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New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."
Minor "Big?"
Here's the link that should have been in the summary, to the post in Ed Felten's blog, Freedom to Tinker, complete with images of the paper tape in question.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Make up your mind.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
This is getting old. Nobody in Government wants to say anything against this, as they might just end up on the wrong side of an upset vote. The people don't care as long as the majority doesn't feel disenfranchised. The minority can't do anything, because the majority doesn't care.
I guess I'm a dork for enjoying the second-order kind of humor in that statement.
So what the hell do you expect? This is New Jersey, whose various governments have a reputation for corruption that makes the chicago machine green with envy. Someone is benefiting from the use of these voting machines, payment for them, support of them, transport of them, incumbent protection by them... oh hell, its New Jersey; all of the above!
So many stories have "the company did this" or "the company denied that." Aren't these companies made up of people?
I can imagine an effort by management to cut corners and maximize profits at the expense of quality and company reputation, but is there really no one in a position of first hand knowledge who knows better?
With the multitudes of avenues for anonymous communications, it's not like I'm asking someone to put their job on the line. (Not that it would be too much to ask. There are people out there risking their lives in a very real way to protect this country. You won't even risk a job you most likely hate anyway?)
I think the scary part is that the small error is definitive proof that the voting machines are wrong, but that there is no mention of a method in NJ for the poll workers to go back and check out that there really were X number of votes for each candidate.
The thing that is important for the integrity of the election is that there is a verified paper "receipt" that the voter has checked and dropped into a box that can't be tampered with.
Sure, the summary print outs are "nice" for instant access to the results, but there isn't really a good reason not to have a bi-partisan check of the paper records at the end of the day.
After 5 or 6 election cycles are validated with this computer/receipt method, then we could start to put more trust in the machines... but Diebold and their ilk have proven time-and-time again that they cannot design voting machines that stand up to scrutiny of even the simplest checks (like Felten's comparison between total votes and reported number of total voters).
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
You have a "Perfect Storm" of apathetic voters, an administration that has displayed its contempt for democracy at every turn and aggressively appointed people who place ideology above honour and country to positions affecting all levels of government, a company that has exhibited at every opportunity a predilection for cover-ups, a House and Senate that have abrogated their role in the checks and balances equation, and a judiciary that has similarly abandoned its responsibility to remain independent of politics.
What the hell did you expect?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Your country's elections are screwed up!
How'd your elections get to be such a mess?! USA - the 'bastion' of democracy, and you can't even organise a fair, verifiable election.
You might want to take a quick look at how so many other nations manage with just paper ballots and pens. Don't forget kids, K.I.S.S.!
I am bald
I don't mean the security of the evoting process - that is very hard.
But getting the numbers to add up?? Come on - that should be trivial. If they're FBARing that, I have absolutely no faith in the rest of it.
Kinda hard to blame this on "Bushco" or "Hallibushitler", but I'm sure the barking moonbats will try anyway.
I'm going to so laugh my ass off when Barack Obama finally goes down in flames. Or, even better, when he's sworn in as President and doesn't withdraw the US from Iraq.
...and, you know, the voting machines fell off the back of a truck - if you know what I mean - which is why the state was able to get them "wholesale". You got a problem with that? I got your warranty right here.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
or does "worse than originally thought" define the daily dose of reality we Americans keep receiving?
Then again, maybe they *were* using Sequoia's gear
Here's the real story. Just in case you missed it. Diebold has already accidentally leaked the 2008 election results. Warning - Stupid non-skip 10 second ad before story.
-b
Are e-voting news and problems covered in US print media? Is there some form of discussion or is it just too technical?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I think the number one reason people are suspecting corruption and election tampering is the idea that adding one (1) is somehow a complicated action to perform. And that is the basic operational notion behind voting after all.
But why aren't people outraged? I think it's because we, the people, don't believe our votes count anyway and so none of this comes as a surprise. There may have been a time when men with pistols and rifles might gather and demand a recount, but guess what? We don't have gun ownership any more... at least not the kind that we had in the past. And if a group of people with guns gathered together for just about any reason at all, I think the potential outcome would be easy to guess based on recent historical events.
