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A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
H.R.811 sounds great: It's stated purpose is "to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot." Unfortunately, it sounds like the details have some devils, as usual. From the Bev Harris article Is a flawed bill better than no bill?: "[T]he Holt Bill provides for a paper trail (toilet paper roll-style records affixed to DRE voting machines) in 2008, requires more durable ballots in 2010, and requires a complex set of audits. It also cements and further empowers a concentration of power over elections under the White House, gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting, mandates an expensive 'text conversion' device that does not yet exist which is not fully funded, and removes 'safe harbor' for states in a way that opens them up to unlimited, expensive, and destabilizing litigation." Update: 07/11 16:23 GMT by KD : Derek Slater writes "EFF's e-voting expert Matt Zimmerman recently published this article separating the myths about HR 811 from the facts, and countering many of the misleading and outright false claims being made about it."
Other than that, it's ok.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Type "Wii" to much and you start producing words like "Biill".
I knew I was a PHP ubergeek when I found myself typing "mysql" automatically whenever I meant to type "myself" in e-mails (and I did it typing this sentence and had to correct it, I kid you not!).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
My opinion is that the US election system has become too cumbersome/complicated for the average person. I'm Canadian, and I find voting very simple. Federal elections require me to check 1 box. That's it. There is about 7? boxes to choose from depending on which riding you are located in. Each box shows the name of the representative of a specific party. Provincial elections are the same, although there's usually less boxes. Municipal elections are actually the most complicated, in which I have to vote for Mayor, Councillor, and school board trustee. There's too many options on the US ballot, and having different ballots for every state or county when people are electing the president just makes things overly complicated. There would be no need for voting machines if people weren't voting on 75 different issues for every election. A simple pencil and paper ballot works a lot better.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The dems are fighting against this admin, accuse it of being corrupt (which it obviously is), is possibly about to lose the ability to monitor the WH (if they lose the up-coming battle in SCOTUS), and YET, they want to put voting admin under the WH.
In addition, they are removing from the states, saying that closed systems are fine, as well as dictating exactly how a complicated paper trail will be handled.
Offhand, I am guessing that this has MS written ALL over it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How about a machine running Tivo-style Linux (so you can't mess with the software) that lets the user pick one out of several choices, then prints a receipt and says "Does the receipt match the screen?". It's /not/ /that/ /hard/.
On top of the usual politicking and industry appeasement, there is the fact that there is only one engineer in congress now, and he's a civil.
If as our fearless leaders say "the future of America is the knowledge worker and innovator" then we must start electing a few (or more) people with technical backgrounds.
For this to happen, some of us introverted technical folks are going to have to swallow that and run for office.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The bill looks like it creates far more problems than it repairs...and doesn't repair the problems it is supposed to in the first place.
I'm a right-winger who doesn't think there is much to the election fraud arguments, and even I think that there needs to be a paper trail for voting. We don't need new laws to fix the problem, new bureaucracies...if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process. BOTH sides of the aisle look bad on election matters right now, and no real practical solution has arisen out of Washington yet.
So that's a vote registered to Diebold, right?
...for a better "nutshell" summary than the one in TFA. I read the whole thing, the actual whole thing, including all the comments with the bad avatar-like photos, and I'm still confused about why this Holt Bill is so bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying I don't know. Most of all, I don't particularly trust the summary of someone who then goes on to argue against a bill, mainly by just repeating the same comments over and over again with no deeper explanation.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
is the dead tree solution without any computers in site. Anything else is bad for everyone except Diebold.
The more power the white house gets, the more corrupt it will become - regardless of which party is there.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I guess if they're going to quit pretending to count my vote, maybe I can quit pretending it matters, and I can stay home and wait for the results on teevee like every one else. What a time-saver!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
> a voter-verified permanent paper ballot
yeah, but will it blend?
I reckon we should ask Hillary.
>[T]he Holt Bill provides for a paper trail (toilet paper roll-style records
How fitting. I think all federal documents should be thus produced.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process.
Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
--"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there."
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
"trade secrets in vote counting"
Hell, fellas - it's not that complicated.
