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WV Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes
An anonymous reader writes "Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.
This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for 'Barack Obama' kept flipping to 'John McCain.'"
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes. Especially since the voter isn't able to view a paper receipt.
If I had to guess, the way the ballot is organized in terms of candidate ordering probably makes it easy or possible to look like you're pressing the right area, but the boxes and/or your perception of the boxes' location isn't perfectly aligned with the touch sensing elements. Because people are so sensitive to this issue, any errant touch among thousands of voters accidentally getting the wrong box VISIBLY checked, AND able to be corrected, is going to be interpreted as malice instead of (user) error. "When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, 'I'm absolutely positive.'" Yeah, just like a lot of users are "absolutely positive" that they did the right thing. No, they THINK they did the right thing. That's the only thing they are "absolutely positive" of.
Since so many people want to believe that the electronic voting machines are rigged to make Republicans win elections[1], so I'm sure people will choose to believe that this is due to a GOP conspiracy instead of simple errors. (And yes, it could still be an error, due to the way the screens are physically set up, even if the reported errors are "always" Republican. Does that mean it's not an issue that should be addressed, even if it is only a genuine design/setup error? No. But if you can touch the screen a little more carefully and get the checkmark beside the right name, that is what matters. Who hasn't ever had a touchscreen ATM or a touchscreen POS station not register a touch as something unintended? You don't think the ATM is trying to rip you off when it picks "Savings" when you meant "Checking". You just hit cancel and do it again.)
Remember, too, that in many jurisdictions in which we have electronic voting machines, they're there as a direct result of Democratic-sponsored legislation, like HAVA, in response to the voting difficulties with antiquated machines in Florida in 2000. The problem? Everyone assumed that modern technology was just great and overlooked a mandatory requirement for a paper trail. Of course, now ALL e-voting vendors have voter-verifiable paper trail capability as options, but many municipalities didn't want to spend the extra money to deploy since it wasn't required by law.
Also, "In Putnam County, early voters have the option of asking for either touch-screen machines or optical scan ballots -- paper ballots on which people mark in their election choices." And when people are using the machine, "The main thing people need to remember is that when you are done voting, make sure everybody you wanted to vote for has a check mark beside them." Just because you touch once and it registers wrong doesn't imply that it can't be corrected. Has no one ever used a backspace key on a computer before? Or an eraser on a pencil, for that matter?
Bottom line? Since this clearly is causing so much fear and doubt[2], we should go back to a simple, auditable paper solution, if only so conspiracy theorists can STFU and stop thinking every election where their preferred candidate doesn't win is "stolen".
[1] Have to put in the disclaimer. Very aware of the famous quote about "delivering the election to George Bush" by Diebold's CEO. It was in his capacity as a Republic business leader, but still a very, very, very poor showing on his part, and ridiculous appearance of a conflict of interest, even if none actually exists in reality.
[2] And it's actually not causing a level of problems that are probably any worse than error in paper or any other voting. But the perception is that it is a huge problem, and subverting democracy, and that is reason enough to change.
BlackBoxVoting has been doing some really thorough coverage on these occurrences and I would like to point out that in North Carolina & Tennessee, people are complaining about votes flipping from McCain to Obama. Some are saying this is a serious issue and not just isolated incidents of entropy.
I'm confused as to why the people voting weren't given access to an on site authority or technician that could verify this was occurring. I guess it's also possible this is something that will only happen once rarely but enough to do damage. It could also be attention seeking or insurance to claim fraud if the other side wins.
My work here is dung.
Spamming confirmation will be the next thing we hear about from voting machines I bet.
*Casts Vote*
"Are you sure?"
*Yes*
"Are you positive?"
*Yes*
"Have you researched your options?"
*...
You can't secure them. Anybody with an ounce of sense about computer security knows this. Plus, there is no way to verify whether they are programmed to do what they should.
And we argue over whether to have paper trails?
What's wrong with a machine that tries to assist the politically challenged by selecting the right candidate?
And yes, it could still be an error, due to the way the screens are physically set up, even if the reported errors are "always" Republican.
What I mean by this is in this particular instance, not in general. There are reports of votes "flipping" both ways. But if there is something happening in one jurisdiction in one state, and it's always the same problem, and the same order is on every ballot, then it's no surprise that the manifestation of the problem is the same.
This story is a bit old and has been rung through the media wringer already. The issue is that the machines they were using require a 20(!!) point calibration process, and apparently the poll workers weren't being careful enough when setting it up. It's a combination of a badly designed machine and lazy/incompetent poll workers. The good news is that since the states are pushing so heavily on early voting this year, there is a chance they'll figure out workarounds for issues like this before the general election.
I read the internet for the articles.
I hope that my vote (haven't decided between Barr and McKinney yet) doesn't get switched to Obama or McCain!
Some may say "jail? it's an honest mistake" and invoke Hanlon's Razor, but I'd rather go by mcgrew's razor, "Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greedy self-interest."
If the votes are switched randomly, it's stupidity/incompetence. If it's always Dems switched to Repubs or the other way around, somebody needs to spend time in jail. Not only is it not rocket science, there aren't even any rockets involved.
Free Martian Whores!
It's incompetence of a different kind.
They are marking the spots on the touchscreen wrong when they are setting them up, possibly not at all or just lazily and it's causing the border between Obama/McCain spots to drift.
Again, why is there not a national standard for fill in cards that can be saved and recounted? We've perfected scan card technology over the past two decades. It's not like there are going to be hanging chads or marks on the card that are WAY off.
It looks like you are trying to vote for a black candidate.
Would you like help?
(*) Switch vote to McCain with visual confirmation.
(*) Switch vote to McCain without visual confirmation.
(*) Dial terrorist hotline with your personal information.
@
From your reply:
From the article:
It would really suck if votes came out wrong because of a poorly-designed user interface.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Thomas W. Swidarski
... our technicians are even confused how the screen (with milliseconds of response time) managed to show it.
President and CEO of Diebold
1600 Styx River Rd
Hades, New Jersey 66666
October 27, 2008
Dear Voters,
I regret to inform you that the evil bit of the IPv4 packet header field was accidentally propagated to the display screen and--subsequently--would ensure that in the last femtosecond your vote was for evil as you were accepting your selection.
Who would have thought that Americans could see this near-planckian event on the screen
Regardless, we are sorry and promise that I will personally collect and publish information on these three voters although I heavily doubt that 3 votes will change the outcome of John McCain 100% Barak Obama 0% which is what the current count is at.
This may be merely be something we have to live with for now and is trivial. We will fix this when IPv6 is enforced and it is an entire "evil byte" in the packet header that will be much easier to spot and stop. This should not undermine your satisfaction with the democratic process in America--do not let the terrorists win! You must remain ever vigilant and patriotic!
Sincerely,
Thomas W. Swidarski
My work here is dung.
IF a machine was going to do this, it wasn't going to show the voter that it did it. Wow. 3 events. Did they go to an ACORN meeting and ask, "HAS ANYONE EVER HAD A MACHINE NOT SHOW WHAT THEY VOTED FOR? PLEASE RAISE YOUR HAND" Amazing, three whole times, and always switched to republicans. I'd bet if they went to an NRA meeting and asked the same question, they'd get 3 whole people, and miraculously it switched them all to Democrat. But we all know the media doesn't go to NRA meetings unless they're doing an Expose on bitter gun owners...
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Vote by mail, and make a photocopy of your ballot. It is a lot harder to change a vote when there's a massively distributed paper trail.
stuff |
Good points all. Still, the fact remains that voters don't have confidence in the machines. If it does appear to the voter to be switching votes in formant of them, they aren't going to trust that it won't do the same thing after they walk away. For what its worth, I've hears similar stories from friends that have tried early voting in cook county, Il. If that county goes for McCain, we know we have something seriously screwed up.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
These machines aren't very smart. They need to change their votes to Cthulhu if they want to live.
UI design is an important consideration. Suppose you wanted to make a machine biased toward one candidate, without having anything obviously incriminating in the code. You could do something as simple as arrange the options so that parallax effects like you suggest make it easy to press the wrong portion of the screen. If the effects make people press high on average, and you put the candidate you wanted to favor at the top of the list, then pressing high on your candidate registers no check box, and people just press again. But, sometimes they'll press on the other candidate, get the one you wanted, and give up before figuring it out.
Ballot design needs to be fair, for all the same reasons the code needs to be correct. Badly designed ballots are probably just that -- bad design by someone who didn't know better. But, with something as important as an election, it's not ok to have badly designed ballots, and it's not ok to let people who don't know better design them. Design sufficiently bad that it shows meaningful bias should be treated as criminal election fraud, whether it was intentional or not -- there's simply no reason not to have that level of accountability.
"No, I really think you meant to say McCain...let me fix that for you."
This is what happens when you have a bunch of simple programmers tasked with making democracy "work".
There is no oversight, no accountability, nothing.
What does a simple programming #24028 have to lose if the machine doesn't work, it will be patched in version "next election 2.0" anyway.
Worst is he gets fired, and goes to next code jockey job elsewhere.
Engineers on the other hand, stand to lose their license if they get caught. Sure, they "might" not get caught, but there is a whole organization that monitors and reports them, making it generally not worth it.
Quality improves, trust improves, etc.
It's time to add another tier to the programming hierarchy:
Engineers, Programmers/Developers, Java Jockeys, etc...
I have to wonder what the source of a problem like this is..
Is it poor coding practices, that are making the interface do the wrong thing? I've seen this in web interfaces, if you swap your variables accidentally. How well have these devices been QA tested? Probably not well enough.
Are the touch sensitive screens too sensitive? I was trying to buy at a store, and the touch screen pen would click buttons while it was still about 2 inches from the screen. It made it very difficult to use.
Is it just user failure, where they're dragging the stylus (or touching with their finger) across both boxes, making it see a corrected input to the wrong selection?
Is it an evil conspiracy? Ah, why not, I love conspiracies. :)
Since I don't have access to the offending devices, nor the users, I'll just have to take my guess. I guess #4, evil conspiracy. Occam's razor would tell us differently. Probably option #3 is the correct answer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Nor should they. See my post and its followup.
It happens both ways, and it can still be attributed to simple error, even if it's the "same thing" every time. It's the individual county election departments (clerk's offices, etc.) who set these things and their ballot layouts up, and they don't have the power nor the skill nor the capability to do what you're describing.
In Pennsylvania we have the option of either using the electronic machines, or using a paper ballot. I use the paper ballot every time.
-posted with LYNX, the Commodore 64 browser
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
This is absurd. I do not understand why the American government continues to invest large sums of money in proprietary software that has been proven to not work. This is of course assuming there is no conspiracy whatsoever behind this.
Will we see any major media coverage for this issue? Will the general populous cause a huge uproar? Sadly, I doubt it.
I wonder if this is how Bush won the last election...
I think Obama understands that a level playing field is about the common good and John McCain really needs a leg up. And Sen McCain should not feel ashamed because this is not charity.
This is an early example of new hope.
Let it begin. I predict once again, a Republican will win, despite pre-vote polling and exit polling both showing a Democratic win.
-1, Apologist.
Bottom line? Since this clearly is causing so much fear and doubt[2], we should go back to a simple, auditable paper solution, if only so conspiracy theorists can STFU and stop thinking every election where their preferred candidate doesn't win is "stolen".
Just because conspiracy theorists happen to think that an election was stolen, doesn't mean that it wasn't.
is that we don't hear about how the machines work flawlessly in 99.9% of the cases. Everyone loves a conspiracy.
Maybe the machines should do the "touch the center of the X" thing with every single voter to make sure they're properly calibrated for the viewing angle of each voter. Most public computer kiosks I've seen have very thick covers / empty space / whatever between the touch surface and the actual display, being too tall / short could easily result in a half inch or more offset from where you thought you touched.
I believe this is just "static electricity." Nothing to worry about. Randomly flipping votes tend to happen from positive Obama to negatively campaigning McCain due to the electric attraction force.
Unfortunately, there's no way to prove that someone intending to vote for Republicans has had their vote switched, because no-one's voted for Republicans.
(Lighten up, it's a joke)
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Video tape your election vote.
If it does a dodgy switcheroo, you have the evidence that you hit the right button, etc...
But honestly, if you were going to fiddle a machine to flip a few votes to the GOP, why have the output show the flip at all?
