then add a paper trail system.
Here's what I want:
- I walk into a voting center.
- I am asked for ID.
- I present my state Drivers License or Federal Passport for visual inspection.
- In return I'm provided with a re-usable line-tracker token (deli waiting line slip).
- I wait in line to vote.
- I enter the voting booth, surrendering my deli slip to a large box.
- I vote.
- The machine produces three bits of paper; my reciept, my official ballot, and my exit poll token.
- I retain the reciept for my own personal records. It contains no bare words, simply a tracking number, date and time, and location.
- My Official Ballot is dropped into a lockbox of a million similar others, to be stored for eventual hand-recount. It never enters my or anyone elses hands.
- My exit poll token may be presented to exit pollsters, or I may destroy it.
- I enjoy some milk and cookies, and leave.
- Much later, at home, I am able to look up my ballot based on the ID number on my reciept. From this, I can tell where my ballot is, in what box, in what warehouse, what machine I used, what voting center, and the date and time. It may also show what machine was used to process my vote in a recount, or if a hand recount had been done.
- I am able to sleep at night, knowing that democracy will take effect.
This is really not that difficult. Not as difficult as Diebold has made it, and surely not as cloak-and-dagger.Informatus Technologicus
Ok that's a weird statement but here is the basic assertion. I have a Pure Digital single use camera so I did a little googling to see if there was a way to hack it. Turns out these cameras are actually quite complex and secure. They are engineered 8 ways to Sunday to ensure that you can't really do this. Of course there is a way, more or less but it involves building your own electrical interface, reverse engineering some digital processing technology, writing some unassembler code and picking through the bytes by hand. A $20 camera. It seems to me that if someone can build this much protection into a $20 camera then it should be possible given the massive awards, time and effort of Diebold to do this for a voting machine. Let's say for the sake of argument and normal government waste that a voting machine costs a 100x what a camera costs; $2000. I don't know but let's say. So are we concluding that for $2000 we can't find anyone to build in the protection and reliability of a plastic camera that costs 1% of a voting machine?
We've got it working here in brazil for ten years now. We were the first country in the world to have fully eletronic elections (since the year 2000). We also lend the machines to Paraguay and Ecuador, and currently have plans to start exporting the technology. On presidential election we can have the results within 12 hours, and in small towns, within a few minutes. BTW, it runs on Linux. Just my 2 cents :)
Diebold is Soooo 2004. Flaky results, mystery errors, no paper trail are things of 2004. Diebold, thou have cheated death with continuing on to the 2006 Congressional elections. Thou should and shall die, and not exist beyond the hand of death. Death to flaky results! We need a version of the Office Space Copier Beatdown with one of these Diebold voting machines.
After the counting fiasco in FL, Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" to get rid of the "hanging chad" forever. The Act provides funds to states to buy electronic machines so they can retire the punch card machines.
As you can see here with the Roll Call Vote, Overwhelming majorities of both parties voted for it, but MORE DEMOCRATS than republicans voted for it, even though Democrats are the minority party.
[posting as AC because I have mod points.]
forgot to check the "post anon" box.. oh well
The machines will elect a robot who will then slowly start phasing out humans. Thanks a lot Diebold, or should I say "The Architect".
Can I bum a sig?
Read title. Not much more to say.
And we all know why the Democrats want to go back to paper chads, so they can eat them!
Okay,that was flamebait.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
I fail to see how things could be worse with anyone else. Could you enlighten me?
They can hardly be worse than Diebold, so the usual complaints about software quality don't apply.
But why not go all the way? Let the Indians do the actual voting! Many Americans don't care anyway and with a population about 5 times bigger the participation is bound to skyrocket. And, (tongue-slightly-in-cheek) Americans pick the wrong guys...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I guess that would be great.... for about 10 minutes until anyone with any intelligence realizes all the technology they rely on comes from Asia, a lot of the raw materials for manufacture come from across the globe, and the countries on list 2 call in the US's 8.5 TRILLION dollar debt, leaving the country with such high inflation it spirals into a third world country.
Yeah... that would be great!
I'd rather hear this speech.
My Fellow Americans,
Today we embark on...eh, fuck that. One half of all government workers, including the military, will be fired. Tomorrow, the same. And so on, until the government is one one-hundredth the size it is now. Term limits are one year, for every position. If no one runs for an office, someone will be chosen randomly.
Thanks, and here's my two week notice. Oh, and I am screwing Condi.