My sig sucks.
Not the federal Gov... WHY is there ANY bills from the federal government side about elections even being considered?
.02$...
"also cements and further empowers a concentration of power over elections under the White House"
DAH! Power breeds Power!
I'm not for either Dems or Replublicans, I'm for the United STATES of America... STATES is where the power comes from people! The Federal government can only do what the States let them... WE Are the BASE of those states... Call your Rep(s) and tell them what you think... At the State level they should decide what type of voting to do... old or electronic, etc... The Federal side should just be timeframe to get the counts into the auditors and then to the House. Anything else in tampering with the STATES election results.
Personally, I liked the old way... We had a paper and a punch. Easy to track... It wasn't until "chads" came into question etc.. in the old days it would be a dead vote. plain and simple.
THE IDIOTS! It's not rocket science, but obviously we've dumbed down our citizens too much. and BOTH sides try to take advantage of it.
Just my
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
if we don't even verify that only qualified citizens are voting. It's absurd that photo identification is not required to vote.
is it okay to publish buggy software? Yes Will you get yelled at by the community for exploits? Yes Are you really going to care what people think? No, because their going to accept it anyway and ill make lots of money $_$
I was sleeping last night and this came to me in a vision. How about we have all of the major television networks choose a candidate. They will all appear on TV during the same block of time. Then we just check with Nielsen. The candidate with the highest rating wins...
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting
WTF? What's wrong with the open-sourced way we have been counting since humans first figured out they have 10 fingers?
Seriously, what are we really talking about here that is so damn revolutionary that the system requires trade secrecy? Touch screens and scanners? Printer drivers? Encryption? Some minor networking?
It's the government. Companies build things to spec all the time. If Diebold and the rest think this kind of stuff is so proprietary then don't bid. I am sure there are hundreds of small outfits that can do this work and would love to write to a spec, release the code, collect the bounty and live prosperously ever after.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Am I the only one that thinks that needing a computer to vote is absolutely ridiculous?! What a waste of money!
The best solution IMHO is to simply use optically scan-able bubble sheets. They are accurate, quick to count and straightforward to use.
You can also offer a computer to assist those with physical limitations that can fill out the bubble sheet for them.
This would involve investing in much fewer computers.
http://blackboxvoting.org/ has the best solution. The machine that fills out the ballot, does not do the counting of the ballots. The ballots are paper ballots with names of candidates and filled circles next to names so they can be read and counted by computers OR humans. The ballots can be filled out by hand, if needed, or by a fancy eletreonick votin' macheenee. After the machine spits it out, the voter can inspect it and verify it before walking across the room and depositing it into the ballot box.
But there is a bigger problem. First, there is no constitutional right to vote in federal elections. Second, we have too may DUMBASSES voting.... voting to line their own pockets, or voting how they are told to vote. It should be HARDER to vote. There should be a citizenship test in order to register to vote.
I like Robert Heinlein's vision -- you want to vote, then you have to serve your country FIRST.
I think it is hilarious... people screamed for eletreonick votin' macheenes. Then they got them, and THEN they discovered that of all the methods of voting, the most reliable (still not perfect) is the old paper ballot.
If Yes then the ballot is moved into a box and the tally is tallied.
At the closing of the voting day, several precincts are selected at random and their paper ballots are counted by hand. If the hand count agrees with the machine count, then the other precincts are counted via their machine counts and the vote count is published.
NB, no ballot counts are published until the hand count is verified.
This preserves the sanctity of the voter's vote. It has nothing to do with making "Bozo and Bozette at 6 and 10" happy.
Would it be legal to bet on which politician annually is identified as the worse politician in the United States?
... I would damn sure start voting again with a few
Would it be legal to bet on which politician will wipe their ass with The USA Constitution and Citizens next?
If Vegas could come up with odds and fair-games that could tally
nationally and internationally the worse/best "in office"
politician
bets in Vegas.
