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.'"
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.
Actually, organizing to avoid fragmenting is what causes partisanship. Duvergers law.
Condorcet and/or approval voting solves this problem, but until we have that, we're stuck with partisanship and all the screwiness of plurality elections.
We can't, and shouldn't. Being a geek is only one small part of who we are as human beings. Technology issues are important to us, and in that sense we could all probably get together on who supports the positions we espouse the best.
The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war. There's the "war on terrorism." There's the issue of things like the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's immigration and visas. Of course on top of all these relatively new (or updated) issues, we have issues like education, health care, social security, civil liberties, privacy, economic policy, foreign policy, taxes, plus many others.
These are all far more important and far-reaching issues, and ones where there will be a lot of different and valid view points. We should vote for the person we believe best supports our entire range of issues, rather than trying to band together to support the biggest technology geek running for office at the time.
We should all vote our consciences in that regard. What we geeks should do, however, is band together on these technology issues where we mostly tend to agree and become an influential force on those specific topics, regardless of who we voted for in a particular election or who ended up in office.
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!