Clinton signed the DMCA bill and made it a law. I would have to assume that Gore, being Clinton's second-in-command, could have said something to prevent its passing. But he didn't, so I can only infer that he would have signed more DRM and anti-fair-use bills into law. And I highly doubt that Gore would have ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. (Would we have been attacked in the first place: definitely. All of the attacks were planned WELL in advance of Bush taking office less than a year before.) Other than that, it's pretty much a wild guess.
Kerry? Well, who knows with him as he's more indecisive than a woman with two dresses trying to figure which one makes her butt smaller. I imagine that except for raising taxes (BTW, his wife paid a measly 12% of her seven figures of income in taxes in 2004 and that is BELOW the lowest tax bracket!) his administration would have been a complete and utter mess, especially if Congress would have been the same as it is now. Nothing but bickering and John Murtha-esque I'll-shut-down-the-government-unless-I-get-my-way tactics.
Basically put, none of the candidates were all that hot; it's getting towards picking the least foul one rather than one you like the most as all of them stink to varying degrees.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
Diebold is just following through on its promises.
8.5 Trillion? They want it? They can come get it. Manufacturing? It's about time we bring those jobs back *here*. Where they belong.
I like this system, because it restricts itself to solving the one, single problem there was -- the "hanging chad" problem with punchcards. The machine detects unclear votes as they happen and allows the voter to fix it. Other than than, it's just a counting utility, and hand recounts are simple to do.
Scoop has an article about a zogby poll commissioned to look at US voters impressions of computerised/blackbox voting.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0608/S00220.htm
One of the larger issues they found was the high level of people unaware of any of the risks. Which is understandable because of the paucity of national coverage. We have a lot of smaller local coverage reports, but it doesn't move upstream to hit the big broadcasters, etc, near as much as it should.
Yes, I realize I'll be modded down offtopic but I thought this type of thinking was worth responding to. Manufacturing jobs will come back to the states as soon as americans are willing to pay for them. You can't cry and make noise about no manufacturing jobs, yet demand the "low low prices" at Walmart caused primarily by asian workers making pennies an hour.
You want American manufacturing jobs back? Be prepared to foot the bill American workers demand.
C'mon Ted, you can do it!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's not just a matter of counting the votes at all. That's the easy part.
One would think.
So why does Diebold keep fucking it up? They can't even handle the counting part properly. How can we trust them to get the rest of it right?
But, the post to which you reply simply presents a user scenario, and did not discuss the complexity of rolling out a system that will handle the tedious management of presenting a voter with the proper information. A fully-integrated, secure, auditable system would be far superior to the current method of rolling out a paper ballot, recalling the ballot because of last-minute changes (for instance, the case where one candidate died before the election, but it was too late to remove his name from the ballot, and he won), and generally fighting to the last minute with ballot distribution.
A secure, auditable electronic voting system would be much better. A soundproof booth could be set up for blind voters, for instance, and the ballot could be read to them, and they vote by stating out-loud, "I vote no on measure 2." Or simply, "No," in response to, "How do you vote on measure 2?"
But I'm a pollyanna when it comes to stuff like this.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I never said it would be without any drawbacks.
I said it would be better.
Not immediately, but in the long term. Independance from any foreign governement is far better than what we have now.
YEah, I know few americans who would sacrifice their luxury for a better tomorrow. That's part of the problem. No-one gives a shit about national pride or responsibility any more.
Both Spain and Poland have withdrawn their troops from Iraq. Bulgaria has a tiny handful of troops and they don't do much of anything, the Australians have withdrawn all their ground forces and spend their time cruising the gulf in their boats.
The money saved by cutting off foreign aid to countries which don't support the Iraq occupation is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual cost of the occupation, Israel is the number one recipient of foreign aid and supported the attack but can't send troops for obvious reasons. Should we cut them off? Egypt opposed the war officially but is very supportive of the war on terror and likely has incriminating evidence of US complicity in torture. We could cut off their foreign aid under your criteria but doing so would probably cause enough trouble that it would end up costing us more than we saved. Either way it's still an insignificant amount compared to the total cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation.
Telling the terrorists "screw with us and we'll hunt you down" doesn't really work after you have just pissed off every single ally you have besides the UK, a few random post-Soviet countries, and a couple of tiny island nations. Considering the massive economic disruption created by the US in your scenario it would not be surprising if many nations became much more willing to look the other way so long as the terrorists based in their territory only attacked US interests.
You mean we'd have to defend ourselves?
After making our bed, we'd have to *sleep* in it?
*gasp*
Ooh, the horror!
There is *nothing* wrong with taking responsibility for the direction of a nation.
As for aid covering the costs? If we out now, no problem. We're talking $60 billion a year here. It would not take long to pay those costs. Definitely take less time than this "War" is taking.