I mean, I think, we can't legally sell our vote or bet on elections; However, our votes (most of the time) count on the basis of the amount of money expended by the elected official; so, why not have betting pools that pays out every year on criminal a/o poor-performance politicians. On December 31 we could place our votes/IP and/or credit card name/address, then be given an option to make our bet on any elected federal politician. The vote counts, but the payout is proportional to the winners who pick the biggest looser politician in Washington DC (on pool national another international) all US Citizens could vote twice. Then on Jan 01, the losers would be announced to the public.
Well anyway, it would be as democratic as anything else today in the USA [got money, place a bet!].
Would it be (who cares about fair) legal?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Not trying to piss anyone off, but why in the world are things being made so complicated? The basic requirements of a voting machine should not be able to fit on a single sheet of paper. Instead, once business interests and beaurocratic verbal expansion take hold things get really complicated and messy. In Canada, and I'm sure elsewhere, people walk up to a school or other public building, say hi to someone at one of three or four tables, show some ID, get a pencil and paper ballot, vote behind a cardboard screen, then submit the ballot. I know that in the US people vote for more things in federal elections, but more things are also voted for in Canadian municipal elections, and paper and pencil work just fine for that too. Increased complexity brings with it the chance for useless spending of money and failures in the system.
Is it to find out the results a half hour earlier? Is that really necessary (and worth the investment of a computer at every voting booth)?
Just have people fill out the bubble sheet. Have the voter put the bubble sheets in a locked box. Open the box when voting is over and have the scanner count the votes. That way, there isn't a computer needed at every voting booth.
Why do we need all these extra computers???? What a waste of money!!!
Some of the objections given at the beginning of the article seem to be worth considering. The straw man debate that follows is just idiotic, however. It might be useful to look at what some actual supporters have to say, supporters like the EFF, Prof. Ed Felten, Ars Technica, the Brennan Center for Justice, People of the American Way, TrueVoteMD, and Prof. Avi Rubin to name a few.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
I haven't yet read my morning IQ dropping discussion thread on how evil, oppressive, etc, the current administration is. Please help me out I need to dumb down in order to make it through my next couple of meetings.
Here's an idea I'd like to throw out there:
Make the title of the article "A US Election Reform Bill", describe the bill in the summary, and the LET THE READER decide if it's flawed or not.
It's crazy I know, but they used to do stuff like that. I think they called it journalism.
The damage is already done. We've already had almost 8 years of the anti-Christ in office thanks to the flawed election system. This is like fixing the barn door after the animals have all escaped, and been run over by speeding 18 wheelers, or eaten by wolves, or killed by neighbors wielding elephant guns, or... you get the picture.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
wonder if there's a block of voters out there thinking that using computers to vote is a good idea? Seriously. I'm asking because I don't know.
/. opinion on the matter I'm led to believe that a small group of people somewhere is ramming electronic voting through local/state/federal government. If there was ever an example of how corrupt the workings of American Government are, I'd say this is it.
Regardless of
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
By adding a voter-verifiable paper trail, it addresses by far the most serious problem with DRE voting machines. Using the rationale that we shouldn't pass it because it leaves some problems unsolved is making the perfect the enemy of the good. This is the way many activist communities shoot themselves in the foot. As for limiting the states, as I understand it this doesn't. From the EFF:
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Don't like the election results, sue to change them.
While in principal I agree that every vote counts, and every vote is sacred... [deep breath] An election is a system. It is a machine. It has to have SOME fault-tolerance.
:-)) to administer a fault-critical system... Let's fix the fault-critical system.
But when one vote can swing one state can swing one electoral bloc can swing one election can swing one world climate/political landscape/economy... THAT is a BSOD waiting to happen. With the ability to count 99.994% of the votes instantly, the need for the Electoral College is obviated. Instead of using a fault-ridden system (Imagine if the voting system was as buggy as WinME
LOSE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!!!
Then, if one precinct gets utterly lost or corrupted, then it dings the POPULAR vote tallies. The same person wins the election AND gets inaugurated. The only people who REALLY are affected by a tolerable tolerance of fault will be the Bookies in Vegas who handle the point spreads.
The Electoral College was a necessity in it's day when bandwidth was REALLY REALLY low. We may need it again, when votes within the United States of the Virgo Cluster are counted... but till then, abolish the Electoral College, even though it takes a Constitutional Amendment. We need to do this while we still have a Constitution to amend.
