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John Edwards on Open Source Voting Machines
goombah99 writes "John Edwards, the presidential candidate and lawyer, is standing out from the pack by showing himself to be a bit tech savvy. In 2003 he was a guest host on Lawrence Lessig's Blog, giving his view on the imbalance between property right protection and the good of public access. As of this week he has become the first presidential candidate to support 'open source code' for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records. He's even personally using Twitter. 'Currently, software used in election systems remains the proprietary property of vendors. This situation has created a continual problem when anomalous results have been reported and independent experts are denied the ability to review how the systems work. A growing body of critics oppose this privatization of the voting system.'"
Ah, fragmenting the geek vote I see. You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate. Unfortunately partisinship destroys this, and geeks seem willing to get in bed (so to speak) with whoever is willing to throw them a few treats (i.e. favoring Edwards just because he utterd the words "open source", not even in support of it in general).
Philosophy.
It is a principle mistake to think that electronic voting can ever replace manual vote counting. Or if it will replace it, then you will always lose the audibility.
If you want an election to be publicly auditable, then the only (!!) way to do it is to count votes manually by hand in public.
You can use an electronic voting machine to get a faster preliminary result, but if you give up on manual counting the electronic voting machine will become a black-box. Regardless what kind of software, security etc. you use and implement.
He may know a great deal about health care, but I've never read an interview in which he didn't reply to that type of questioning with a non-sequitor about small government being better.
As for both Sicko and your article, neither settles this debate as both rely far too heavily on individual cases than generally applicable logical analysis. Obviously, such analysis is difficult to express sucinctly, but to me it boils down to this: The government is motivated by getting enough votes. When it comes to healthcare it can do this by keeping taxes low and/or by providing better service. On the other hand, the corporation's primary objective is to increase share price. Which it can do only by increasing profits. Profits can be increased by growing the corporation's income and growing costs at a slower pace or by cutting costs (or a combination).
The above are the facts of the situation, my decision is a result of a willy nilly hash of how I feel the shit breaks down in real life: The corporation, unable to grow itself at a rate faster than the economy (which it must do to add value) is forced to cut costs, even if this means worse healthcare. Rather than improve services it games the system to avoid losing market share. Thus, it fails to provide the same level of healthcare efficiency that the government CAN (note: not "does") provide.
There are things that humans are not so good at. Financial systems allow data to be processed at high speed, to be stored in much less space for long term retrieval, transported around and for the complexity of data to be represented in many different ways. The results are required quickly. They run repeatedly, so despite a high initial cost, they pay off in the long term.
Votes are the complete opposite. With a paper vote, you collect less than a byte of information for each person, speed is not that important (we do it in the UK with a small army of staff in each constituency who deliver the results by morning), the process is nothing more than tallying for each candidate and rarely is retrieval required (and in those cases, it's not random). You do it occasionally.
Computer systems have problems that humans don't have. A person with a fault (stupidity, illness) has a tiny impact. Software with a fault will reflect across all results. And those human errors get picked up. If the vote is tight, there's a recount and stacks are rechecked, so any human errors are more likely to get ironed out. An electrical storm isn't going to knock out a box of ballots. A head isn't going to crash in a ballot box.
election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records
There's an article from nist linked somewhere up that page (open source doesn't help..), that says something I never thought of before: even if you have a paper trail, a compromised machine could still effect the result - by (for instance) placing a candidate's name in a hard to see place or somehow making it a bit harder to vote for them. Given the fact that quite a few people only decide who to vote for in the booth and are lazy, I could see this swinging a close race.
Not to say that a paper trail isn't a good thing, just interesting that it doesn't solve everything...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
One issue with healthcare is the who-pays problem. If government offered free health care to anybody who paid at least $5000/year in Federal taxes there would probably not be an objection - most likely the level of care would end up being pretty high, and since so few people pay that much in taxes it wouldn't lead to a huge competition for treatment facilities.
The problem is that universal care means taking care of the 95% of the population who pay little to no taxes (comparatively).
The people who pay for health care now will still pay for health care under the new system (just in taxes). The difference is that they'll have to stand in line behind people who aren't paying much of anything. So what incentive do they have to want the new system? They pay the same, but get less in service.
So, ultimately, those with money and power are going to oppose universal health care. If it happens it will be the result of voters who don't pay much in taxes (which would be most of them).
The problem is that you can't make the cost of universal care go away simply by putting a zero-dollar pricetag on it. Somebody ends up paying. Unintended consequences tend to cause nasty problems if you don't think things out.
The reality is that every nation practices capitalism. The only thing that changes is the form of the currency. Iran is a capitalist nation that trades in religious fervor. The USSA was a capitalist nation that traded in political power-brokering. The day that an MP in a socialized nation waits the same time for a hospital procedure as some guy out on the streets is the day that I recognize that they are in fact socialized. They might not pay for health care in dollars, but those with power still get preferential treatment...