Just edit the totals and display whatever the hell you want on the UI.
printf "You have voted for Obama"; McCain++;
Know what I mean?
sometimes paper and pencil should not be automated
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
They don't need to subversively change your vote, just create a UI for the voting machine that is designed to facilitate voter mistakes, say make the touch area for some candidates bigger than others with a bit of overlap.
This gives you the plausible deniability that it was the voters mistake. Fingers too fat (You know how fat Americans are), plain stupidity (Bubba's just too stupid to work an electronic device), too old (Gramps clearly couldn't see who he was voting for).
Remember, they don't have to deliberately change the votes, just make it so any mistakes made will favor your candidate. From a UI design standpoint, this is easily done.
Until there is a way to be sure the code running on a voting machine is properly vetted, it's insane to think they should be trusted.
If your willing to trust one of these machines, just give me your paper ballot. I promise it will get tallied correctly. ;)
Have to put in the disclaimer. Very aware of the famous quote about "delivering the election to George Bush" by Diebold's CEO. It was in his capacity as a Republic business leader, but still a very, very, very poor showing on his part, and ridiculous appearance of a conflict of interest, even if none actually exists in reality.
I just want to point out that the conflict of interest does exist in this case. It doesn't matter how honorable the guy is. Conflict of interest is a matter of position, not character. He could be the most honorable guy in the world and never let his CEO position conflict with his Republican position, but the conflict of interest is still there.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Video, or it didn't happen. Until there's a video-documented case of this happening, it's a bullshit claim. It is unfortunate, though, that whoever ends up "winning" the Presidential race will always have the question of whether the victory was legitimate. We can thank ACORN, among others, for this.
sig: sauer
Who's to say that these people aren't just liars? If I wanted my candidate to win bad enough that I would compromise my integrity, I might just lie about what was happening to my voting machine. It's just you in the voting booth. No one can prove you aren't telling the truth any more than they can prove you are. If it raises doubt, it could be enough to help your cause.
John McCain's own polling gives him hope, an aide says
When John McCain insisted, during his appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was doing "just fine" in a presidential race in which the polls have shown Barack Obama with a steady lead over the last few weeks, many may have dismissed the comment as just something that a candidate has to say.
Not so, said a campaign official who spoke on background with The Times' Bob Drogin. The aide said the campaign's internal polling showed McCain down only 4 percentage points nationally -- a sharp improvement from a week ago -- and closing fast.
State-by-state, the private polling also showed McCain up 1 point in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, and behind by only 3 points in Virginia (a new Washington Post survey found him down 8 there).
McCain almost assuredly needs to capture all five states to win the presidency. And even that may not be enough if he fails to win Pennsylvania, one of his campaign stops today. Without Pennsylvania, McCain needs to pull more electoral votes out of some combination of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico or Iowa -- all states where, as of now, the internal numbers look bleak.
The anonymous McCain official argued a comeback remains doable. "Check with me Wednesday," the aide said. "If we're still within the margin of error (in polling), we're going to win."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/john-mccains-ow.html
Just like the last two times.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Although technical issues such as touch-screen alignment are certainly possibilities, and dirty tricks/malice on the part of political organizations are popular scapegoats, this seems to be more a case of people refusing to take personal responsibility for their own actions. I voted early last weekend in NC, and the electronic touch screens were well-spaced and crisply clear, with large font type. Pressing the wrong button would have required more than a bit of effort for any responsible individual. Additionally, there were voting registrars (local volunteers) overseeing everything, and offering very helpful and thoughtful assistance to anyone who asked. I'd guess this is more about wanting to blame someone else for their carelessness than it is about dirty tricks, political skullduggery, corporate foul play, or technology.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=21a_1225010361 [video]
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes. Especially since the voter isn't able to view a paper receipt...
Since so many people want to believe that the electronic voting machines are rigged to make Republicans win elections[1], so I'm sure people will choose to believe that this is due to a GOP conspiracy instead of simple errors.
Maybe they're just as incompetent at rigging an election as they are at governing?
Any story about rigged machines needs to include this link.
I came here for a good argument
Mail can get lost, stolen, or modified. It doesn't really help to have a photocopy of your ballot. Sure, you can point to the copy if your ballot was counted incorrectly, but how would you know your ballot was counted incorrectly in the first place?
or it didnt happen.
If you have a problem on election day, ask any bystander to lend their video-enabled camera phone.
the problem with electornic voting is perception. if people perceive their vote is being tampered with, this matters more than the truth of the matter
passions are high in an election. people get upset if they lose. they seize on anything that feeds into their perceptions, and electronic voting is too black box: votes go in, sausage come out, and who knows what happens in the middle
when an election is over, people have to know the vote was fair. knowing the vote was fair is not a matter of trusting a talking head on a tv screen or a poorly paid government worker. its about how they feel about their voting experience. paper you can trust. you can't intrisincally trust a black box process
electornic voting should be abandoned. its a bad idea
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
.. I just can't figure out how you could program vote software wrong, it's simple integer counts.
It's one of the easiest things to program.
What's with this hypothetical language ("would" and "if")? It's already happened -- hanging chads are caused by bad UI too!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So, really, it isn't a UI design issue; it's a voting machine response time/feedback issue, IMO.
How is response time/feedback not a UI issue?
TL:DR.
Anyway, the retards could probably not work the machine, messed up and blame the machine for their stupidity.
All that aside, its not like Obama has a shot at WV or even if he did, WV would be the state that put him over the top.
If someone wanted to screw with an election via the machines, they wouldn't do it in WV.
Actually I think you can make an electronic voting system that's trustworthy and that there are advantages to it. For example, in Chicago they use electronic voting machines for the early voting. The reason for this is that it permits anybody to vote at any precinct in the city because they can pull up the correct ballot electronically. So if your closest polling place is nearer to your work than your home, you can just go there. Convenient and insures more people vote.
Furthermore, electronic systems are easier to use and less prone to human error in the voting booth. It's much easier to screw up punching a hole in the right place or filling in the right bubble. If you click the box and the check mark appears, then it's much clearer who you picked. In fact, the problems we hear of peoples votes being switched is almost certainly a miscalibration of the screen, but it means voters can see the mistake rather than if they punched the wrong box and can't tell for sure.
If you have a verifiable paper trail and you have adequate safeguards of the chain of custody of the machines, then it is a good way to do things. You should also incorporate some degree of spot checking and random sampling of voting machines to insure that they are accurate. If they fail those checks you fall back to the paper trail and do things the hard way.
Also, with an electronic system, you open up the possibility of making the vote even more secure. For example, have each voter receive a receipt for their vote with a unique identifier code. This code would not make it possible to track a vote back to the individual who voted, but it allow them to log into a website the day after the election and confirm that their vote was accurately counted. Seeing that the vote made it through the machines and came out right on the other end would do a lot to help people feel confident in the system.
In the end, no voting system is perfect. Relying on paper ballots is prone to errors too as we saw in the 2000 election. Electronic systems with no paper trail are a horrifically bad idea, but with a paper trail and some effort to insure that the electronic systems are doing accurate counts, I think it's a good way to go.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Actually, I think it is a UI problem if double-clicking an icon doesn't give a response. Maybe not the perfect example, but I know that KDE (at least in SuSE) gives a bouncing app icon with the cursor, and OSX gives a bouncing dock icon.
It's really just Windows that gives no feedback!
I'd like to see Barack Obama ridiculing these 50 million voters' computer (il)literacy, the way he ridiculed John McCain. Wouldn't that be sure vote-winner, uhm?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It needs to be documented.
Everybody, if your district has electronic voting of any kind, bring your video camera (cell phone, pocket camera, PDA--whatever) in with you, and record yourself voting. If this phenomenon is happening, we need to document it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
While I don't find it hard to believe that an elitist group would seek to control elections this way, my gut tells me it really comes down to is Corporate America selling the Y2K fix for democracy. Just like then it's mostly unnecessary, and for what we'll pay we should have just bought a better ballot.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Problem: You would have to arrest the State Legislators who tested & approved the machine with their own eyes. So, you'll never have that level of accountability.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Hahahaha!! Reading this from Us if funny, Seems again a president with less votes from POPULATION can win. Yesterday In Brazil, they have the 2 Turn of elections ( 1 turn, population decide between a lot of canditates, the 2 most winers, have after a 2 election where one have 51% of votes WIN). They used AGAIN the eletronic machines. same they are using last 10 YEAR and if we think in TESTS like the ones in US, more time. ITS simple. Small. NOT TOUCH SCREEN, BUT BIG SIMPLE KEYBOARD WITH NUMBERS, YES, NO, NULL with BIG COLOURS AND BAILER TO BLIND. AND AFTER ALL PROCESS OF PUT NUMBER OF CANDIDATE, YES, NO, NULL HAVE THE CONFIRM. the screen is simple, black white, candidate number big, photo BIG. The system use standard components, EASY AUDI TABLE. AND A CLOSED (BACK BOX LIKE) CASE. From a total of 406.000 URNS, 285 broke and most of the ones that come from 1998 election ( OFFICIAL DATA here http://www.tre-mg.gov.br/eleicoes/eleicoes_2004/resumao1/urnas.htm). Everyone can ask the results of URNS when the electoral section close. SAME ME. from all time using this thing. almost no case of ALLEGATION OF FRAUD ( same the parts blame each other, don't discuss the system). EACH ONE HAVE A COST OF R$1.425,96 today near U$ 620,00 The one FLAW is the lack of PAPER confirmation like votes to STANDARD PEOPLES audit. But next ELECTION. after you confirm your VOTE. the urn will print the vote and you can put put inside the VOTE PACK for further analyses and if need. EACH URN can surviee for almost 6h without energy and a simple CAR BATTERY can be used to extend this ( not need a crazy SAT ELITE/NASA with a KIND OF RARE PLUTONIUM like US :-) ) that leave just some minutes of use.
More than ELECTRONIC system, was the system to count the votes. each place with electronic urn, or have a kind of secured cable communication or even middle amazon or deep country cities have a sat antenna to transmit the data just after close the electoral zones. So, 8h after the end we know 100% of VOTES COUNT. and we speak
MORE THAN THAT, in a test way. the voters already have a ELECTRONIC kind of ELECTORAL DOCUMENT tested finger and eyes to confirm the votes and that Who are in document is who VOTES. and worked 100%. with standar electronics. NOT SUPER MAMBO JAMBO DARPHA/NASA ELECTRONICS.
WY a country like US that have/PRINT ( want see who will pay the bill) so much money can not do a simple thing like this?
Seem always someone want money or give margin for a kind of fraud.
ITS something we cant understand.
Why not BLAM a kind of PATENT in this system that already exist ( like do always) and build lot of this systems ( yes, seem they need jobs there now).. and just use this? Hoo, the Brazilian machine use OPEN SOURCE Soft. Something US cant use, maybe because security ( paedophiles or terrorism can take advantage of this, or maybe the P2P. how? don't know, but seems GOVERN speak this all the time now).
Well..
why so difficult do it?
EVERYONE need to ask, WHY the govern still doing this kind chit? WHO HAVE ADVANTAGE WITH THIS?
BECAUSE SOMEONE HAVE. OR WHO RECEIVE MONEY TO DO, OR WHO RECEIVE MONEY TO RESEARCH or JUST A WAY OF MANIPULATE a PERCEPTUAL of VOTES in a CRAZY CONSPIRATIONAL WAY ( something after last 2 elections in US seems be the most obvious).
IT IS
What about the reports that some of the votes changed to *Bush* ? Doesn't that imply they forgot to update something in the code?
I don't get why they need to use touch screens in the first place. Having to calibrate them in the middle of a voting session seems unproductive,and are they even allowed to do that which would leave everyone in the same boat. I've used touch screens(I setup smartboards in some of my clients) and I could see someone accidently clicking the wrong person if the screen wasn't calibrated.
I've heard of these new fangled things called buttons... they seem to work wonders, no calibration, AND THERE STILL TOUCH SENSITIVE.
Hell you could have it as simple as a figging atm machine where you have the buttons on the right hand side. Most people are used to ATM machines and having to hit a button.
Touch screens are nice but I think they leave a little room for error and are probably more expensive then an lcd screen with 6 buttons. I in the states you sometimes will be voting for more than one position, well you could have different pages for each position your voting for and have 6-10 buttons one for each canditate with a line marking what button you have to press.
Seems like common sense to me, but people are impressed by flashy touchy thingies.
