Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.