You might be wondering why Bev Harris and others think this bill is awful, after there was so much net-roots support for the Holt bill early on. I did. It turns out the areas of disagreement are:
1) Some of the critics of the Holt bill believe that computers should not be involved in the electoral process at all. This is not a wholly unreasonable opinion, given the electronic voting machines we've seen used in past elections. However, paper systems aren't perfect either, albeit having different failure modes. Thus there would seem to be an opportunity here to improve the system even over paper alone by using both computers and paper and have them check each other.
2) There are some potentially useful reforms that are omitted from the present bill. Critics would argue that they are essential. Supporters would argue that they are not essential and would make the bill much harder to pass. That's not to say they're unimportant, but as others have so aptly put it: is an imperfect bill better than no bill? That's a hard question. The good is often enemy of the best, and sometimes good is good enough, and sometimes not.
3) There are disagreements about some of the logistics of implementation, some of which the critics view as paramount. In particular, there's controversy over whether this gives the Election Assistance Commision too much power, whether the federal government has the authority to impose these rules on the states, etc. Supporters would view these more as simply details, that this isn't about whether the EAC or federal government ought to be involved, but rather to what precise extent they should be involved. I'm not familiar enough with all the issues to be able to discern where the optimal balance is here.
The liberal tinfoil here just keeps getting better. Kooksville man. Next thing the slashtards will be saying is that 9/11 conspiracy theories are "news for nerds, stuff that matters". This site is DEAD!
Well this is how it is done over in Sweden at least...
You get an envelope. You stick a bit of paper in it which holds the relevant information. It is counted, by hand, within 24 hours.
Now ok, the US has a larger population, but that also means you have a larger number of people to do the counting.
I really don't see why you need an advanced computer system to do this once every couple of years. Keep it simple, keep it open, and keep it manual. It works.
As long as the incumbent parties are involved, the process will remain suspect. Ballot stuffing occurs on BOTH sides of the isle, as well as trying to restrict (enable) who can vote. Both (D) and (R) do it. And if it wasn't (D) or (R) it would be someone else afraid of losing power.
The point being, all the laws in the world are not going to prevent vote tampering. The process will NEVER be perfect, the best we can do is LIMIT the fraud so that the elections aren't thrown because of fraud. In the case of EXTREMELY close elections, decided by a few vote, there will always be accusations of impropriety. I suggest that they have RUN off elections if votes are that close.
Chances of fraud being perpetrated twice without detection is extremely low.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Politicians continue to destroy the country, the world, and life in general. Doing their job as usual I see.
Tell me again why anyone even votes at all.
Part of the beauty of the US is that each state can experiment with different ideas. Ideally, in turn, each state can learn from the successes and mistakes of others. If all states were doing the same thing, then you would potentially miss out on way to do it even better. In general, the less that the federal government imposes on the states, the better. Similarly, in general, the less that the state government imposes on the local governments, the better. Sure, there are places where it's appropriate, but unless there's a strong overriding reason to get involved, larger governments should allow smaller governments to make their own decisions.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Overall, though, what difference is all this going to make if they do not require some kind of voter ID card that has a photo attached to it? Sure, everyone calls up the scenario of the Chicago Mayoral Elections and Mayor Daly (father of the current mayor)... but that was just a blatant one where you had registered voters casting their votes from six feet under. How many other ballots get stuffed by people who are very much alive but not registered voters for whatever reason (e.g., they're not US citizens or they let their registration elapse)? These auditing changes will only do a small fraction of the job. If you do not require voters to produce a photo ID showing that they are legally registered to vote in that district, it doesn't matter what else you do.
With all the new technology, however, one would think that with a valid photo ID with a magnetic stripe, a registered voter could go to any polling place in the nation, swipe his or her card, and see the ballot on the machine in front of them that would be presented to him as if he had gone to his primary polling place. The vote would be registered and counted. No need for absentee ballots, unless you travel outside of the country.