Frankly paper never had this problem
When the media becomes insistent enough that a specific outcome is the right one, why does it surprise you that polls indicate the outcome they desire is more likely? The act of reporting that McCain has no hope is of course a technique to try and insure McCain voters will not feel motivated enough to come to the polls...
So whichever way it goes this year, I wouldn't be surprised - because we the electorate are not being fed clean data to evaluate what might actually happen. Moreso this year than in any other year previous.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These AREN'T complicated systems. There is absolutely no excuse for touch screens to not respond instantly when touched. I'm no computer illiterate, but if I touch a button on a touchscreen (say an ATM), and it doesn't react instantly I assume it didn't detect my finger and I try again. I've never seen a case where the machine was just too busy to respond.
Here. (The title is not in English but the clip is; the oft-linked English-titled clip got yanked.)
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Because you can have God's own UI design that even the most moronic person in the universe could figure out, slap it onto a POS machine without enough power to run it quickly and you WILL have a response time/feedback time problem. UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
That is why it's not a UI design issue.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I think the best thing to do would be to keep the options well spaced. I haven't seen any of the UI screens so I don't know what it's like.
Even if a touchscreen is calibrated properly for one person, another person may put their finger down in a different way.
I even have to recalibrate my phone's touchscreen just to be able to use the stylus effectively in the opposite hand, so I'd hate to think what it would be like designing a system to be used by thousands of people, left and right handed, some pressing with nails, some with squidgy tips of fingers, some with the even larger surface area of their fingerprint, etc.
You could just use buttons beside the screen like with ATMs, but if/when a button breaks or gets stuck, people will be complaining of conspiracies again..
which is totally what she said
How is response time/feedback not a UI issue?
It's not an issue, it's a feature. That's why!
easy.. :)
he just needs to find someone who want's to vote for opposition and convince him to change his vote in order to eliminate the error
Good point.
I could come out of the poll booth, walk-over to the local reporter and say, "I just voted straight Republican, but for some dumb reason the machine recorded straight Democrat. It switched my vote! This is despicable." And I could be lying through my teeth, just to cast doubt on whether the winner (whoever that might be) actually won.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
So that is the kind of "Change" the McCain camp was referring to. It is becoming very clear now.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln what did you think of the play?
So, really, it isn't a UI design issue; it's a voting machine response time/feedback issue, IMO.
How is a computer system as simple as a voting kiosk not providing instant feedback anything but a UI design issue? If ever a person is left wondering "did I press it or not?" then that is a UI design issue. If they're left wondering long enough that they start re-clicking, it is a serious UI design flaw. Machine response time and feedback are most definitely UI issues.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So, I go down to my voting location, cast my ballot, believe I got it right, but in the end how do I really know? How do I know my vote is counted? I can look county by county the next day online or in a newspaper, but in the grand tabulation of things there are just X votes for Candidate 1 and Y votes for Candidate 2 (oh, what I wouldn't give for a viable candidate 3), and my vote is inseparable among them. There was a case last year in NH (wish I could find a link) in which a woman reading the paper the next day noticed zero votes of Nader in her county, and yet she had voted for Nader. An investigation found something like 20 votes for Nader had never been tabulated, and in the end it made no material difference. But let's face it, the election could turn on a heck of a lot less, and in the end how do you know?
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
and just because you happen to think it was, doesn't mean that it was.
As someone who lives in Canada (and having just gone through a federal election), I just cannot understand why it's impossible to have a paper ballot, with a big circle, that one makes a mark (check, X, whatever) in the circle for your candidate of choice with a pencil and then have people count the ballots at the end. Canada manages to do it every time we have an election and it seems to work out just fine. And, with a paper trail, we can easily recount, if needed. Yes, America has ten times the population but it probably has ten times the election volunteers as well so there's really no difference. I just don't understand why a good paper ballot is so hard to accept...
These sound like the devices shown on Chocolate News. When you select Obama, they say "Are you Sure?" If you select him again they say, "You know he's black right?", finally they just register your vote for McCain anyway. And I thought they were just a joke.
After all this decades of us brushing off their complaints, the black man has the proof we can't ignore. Looks like the system really *IS* trying to keep the black man down!
except for that whole hourglass thing, or spinning circle next to the mouse cursor.
it still doesn't matter.
I've seen people double click fifteen times when the computer didnt react instantly.
its a user error.
maybe we should require training on these machines before allowing people to use them.
oops, then we would of course be discriminating against stupid people/computer illiterate people/minorities/handicapped/etc.
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Having a touch screen of my own, when I first heard what the problem was like I immediately knew it was a touch screen issue.
It's possible that the machines were purposefully calibrated to make "Obama" votes be registered by the machine as "McCain. HOWEVER, this would also mean that the field for selecting McCain would be shifted as well away from what the on-screen display would indicate--perhaps even, depending on how the display was set up, off the actual display area, making it possible that McCain could have been impossible to select via touch screen!
This is not an effective way to rig the machines, and it's very unlikely it was done on purpose.
Actualy Windows Vista does. You get the little animated circle near the pointer telling you that it's loading the program. In Windows XP you have the little hourglass next to the pointer.
I live in WV. The local news showed the ballots and exactly how this could happen and it was entirely feasible that it was user error due to bad software design.
The UI is poorly designed. McCain's name appears above Obama's. The bottom border of McCain's box touches the upper border of Obama's box. When looking down at the device it looks like you are selecting Obama when your finger is actually on McCain.
This effect can be compounded by initially touching the box with the tip of your finger and then rolling down so your fingerprint area is fully on Obama's name, but you initially touched the bottom of McCain's box. In this case your finger will fully be within Obama's box but McCain will remain selected.
However the people doing the voting should be double checking their vote on the screen and the paper receipt that scrolls up next to the screen as you vote.
Bottom line is, bad design, untrained user.
I'd like to see Barack Obama ridiculing these 50 million voters' computer (il)literacy, the way he ridiculed John McCain. Wouldn't that be sure vote-winner, uhm?
Those 50 million other Americans who may or may not need to use a computer in their daily lives shouldn't be ridiculed. A person running for the highest office in the land, who is expected to adapt and change as the world does, should be.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
How is the POS not part of the UI?
If the user intends to vote one way and the machine interface is so designed that it does not allow an easy, intuitive reflection of this intention in the vote that is cast, the machine is at fault. We technologists sometimes feel frustration when non-technology oriented people don't see clearly what we see as intuitieve. But this is voting, for God's sake. WE MUST MAKE IT EASY for anyone or we have failed, and shoudl go back to easy-to-use paper ballots.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
When they came for the people in charge of building voting machines, I said nothing because I was not in charge of buiding voting machines.
Seriously though, it really shouldn't be an issue. Any machine built for this purpose should at the very least be inspected (including code and all other pratical aspects) by an independant non-political technical review board.
lol: You see no door there!
For computer software, I would agree with you. You can't predict what hardware onto which the customer will try to install your software.
In this particular case, though, I disagree. For isolated software that is running on isolated hardware, where both are produced by the same company and engineered by cooperative teams (I would hope), they ought to know the hardware platform before they begin the software development. This is a single-purpose machine running a single-purpose software program. It is almost a kind of embedded system. Thus, blaming UI delays on the hardware is not acceptable, not in this day and age. This particular kiosk is not any more complicated than a ticket-sales kiosk at the train station or movie theater, or than an ATM, and we can easily design those to respond instantly.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
For a country that "Will bring Democracy to the World" the US has a lot of "beam-removing" to do from their own eyes if you ask me...
Who's to say that these people aren't just liars?
I would rely on the video example of the problem occurring, as reproduced by an election official on a sample machine in the presence of a CNN reporter and camera crew.
So a claim was made as to a problem, and then it was reproduced by a (more) neutral third party in a (more) controlled setting. It's not scientific proof, but it's enough to show that they aren't just lying about a nonexistent UI flaw.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
But isn't this a controlled situation where they know what hardware it will be installed on?
You know, I thought of hanging chads immediately after submitting the gpp post... *sigh*
We don't learn, do we. We just apply technology so we can make mistakes faster.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
exactly.
if i wanted to ensure that the savior obama got elected, what better way then to report story after story (real or fictionally created by voters) of votes getting switched.
this would of course ensure that EVERYONE who was thinking about voting for the savior then did in fact, turn out to vote to "counter" these supposed "bad" votes and thus would attempt to influence the election by causing a higher turnout in the saviors party.
it's not illegal unless they can get the individuals for fraud (like the girl in texas who was anti-obama) and even if they do prove it, the party and candidate are not implicated and the point still works.
anybody else think that this is exactly why these stories are appearing now?
sometimes paper and pencil should not be automated
As a long time RPGer, I couldn't agree with you more.
Yup, sounds like a another scam.... or a usability bug.
Now... some serious questions (this will be my first time voting so I don't know the answers yet):
Do these machines print receipts?
Why are our votes not published on a verifiable internet accessible database for ALL to see?
Wouldn't it be nice to verify this shit?
I really don't care if someone wants to beat me up because I voted for someone they don't like, in fact I would love it if they did know.
I heard from a European friend that in her country all votes are verifiable online.
I hear we keep this information anonymous... I don't think that's such a good idea anymore.
FYI: I am voting for Obama.
Off topic but proves a point about people seeing your vote:
Once in Washington DC (yes I lived in that SHITHOLE for a lil while) outside a pub at around 11PM shortly after Fahrenheit came out I was hanging outside smoking a cig. Some typical military fascist jock looking meathead walked up to me and accused me of liking Fahrenheit. I said yes. He then offered to kick my ass because I LOOKED like someone who would watch that movie, and his brother was in Iraq. What a patriot. You know what I did? Defended myself of course... and risked getting my ass kicked. No big deal, just proves to me how irritatingly backwards the status quo is.
I really don't care if someone sees my vote, as long as we can prevent Florida from fucking over the rightful president!
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One of the basics of UI design is that if the intended users can't use it, you got the UI wrong. Simple as that.
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You didn't teach your parents to use their PCs as much as you taught them how to cope with a terrable UI. There should always be instant feedback to a user's actions, otherwise it starts causing confusion.
I think user interface design is a facinating subject, but, sadly, it is often dismissed by programmers as the user's inability to use technology and not a problem with their UI.
The UseIT alertbox is an excelent source of articles on UI (primarally web based). There is also this interesting look at the 2000 Florida "butterfly ballot".
2 candidates :
1 big button (not touch) on right, one on left,
you press, it beeps, asks to confirm.
BIG HUGE BUTTONS like doorbells, so people who never used a touch screen can use it.
I deal with users and their interface preference on a daily basis, and I can tell you, that older people are NOT comfortable with what WE technical people would consider normal.
I am not saying that this is on purpose, but I could easily construct a confusing interface that would favor selection 1 over selection 2 on user error, and all you need is to define the touch screen areas tricky. How about calibration ? I can mis-calibrate a PDA on purpose just like any other touch device. I doubt that the company designed a bad interface on purpose, but how about people tempering with the machines ?
Just my 2c
Insightful? Really?
Another possible flaw is a screen that is just set too sensitive, and is registering phantom touches.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Poor interface design isn't the issue. People who are computer illiterate expect computers to respond just like mechanical systems (e.g.: push the button and it instantly responds) and when things don't instantly provide tactile/audible/visual feedback that it "clicked" they will start spamming the button repeatedly.
Look son, I'm a computer professional, and I would do just that: spam the damn fucking thing until it fucking breaks. Because, btw, that's how I treat my own software.
And think for a second. On one hand, you have ONE piece of machinery; and on the other you have MILLIONS of user.
Which is it: millions of user who happen to be stupid enough and get it wrong all at the same time; OR one piece of poorly designed crapware? There's plenty of crap software out there, why shouldn't this be one of them?
Let's transpose the situation. Imagine there was a car which was involved in twice as many accidents as other similar cars. Would you say that this particular type of car's drivers just happen to be clumsy?
Think about that for a second. And stop blaming the victim. Making good software is hard. But the makers of those P.O.S. are payed handsomely for the detritus they produce, and they're no better than good ole' pen and paper, and in fact probably worse.
How hard is it to temporarily lock out that icon/button/etc until the code returns to that block? Not difficult whatsoever. It should be the first thing done in anticipation of a delay. Personally I don't see what you could possibly be processing to cause a button press to not instantly register. If the button is pressed, there should be instant and undeniable evidence of such a push. Especially with a check box. It's good programming practice to first update the UI before processing in the background. You should NEVER let the user wait without some sort of notification. That's all in UI design.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Because you can have God's own UI design that even the most moronic person in the universe could figure out, slap it onto a POS machine without enough power to run it quickly and you WILL have a response time/feedback time problem.
