Slashdot Mirror
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.
I work for Paul Krekorian and I hope that all Californians here will call their state legislators and ask them to support AB 852, the Secure, Accurate, Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, a bill that would require disclosed source code for all election systems. http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_n umber=ab_852&sess=CUR&house=B&author=krekorian
The bill is currently in Assembly Appropriations Committee and won't move until January, but it's a very important piece of legislation that we hope will reach the governors desk and receive the governor's signature.
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.
How open source is it in canada? It is as open as it can ever get. It is done on paper. You get a pen and a piece of paper with a list of all the candidates from all the major parties and then some. It is all counted before the turn of the day and recounts are done within another. We've never had a problem.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Pretending that the free market can solve every problem known to man is beyond naive. The worst part is that Mr. Paul acknowledges that the military can't be disolved, but won't apply the same logic to more serious problems of civilized man: health care and information access.
The airwaves and telephone networks would not exist without public land, pretending that allowing one corporation to own all that spectrum or all those acres of land is good for the consumer is ridiculous. The market forces do not apply when the resource is of such a limited nature, the PEOPLE must regulate!
Similarly, the market can't decide when a surgery is a good idea. There isn't a profit opportunity there, it's humanities compassion for eachother and lust for life made manifest! Again, the PEOPLE have to take control of this, but Mr. Paul would again make no inroads on this issue...
He's better than most of the other candidates but IMHO his ideals get in the way of his reason...
There, no we can both be offtopic...
According to this paper
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
More than a haircut: He actually knows what's going on and what to do!
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.
the Edwards campaign stated that, "To ensure security, these machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records."
I know RTFA is uncalled for, or even RTFS, but maybe if I put this quote in the comments section I can head off the "It needs a paper-trail *snort*" comments. Already, those seem to make up 35% of the comments. Ron Paul comments seem to come in second at 25%, and comparisons to Canada and bad jokes seem tied at about 10-15% each.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Maybe they can tout the closed source system as: Yes, one man can make a difference*.
*Must be a Diebold programmer to qualify.
God spoke to me.
He could have asked Democracy what it's like being dead...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
This cynical shit is really annoying me. Do you seriously believe that every single senator and congressman out there wants to flout the constitution and destroy the American way? Are they really all as crooked as you like to think? Get a grip!
Bush may not be the most successful prez all round but he's been successful enough. And he's been a buttload more successful than leftie posterboys like Clinton.
Twatters for twitters?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Who cares if its open source or not, who actually compiles the code?
;)
Just cause you think you know what its running cause its in some source control doesn't make it so, i do it all the time on servers
It should be completely regulated from top to bottom, full accounting.
While not impossible to forge and cheat, as they say here in Chicago: vote early, vote often, but I liked the idea of a paper ballot.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
Oh, now the term is "Successful"? Is that a synonym for "a disaster"?
Not every senator and congressman is crooked, but some are. And those can apparently get into the white house. And not because of election fraud, which probably happened the first time, but because the people is stupid enough to re-elect them.
Yes, I expect so...
Wait, its not the same twitter? Oh that's good to know. I'd lost quite a bit of respect for John Edwards (what little I have for him considering I constantly get him confused with John Edward) when I thought he was using such blatant trolls for marketing.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Actually, the market can decide when surgery is a good idea. The problem is that the payer and the patient are different people. If you look at the history of healthcare costs, you will discover that the cost of healthcare began to rise significantly faster than inflation the year after Medicare began.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Anyone who argues that (for whatever reason) a software-based voting system cannot function incorrectly must first argue that it does not function incorrectly.
Seasoned programmers will recognize this as just another form of the well known fallacy about producing bug-free software.
Do not be lulled into a false sense of security or progress by efforts to require electronic voting machine software to be available for public review. It's a good idea at best, harmless at worst, but ultimately irrelevant unless a voter-verified, persistent, and authoritative paper trail is already mandated.
Cuntact your representatives: Support HR 811.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
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...
So let me get this straight.
Paper ballots cannot be lost, thrown out, replaced, or stuffed?