I really don't think our votes count. They don't because of a variety of reasons prior to the ballot being printed. Independents don't stand a chance... even the people who are actually pretty well liked by most. The news media is incredibly biased. When debates are being held, lots of people are simply not allowed to even participate. Some states such as Texas even have laws that state you cannot participate in getting an independent on the ballot if you have voted in any party primaries. The end result is that we can "vote" for whoever we want... but the selection is more or less out of our hands.
If people really believed their votes counted, they would be outraged. The lack of rage is a pretty telling indication that the people aren't interested in voting irregularities in the least. If there were irregularities in their bank statements, their phone bill or their paychecks, they'd be outraged to the point of violence as is often the case when such issues occur. So if outrage is an indicator of how much someone cares when things go wrong, then I'd say people are more upset over [literally] spilled milk than they are over elections.
That is why Sequoia sued all of the Princeton CS Profs and hired some drunk named Mike Gibbons to do the same thing that the Profs were going to do for free:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5849
The profs may have come up with their own conclusions, instead of just signing the ones that were handed to them the first minute they walked onto the job. - There's your problem.
it says a lot. If the feds had required that ALL machines had to have open code and closed boxes (i.e. truly locked down), then no doubt that a number of other companies would have come forward. And they would have sold it at a much cheaper price. But the problem is not just that the feds allow this, but it appears that a number of their policies ENCOURAGE this. It would be like the feds telling states that they had to allow only 1 republican to count all the votes.
To paraphrase an obvious progenitor of these kind of politicians said, "it is not who votes that counts, it is the vote counter that is important". Apparently, these politicians who push these kind of laws and rules are true descendants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
that members of this site haven't started an open source project around developing an OS and maybe a basic hardware specification for cheap E-voting machines.
Considering how many people get upset every time some article like this comes up and the expertise many claim that this hasn't occurred to anyone yet. I'm no programmer (outside of incredibly simple perl scripts) so "I" couldn't do it but I can't imagine that members of the Slashdot community would do any worse than these asshats. Besides, even if they did do a crappy job it would be open source so that security hats could look through it and point to all of the bugs for fixing.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Someone made this comparison in an older post and i think it is key to making people see the point: gambling machines are required by law to go through a very stringent and thorough set of checks, including source code examination, in order to be certified for use. Why we don't do the EXACT same thing with voting machines is ABSOLUTELY beyond me. It makes perfect sense and it is insane that we don't. -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Nope.
The difference between the two devices is one is gaming HUGE income generator for Government. In order to keep the poor schmucks at the poker machines, they contribute to the scheme by certifying the devices. Voting infrastructure is all costs and the only people that benefit are the contractor and the representatives the contractor is paying.
You seem to have forgotten that government is supposed to be run more like a business.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The minority can't do anything
And there's your excuse for you and the ~4 moderators let sleeping dogs lie.
It's partially your fault for not participating. Own up and get involved in the voting process.
Or, maybe you'll have another excuse for doing nothing.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
There have been a number of stories posted here and at Digg about payouts that were voided because of courts siding with casinos when they declared the winner only won because of a bug or the jackpot was wrong because of a bug.
So they aren't a great example.
Its not like either party wants it fixed, they do far better crying an election was stolen than do actual work.
It also gives them an out, elections are the ultimate ego bitch slap, its no fun when people don't vote for you and you lose, it means people didn't like you and that hurts
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I get the joke, but..
One of the interesting things about the situation, is that New Jersey apparently does not own the machines. They neither stole nor bought them. They licensed the machines, and the terms of the license are what prohibits them from analyzing the flaws. Without the state signing a contract that prohibits them from auditing the machines, Sequoia would have had no muscle to prevent it, and Felten would have his hands on one by now.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How the hell hard is it to actually develop a worthwhile voting machine? This shouldn't be rocket science. These should be devices designed with minimalism in mind in order to reduce the chances of error and on their own platform to reduce the chances of attack.
I bet someone could develop a halfway competent e-voting system in under 1,000 lines of code to run in a secure manner on a minimalist platform.
What is really bugging me is that computers are great at counting and adding. ITS WHAT THEY DO! The fact that nobody can come up with a believable voting machine tells me something really rotten is going on. I could understand if they were having troubles with advanced CFD code making or some other complex process where the real-world results are not completely understood, but these machines are basically taking $NumVotesCast +1 many many times.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If you're just going to print out and count paper voting receipts anyway, why even bother with an electronic voting machine?