And I highly doubt that Gore would have ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11.
He probably wouldn't've given them $43 million four months before 9/11, either.
But, really, this is simple speculation, and complete bullshit anyway. There's no reason to assume he wouldn't've, and every reason to assume he would. Americans wanted someone to blame for the attack. Americans (and the world in general) were behind the invasion of Afghanistan. I doubt Gore would've just sat on his ass after 9/11.
And, better, he wouldn't've invaded Iraq, especially on trumped-up non-9/11 pretexts, taking our eyes off Afghanistan. If you read the news, things aren't going well in either Iraq *or* Afghanistan. Bush hasn't successfully ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan yet. And he hasn't caught bin Laden, either. So, he's 0 for 2. 0 for 3 if you count the faisco in Iraq.
The fact is, Bush has put America in more danger. Instead of taking care of the problem, he's fucked up two foreign contries, squandered the good-will America had after 9/11, lied to and spied on his own citizens, ignored domestic issues, spent our future so the Chinese government owns even more of the US, increased the size of government tremendously, increased the power of the executive branch over the other two branches of government so we no longer have effective checks-and-balances, and has labeled everyone who criticises him as "anti-Patriotic." The two countries he's fucked up are breeding grounds for people who have reason to hate America now. Those "insurgents" aren't all old terrorists. Many of them are citizens of Iraq who have been let down by America's inability to rebuild the infrastructure we destroyed. They don't care that it's not all our fault, that we've been hindered by lack of cooperation from Iraq itself.
All they know is, life is much, much worse in Iraq now that America is in charge.
Basically put, none of the candidates were all that hot; it's getting towards picking the least foul one rather than one you like the most as all of them stink to varying degrees.
Amen to that.
Bush was the worst of all possible candidates. Nader would've been a helluva lot better, even. The scary thing is, we elected him the second time through as well, after seeing what a lying, scheming bastard he really is. Bush turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. The fact we re-elected him just shows that Americans don't really care about candidates, they just care about "red vs blue," like we were voting for our favorite sports team or something, and we're going to stand by our team, no matter how suck-ass they are, and we're going to shout about how terrible the other team is, no matter how good they really are.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Gerrymandering, I think, behind verified voting is most dangerous to the democratic process.
I'd think it's tied with the power of corporate lobbying. With corporations buying the votes of all parties, it often doesn't matter which person gets elected.
But I might just be a wee bit jaded.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Dummycrats are just too damn stupid to vote.
I walk into Best Buy. I pick out a TV from a wide range of products (mfg, sizes, technologies, prices, warranties, design, etc). I rarely know the salesperson. S/he rarely knows me. Maybe I go across the street to Circuit City to shop around first. Multiply this by 100 million people doing the same thing. That is a free market.
No it isn't. You think Sony and Dell and Pioneer and whatnot don't have influence over what Best Buy and Circuit City sell?
It's a "free market" only to the extent that you are able to easily purchase things that you are allowed to purchase. Exclusive deals, loss-leaders, and control of distribution channels (Best Buy and Circuit City) are the bread-and-butter of mega-corporations. Smaller companies are relegated to botique shops, where the general public will never hear about them, let alone go out of their way to purchase them.
Those that control the distribution chains have a much greater effect on the market than consumer choice, or government intervention.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Consider the UK sytem. You walk into the voting station. You put a big X with a pen against your candidate's name. The end of the vote, these boxes are taken to the town hall and opened in the presence of the officials. The count begins. Teams of council clerks/ bank employees / post office cashiers (anyone can volunteer to do it, but it's normally people who can deal with mad volumes of paper) count the papers. The candidates and officials can watch the count freely. The results is declared. If it is tight the candidates can demand recounts. No complex equipment, little or no oppurtunity for fraud on the day, and it doesn't take a fearsome IQ to put an X on a bit of paper. Technology is awesome, but there a lot to be said for K-I-S-S.
echo $SIGNATURE
For the next draft, compensate for some political issues.
>a voter walking into a polling station and presenting his/her ID
Is this ID issued to everyone, conveniently? And is it free? If there's a fee for it, then you've reinvented the poll tax. There is one US state which requires a paid-for ID in order to vote. GUESS what part of the country that state is in.
>Each polling booth is issued a fixed number of voter tokens, enough for the total number of voters expected to show up at a booth.
That's a difficult number to predict especially in a crucial election. This also allows the Kenneth Blackwell's of the world to "accidentally underestimate" the number of tokens need in opposition districts.