Nipple powered voting machine?
"Basically, the only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." - Bruce Ediger (1995)
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
a. hacking powers to see their vote in the machine after voting, mind that they would need the unique id to find their vote in the database. And even with optical scanners, I thought they just displayed a confirmation of the ballot, not who you voted for... OR
b. what? the gov't has allowed citizens to view the county voting database?
All the accounts of fraud sounds unbelievble since there's no way one can check audit their vote unless one has access to the central database or some lookup tool--which I haven't seen [or offered] yet. And having access would be shocking, as it implies republicans or democrats can alter votes--it cuts both ways at that point.
Companies can promise validation, but authentication is another problem. Voting in the US is pretty sad, there is no sure way to audit votes--either the machines cheat or the humans managing the process do (that's been a problem since the birth of this country). We're asking a informal group of people (US citizens) to do something that was designed to be formal (vote).
Ok, so I admit to the hourglass, but an hourglass just says the computer is busy. Some people have near-constant hourglass anyway just because their computer is junk.
Don't you think it makes a difference that the icon showing the computer is busy is the icon of the program you're trying to run?
Because touch screen voting machines are completely useless. Pen+paper is just as good, with less risk of failure and more accountability. Or even just paper as we do around here.
Who hasn't ever had a touchscreen ATM or a touchscreen POS station not register a touch as something unintended? You don't think the ATM is trying to rip you off when it picks "Savings" when you meant "Checking". You just hit cancel and do it again.)
I haven't. Maybe I'm lucky and have picked three consecutive banks that don't buy ATMs from the lowest bidder, but I call such an argument excuse territory, not "plausible explanation." I employ PEBKAC as a diagnosi, but I wouldn't make it this case.
I take my money and my vote very seriously and I don't just jab at the screen wildly, even on my regular ATM. Again, while technically possible, I doubt grandma, who has never seen this particular kind of machine, would "jeopardize" her vote by clicking haphazardly. Unless she was poking McCain's name with her middle finger- I'd actually buy that.
Ignoring the possibility of a blatant (and far too risky to be believable) "switching votes before the users' eyes" "feature", as a software developer my totally uninformed hunch screams "crappy UI." If a machine is built to be used by the general public, it should be usable by the general public. It's why ATMs have screens with very few nice big buttons with big bright centered-aligned text. Your hand has to shake really badly for you to miss the $40 and hit the $200, though granted can shake less for the checking/savings error.
OT: my ATM doesn't have a "cancel" button. Maybe it should, but I don't need or want it to.
Maybe not just UI, but poor calibration. I'm not sure how modern touch screen monitors work, but I know on a touch screen mobile device, you still have to calibrate it. If it isn't done correctly, every single vote will be skewed.
All the same, it seems to me a series of question/answers should be relatively trivial to write correctly. I'm talking Sophomore level of college here, at worst. If they can't get the UI to work on these things in that amount of time, someone needs burnt alive to their very deaths.
In other news, resource management isn't a programming issue, because you don't know who is going to try and run the program on a system you didn't intend it for.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
hackers control the election!!!
Of course we'll switch your vote to McCain! We want the acceleration of punctuated equilibrium, not the appeasement of liberal society through the election of a white guy who thinks he's black!
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
If Apple designed the voting interface you would at least have a finger friendly voting mechanism.
"This particular kiosk is not any more complicated than a ticket-sales kiosk at the train station or movie theater, or than an ATM, and we can easily design those to respond instantly." So we'd like to think, personally I've had nothing but issues with the new ticket kiosk's at our local movie theater. After a long discussion with serveral managers who felt these problems were something I should live with and not complain, I no longer go there. Unfortunatly with elections, you don't have the same choice.
Voting machines have a surprisingly strong leaning toward making errors. This is quite amazing as the ATM, airport self checkout and self pay at Wallmart all work perfectly fine. Its not like it is rocket science devices. This is maybe only incompetence, but this is no excuse. They should be accountable for their miserable failure.
I think this is a case where conflict of interest is practically unavoidable. This is only one step away from saying that no one in the Department of Agriculture should eat, or no one in the FDA should take medicine.
I don't know anything about the man in question, and, clearly, Diebold is a catastrophe for US democracy. But I don't think there's any effective way from removing partisans from the process at every level. Better to have openly political people running the system than covertly political people.
Openness is the solution, not the unverifiable appearance of neutrality.
-Peter
How is response time/feedback not a UI issue?
This is absolutely correct. As a UI designer, any part of the user experience is something I share responsibility for. Response time and feedback are things that I deal with daily.
Voting machines are probably the most important general-use UIs in our society, and they *have to* be good. There are thousands of competent programmers and UI designers in this country, I just don't understand why a single company can't manage to produce a good voting machine. It's not that hard.
Eagles may fly, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
"Poke a hole in a piece of paper" is about as simple a user interface as possible. If you are three years old and can't poke a hole in a piece of paper, something is wrong. If you are ten years old, are supposed to poke holes, and can't ask "are those dangly bits a problem", something is wrong.
No, there will always be a user interface, and someone will always do it wrong, and of those who do it wrong there will always be people who refuse to ask for help.
In the butterfly ballot/hanging chad age, it's the seventy year old guy that the democrats trotted out after the election who said he'd been voting for fifty years and didn't need to read no instructions how to vote. Yes, sir, you did.
In the good old days of paper ballots in a small township, I would help my Mom unfold and stack the ballots before they were counted by hand, and I'd be amazed at the number of adults who either could not or would not make a simple X in a box.
The instructions were clear -- X in a box. The rules for counting were simple enough. "Two intersecting line segments and the intersection within the box." That's the actual rule. An X in the box counts. A check mark would count if the corner of the check is in the box. Anything else did not. No lines through the box, no coloring in, no Xs or checks near the box. And yet, people would wait in line to cast a ballot and then fail this simple test. In a day when every child was taught to color within the lines, I saw adults who could not make an X.
Why not count "almost"? It was not unusual, in those days, especially near Chicago, to find poll workers with finger injuries requiring a bandaid (hiding a bit of pencil lead) who could mark ballots while smoothing them out. Hard to make Xs unobserved, but lines and checks are easy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra0auEa6rEs
No, you don't. State legislators aren't qualified to understand UI design any more than they are to understand the code behind the UI. There's a reason many skilled professions have certifying bodies, and that certain jobs are only allowed to be done by someone qualified. This is a job that requires the work of someone qualified. Presenting yourself as qualified to design a ballot when you're not is as big a problem as claiming you can design a bridge without a professional engineer certification.
I have seen electronic voting machines in India, they seem lower tech than fancy voting machines from the US, however they work, they are like a keyboard, each key has a label next to it. an LED lights up registering your vote when you click them, its simple and it works.
When you click them, you know what key you have clicked and who you have voted for.
picture here http://www.bel-india.com/BELWebsite/images/EVM.jpg
Yes, that would be a start. I'm certain there's more to it, though -- and I'm certain I'm not qualified to design a ballot. But, there are people who are, and we should require that ballots be designed by such people -- and we should expect them to get it right, along with the people who wrote the code for the machine.
We just had a federal election in Canada. At the polls I was given a piece of paper with six candidate names and a circle next to each candidate. Using a pen, I put a X in the circle next to the candidate of my choice. That piece of paper has a unique number on a perforated strip down the right side. I handed the folded piece of paper to the election official who removed the perforated strip, put it into an envelope and handed me the paper back, instructing me to put it into the box in front of him.
So, this is a simple, effective and very trustworthy method of voting. Why can our neighbours to the south not use this method? Recounts, if required, are easy and there is a definite paper trail, where voter fraud is easily uncovered.
If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.
You really, really, really underestimate some people's stupidity. This is NOT a technology problem. It's a stupid people problem:
1. Remember hanging chads? You know, the thing where some people couldn't figure out that you had to poke the entire piece of paper out.
2. Remember where some people voted for multiple people on their paper ballot and were disqualified? Sure, maybe they were purposely trying to throw their vote away. More likely they couldn't figure out how to use a PENCIL properly.
I could go on and on. Stop trying to think that paper/pencil means perfect and hold any machine up to the standard of perfection.
There are just too many stupid, tired, distracted, illiterate, whatever people out there. Voting won't be 100% or even 99% perfect no matter what mechanism we use. Guess what - that means tens of thousands of lost votes.
I'm a big tall mofo.
What might one do to cover the tracks? Well, if there was an apparent issue with the user interface, wouldn't this provide rather good camouflage? Sure, some would be suspicious anyway, but the important thing is plausible deniability.
is more regulation what the situation needs? or any situation? I think tighter controls lead only to more bureaucracy = less common sense to something that should be so simple. It's voting, it's not rocket science. its the legalize and "hanging chad" attitude that leads up to votes being counted incorrectly. HOW can a digital system, based on a boolean set of values produce half answers or incorrect responses unless there's operator error... the same go's for paper ballots. as far as the security of electronic voting; I'll bet there's still whole voting machines sunk to the bottom of the Hudson from the 1930's on thrugh the 50's (and beyond perhaps) ... those votes weren't counted... theres already laws that cover tampering with the voting system; so outright banning a possess that might actually add value is kinda ridiculous don't you think? Voter fraud is not an issue of how the votes are collected in my opinion. If were going to tighten voter laws how about requiring an ID at the poles NATIONALLY, how about making sure that somebody isn't voting six times for the same candidate. These are the kinds of things that make good sense for voting laws. At least in my opinion
The mouse pointer includes an hour glass beside it.
I think the author was pointing out that mechanical devices generally have immediate feedback. Computers, due to their "nature", can have problems with that. There is some amount of lag that is inherent, even in dedicated systems.
Who hasn't ever had a touchscreen ATM or a touchscreen POS station not register a touch as something unintended? You don't think the ATM is trying to rip you off when it picks "Savings" when you meant "Checking". You just hit cancel and do it again.)
Slight off topic but related alignment issue with non-touchscreen ATMs and POS devices. They usually have labels that line up with the physical buttons next to the screen. The problem is the screen is normally set back about an inch from the buttons. This means that the quality of the alignment between the label and the button depends on the angle you view the screen -- which depends on your height.
From my vantage as a taller person, the labels are often so shifted that they appear to the line up with the next row of buttons, causing me to hit the wrong ones. Very annoying. Occasional ATMs will use color coding as well, which avoids this problem.
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The other factor is that voting machines give instant feedback. With an optical scan ballot, for instance, you mark a space and feed it through the reader. That's it - no actual feedback on who that vote counted for. Unless you check your ballot carefully, you're not going to notice any mistakes. Whereas the electronic machine seems to make it pretty apparent.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
... simply ask the person who they voted for so that they can double check what was computed by the machine ? LOL :)
Anyone who has installed a system with touchscreens knows that you have to calibrate the screen to line up the physical screen coordinates with the visual display. By combining ballot layout with a deliberately misaligned touchscreen, the machine's results could be scewed just as the article describes, and there would be absolutely no evidence of tampering.
No, it's a design error to assume voting machine users will understand the same conventions as normal computer users. There any many people in the US who don't regularly interact with computers. The systems must be designed with the idea that, for many users, this will be one of their first experiences with a computer.
To follow on: If your candidate is behind in the polls, then even an 'unbiased' swapping between one party and the other will favor the trailing candidate, just by chance.
You're setting up an artificial barrier software/hardware barrier here. UI design isn't just about software--it's about the whole user experience, and that requires thinking about hardware.
In this case, we're talking about a custom-built voting appliance, with non-standard hardware to support its UI (a touchscreen). There is no excuse for slow reaction times.
Are you adequate?
You can be damn sure that any ATM has a paper trail and that the whole system is audited by vested interest. Not only that, but most, if not all, that I have seen have a security camera pointed at them. Technologically speaking an ATM and a voting machine are no different, but pragmatically they are. That difference makes all the difference.
"Who hasn't ever had a touchscreen ATM or a touchscreen POS station not register a touch as something unintended? You don't think the ATM is trying to rip you off when it picks "Savings" when you meant "Checking". You just hit cancel and do it again.)"
In all my many years of using ATMs, not once has this happened.
Multiple safeguards are the name of the game. The machines should be inspected and every other reasonable precaution should be taken to ensure that they don't come biased in the first place. Belt and suspenders and some rope too.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Doesn't anybody remember the Robin Williams movie? The voting machines are rigged to change random votes to the candidate with alphabeticaly-first double letters. John McCain?!