You can't help fix elections if you allow the public to review your machines and code! Come on, people, don't be ridiculous.
The first time I saw one of Sequoia's units was at a demonstration in Philadelphia about 3 years ago. At that time they were demonstrating a prototype as they didn't have the displays they intended to use. Half way through the demonstration, in true Bill Gates style, the device threw up that old familiar blue screen.
One thing to point out is that Sequoia, or at least some of the companies that it now owns, has a history in the voting machine industry. Remember those big blue mechanical booths with the sliding curtains? Those things were as inaccurate as hell.
The argument for paper is good, but in many elections there can be thousands of individual ballots in a single county. If you overcome the logistic hurdles, then you have the problem of people doing the counting of thousands of ballots and compiling that information. I've spent many election nights reviewing paperwork from precincts that was just wrong - didn't add up or was off by an order of magnitude. These weren't people trying to hedge an election; they just screwed up simple arithmetic.
I studied this problem for years from a security analyst's position. In my opinion, a print on demand, image, scan, and destroy solution is the only practical solution. Sorting and storing tons of paper just doesn't make sense. Recycle it. Use barcodes on the ballot, steganography in the stored image, and encryption in the scan record to verify the match of the scan and the stored image to the print at the polling place.
Let's face it, we have exactly what the original GW warned us about, a two party system where the political aristocracy selects the possible candidates based on the influence of lobbyists. Their machines are calibrated to select issues and positions to give a 50% bias within the uneducated masses.
As a Libertarian, all I can do is sit and watch in disgust. This not what our ancestors had in mind, but they only had (much less than) 0.3% as many ballots to count.
Why does the taxpayer pay for these faulty systems? If a car fails to work they will fix it or eventually give you a new one, same thing with computers. Since these machines are obviously not working properly and can't be fixed all the municipalities that bought these things should demand their money back. These company's sold defective merchandise; they are LEMMONS, use the lemmon law to get their money back. And put the suckers in jail for selling crap that didn't work!
You don't have to count them every time. Just when something like this comes up, or maybe take random samples.
Let him know how you feel too! "Smith, Ed"
Here is my email thread with him-
Buttressed by the fact that the email I sent only to two professors has been distributed without my knowledge or consent, why would we allow analysis of our machines by unlicensed parties? We are not afraid of the results. In fact, as mentioned to you earlier, the report from the code review that is in progress goes to the State simultaneous to release to Sequoia.
Ed Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems
Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use, disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message, including attachments.
-----Original Message-----
From: Name Withheld for Slashdot
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:55 PM
To: Smith, Ed
Subject: Re: why are you refusing an independent analysis
Just because you are not aware of Felton's test plan does not mean he does not have one. If there is nothing wrong for him to find, why is there a problem with him analyzing it? You keep ignoring this question.
Name Withheld for Slashdot
On Wednesday 19 March 2008, you wrote:
> The lack of a published Test Plan, stated objectives for the study,
> voting machines for study that have been secured since Election Day
> and other facts in evidence do not support your contention that this
> is a structured review.
>
> Ed Smith
> VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
> Sequoia Voting Systems
>
> Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the
> attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and
> contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is
> prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use,
> disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the
> intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply
> email and destroy all copies of the original message, including
attachments.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Name Withheld for Slashdot
> Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:07 PM
> To: Smith, Ed
> Subject: Re: why are you refusing an independent analysis
>
> Mr Smith:
>
> This is not an "ad hoc" review. Felton is an expert in the field.
> Are you afraid he will turn up problems with your machines like he has
> with others in the past?
>
> Name Withheld for Slashdot
>
> On Wednesday 19 March 2008, you wrote:
> > Name Withheld for Slashdot:
> >
> > We are acting against only these ad hoc reviews. There is an
> > independent source code and functional review in progress at this
> > time, with results going to the NJ Attorney General's office. We
> > support reviews that protect both our intellectual property rights
> > and
> >
> > have donated staff hours and resources to the on-going review
> > mentioned above.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Ed Smith
> > VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification Sequoia Voting Systems
> >
> > Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the
> > attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and
> > contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is
> > prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use,
> > disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the
> > intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply
>
From the post you replied to, "the summary print outs are 'nice' for instant access to the results". Basically, the summary voting gives a sense of instant gratification that let's the voting public know who "won" the election the day after it is held. Computers can aggregate and publish the sum votes of millions of voters at the instant polls close and provide a result that meets the anticipated "instant-gratification" needs expected by the population.
