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House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
Spamicles writes "A vote is imminent for the bill that is a direct response to problems in the 2006 elections. This legislation would create a paper trail for elections, require a manual audit of every federal election, and open the source code of voting software in certain circumstances. The bill currently has 216 co-sponsors and is expected to be brought to the floor of the House and passed any day."
this is definitely a good thing.
Now if we could just get mandatory picture IDs for voting, we'd eliminate nearly all of the election rigging.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Let your representatives know how you feel... http://www.house.gov/writerep/
I've seen a number of sensible bills which seemed like a shoe-in, only to be held up, and eventually dropped. I'll believe it when I see it.
On the other hand, if it DOES make it through, then it will go some way to restoring my faith in the US political system. Not just because of the mechanism required by this bill, but the fact that the politicians actually passed it.
I actually think we may see more opposition to the open-source voting machine concept from companies like Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers. This harkens to memory the fuss Scott Ritchie raised about Australia switching from an open source voting software to a closed one. There's some great information in that story about the dangers of closed-source voting software, and its impact on what is supposed to be a democratic process.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I'll believe it when I see it. A nickel says if it passes in the House it'll die at the Senate. There's too many extremely evil people who want elections riggable, and want their machines used to do it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them. Even India uses paper ballots, and if they can do it with their population, I'm sure the US can handle it too.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The mass media controllers hand pick the candidates *they* want you to focus on,and yes I'll even label it a conspiracy and interference of a sort in the political process. Merely by increasing news coverage and declaring such and such candidate a "front runner" it becomes their self fulfilling prophecy. Words have meaning and advertising/brainwashing works to a great extent, notice how they describe candidates other than their version of the top runners.
We always have a lot of candidates, just a very few get the bulk of the press.
The current Republican party disconnect with Ron Paul is a clear example, he has a lot of grassroots support, yet very little national coverage and what he does get is artfully spun negative propaganda, whereas their globalist darlings like giuliani and now fred thompson get the bulk of the positive press. This is on purpose and this controlling the voters mindset is a long running "feature" of having our media controlled by a few people at the top. Their hand picked examples get the bulk of the news, so they turn around and can say "candidates x and y are the front runners, look how much news and interest there is!" Well, duh... These are artificially manufactured "top runner" candidates.
Want to change things, use the net and embarrass the mass media on their own news blogs and follow through no matter what once you actually get to the voting stage. Dump that lesser of the top two evils "vendor lockin" they always push, it's just plain harmful and results in the political situation you see today and what you have seen over the past generations.
Yeah, seriously. The important thing isn't that the process is fair, it's that everyone knows the process is fair. I don't care how Free a voting machine is, if voters don't have confidence in it, democracy is damaged.
It's not enough for computer experts to say "the system is good"; everyone knows that experts can be biased or bought. Every voter has to be able to look at the process and say, "I trust this". That's why paper ballots rock.
Of course, you Americans would have to stop having dozens of elections and plebicites on the same day. One voter, one ballot, one X means the results can easily be counted by hand.
I can not see ink as a solution. So we argue about whether that ink mark is dark enough or actually in the box, etc.
Your proposed 'solution' returns us to something we have already tried and found lacking.
Electronic ballots, with paper confirmation, using an open sourced software, is just as verifiable as your old fashinoned paper + ink, but is cheaper, quicker, and harder to 'stuff'. When you have a paper + ink ballot box, all you need do is throw out 1/2 the real ballots and stuff it full of fake ones. Electronics voting with paper ballots, means there are two records, so BOTH must be modified, and they must be modified 'synchronosly', giving us three times the chance to catch you (both records must show the winner you desire and they must match up exactly, including any time, location or other coded stamps placed on the paper and electronic records.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It may be due to less money involved in Canadian elections. Checking opensecrets.org I see:
2000 US Presidential election - $528.9 million dollars
2004 US Presidential election - $880.5 million dollars
Predictions for 2008 say the final two candidates will need over 500 million to be competitive . That is a lot of money... And where there is money there is potential graft, embezzlement, and lots and lots of power.
Checking http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html I see:
2004 Canadian elections - ~93.5 million Canadian
2006 Canadian elections - ~100 million Canadian
The difference is that Canada seems to limit how much the political parties can spend rather than how much people can give. So If a party spends a lot of money on one candidate for office then there is less money for other candidates from the same party. Thus there appears to be less money in all Canadian elections than there is in the US presidential election.
Also Canada has many parties so "winning" an election may not give an absolute majority there may still be coalitions of parties able to wrest control and that gives the minorities more power to bargain with and leads to more review of the winning parties laws. Compare that to the "winner take all" system that in the US. Many laws are proposed and voted on without senators being allowed to review the full body of the law. They just know if their pork projects were included and they are told by the leadership which way to vote if they want their pet projects to get in the next time...
USA political system needs a fix. One fix would be to pass many smaller bills instead of monolithic bills with many riders attached. But that means less pet projects to make constituents happy. It is a vicious cycle currently where the US parties are both striving to break the bank as fast as possible so they get the most for themselves.
Parent is correct. As an added benefit, manipulation of vote counts (i.e. rigging an election) becomes more difficult with distributed vote tabulation because getting cooperation among a large group of tabulators becomes difficult.
The point is that nobody is actually trusted with the vote. It's all done in the open with members from all political parties watching (but never touching) every aspect of the count. To get away with any significant fraud, you would have to have to collusion of multiple groups with very different agendas. I'm not saying fraud can't happen, just that it's going to be a hell of a lot harder than opening the vote database in MS Access.
There's a key difference between any banking system and voting, and that's anonymity.
EVERY transaction in banking and commerce is fully accountable for any/all parties involved.
Ideally, our votes are completely anonymous, so the analogy isn't quite right.
Take the authenticated identity component out of our banking system and I'll bet people would stop trusting it immediately. "Just slide your money through this slot, I promise you we'll take care of it..."
In this case, IMHO, the problem is "appropriate technology"...and so it _is_ the computers because they are simply not an appropriate technology to provide universal accessibility to our elections...most people have no clue how to operate, verify and thus, trust them. You can count hand marked paper ballots in your precinct by candlelight, now that's reliability, and if we can't trust our neighbors, well, then we've got some other very serious topics we should be discussing.
And, given all the issues we've had with problems such as mass identity theft via millions of card numbers being stolen in a single swoop, do you really consider those systems secure, reliable and verifiable? Do the best of the security experts who read Slashdot feel that way?
PS - Remember, too, that cash still a tangible artifact, and, the most valuable cash in general use is, wait for it...Paper!
You are comparing a population of 30 million, most of whom vote, to a population on 300 million, most of whom don't vote. From the figures you quote, Canadian per capita election spending it higher.