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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.
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.
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.
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!
But is the paper distributed under a GPL???? Is it some proprietary paper, or is it open source??
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
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.
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.
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...