Now, I think each polling place has an order of magnitude within 1,000 voters... so if the 10-20 workers open up the box with the votes at the close of the polls, it is reasonable for them to spend 2-3 hours doing a double and triple check count before actually "validating" what the machine summary said.
Trouble arises when the a human count differs from another human count or from the machine count. When this happens, obviously the data cannot be immediately validated and "official" results cannot be made available.
However, as long as "vote receipts" that have been checked over by the pair of eyes who cast that vote exist, then I think using a machine to vote is fine.
So - the first advantage of running an election with a computer voting system is instant gratification.
I am sure there are other advantages, too. Because computers have the ability to provide easier-to-use interfaces to complex systems than old-fashion analog machines. Not that voting for an individual office is a complex system... but imagine (god forbid) John McCain dying two days before election day and the complete mess it would be to retool 50,000 voting machines to have some other guy's name in it. In an analog world, that is impossible. In a digital world, the change can be managed from a central server and pushed down to the client machines.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
McCain got his highest percentage of votes in NJ.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
But they need our support. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/our_solution Anyone out there care to match a $30.00 donation to help stop the next GWB® from buying key districts in swing states.
For all their fancy screens and print-outs, what problem do e-voting machines actually solve? Counting votes by hand seemed to be old-fashioned, but working just fine, thank you. :\
cpeterso
candidate->votes++;
In Wisconsin, they ask you 'paper or electronic' when you ask for a ballot. Knowing what I know, I always say 'paper.'
Eventually there will be a time when they stop asking, just like grocery stores stopped asking 'paper or plastic' and just give you cheap plastic bags that drop your groceries to the ground before you get to the car.
The fact that voting machine companies have refused to use an open model for handling votes shows that they are just in it for the money, they could give a damn if the election is skewed by bugs in their machines. all they want is that big multi million dollar budget for essentially a 200 dollar computer in a special case and with a $20,000 dollar touch screen.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Go read Sequoia's explanation. Under their scenario, voters were presented with THE WRONG CHOICES for PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES. Specifically, Democratic party members were presented with Republican party choices or vice versa - and (this is important) - the error was not detected by the voter. This should be reason enough to disqualify the equipment!
I also note the use of the term "Democrat party" in Sequoia's explanation - I'll reserve my own comments on this slur, instead referring the reader to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(phrase)
The problem with barcodes is that most ordinary humans cannot read them, so the ordinary humans don't know for sure what information is contained in them. Sure, you say you pushed the button for void, but how do you know it's the word "*VOID*" that's printed and not "*CONFIRMED*"? As a human, you don't.
To be trustable and easily understood by the average voter, the receipts must be human readable. If there is a real need for them to be machine readable, then they should be printed in an OCR font.
John
The way Dems, liberals, and "progressives" all wish ill upon the US, why not?
Don't think they wish ill of the US?
Just look at how Pelosi is "warning" Gen. Patraeus to not report good news in Iraq. Because the Dems are fully investing in a US defeat in Iraq.
If you actually look it up you'll see that the new jersey institute of technology checked and approved these machines last year (they certified them around august last year). most likely someone changed something between now and then and rather than sending the machines through a full recertification they slid it in under the radar.
having them recheck it will simply show us their shenanigans and put them in a world of hurt.
If you vote using an electronic voting machine, then your vote doesn't count.
Money? They are in it to *cheat*. No system so simple could f* up so badly unless someone wants it to. It's counting, for FSM's sake, not modeling a nuclear explosion.
Democrats in public office. Solves the problem perfectly.
But you can already tell who won the day after, the rest of the world counting manually have been doing so without problems for ages.
The reason they want electronic is to feed the media and nothing more.
those must see adds are gonna lose people traffic. I automatically close the site these days, been way to many sites that force a commercial that often takes longer than the content you want to see. (not in this case though)
Every time they have a vote to ban Sequoia, it turns out in Sequoia's favor -- no matter how many claim that they voted against them.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
To partially copy-paste from a previous post, I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool. The spool also had barcodes everwhere for machine-scanning, as well as the people-readable (and verifiable) totals.