It's exactly like in the movie!
/sarcasm
it's not possible that a hacker would be stupid enough to display the flipped vote back to the user, oh wait, nevermind...
Is there anyone with any depth of writing knowledge at all, that seriously believes that we should use such a corruptible technology as pencil and paper voting machines in our sacred voting process?
You can't secure them. Anybody with an eraser knows this. Plus, there is no way to verify whether anyone is changing votes after the fact.
And we argue over whether to have engraved-stone trails? --- The proposed system is not perfect, so you refuse to acknowledge it might be the best practical solution because you refuse to really look how it compares to alternatives. In short, you're an alarmist at best.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I agree with you about halfway. It is unavoidable. But your conclusion is that we should just accept it and move on. I disagree. We should not accept it. If voting machines can't be built by people who have no conflict of interest then they should not be built at all. Plenty of other large democracies get by fine with paper voting, and so can we. If that's what it takes to get rid of the conflict of interest then that's what we should do.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Voting machines are probably the most important general-use UIs in our society, and they *have to* be good. There are thousands of competent programmers and UI designers in this country, I just don't understand why a single company can't manage to produce a good voting machine. It's not that hard.
The competent people were all rejected at the job interview.
Mod parent up!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
You could still keep it anonymous, very easily.
All you do is put a reference number on the receipt that is pre-printed and covered by tamper-proof tab. Add a bar-code to the receipt so the machine can read said number.
That way you (or a machine) can verify the card. You can even link the reference number back to the particular voting machine it was cast on. This way you can spot problems with a particular machine.
It's far easier to just count the votes on the day of the election during a slow time where all of the security and verification process is already in place than to set up a distinct process for absentees.
Now in some places, the ballot merely has to be postmarked by election day; those individual ballots may arrive after election day and will be counted later; that's part of the reason why initial results are preliminary and aren't made official by the secretary of state for a few weeks later.
In places where voting is done on scantron machines, they simply take the paper scantron absentee ballot, bring it in a sealed envelope to the voting precinct or ward, and sometime in the day when it's slow [usually 10-11 am or 1-3 pm] they open the envelopes and feed the ballots in to the machines.
Do you have any links, documents, or personal experience to suggest otherwise?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
You're assuming that the people who allegedly programmed them to switch votes are smart enough to have it done on the back end...which is a pretty stupid assumption.
If you'd done any research you'd have seen that even when there is a paper trail, the electronic side of the machines aren't accurate and the paper trail is NOT USED IN RECOUNTS. It's just a receipt.
On many of these machines you can't go back and change the ballot once it is done. Have you ever seen a pencil in a voting booth? They use pens you idiot.
Your disclaimer should say that you're a cynical asshole who didn't do any research before posting a 1-page clusterfuck to slashdot.
And yes, it could still be an error, due to the way the screens are physically set up, even if the reported errors are "always" Republican.
Agree.
Plus, Someone would actually have to vote Republican to prove the contrary. :-) /satire
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes"
So a vote is only "switched" if it's done in secret? If I order a one thing on an item and get something different it doesn't matter wether the mistake was intentional or due to some error. It's still the wrong thing. A switched vote is a switched vote regardless of the reason.
Dude. Touch screens need to be calibrated as part of their initial set up, otherwise pressing "here" might result in triggering a click "there". Bet a tenner this problem is related to lack of, or wrong, calibration.
Your head a splode
McCain doesn't e-mail because he can't type. He can't type because his arms were broken while he was a POW and weren't treated properly until he was back in the States. He also can't comb his own hair or tie his own shoes. In the 2000 election, he was called the most technologically savvy candidate in the race for using things like online fund raising. (Look it up, McCain was the first to do this.) Fun Fact: One of the other candidates in the race (who McCain was more technologically savvy than) was Al Gore, who was an Atari Democrat (a young Democrat who understood and ran partially on technological issues) who invented the Internet.
A person on the Internet may or may not know about McCain's history shouldn't be ridiculed. A person running for the highest office in the land, who is expected to do a little research into why something is true before releasing an ad, should be.
What problems were you having? Also, was it just you, or the other patrions as well? I've used them before, and they are fairly easy to use.
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
You sound pretty sure about this, but remember that according to your own belief you only think that you're right.
When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, 'I'm absolutely positive.'" Yeah, just like a lot of users are "absolutely positive" that they did the right thing. No, they THINK they did the right thing. That's the only thing they are "absolutely positive" of.
Hobby Robotics
Why don't we both send them out to be qualified by USMC standards.
They can both try to pass the annual Marine Corps physical and the KD course.
I suspect that after "training up" a little that Joe Cool will make Expert. The hothead will probably UNQ.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is at least one open-source election solution that has been proposed to fix problems like this. I especially like the "life in prison" part for those who commit a fraud on the system.
Requiring candidates be displayed in random order (or grouped random order if you want the "major party" candidates displayed first, which is a bias in and of itself) is an easy way to remove that bias.
Of course, it doesn't solve the actual UI problem.
Heinlein, I see that once again you are posting from beyond the grave. Please stop, Slashdot is for the living.
No sig for the moment.
RPG?
Did you work on system 38 or AS400?
I guess that's why you want military advisers for. The president needs only his intelligence and common sense to take the right decision of the choices that have been put before him. One person cannot know ALL of military, economics, education, healthcare and so on.
Your head a splode
somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
Such an absurd comment is the heart of the whole electronic voting fiasco.
You might as well say, somebody who maintains 747s like Air Force One should not be politically active. Somebody who manufactures bullet-proof glass should not be politically active. Somebody who mows the lawn at the capitol building should not be politically active.
*Everybody* should be politically active!
How about, "Somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be able to construct a voting machine that changes people's votes without their knowledge and beyond their control."?
That goes for mechanical butterfly ballots, optical scanners, pencil and paper, etc.
It is certainly possible to construct a paper ballot where the ink disappears from all Democratic candidate boxes after an hour or so. It should also be easily detected.
Electronic voting makes election fraud more difficult to detect. Given that fact alone, there would have to be a huge benefit in its favor before we even consider it.
Let's look at some potential benefits:
Cost: electronic voting is enormously more expensive.
Ease of use: no clear winner
Speed: Electronic voting seems to take a lot longer. That may change with experience.
Accuracy: no clear winner
Media-friendliness: Electronic voting is a clear winner, able to feed electronic votes into network newsfeeds in near realtime.
I do not see a huge benefit to offset the enormous downsides of electronic voting.
ACORN has got nothing to do with actually voting - ACORN is about VOTER REGISTRATION. There's a massive difference.
An ACORN employee might register "Mickey Mouse" and "Mike Hunt" as potential voters, but that doesn't help these fictitious entities actually cast a vote unless they then actually turn up to vote with a photo ID, and if you do have a photo ID then no one should be denying you the ability to register to vote!
What about medical reasons? Some people cannot physically operate computers.
People running for the highest office have oodles of people to delegate to in such matters... don't expect to see the president wasting time checking emails/writing text/etc.... they just have people checking in w/ them and doing as told.
Myself, I would go insane if such an injury occurred.
Yep a bunch of people with no connection to each other decided on the spot to form a spontaneous conspiracy. That's much more plausible than hardware/software glitches. Afteral, that's what happened to OJ!
Okay, I didn't RTFA, but:
"My son Chris said, 'Mom, I didn't vote for the people who came up on that machine. I wanted to go back and vote again. I called the lady at the polls and she said it was my fault because of the way I was punching the buttons.'"
Why is a 6-year old voting?
Actually, no, I'd like to know, that who I'm voting for will be who hands the power over to the next president-elect. I don't want an opportunist, who "adapts and changes" with the latest breeze.
But I digress. The point was not even, whether it is Ok for McCain to use his wife's help with e-mail, because his hands hurt (he can't use the comb himself, because his hands were broken by the Vietnamese during real torturing). The point was, whether or not such ridiculing would be a vote-getter or not...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No. It is an established fact that the Republicans are biasing the vote by playing statistical dirty tricks: decreasing the chances that Democrats will get to the polls on time, arranging paper user interfaces so that errors tend in their favour, applying different standards of required clarity of marking at different polling stations. Your argument that 'soft' and in principle correctable bias doesn't count is a support of this pattern (whether as a principal or a dupe, I cannot say).
I'm not saying that Democrats never engage in the same activities, by the way, though I do think it's worth noting that I've seen almost no mention of it in the foreign press, while Republican shenanigans have been widely commented on.
Your country has reached the sad point where it can no longer be trusted to run its own elections. That was clear before the polls closed in 2000. I don't see much evidence of change, even if—and here I do agree with you—people have become more sensitive to the issue.
CNN was showing video of retards having problems with the touch screens.
They got a test machine set up and had to do the most retarded crap ever to make it mess up.
McCain is listed on the top, and Obama just below.
They round of some fossil of a lady and have her vote for Obama, with her finger at the very top of the box. She leaves her finger there for a second, and you can see the check mark and highlighting appear for Obama. They then have her remove her finger in the most retarded fashion possible - rolling it upwards and then pulling away, after the tip of her finger has just tapped McCain's box, and voted for him.
This was all shown at a ridiculously high camera angle of course, to make it seem like her finger was lower than it really was.
I don't get why the media focuses on retarded voters and parts of the system that work fine, yet completely ignore the real issues with electronic voting machines.
Also - am I the only one who hates CNN's i-Reporter bullshit? They ALWAYS make it a point to call them "Our" (CNN's) i-Reporters. Yeah, we get it CNN, you got embarrassed because you kept having to show youtube videos as news. Now you show youtube videos as news, but you have your own site, and get to downplay the fact that these people aren't reporters, they're just plebes with cell phones.
Take a systems that works and copy it.
Oregon's vote by mail.
1. Vote in your own home.
2. Have the internet, family, the phone, and the local papers when you vote.
3. Easy to check your results.
4. Easy to audit (it has done a good job of catching errors in the past.)
5. Doesn't take time out of your busy schedule.
love seeing stupid partisans get pwned. nice job.
What really sucks is that the FUD has started before the vote is done.
In other words, they are preparing for a loss by declaring any such loss as a fraud. I figure it this way, and close district probably has lawyers lined up and enough lackeys too stupid to vote but not too stupid to be trained to recite lines as told.
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN. I guess there had to be a diversion generated to make it look like the other side was being just as bad.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ok... then make the cues a little more OBVIOUS.
OH... mebbe in stead of a pretty obvious timepiece (clock or hourglass) then
throw up a big fat dialog box that says "PLEASE WAIT WHILE I PROCESS THIS".
Despite what some people would like to claim, we do share a common culture
here and a common frame of reference at some level. Hillbillies really aren't
from Mars.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"even if the reported errors are "always" Republican."
Reminds me of a 60 minutes years ago about bar code scanning price errors. Yes there are errors but 90% (aprox) of these errors where in the stores favor.
It's a shame that your 75-year-old father has to work.
People keep using Occam's Razor and don't know what it ALL says.
But for now I'll just deal with the "simplest solution" bit. Incompetence would require incompetence of EACH AND EVERY PARTICIPANT. How likely is it that each would be incompetent? A conspiracy requires that only selected people who won't care to look or think the same way are involved. That's a WHOLE LOAD more likely. Like Jury selection, the intelligent people are weeded out because either side don't want people who can think in the courtroom. It reduces the freight of the solicitors. Someone may come to a conclusion based on evidence rather than what the solicitor says.
And the same here. Each person could be selected on incompetence and the number of people "in" on the conspiracy will already have avenues to self-select without showing any overt bias.
I don't know your particular situation but in my state, California, our constitution mandates that voting be secret. It would be against the law here for you to receive a receipt from the machine (or to have any type of vote checking after the actual vote is cast).
Devil's Advocate time: How can you color in a polygonal box with a pencil and not create at least two intersecting line segments in the process? The only way I can think of is what an SAT book I read back in the day called "the moron dot method," in its chapter of how to most efficiently fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet. This method involved stabbing dots into the bubble until it was filled. So, unless people did that or the voting boxes were elliptical (including circular), then coloring them in almost certainly involved drawing in two line segments.
That aside, I agree. You can't make any interface idiot-proof, because the world will just give you a better idiot.
Funny, since particularly in West Virginia, it is widely suspected that the 1960 election had votes shifting to the democratic candidate, John Kennedy.