OCO is Loco
Ugh, I hate how there has to be a federal government solution to everything. Since the states elect the president, senators, and representitives, the states should be the ones to handle election issues. When the feds do it, we get stuck with a one-size-fits-none, pork-laden, money-pit, lobbyist-attached "solution".
Most states (all the red states from 2004) are welfare states and depend heavily upon federal funding (which comes from prosperous states, all blue states from 2004.) Since the funding is decided at a federal level the states are already being heavily influenced by their federal funding; even the hard working blue states want some of their money to come back their way. (To be fair, its not entirely because red states are primitive, its because they are being bought by the GOP with money from 'Democrat' states. )
We are already well on our way to despotism. US Elections are broken.
Its certainly true that current voting machines have terrible security. But if you put even secure machines under the control of the current Whitehouse, would you have any more confidence in the results? Even with a paper trail, chances are some of the paper trails would be "lost". That's probably going to happen occasionally in the normal course of events, so adding a few more for nefarious purposes could be hard to detect, though it would probably prevent you manipulating anything other than a close result.
Squirrel!
Say 'open source'.
As I understand it TiVo uses a GPL-covered operating system and related utilities to implement closed-source proprietary binaries. A voting machine that did that would be no better than one that used only closed-source binaries for the purposes of public auditing.
BTW: a little manners go a long way.
Maybe the GOP won't be able to steal another election?
Oh wait!
Aren't the GOP just the "Dark Side" of the Democrats?
Demublicans?
Republicrats?
Only one party in reality?
No viable third/fourth party/parties equal something very much like the Communist "one party" system, or just a dictatorship.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Spelling matters.
In the USA, people get to vote on all manner of different positions which, in other countries, are appointed by the government. They not only vote for politicians, at the state and local level they vote for judges, police chiefs, chief prosecutors, chiefs of fire departments, the members of the school administration board (this is how the crazy creationists occasionally try to impose creationist textbooks on school)...and on and on it goes. In some states, there will also be a number of citizen-initiated referenda on the ballot. I am utterly unconvinced that such a multitude of elected positions is actually a good idea, and hamstringing elected officials with CIRs is also not great (proposition 1: the government should cut taxes. Proposition 2: the government should offer more services. Hey, they both sound good, let's vote for both!), but it does create a strong logistical case for more elaborate voting technology.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The EFF is behind this bill, and that's more than enough stamp of approval for me.
For those without the time or energy to read Slater's response to the FUD being flung at the bill, the bottom line is that it creates a minimum standard of accountability for federal elections.
Individual states can (and should!) require even more transparency; this law would force those without any transparency at all to open up quite a bit.
Heading is now "A Flawed US Election Reform Biill".
Probably in a few hours this stupid typo will be fixed, and my post will be modded troll. But just for the record.... Why the fuck can't the editors spellcheck?
And also, I predict they won't fix or notice the mistake in the first line: "It's stated purpose is..."
"It's" == "It is". Possessive is "Its".
{Reposted as the original has disappeared as a "troll".)
I note all came to pass: headline typo fixed, text typo ignord, post modded troll.
Just remember, the House is controlled by one party right now. That party created HR811. So, those who voted them in, you gets what you paid for.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
(Yes, I'm ducking.)
Perhaps problems with the audit protocols could be solved, but there's a difference between "problems" and "unpatriotic heresy." The Holt Bill audits are joined at the hip with unpatriotic heresy. According to Holt:
If you want audits, you must put control over elections under four White House appointees.
If you want audits, you must capitulate to Microsoft and various voting industry vendors and give up the public right to examine the software that controls the vote counting.
- These audits have the EAC, the four presidential appointees, getting in between voters and certification of elections. The bill calls the EAC "The Commission," like something out of a John Grisham novel. It's in there at least 32 times. These audits force the states to go to "The Commission" for approval of their audits. The states have to submit their report to "The Commission" before they can certify their elections!
These so-called "audits" produce false confidence -- no intelligent selection, no attention to red flags, no surprise factor, and no forensic investigations when audits do not match.