Just because there are flaws with the current implementation of electronic voting, you can't sit back and ignore how monumentally fragile the paper ballot voting system really is. Sure you can sit there and hand count a stack, but how can anyone ever prove that the stack is the exact same one cast by the voters?
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Absolutely. It's hard to emphasize how much the actual balloting system determines the outcome. The balloting system we have tends to push the outcome to a choice between extremes; it does not have any mechanism pushing toward center candidates-- the center gets eliminated before the election even starts. I'm a great fan of approval voting; it avoids a lot of the problems and doesn't eliminate the center candidates. (Condorcet voting is a bit too complicated for my taste; I think the balloting system should be more transparent than that). Ranked approval voting is fine as well (this is the one where each voter ranks each candate, say, from 1 to 10, and then you just add all the scores-- like reviewing a restaurant. Technically it has exactly the same advantages and disadvantages of approval voting, but people understand it, and since they understand it, they trust it. But if the voting machines can't be trusted, it doesn't matter what balloting system is used. And if you can't even tell whether a machine is counting accurately or not, you can't trust it. Every single voter should have the right to know what software is counting the votes.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
No, proprietary secret code is worse. You're right that open source counting software isn't a perfect solution that solves all possible ways of fraud. But it is still vastly better than secret code, which is nearly an open invitation to cheat without being noticed. Replacing hardware and even software is going to take a moderately well-orchestrated conspiracy. Crafting software with deliberately indetectable weak points takes one person, if nobody is allowed to see what the software is. A paper trail is still better.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He's a lawyer that used fraud science in the court room. Like channeling a dead fetus's thoughts. Or blaming any birth defect (including genetic ones or the mother being alcoholic) on the use of a natural birth rather than the more expensive, more invasive, and more error prone C-section. People like him are the reason doctors make decisions based on reducing legal liability, not on doing what's best.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No, not all politicians are corrupt and want to flout the Constitution. However, this administration has shown enough of its true colors in the past six years to make it entirely plausible (if not probable) that they felt they had a such a mandate from God or corporate America or whoever that they would circumvent the electoral process to gain office and start doing their thing "on behalf of the American people." Bush is a zealot, and zealots tend to think it's worth bending or breaking rules if need be to advance their agenda, just because they feel it's just that right and important.
So you could argue that he has the interests of the people so fervently in mind that he busted through the rules to get to where he could start helping all the faster (I wouldn't argue that myself, but one could). By that logic, he's a very well-meaning person trying to gain as much power as possible to do the most good.
That, however, still does not excuse stealing an election. It's not a valid election if votes are systematically ignored in certain areas (some votes will always miss being counted, but that should be a random and accidental occurrence, not entire precincts with a heavy slant toward one side being ignored). And if it's not a valid election, the winner is not a valid winner. It seemed like a big expense at the time to propose a new election, but in hindsight, it would have been a bargain compared to the money spent as a result of Bush being president.
To get back to the topic at hand, it's quite evident that you can, through legal wrangling, start or stop counts of votes regardless of whether they're on paper or electronic ballots. So electronic vs. paper doesn't hold much water. It's like arguing about whether to break a neighbor's window with an apple or an orange -- sure, there are differences in the hardware, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're breaking a window.
Transparent electronic would certainly be better than closed electronic, of course, but it's still always possible to throw enough lawyers at it to get certain blocks of votes counted or ignored. So I've never really understood some of the debate about paper vs. electronic -- the votes were there in Ohio in 2000, collected however they collected them. Can electronic machines be rigged to under-report in certain precincts? Sure, but here I tend to agree with you that that's a very deliberate act of sabotage that goes beyond what most people (even most zealots) would do. Same with destroying paper ballots. So the argument always seemed kind of academic to me -- whatever happens in a voting booth can be discarded by applying enough attorneys to the situation.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The polling machine is immaterial; the fraud that REALLY happens, and is the biggest problem happens BEFORE election day. Registration fraud is what everyone should worry about. If you can game the registration system, then you can cast as many votes as you want for your chosen candidate.