>The receipt format would be a standardized one, established by the febderal election officals
Lots of places don't want to give up sovereignty to the federal government.
The great part of your proposal is that it throws away the need to trust any of the machines. Trying to build trustworthy equipment is a seductive game that you cna spend infinite money on. Good security engineering is about minimizing how much you have to trust in the first place.
Here's an instructional video on hacking a voting machine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/how-to- hack-a-diebold-vot_b_26301.html
Considering that the current cost of the war is somewhere in the $300,000,000,000 to $600,000,000,000 range, costs over $5,000,000,000 a month (and increasing) and will last at least the rest of Bush's term I would say cutting off foreign aid to pay for it is likely a lot longer than you think. Not to mention the fact that our foreign aid budget buys us a lot of cost-savings, removing it is just as likely to create more costs for us than it saves.
>they're nearly always among the last to report results, because tallying the votes is hard.
After accuracy, honesty, resistance to tampering, and openness to all who want to vote, speedy reporting is such a low priority that it should be thrown out of the requirements document altogether lest someone pay attention to it and be distracted from something that matters.
Our lil' redneck is making insults at a sixth grade level! Makes me proud to be a Repugnican. Yeeee-haw! Now let's go git us some more of that eastern lib'ral tax money for our pork barrel projects. Them Dummycrats is so dumb, they pay more in taxes than they take in gub'mint services, leaving the rest for us real 'merkins. Ah loves me some pork!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
>how can ANYBODY say "well, the number isn't enough to change the outcome." How do you know this?
You make an extremely good point.
Wish I could remember their names, but one university team crunched the numbers and found that if you were to change just one vote in every precinct of the country you could reverse the outcome of a recent presidential election. That sounds strange until you stop and think how many precincts there must be in Florida and that the arguments were over dozens or hundreds of votes.
I live in the US in an area with a population well over 100,000. We have been using a system where you mark your selections by using a black marker to fill in a space. The ballots are then inserted (by the voter) in a counting machine that either accepts or rejects the ballot. The votes are tallied for the entire area within a few hours (including write-ins). The ballots are available for manual recounts if needed.
This is exactly the same as the system you describe, but with the counting process greatly accelerated. As for "exclud[ing] many people with disabilities from being able to vote" -- how about if they use a special machine designed to meet the needs of people with disablities while the rest of us use the simpler process?
'Course, now that the fad is the touch-screen systems I expect we'll be spending a bunch of money for little benefit (and gaining some risks).
Nice troll. But I'm bored, so I'll answer it anyway.
Yes. Unfortunately, I find it unlikely that the US is going to stop messing around with the world and causing trouble and destruction everywhere it goes.
I thought that it was "mission accomplished" years ago. But I guess someone forgot to tell the insurgents that.
Does that mean that your mission was to waste as much money as the congress let you ? That's what you get when you don't bother defining victory conditions before going to war - it drags on without any clear resolution.
Oh, did you win or lose ? Saddam was owerthrown but you're leaving because you ran out of money, so I can't tell... The Iraqi people certainly lost quite a few of its members, not to mention its infrastructure, but I guess that was never important to the US in the first place, as long as Bush got his war.
I'm pretty sure that any nation that depends on your foreign aid is incapable of sending armed troops anywhere, so your attempt at petty vengeance falls flat on its face right at the start.
Good. Without your support for said dictators, the Middle-East might finally start calming down.
Or simply ignore US patents and mass produce cheap medicine.
Well, that's sure to spoil their day. Especially since the logical answer to that is to declare all US intellectual property - copyrights, but especially patents - null and void which, in all likelihood, will benefit their economy a lot more than you can hurt it.
But tell me, are you going to sever the underwater Internet cables as well ? Without doing that your "severing of diplomatic relations" is rather meaningless, and if you do it, you'll facing a rebellion from both nerds and the multinational corporations. And with nerds in the rebellion, who will maintain all those nice automatic systems that make your remaining industries at least somewhat productive ?
Does NATO serve any real purpose anymore, now that the Cold War is over ?
I'm sure that people willing to blow themselves up just to kill you are shaking in their boots thinking about your revenge. Not to mention their leaders, who've watched your less than succesful attempts to capture Osama for the past five years.
Yes, we all know and love US's way of betraying their word - ignoring international treaties - when it becomes inconvenient.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Massive failure in Alaskan voting machines cripples vote rigging. Congress appalled.
When "cutting-edge technology" slows things down, that's a persuasive argument that it's cutting-edge clutter. This technology may have Bold intentions, but it Dies too often.
... while they have been shown not to "fool-proof" their security?