Destabilization - The rocket scientists that came up with this audit plan decided to make an untested and complex procedure into federal law. Yes, folks, they want to implement an untested procedure simultaneously in 10,000 jurisdictions at once on a single mission-critical day. You wouldn't open a chain of pizza parlors with this kind of a rollout schedule, yet it's okay for an event that controls the future of the free world.
And hey, GANTT chart, anyone? Next these rocket scientists constructed an audit protocol with a killer dependency in the first step and a fixed, immovable deadline at the end. No precincts can be selected for audit until ALL precincts in the state have committed and published their results. So if one blue-haired lady in any of California's 11,000 or so precincts loses her memory cards, the whole election comes to a grinding halt while she tries to find them.
It typically takes up to two weeks for every precinct and absentee batch to be committed. And that's just when they decide WHICH PRECINCTS to audit. No one knows how long the audits actually take, because these audit protocols have never been used anywhere at all. And there is no mention of what to do when the audit uncovers discrepancies.
The Constitution requires that by a time certain -- a specific day in mid-December -- the presidential election MUST be called. Audit, meet brick wall. Hello constitutional crisis.
There is a difference between something that's got problems and something that is dangerous. This bill is dangerous.
Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
That is my opinion exactly, if you'll forgive my southern drawl:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Fix the precincts that are broken... i.e., Miami-Dade County. If they had just fixed the one precinct that screwed up, rather than force feeding these reprehensible, hack-in-a-box, miserable excuses for security holes to the states, without even funding them for the mistakes, then everyone there would feel accomplished, they'd continue to screw up the election, and Ohio wouldn't have had any trouble. As is, neither state's voting populace believes their vote was counted properly, and it's just as likely that they're right since there's barely even an electronic trail to follow and almost no paper trail.
I like the optical scan ballot (paper with arrows to be joined by marker and scanned into the database). We use them here in Madison County (Huntsville), AL, too. There's a voter verified paper trail and an electronic tally without the mistake that is magnetic digital storage. All it would take to wipe an election record on those "ATMs" is a well placed EMP. You wouldn't even have to get into the building in some places.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
Black Box Voting is opposed to counting votes in secret. Computers count votes in secret, with a debatable conversation point as to whether, IF they were open source, they would still be counting votes in secret. Return to that in a minute -- I think there is no viable debate as to whether computers with proprietary trade secret software count your votes in secret. They do.
If the government counts your votes in secret, using trade secret proprietary software held in the sole custody of governmental officials, have they not just removed The People's sovereignty? If a government insider or his private contractors control the counting of your vote, in secret, you can only alter your governance if those with custody and/or programming skills happen to be honest. What this means is, quite simply, your system of government will become progressively more corrupt.
Open Source: There are three issues with open source as it pertains to counting votes in secret.
1) It is difficult to enforce open source requirements for subcomponents, like motherboard chips and hardware drivers, since so many are manufactured by foreign corporations
2) It presents challenges to confirm that the software/hardware configuration running on any given day is precisely the same one as people have been examining with the open source software.
3) Even if 1) and 2) were not issues, the concept of citizens being sovereign over their government has generally been interpreted to mean average citizens of average skills. Freedom of Information laws, for example, don't say "expert citizens can review documents" they say "any person." The use of complex configurations of hardware and software for elections imposes worse than a literacy test on citizen oversight.
Forty-five percent of New Hampshire jurisdictions hand count ballots, in public, at the polling place, and even with complex ballots containing many questions and precincts as large as 3,000 votes (triple the U.S. average), they get results completed on Election night.
When viewed not in terms of mechanics, but in terms of the ability of The People to exert sovereign control over their government, a properly administered hand count system provides benefits of public inspection (i.e. freedom of information and contemporaneous 100% audit) and participation by citizens of average skill and experience which cannot be matched by computer voting systems. And, even when all poll workers and counters are paid, properly administered hand count systems cost approximately one-fifth as much to run as computerized voting.
Before you say "you can cheat with a hand count system" -- that statement, repeated often by computer voting advocates, makes assumptions about the procedures. When done correctly, at the polling place, it's difficult to game the system even if the government insiders happen to be crooks.