Trying to catch voter fraud at the polling booth is a waste of time; it's too late. What we need is a great way of scrubbing the voter registration lists, and then "firewalling" those against illegal registrations.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What if the voting machine told (not printed) you a temporary ID that wasn't tied to your real ID in any way. Then votes are always pushed to multiple publicly accessible listings and you can go home and verify how your vote was recorded with multiple sources.
Then the government could produce their results and independent groups could produce their own results based on publicly available information. Individuals could verify with multiple sources that their vote was counted accurately (so long as they can remember their temporary ID).
Enough people would be able to verify that their vote was accurately counted by the independent groups and the independent groups could verify that the government counted right. With this idea, where is the chink in the armor?
Let's spend billions of dollars for unverifiable results for machinery that is used once or twice a year and is likely useless in 5 or 6 years.
Orignator of the Miserable Failure Googlebomb
You forgot about his record as a trial lawyer - using junk science and a lack of ethics ("channeling" a dead babys thoughts, etc). The moderate electorate will be turned off by him, giving the election away. People are sick of Bush - they don't want such a deeply flawed candidate as their next president after having Bushit. Edwards is only doing so well because the spotlight is on Hillary - Obama.
Bush may not be the most successful prez all round but he's been successful enough.
Successful at what? Wasting trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and our military on his incompetence?
And he's been a buttload more successful than leftie posterboys like Clinton.
If by "leftie" you mean "right of center", yes the Clintons are that. You want a real left winger, you need to go to Cuba.
Reason magazine gives a good summary why the government shouldn't be involved with health care.
Reason is full of shit. Let's look at their claims:
But his radical prescriptions, which include a call for a British-style, single-payer system, will likely have little resonance with viewers.
The health insurance industry is in business to take premiums and deny claims. The movie is going to resonate with any American that has struggled to find decent insurance. It is going to resonate with any American who has had to pay through the nose for insurance. It's going to resonate with anyone who's had to fight their insurance provider to cover legitimate medical claims. And it will resonate with anyone who knows someone who has had a serious accident or illness but rapidly hit their benefit caps and have to run bake sales to cover medical costs.
As with much of his previous work, Moore's latest film is, by turns, touching, naïve and maddeningly mendacious, a clumsy piece of agitprop that will likely have little lasting effect on the health care debate.
And as with many of his previous films, Moore's critics are Pot calling the kettle Black. Case in point, Reason's naïvette and mendaciousness.
Take the case of four-year-old Elias Dillner. In 2004, Dillner's parents were told by doctors that their son too would benefit from cochlear implants. After being fitted with the first implant, Dillner's insurance provider said the second operation could not be "prioritized." The family would have to wait. "We will do anything," Elias's mother told reporters, "even if it means that we have to take out a loan for the operation." Without insurance, the second procedure would likely cost $40,000. But Dillner's truculent insurance provider was not Aetna or Kaiser, but the notoriously generous Swedish welfare state, where health care is "free."
Ah, the right wing's #1 tool in arguing against torts, unions, and nationalized health care: the anecdote. And then the Moore haters accuse him of "cherry picking". Reason spends the rest of their article doing just that: cherry picking.
But let's go ahead and ignore the statistics that prove that the U.S. lags far behind other industrialized nations, and for the sake of argument say that the U.S. system is no worse than Canada's or France's. But at least under socialized medicine, at least you wouldn't be throwing away trillions of dollars at useless middle men. Anyone who defends U.S. health care system is either ignorant, a Libertarian loon, or a tool for the insurance industry.
Further, Dr. Paul certainly knows much more about the health care system than you or I.
Dr. Paul seems to have real convictions and integrity, which in today's Republican party is like getting a shot of novocain after a root canal. But he's still a Libertarian loon.
You can't seriously expect me to put the fate of the free world in the hands of someone who decides that Twitter is useful, can you?
Yeah except that's a misplaced candidate name is a highly visible change and easy to prove and enforce.
You take a picture of the screen and cry bloody murder and it'll get fixed; if the machine registers your vote erroneously and you don't have a paper trail, you're SOL. It's your word against the official record.