Modem failures: why are these machines designed, apparently, to "fool-proof" the transmission of accurate vote-counts by election officials
One might conclude that the purpose of the technology is to displace local human intelligence, in favor of intelligence-central. This is hardly a democratic (or whatever we can agree to call American) solution.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Of course, you're assuming that votes will be fraudulently added or deleted, rather than simply switched from one candidate to another. On the plus side, though, it should be possible to prevent "spoiled ballots" by alerting the voter if his/her vote might be invalid for any reason...
Even if this is statistically likely to capture widespread fraud, I still think a total recount should always be done. It's not that much extra work, and it is important that the average person believe the election results are legitimate (and the best way to do that is to make vote fraud as difficult as we know how to make it).
1) In 2000, gore won despite nader or "stupid" democrats
2) Computers were involved (smaller scale)
3) It wasn't the "stupid" voters confused on those butterfly ballots. THINK past the propaganda machine for a second.
I have a smart friend (engineer) who was confused: he asked for help to make sure and they gave him wrong advice-- he DID figure it out but he wondered if they were giving bad advice on purpose.
He figured a popsicle stick could been used to shift the ballot up in the slot further confusing or tricking the voter.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is to all US readers of this thread: What are you doing to help in this situation of creaky or questionable voting systems? In this country most election judges are volunteers, your neighbors. I have done this for two elections in my city, one the 2004 National election and this year's primary in March. I can tell you that at least in my area we need help! I'm 55 years old, and am the youngest election judge in the district. We are moving toward Deibold-type machines, and we don't have computer savvy people to set them up. Whether you use the machine verified paper ballots or all-electronic systems, you need people comfortable with equipment to make them work right. And we don't have enough. By all means suggest better ways to do the job. But it you really want to help join us in actually running an election. The problem isn't corruption, it's not having the right people. Call your local election comission and join up. You will learn much more about the actual nuts and bolts of your government.
Does that mean that your mission was to waste as much money as the congress let you ? That's what you get when you don't bother defining victory conditions before going to war - it drags on without any clear resolution.
Yes. That's how it works. We've done it before and we seem to be doing it again. But there is one other positive outcome.
Oh, did you win or lose ? Saddam was owerthrown but you're leaving because you ran out of money, so I can't tell... The Iraqi people certainly lost quite a few of its members, not to mention its infrastructure, but I guess that was never important to the US in the first place, as long as Bush got his war.
Some questions are never resolved. Ask someone who won the Vietnam War. I think in this case (at least if we do what the poster is suggesting) as well as that one the argument can be made that both sides lost, but you'll never get an answer that satisfies...
Does NATO serve any real purpose anymore, now that the Cold War is over ?
It serves the same purpose it always has. It pisses off the Russians.
Why ? Without your continued aid for the various dictatorial governments and terrorist organizations (you have heard of "School of America", have you ?), the area isn't a threat to anyone. Leave the muslims alone and let them build a democracy for themselves, don't forcefully keep them locked in Dark Ages just to get oil from them.
The Army School of the Americas no longer exists. The Army School of the Americas never existed. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation is a benevolent institution. We have always been at peace with Eurasia and at war with East Asia. Long live our Great Leader :D.
Now as for the muslims it's not fair to lump them all in one basket. But the only people who are forcing them to live in the Dark Ages are themselves. Some (like Al Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood and friends) seem to like it that way. (That is rather their point, that the Dark Ages were the Good Old Days and God wants us to live that way again). Those who do not seem free enough to get out of that mode. For instance the US should be so lucky as to build something as advanced as Dubai's Internet City, where not only technological but social advancement outpaces us (there is a much higher ratio of female workers there than here).
Not to mention their leaders, who've watched your less than succesful attempts to capture Osama for the past five years.
It seems to serve some people's purpose to leave him around. Not that that means that our government isn't just too incompetent to catch him, but he's more valuable alive to the current administration (as a boogeyman) than he is to his own organization.
True. This is one basic safeguard against a specific class of fraud. The idea of human-and-machine-readable paper ballots makes the hand-recount possible as well - solving/minimizing the musical-votes class of fraud.
I think the idea is simple, intuitive fail-safes to double-check the high-tech primary method. Effectively, voters vote twice: once the new, fast way, once the old slow way (via paper receipts), and they need to match or have a *very* good explanation at the end of the night. The voter should, of course, be tasked with making sure that the receipt matches their vote *before* leaving the voting area.
1) Right, so when did President Gore's term start?
2) Bah... the brouhaha was over ballots which apparently simple minded Democratic voters were unable to decifer.
3) He sounds like a genius.