Whatever we do about elections, it needs to be framed in terms of citizens ability to control the instruments of government that we have created, and citizens right to know.
That's the litmus test, not what mechanics are used to achieve it.
Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
This bill changes the very foundation of our governmental structure. It is the structures that have to protect us, not the people. Focus on structure: Does the bill protect your inalienable rights or put them in danger.
Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
blackboxvoting.org
Before you say "yes, but with optical scan at least you CAN count the ballots," no, you can't. Not in many states. Not without a statistical test that allows a recount. And not without huge fees, except in New Hampshire, where any candidate can get a hand recount of anything, inexpensively. In my state (Washington) it is illegal for an elections administer to hand count ballots if they think there is something wrong. That's called an "unauthorized recount." And in San Diego, citizens would have had to pay over $600,000 to take advantage of California's law allowing citizens to purchase a recount.
Computers count just about all votes now, just about everywhere.
Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
blackboxvoting.org
What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.
1) On some issues elected officials, just by being elected officials, have (or perceive) a conflict-of-interest with the voters and thus have a strong incentive to vote in non-representative ways. (Example: Raising taxes.)
2) There are a large number of issues. It's often impossible to find (or elect) a candidate that has the same opinions on all the important issues as the people he represents. In that case the candidate is elected on the basis of some common set of very important issues. Then the electorate can override the legislature on those issues where the body as a whole is non-representative.
3) Sometimes there are important and divisive issues where the politicians don't want to take the flack for their own position or where the politicians know the makeup of the legislature is not representative. They can send these directly to the voters and take no personal flack, retaining their seats if they otherwise act in their constituents' interest.
The representatives do the bulk of the day-to-day stuff but when something close and important comes up or the legislature gets out of hand a direct poll is less of a "game of telephone" than having the representatives try to interpret the "will of the people".
Meanwhile, all this stuff is at the STATE level. The federal government doesn't have these mechanisms. (The closest they have is when they delegate important issues - such as constitutional amendments and interim legislative replacement appointments - to the state legislatures or governors.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In our neighborhood, which is a "progressive, 2-miles-from-campus" neighborhood, queue waiting times in 2004 were 1.5 hours.
In neighborhoods closer to campus, liberal areas and in-town areas, queue waiting times averaged 3 hours, extending in rare cases up to 9 hours.
In outlying, ex-urban, well-off neighborhoods, queue waiting times rarely exceeded 25 minutes.
A local advocate told me this weekend that when he set up a gathering after the 2004 election to allow people to describe their experiences, he hoped to see 20-40 people. Instead the meeting overflowed, with at least 500 people complaining that they either could not vote due to the long wait, or experienced even more direct interference.
I live in Ohio; the 2004 presidential election was a record-breaker in the number, depth and significance of the issues on the ballot. This had the effect on extending voter decision times, further exacerbating the machine allocation problem.
Correlation is not causation, but usually invites further investigation. Intentional or not, the 2004 election in Ohio had serious problems, which should be fixed. Electronic voting systems can serve as a "precious resource", subject to misallocation. Paper ballot systems on the other hand offer the potential for parallelized voter decision making, reducing opportunity for the sort of manipulation that I saw in 2004.
They are used to tell the parties how many times their operatives still need to vote late on election day.
That's the reason some districts suddenly have long lines appear an hour before the polls close (St. Louis is the most blatant example in recent elections, some districts have routine 105% voter turnouts, strangely no investigations).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As the old saying goes, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice - in practice, there is."
Still, if more members of "the vast left-wing conspiracy" would find fit to use the states rights mantra at least when it benefited them, perhaps more moderates would see the value in the argument. (I'm personally somewhere between moderate and part of "the vast left-wing conspiracy".)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
All we need now are valid candidates worth voting for.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
For Electronic Voting:: 14,441
Against Electronic Voting:: -0
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
People can just not rig elections?
I think I'm on to something here! Honesty and integrity in politics.
Um.... huh?
So when the votes are counted, they can count them however the hell they wish and don't have to tell anyone?
A ballot for "A" is worth 1 billion votes but a ballot for "B" is worth 1 billionth of a vote?