Sounds like what you're asking for. Given, it's not a Mini-ATX hooked to a server, but that is terribly impractical. I worked in a polling place in some church where we had a total of about 80 voters come through in 14 hours. Setting up a server would have been completely impractical. Other than that, it seems your requirements have been met - the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
As for cost, they were small, self-contained touchscreen units - I think I remember hearing them being in the price range of about $6k or so per unit. Expensive, yes, but not unusually exorbient. This is the government, after all.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have finally gotten them right.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
So what that you haven't put the voter's name on the receipt. That's not going to stop the selling of votes (etc). I remember the first time I voted. NYS used mechanical machines, every candidate had a toggle switch (on/off). when you were done you pull the vote lever and it records the votes you toggled on. If you toggle a candidate for mayor and then toggle another candidate for mayor, then the first one flipped off. This is freaking simple. You display a page with radio buttons in groups, punching one de-selects another for the same position. When you're done, you press the "vote" button. Then in a window you can see the paper printout and vote# displayed, and it gives you a printed copy of the vote number and machine number. Perhaps a hashed barcode with the votes stored in it (using a hash so you can't visually compare votes). No need to print out in human readable form. Then when you open the voting booth, the paper advances, and/or a shutter is put over the paper display. The votes are then also posted to a SQL database with timestamps,etc. This is like CS201 level stuff. The problem I see though is people will treat the receipts like a receipt from getting gas and leave it behind for the next person.
The problem is that elected officials, election supervisors, elections workers, and prosecutors have an incentive not to rock the boat. They all benefit from the rigged election systems.
For every particular procedure or mechanism that is proposed to ensure honest elections, there is a way to circumvent the protection. Elaborate procedures or processes are not the answer. We need to create some incentive to counterbalance the existing incentive to rig elections. And, we need incentives to detect and prosecute election rigging.
This can be corrected by a simple new law. The major elements of that new law need to be something like:
1. Election-rigging is a felony, punishable by extremely long prison term, without any privileges or possibility of parole;
2. Huge reward for evidence or testimony of election-rigging leading to conviction. If multiple witnesses come forward, the reward is per-person, not shared.
3. Big bonus to any prosecutor who successfully prosecutes any case of election-rigging to conviction.
4. Rewards and bonuses are to be paid from assets seized from the convicted persons. If they had insufficient assets, the state treasury will make up the difference.
Barcode argument solved...
;-)
Sorry, barcodes are a horrible idea, as explained by plover (150551). The readable and scannable problem was solved 52 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICR by the banking industry. Have you ever written a check/cheque?
Receipt argument solved...
Voting machines should have printers in them that print 2 check-like vouchers. One is a receipt, the other is a ballot that the voter inserts into a scanning lockbox on his/her way out. The voting machine isn't even on a network, and doesn't count votes. It would do you no good to hack it. The worse you could do is make it start printing vouchers that would cause people to say, "this one is out of order."
Cancel/Void argument solved...
The way you "cancel" a vote is by giving the goofed-up printed voucher to the attendee and watch them shred it instead of putting it in the scanning lockbox. The attendee then gives you a new card (just like the one currently used) to put in the voting machine and print a new voucher. There is no more opportunity for fraud here than in the original paper ballot system.
This paragraph optional...
You could go so far as to issue each ballot (not voter) a serial number. The results would be reported as both tally numbers and a "tally code" for each candidate. An algorithm could be used to see if the tally code contained both the number of votes reported and any ballot's serial number. The algorithm would be made public so geeks could test by hand, or voters could use any number of "calculators" that would pop up on the internet. It sounds complex, but its really as simple as finger binary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary
And, if you don't like it, I say "finger binary 132" to you.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
When the media and politicians were going mad over the hanging chads on ballots in Florida during the Bush vs Gore presidential election, many people were making jokes and were annoyed with the seemingly childish manner the situation was being handled. What is going to happen during the upcoming presidential election? At least with the Florida recount, the ballots could be double checked. With electronic voting, parties will argue over what part of the print-out is correct: the totals or the individual counts. I can almost imagine what the final result will be... everyone saying screw the votes and have the future of America being decided by a McCain vs. Obama paper/rock/scissors contest.