Anyway, here in Massachusetts, we still use the best error-free tech - SCANTRON!
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
That would fall under a skill that can be learned and is part of why we purposely put a (possible) civilian in charge of the armed forces. Is Obama claiming he knows nothing about how the military works or is unwilling to learn? Somehow, I think that there is more willingness to learn on Obama's part with regards to the military than on McCain's part with regards to technology. I haven't read anything either way, it's just an impression I get from the two main candidates.
Not that I'm likely to vote for either. Personally, I'm leaning towards writing in a vote of "None of the above" and abstaining from that particular selection. It's a bit time consuming on the machines here in Orange County, CA, but I feel better about it.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
doesnt filling in the box constitute two really thick intersecting line segments?
Curious isn't it that it's not Republicans crying wolf? In fact, between butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and now touch screen voting, it's invariably Democrats that don't seem to have enough sense to operate even the simplest voting technology.
Perhaps if you aren't intelligent enough to figure out how to vote, you probably shouldn't be voting anyway.
You'd find a lot more people voting early and often...
This is the DNC planting these stories so if they lose they'll be able to blame it on anything but themselves and their lack of a coherent vision for this nation beyond raising our taxes and redistributing the wealth to their cronies.
Seriously though. If you don't have the wits to vote correctly because it is slightly more complicated than a pictogram walk / don't walk sign then maybe we don't need to know who you want to be president.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
The touch-screen was a bone-headed idea for a voting machine from the very start!
Even ATM machines have sets of physical buttons down the left and right hand sides of their touch-screen displays, so you can alternately choose options by pressing them.
(I often do, since my local bank's ATM is really bad about selecting what I press when I touch the screen itself.)
Or disqualify McCain for the inability to use a computer.
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/is_mccain_unable_to_use_a_computer.html
Forbes, May 2000: His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. "She's a whiz on the keyboard, and I'm so laborious," McCain admits.
There's a very simple, important difference. When an ATM makes an error, it can be reliably detected and corrected in nearly all cases. This is because the ATM (and electronic money transfer systems, in general) keep a detailed record of which accounts were debited and credited for each transaction, and this record can be reconciled with others: e.g., the customers' own checkbooks, online merchants' records, records of how much cash was in the ATM at any point in time, etc. When the relevant parties conclude a certain transaction was recorded incorrectly, it can be rolled back or revised.
When a voting machine makes an error, it's at best a toss-up as to whether it can be detected. No paper trails mean that, in many cases, the error can never be detected. Paper trails help A LOT in this case, but are not a panacea: you can imagine a case where, because of fraud, the electronic tabulation gives candidate A a clear win, and nobody bothers to perform a paper recount that would prove candidate B actually won.
And if you do detect an anomaly in the vote, forget about ever correcting it.
Are you adequate?
Why not just stop voting altogether?
You never see bugs in Windows machines;
or when you sign the CC at the Store, it NEVER requires that the boxes be shifted from what is displayed below.
Absolutely NEVER.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
The latter is probably quite close to the truth. In the US there just dosn't appear to be any tradition of the people running the election being independent of the candidates.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
That isn't actually too difficult. You simply make the electoral process as low tech and transparent as possible.
The machines are smarter than the voters.
if only so conspiracy theorists can STFU and stop thinking every election where their preferred candidate doesn't win is "stolen".
There were NO stories in the mainstream media on election machine tampering and voter fraud after the 2006 election when Democrats swept to power. (as compared to 2000 and 2004)
Any bets on that being the case if McCain pulls an upset??
Yeah, media bias is SO overblown.
Any machine built for this purpose should at the very least be inspected (including code and all other pratical aspects) by an independant non-political technical review board.
How do you do you propose to do this in a way which is both useful and non destructive? Solid state microelectronics tends to require such steps as dunking in liquid nitrogen and using an electron microscope.
I've sent e-mails without ever touching a keyboard - Vista Voice makes that pretty easy to do. Oh, wait, I'm on Slashdot I forgot...what's the Linux analogue? ;-)
-B-
What's with this hypothetical language ("would" and "if")? It's already happened -- hanging chads are caused by bad UI too!
Hanging chads are not a failure of user interface. They are a failure of the tallying system. You only get a hanging chad when you've punched a hole in the paper and the puncher doesn't quite completely cut the entire hole out - leaving a 'hinge' between the edge of the hole and paper from the center of the hole. When there is only one 'hanging chad' it ought to be quite clear what the voter's intent was because, after all, they did punch a hole completely through the paper.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There is at least one open-source election solution that has been proposed to fix problems like this. I especially like the "life in prison" part for those who commit a fraud on the system.
How many of you have cleaned a machine that a user was click happy.
I voted, I selected my candidate.
I looked down and noticed that it was incorrect, I corrected it and wen on with life.
I think its a case of fat fingering and click happy people.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
and this http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hacking+democracy&search_type=&aq=f
...I've had nothing but issues with the new ticket kiosks at our local movie theater.
Same here. Our ticket kiosk has been "out of order" for over 2 years. They fix it, it breaks, they fix it again, it breaks again. Even when it's working, it is slower than the girls in the booth. Informally timing the transactions, it takes a little over twice as long to get a ticket from the automated kiosk as it does from a human operator. Sometimes digital/automated is not the best answer.
Impetuous! Homeric!
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
Until you realize the founding fathers specifically and purposely made the chief of the military a CIVILIAN POSITION. They did not want military service to be a prerequisite for the presidency.
(Yes, I'm sure you're going to point out that Washington had been a general. But move on to Adams, Jefferson and Madison and you'll find no military service in their resumes.)
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
its a user error.
It is not. It's an example of poor - though incredibly common - software/gui design. It doesn't seem to occur to most programmers that there's another way. Or maybe it does and they're just lazy assholes. Instead they blame the user as you just did.
But e.g. AmigaOS in particular made a point of getting this right - Well-written apps using Intuition (the gui subsystem) always ran the gui updates "in a separate thread" in modern terms (though that's a subtly inaccurate description for reasons I won't get into now).
When you clicked a button to perform an action, the button always immediately visually changed state (e.g. went "down" in pseudo-3D-bevel terms). It stayed down until it was "done", when it sprang back up. Further presses were ignored in the down state (and not queued waiting for the up state either).
This was not really "hard" or "expensive" to implement - remember amigaos was typically trundling along on 7 or 14MHz machines with 1/2-2MB RAM! Modern GUIs and OSes and whatnot just seem to be implemented by morons.
I know from experience supporting casual computer users on both platforms that people just didn't click-hammer on AmigaOS like they do on Windoze. There are many reasons why AmigaOS is remembered so peculiarly fondly by people who used it at the time. Subtle UI considerations like that count for a lot.
It's almost certainly NOT a parallax issue. The distance of the screen image from the touch surface is far too small. It might be a calibration problem, but I doubt that too.
The position reading on a conventional touch screen is the result of a hundred or more samples of resistance measurements from points around the periphery, which are then used to calculate a "best-fit" x-y position. What is most likely is that the sample measurements are being thrown off. This could be done by electrical noise, bad connections, an intermittent touch, a touch that is too light, a touch that is too heavy, or touching with too large a finger surface, etc.
Almost certainly it is an interaction between system faults and the physical idiosyncracies of voters. This would be quite independent of whether the users are voting system or computer literate.
Once, in the early days of office computing, I worked for a small OEM that had a number of installations in accounting firms. We began to get reports of reliability problems, which we reported up to the manufacturer. We got back a tech note saying that nylon stockings could cause static discharges (apparently the engineers testing the devices didn't wear 'em), and the work around was to either (a) not wear nylons or pantyhose or (b) regularly spray your legs with anti-static fabric softener. So, we had all the secretaries that every hour or two went into the ladies room to spray their legs with Downy.
The point is, hardware glitches happen in short manufacturing run devices that are used in unpredictable real-world circumstances. I bet the number of those old time devices shipped was fairly comparable to the number of voting machines a modern manufacturer ships, only they were used in much more predictable environments. Even so, a mere two years provided me with a lifetime of oddball stories, like the firm that had their minicomputer plugged into an outlet controlled by a dimmer switch; or the firm that was a cross from the auto wrecking yard that had huge brownouts and spikes when the big car lifting magnet was turned on and off.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's a reason the founding fathers gave the CIC position to a civilian office. It would make just as much sense to disqualify McCain because he *did* serve in the military.
McCain is not a technophobe or a retrograde — his campaign is using technology quite a bit and has posted its share of YouTube videos (a very cheap way to get once message out). It is not as techno-cool as Obama's, but no less so than Hillary Clinton's or Biden's own campaigns were. Indeed, Bill Clinton — everybody's favorite bubble-creator — has sent a whopping two e-mails during his 8 years in office.
What keeps McCain himself from a computer — as has been repeatedly pointed out since Obama's revolting attack — are the injuries sustained in Vietnamese prison, where his torturers were twisting his broken arms (waterboarding is for wussies). The man can't lift his arms above his shoulders to this day — I wonder, why Obama has not ridiculed his inability to comb his hair by himself...
And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain. How good, do you think, is Biden with computers?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It doesn't have to be parallax. It could be just the touchscreen's calibration drifting over the course of the day, due it warming up, or just the fat from people's fingers accumulating on it, or even an automatic routine intended to compensate for such effects that overcompensates.
I just don't understand why a good paper ballot is so hard to accept...
It's because elections are so much harder to steal if you have a "good paper ballot".
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel actually owned the company that controlled the elctronic voting in the election that he won, in a stunning upset, in every demographic, including many black communities that had never voted Republican before. Nebraska hadn't voted for a Republican for Senate in 24 years.
In Georgia, Democratic Senator Max Cleland (who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, after he jumped on a grenade to save his fellow troops), was defeated by a Republican that alleged that Cleland was not patriotic enough. Even after the polls indicated that the voters did not actually believe this, the Diebold machines announced the Republican the winner. Surprise! And in another surprise, while the polls indicated that Democractic Governor Roy Barnes was winning, the Diebold machies announced that he lost as well to his Republican challenger. A whistleblower revealed that secret patches were applied to the machines late in the race, violating state law.
Here are other instances of Republicans winning through voting machine irregularities.
I seem to remember, Bush's critics foaming at the mouths over the idea of sending Republicans and their children to Iraq... Heck, I even wrote something about it back then.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I was trying to vote for the Communist, but it kept flipping to the Fascist!
Part of the Second American Revolution!
You forgot two.
0. Make sure you've put in a bunch of voter registrations that get mailed to your address.
----
7. Vote repeatedly in the same election.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Mod parent down! (we don't need backseat moderation. Get your points and use them, or shut up and let the people who have em, use them)
There is a big difference between 'can't physically' and 'doesn't know how' which is what McCain explicitly stated. Which is back to my original point, if a person does not understand technology, they can not reasonably be expected to run a country based largely on said technology.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
One thing I never understood: Why did Florida matter? No disrespect to Floridians intended, but are there not 49 other states, and various territories that people also vote in? Is Florida so populous that what they say goes?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
6. Allows for intimidation by peers to make sure your vote is "correct", just like how the unions want to know how their members are voting to help keep them in-line with current lobbying.
I had no problem scoring 100% on my quizzes in school on those little ScanTron sheets. I believe that we all have the skills necessary to understand that you need to fill in a bubble completely and only mark one bubble per row.
I don't really understand the burning desire for electronic voting. It doesn't seem to make the process cheaper (because these e-voting companies charge huge fees to cover their R&D). We don't necessarily need super fast results (scantrons and other methods are still quite fast), it's the elections already take into account how long it takes for votes to be counted and a new person to move into office. And while it is possible to have electronic voting to be super accurate, just being electronic does no automatically make you accurate.
Internet voting with a digitally signed/watermarked PDF receipt with a vote id to allow you to match up your vote with an entry in the system while still being anonymous seems to be the cheap way to go to me. Then I wouldn't have to put like a dollars worth of stamps on my ballot when I mail it in. (my district is so small now that we are all mandatory mail-in ballots)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, no, I'd like to know, that who I'm voting for will be who hands the power over to the next president-elect. I don't want an opportunist, who "adapts and changes" with the latest breeze.
Really, you're big flip-flop citation is about baseball teams? Very important stuff that is.
And yes, we would never want a candidate who could adapt his views based on new knowledge and insight, because the opposite has worked so well over the last 8 years.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I was going to say, hand injury is a pretty lame excuse for not being able to use a computer, since there are plenty of technological solutions for using a computer with minimal use of the arms and hands. I work with a few people who can't type for long periods of time (actually, one can't type at all), but they still read and write emails: they use voice recognition software.
From the article, it sounds like McCain has found a similar solution, he's just using voice recognition wetware. :)
Saying "he can't use a computer because of war injuries" is a lame response. The correct response "he does use a computer and has for at least the past eight years" is a much better response.
Bah, I hate political ads anyway. Praise TiVo for saving me from having to watch those stupid ads! I swear, each time I see an attack ad, it makes me want to vote against whoever's running it. That goes for McCain, Obama, and Apple.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Please, has no one noticed what state these people are from.
If double-tapping on a name cancels the vote, that's a bug.
If double-tapping on a name resets it to a default, that's a BIG bug.
If the guys who configured the machines for that county knew about that bug, and arranged the names so that when people double-tap they get the candidate they want, that's fraud.
Whether or not some people are "click happy".
The article you linked to suggests that McCain's war injuries are the reason he can not use the Internet. This contradicts his own observations on his lack of computer literacy. From The Huffington Post:
I don't care why you're posting AC
I bet you are right about the placement of the boxes and interpretation of the screen touch. This happened to me in GA when I voted several years back. Fortunately there is a confirmation screen by which you can realize the mistake, go back and try touching the screen in a lower location. That worked for me. Not sure what the calibration is like on these screens, but seems that they are buggy, at least in GA they were.
Vote by mail has numerous advantages but it also forces you to dispense with the notion of a private ballot which is not something I am all that comfortable with.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
well if *I* were to rig a touch screen voting machine, i'd make it a "Calibration" issue, not a "coding" issue. The former, you could play dumb. The latter, not so much.
I saw a documentary a while back about that; the card makers used crappy paper stock to make the ballots. They disregarded their own QA people's warning, and shipped cards that wouldn't tear off neatly as they used to.
Nice blaming the victim once again.
The presidents job should be like any other job. You hire someone based on their resume, what kind of experience and knowledge you have. I know that if I was going to apply for a security job, my experience in the military will be a big plus and should be considered, same goes for someone applying to be Commander in Cheif.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I seriously do not get this at all..
It's a bloody COUNTING MACHINE! For gods sake have things gone backwards that far? A man was put on the sodding moon in the 60's and now we can't even put together a souped up abacus.
Touch screens were an absolute worst choice. Two large, color coded hardware buttons (say, red and blue) put in front of a user, with a simple non touchy/calibraty/finniky screen which visually maps Red = X Blue = Y and a clear message "please press button".
But no.. like any other government projects inexperienced pimple faced government employees with no common sense buy into the flabber of a snake oil salesman for millions of dollars with nothing more than a dodgy, bent and poorly designed machine which barely meets (if at all) specification.
where will it end..
"Poke a hole in a piece of paper" is about as simple a user interface as possible
I've used those butterfly ballots. The "user interface" is "Poke a square hole in a piece of paper using a round peg".
They suck so much ass that after decades of dealing with hanging chads, most jurisdictions (including most districts in Florida) counted chads stuck on by one or two corners as a valid vote.
Exactly -- when I made some touch-screen software for a company, one of the first things I wrote in was a delay timer to disable the 'okay' and 'cancel' buttons immediately after a window appears or disappears for about a quarter of a second.
In testing, some users would click the screen twice by accident, the first one saying okay to a window that was in front of another screen with a button directly where the 'okay' had been, possibly cancelling a screen they didn't mean to cancel.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If voters are seeing it, the problem is probably a screen registration issue. This is just one of many problems with touch screen voting systems.
"Who hasn't ever had a touchscreen ATM or a touchscreen POS station not register a touch as something unintended? You don't think the ATM is trying to rip you off when it picks "Savings" when you meant "Checking". You just hit cancel and do it again." Hmmm - let me think - 15+ years of using ATM's and I can't think of a single occurrence where an ATM machine registered the wrong choice when I used it. In fact I can't think of ever discussing this problem with anyone. What this says to me is that the registration/alignment of touch screens can be very reliable. Of course it will raise suspicions if this same technology does not function reliably in a voting machine. While I don't buy into the vote switching consipracy I do think that it is at best negligent and at worst criminal to choose such an apparently unreliable implementation of this technology for such an important purpose. Why can't the local voting officials make better choices and avoid this embarrasing and unneccesary confusion every time we vote as a country.
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
You failed to show a logical connection. Obama didn't say McCain was UNQUALIFIED to be POTUS due to his computer illiteracy, he said McCain was out of touch, and had a serious lack of understanding of the issues in the modern world, in addition that ad linked the lack of understanding of technology to lack of comprehension of economic issues, and McCain admitted lack of understanding of both to prove that McCain has no personal understanding of the issues important to America.
Using a similar comparison, Obama's lack of military service would make him out of touch with the rest of America since Military service = Computer literacy, or, percentage of Amercans serving in the military is similar percentage of Americans who are computer literate.
Whew, I'm glad you cleared that up for us....
Seriously, though, Computer literacy touches everyone in the US, the Military is important, but it doesn't touch ALL aspects of what the President has to deal with. So Military service != Computer literacy, particularly in terms of whether the candidate is capable of understanding what is going on with the average American.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
What exactly is the point of a rule such as votes will only count if their are two intersecting line segments within the box? How is it reasonable when ballots with one candidate unambiguously selected are thrown out because the boxes are filled in instead of checked.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
There is a big difference between 'can't physically' and 'doesn't know how' which is what McCain explicitly stated.
You're proposing the "can't physically" is not an excuse for not knowing how to do something? Assuming that "can't physically" is preventing you from doing whatever the task is, what is the point in learning that task if you can't do it anyway?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
For the Same reasons.
Hard to fudge a dice roll on a computer.
Serving in the military is not a requirement to be able to serve competently as Command in Chief. Understanding the military should be and you can understand the military without having served.
The problem with McCain and computers is that you have a senator who has, and will do so again, voted for or against laws concerning computers without even bothering to begin to understand them. He doesn't need to be an expert with them but he should at least understand them. Given his professed lack of even understanding computers I'd really like for him to explain why he voted the way he did on a lot of computer legislation, both for and against. If you don't know about something and you vote on it you're either voting to just vote, pandering to some special interest (corporate or electorate), or being a proxy for someone else's opinion.
I live in WV. The local news showed the ballots and exactly how this could happen and it was entirely feasible that it was user error due to bad software design.
The UI is poorly designed. McCain's name appears above Obama's. The bottom border of McCain's box touches the upper border of Obama's box. When looking down at the device it looks like you are selecting Obama when your finger is actually on McCain.
This effect can be compounded by initially touching the box with the tip of your finger and then rolling down so your fingerprint area is fully on Obama's name, but you initially touched the bottom of McCain's box. In this case your finger will fully be within Obama's box but McCain will remain selected.
However the people doing the voting should be double checking their vote on the screen and the paper receipt that scrolls up next to the screen as you vote.
Bottom line is, bad design, untrained user.
Thanks for the info.
No sig for the moment.
We don't learn, do we. We just apply technology so we can make mistakes faster.
I propose replacing these ineffective voting computers with tequila and handguns!
.evom ton seod gis eht
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
I guess he'll start serving on his first day as commander in chief.
I'm not sure why to some it's such a big deal for presidents to serve in the military in order to be acceptable. The US is not alone but look at the company it keeps. It entreches a culture of agression in the country's constitution by requiring a leadership which has been to war or has at least served in an institution which at best attempts intimidate other countries.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes.
There are a lot less public ways to rig an election, putting something out there so obviously noticeable would be a big risk.
Funny no one ever thinks to take out their cell phone and get video of the machine actually switching a vote. Collect some actionable evidence.
In my mind the only use for touch screen machines is to aid in creating the printed ballot which can then be fed into a counter. That avoids hanging chads, butterfly ballots and the voter has a chance to verify it's correct before turning it in.
I personally know people on the local board of elections from both parties and, interestingly, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is making sure the ballots and instructions are clear and votes are counted properly. I hear partisan bickering about everything else, but not that. I believe a widespread effort at rigging elections would be handicapped by the sheer number of fairly decent and honest people involved in the process. Someone would talk.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
What about medical reasons? Some people cannot physically operate computers.
Tell that to Stephen Hawking...
Let me assure you as a guy with disabilities, using a PC with alternate input methods is tricky... but workable, if you're willing to spend the time. While he may not be able to "raise his arms" {and I have my doubts there, as he apparently had no trouble shaking Obama's hand at the debates} he sure as heck could use a Crackberry with his hands in his lap, couldn't he?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
All of these reports of so-called "vote flipping" seem to be easily and instantly correctable by the voter themselves. A true "vote flip" would show one candidate as highlighted and then count the vote for the other candidate (or show the other candidate at the summary screen stage. If there isn't a mandatory summary screen then that's a bad UI choice in itself). If it's just an issue of a mis-calibration, that's an annoyance and you could argue the UI issues, but there is nothing nefarious about it. It seems like a whine and an excuse more than anything.
For instance, you could use a pencil and paper ballot and accidentally put a stray mark that looks like a vote for another candidate. No one would ever consider that a sign that the entire pencil and paper technology (and it is a technology) is flawed.
I think there are some real issues that need to addressed and there are definite changes to the UI of these systems that could help, but I can't understand why a voter can't be bothered to move their finger a couple of millimeters and fix it themselves until someone can use this information to improve the system.
Pen + paper + human beings - clear democracy. Even if it takes a whole month, does it matter when you know (not assume) it's all done properly?
Who cares about efficiency when it's all about efficacy? Sure this is a little too black and white, but this isn't some random discussion, this is an election right?
One of the most, if not THE most important thing in a democracy. Then perhaps information, but that's a long story..
Creative?
Who the fuck wouldn't use a non work email address for questionable activities?
Sleazy sure, underhanded yeah, but creative? Get the fuck out of here.
If you're charged with passing laws relating to the task, one would expect you to be knowledgeable about it or at least informed.
Even if a referee is physically incapable of playing a football game they should be able to decide a play.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
or feature?
The presidents job should be like any other job. You hire someone based on their resume, what kind of experience and knowledge you have.
Then how the hell did Hillary get into the running?
Why do you people use electronic devices anyway? Or mechanical ones for that matter.
Canadians use a paper and a pencil. Mark an X in the box. Done.
What's wrong with that?
It sure beats cutting up your own face and filing false police reports.
you know, if i had my arms broken and rebroken to the point where years later typing on a computer is painful, I think i'd say screw it someone else can do it, theres plenty other things for me to do.
Spot on. I caught a CNN segment on this last night. It looked like the touchscreen display angle, sliding your finger, and maybe problems with the touch sensitivity of the device were to blame.
I think Microsoft (or maybe that russian guy [art lebidiv?] with the optimus keyboard) designed a touch screen device composed of multiple screens, each one of which was a distinct button. (Rather than being touch sensitive, you push an LCD button). That would be much better than one single touchscreen with lots of options packed in together.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
this sounds like a joke. it's almost cliche, "the voting machines are switching my vote" such an obvious claim that some dumb people would make. GG
An anonymous liberal reader writes ...
The workers in the polling place gave us pencils with erasers to use. They said large fingers were causing multiple selections to be made. Apparently the touch sensors are overly sensitive, and cannot distinguish between the middle region being pressed. My guess is if the finger is being released unevenly, it registers the vote where the sensing was last received, which might be above or below depending on the angle of the finger. It worked correctly for me using the eraser end of the pencil.
There was also a sealed box with a long window on the side showing a paper roll with each selection being printed on it in text. It printed exactly what I voted for, as seen through the box. When the vote was finally confirmed, it printed some bar codes, which I assume is some kind of coding for the vote, maybe with a hash checksum. Presumably, if there is any need or demand for a paper audit, those rolls could be accessed and votes counted from there.
The machines were "iVotronic" models.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.
It is a simple case of the machine being smarter than the person operating it, I mean come on who would want to vote for Obama.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1095921017265685432&hl=en
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmsdSVQSXLg&eurl=http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=UUW&q=boo
I always wondered why the inability to lift you arms above your shoulders makes you a better candidate to run a country. Did his arms being broken give him miraculous insight into economic reform? Health care policies? How about the ability to command an army? NO. All it gave him was bitterness, an understanding of torture and the inability to comb his hair. Vote him in as a torture watchdog maybe but i fail to see how broken arms applies to running the country. Imagine if I put on my resume 'i got beat up lots as a kid' when applying for a programming job. They'd have no idea why I included it as it is NOT RELEVANT.
I think you're forgetting the more important thing: regardless of whether this was done intentionally or not, people's votes are not getting reflected accurately. Certainly if there were tampering being done that should be investigated (as opposed to just saying it's all human error). Effort should also be made to make sure that the vote a person makes gets counted according to that person's intention.
Voting is one of the most stressed responsibility in a Democracy. That's why more care (and yes, a certain amount of paranoia) should be associated with it.
I've sent e-mails without ever touching a keyboard - Vista Voice makes that pretty easy to do.
I don't want to be around when the executive order reading "Dear aunt, letâ(TM)s set so double the killer delete select all" causes an international incident.
Of course nobody reads the FAQ! If people read the FAQ, the Questions wouldn't be so Frequently Asked.
Just like getting any other job, she knew alot of the higher ups and gathered alot of good contacts...
I'm sure what we have here is a well organized conspiracy. No doubt about it. McCain will win 56% to 42%. Interestingly, that would be an exact flip of what Obama's poll numbers say on average.
The "flip-it" worm at work. All votes for these two candidates get reversed! Holy cow! The humanity!
I see the trolls are hungry.
Wow you Godwin yourself in your sig, now THAT takes balls, or just a horrible bias.
I have stated every time it has come up that electronic voting machines should rotate the names of the candidates randomly. If there's an error, it shouldn't benefit one over another. The "worst" error would be if the most chosen candidate had the greatest spillover to other candidates. The election results for the precinct would be the same, but on a wide scale it could affect the results if there are a number of highly polarized voting places. But at least it's better than the current methods of making up a static ballot and having everyone who makes a particular error always have that error hurt one candidate to the benefit of another. That will change results of elections much more easily, and is an error that crops up very consistently.
Learn to love Alaska
MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday (NNN) — The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.
"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."
Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."
The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."
The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"
All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."
Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.
Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The solution: Lever Voting Machines...the technology in use when I first started voting in 1981.
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
It is, actually, when one is talking about a neophyte, who started running for President after only 140-something days as a Senator, and whose only prior executive experience consists of chairing a failed local non-profit organization. During his 8 years as an Illinois law-maker, he voted "Present" 129 times (15 times per year — just how many decisions did they make there?) — whatever the excuses for such indecisiveness, the sheer number of the "maybes" is rather large.
We don't know much about Obama, and what we do know, is unflattering...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
See, Obama wouldn't do that because most of the "50 million baby boomers", even the ones with physical disabilities that prevent them from raising their arms over their heads, have learned how to use a computer, if only to read email from their friends and look at pictures of their grandkids.
Seriously, how out-of-touch do you have to be to be in public life in 2008, extremely wealthy, and not have learned even the basics of using a personal computer?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Damn straight. I wouldn't vote for McCain either.
Why? That didn't disqualify George W. Bush, did it?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN. I guess there had to be a diversion generated to make it look like the other side was being just as bad.
I've been hearing about ACORN for a while, and I'm curious how ACORN represents a threat to the integrity of the election.
Yes, I get that there was fraud, in the sense that they were submitting fake voter registrations in order to collect a commission on those registrations. But unless "Donald Duck" and "Mickey Mouse" show up to vote there is no "election fraud" happening.
So, how does Barack even theoretically benefit from funding ACORN to create fraudulent voter registrations? The only real 'victim' I see of this fraud is Barack who paid them to get out and register voters, (and there is nothing wrong with that, even if he's funding registration drives specifically in 'democrat heavy' areas).
If you retain the reference #, Mr. Voter Buying Man can force you to hand it over, and verify your vote. I'm not sure there's really a good way of knowing that your vote counted, and have it be anonymous. You can pick one or the other.
Mr Voter Buying Man can observe your vote directly, or he can do so by monkeying with the tally behind the scenes. I personally feel more secure having anonymous votes, but having a paper trail that is used/audited. It can still be corrupt, but the likelihood of leaving physical evidence of tampering is higher.
In any event, our responsibility to voting transcends simply showing up and marking a box. We have to be very sure that our vote appears to be cast for who we want, first and foremost. Make sure the ballot is clear and correct at face value. We can blame the machines all we like, but it's our responsibility to make sure our part is done perfectly. Our next responsibility is to observe the election results and match them to our perception of reality, and if we have doubts, participate in the counting process.
It's not easy to throw an election quietly. You have to be very subtle. Let's say you want to rig it for McCain (he's the underdog now). You can't rig it to let him win by a landslide, there'd be riots. Our BS detectors should say "If he wins, it will be by a narrow margin". So you need to rig the machines/process to give him just a slight victory across the several battleground states. Across many districts, state lines and different voting machines (some of which you have no control of).
You forgot another:
8. When the voter registrations of your fraudulent names are not validated, go to prison for election fraud.
Why are our votes not published on a verifiable internet accessible database for ALL to see?
Because if I where your boss and found out you voted for Obama I would fire you.
That is the reason your vote is kept hidden...
Got Code?
I've sent e-mails without ever touching a keyboard...
So does McCain. He dictates emails and his wife types them. Much more accurate than any software-based voice recognition I know of.
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN.
Incorrect. First of all we are talking about is registration fraud, which should be distinguished from vote fraud. When Mickey Mouse shows up to vote then it is vote fraud. Until then the only one getting screwed is ACORN who payed for someone to collect those garbage registrations.
Secondly, ACORN is not the only documented registration fraud going on.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Acorn fraud is temporary employees attempting to defraud Acorn, i.e. getting paid for not doing the work, though it seems to me filling out fake forms is at least as much work as getting them filled out correctly.
Prosecutors said the defendants committed fraud in order to keep their jobs without actually registering voters.
Do you seriously think someone is going to show up at the voting booth claiming to be Mickey Mouse?
as if the votes counted to begin with. as long as im voting with the same machine that i get cash with i do not believe anything is true
A person running for the highest office in the land, who is expected to adapt and change as the world does, should be.
I'd rather he not be surfing for porn during the next crises myself.
Excuse me, but Stephen fucking Hawking can use a computer and not move any part of his fucking body, and McCain, who is wealthy enough not only to buy a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking ($145 retail), but probably buy the whole company company has to have his wife sit and read email to him?
Is Cindy going to sit next to him in the oval office and move the mouse around for him? Gee, I hope she stays off the Vicodin the day John McCain has to google "cyberterrorism".
This pitiful use of McCain's POW status to excuse every one of his shortcomings is really sickening. Strange, most people who have experienced horrific things in war don't like to talk about it, but McCain can't say three sentences without reminding us that he was a POW. He usually leaves out the part about making propaganda films for his captors, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So ACORN and the registering of the entire Dallas Cowboys football team in, I think, Arizona was completely glossed over by the press? There are people wondering now if Obama really won the primaries. If Hillary and Bill weren't playing such good little democrats I'm sure they'd be raising hell right now.
Can't they just make the buttons far enough apart so it's pretty much impossible to errantly push one?
For example, the top 1/3 of the screen says "John McCain" and the bottom 1/3 says "Barack Obama". The middle part of the screen is blank.
(Yes, I know, you can vote for more than just two people, but you get the idea. d:)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes.
I don't think there is a conspiracy, but if there was....
Ever hear of hiding something in plain sight? Heck, hide it in the touch screen logic, and the counting software would survive any audit.
Sprinkle a few examples switching the opposite way in safe places.
Know that all you have to do is change things very slightly, put the machines in critical counties.
Of course, it these reports could be reports of a glitch in buggy software. These are only votes, not mission critical stuff like money, and its hard for people to check if the machines are doing a right job, so you can afford to be the lowest bidder doing a sloppy job. There probably aren't even consequences for that.
The strength of the machines is helping users and making sure there are no mistakes -- that only one vote is cast for President, etc.
The strength of the paper ballot system is the security and the lasting, verifiable record.
So COMBINE the strengths. Use the machines to print a standardized paper ballot that THE VOTER takes over to a ballot box.
This way it doesn't matter if the machine is secure because the voter looks over the paper ballot bvefore putting it into the ballot box, and makes sure that it reflects what the voter wanted.
That's because computers can't tell the difference. Terrorcrat 1 or terrorcrat 2 makes no difference to the voting machine. Losses abound either way.
I saw a news article where they showed the UI and its obviously not fraud but a UI issue with the layout of the buttons being so close together and the "fat finger" like effect of putting your finger on obama and moving the finger up enough that it then choses McCain. My advice is to have a seperate screen per category, prop, etc. So each candidate can have more screen real estate , with alot of empty white space in between.
You know, I don't know that people who were that pedantic didn't get their votes counted anyway. I just know what the instructions said and what the official rules for counting were.
It's not like we were in a high-fraud area like Chicago, we were just close enough that we all knew who Richard Daley was and how he got elected so often.
And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain.
Seriously? Infringe on their executive's domain? The executive is still answerable to the public, and while there are exceptions for what can be subpoenaed, the executive does not get to decide unilaterally what meets those criteria. Everything is archived, and then there is a process by which the decisions are made based on the arguments of both sides.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The presidents job should be like any other job. You hire someone based on their resume, what kind of experience and knowledge you have.
Then how the hell did Palin get into the running?
There, fixed that for you.
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
Of course not. They're computers! What could possibly go wrong?
If there's a problem, it's the user. That's because the problem is always the user. Computers don't screw up, and if users claim that they do, it's because they're lusers.
And the reason that the companies won't let anybody look at their source code is to protect us. After all, it's intellectual property! If somebody saw it, they'd be able to figure out how votes are counted, and that's proprietary knowledge!
...say, why isn't this one tagged "what could possibly go wrong?"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
One of the "reasonable" precautions of "reasonable" people is to reject, out of hand, the machine of anyone who guarantees a victory for one party in an election.
You want to make a voting machine, you keep you political preferences quiet and make sure your employees don't even find out who you plan to vote for. That way there's not even the appearance of favoritism to one side or the other.
How hard is that? It's a failure of the American public that they don't give much of a damn if their political system is corrupt, as long as the corruption favors their side.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You are a fucking nutball, daveschroeder. Every time there is an article about voting machines, Republicans, and stolen elections you come out of the woodwork to claim nothing is being stolen. Go ahead Slashdot readers, see some of Dave's previous posts for yourselves.
So Dave, please inform us all how the hell do you know what is really happening? I ask because you sound really sure of yourself. Have you never read anything by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting? You probably also have never seen any of the multiple video demonstrations of voting machines being hacked. Of course none of this is real either is it Dave? Open your eyes you moronic turd.
It does not. What made you think, anybody thinks, that it does?
The only reason the said inability was ever brought up was to explain, why McCain is averse to using a computer personally. It was never used to claim, he'll make a better president because of the injury.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
8 years of running the country. Duh.
Haida Manga
McCain isn't wealthy, Cindy is. As far as I know, McCain's only 'comfortable'.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yes, seriously. Just recall Bill Clinton's jockeying to dodge Congressional subpoenas and invoking Executive Privilege left and right...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This kind
Actually, no, I'd like to know, that who I'm voting for will be who hands the power over to the next president-elect. I don't want an opportunist, who "adapts and changes" with the latest breeze.
So being a good sport and praising the other team is a bad thing now? Doesn't surprise me really. Looking at partisan politics today, it's all about backing your team no matter what and bashing your opponent at every opportunity, as you just illustrated. It's killing our country and reducing the level of debate to a shouting match between drunken idiots. Please refrain from joining the melee.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You really think law makers are knowledgeable and informed about the fields they regulate? LOL!
They don't even bother reading the laws they vote on, they're certainly not going to bother reading up on the fields the laws regulate.
It's pretty silly to use it against one candidate because whoever you're voting for is undoubtedly just as guilty.
Maybe not
I, obviously, disagree. I think the issue here is actually the public support for one candidate. This public support tells his employees without him having to tell them explicitly, who their machine should elect. If the braggart kept his mouth shut, either his employees wouldn't know who he wanted to win the election, or he'd have to actually tell them who to rig it for. Either way you've created a situation where there's a lot more risk involved in actually interfering with the process because he's not allowed to tell his employees at the voting machine company who they should be voting for.
The point isn't to remove partisanship, but to make collusion more difficult and more obvious when it occurs. You want to make it so that if corruption becomes evident the police can lean on the small fry and have them flip on their bosses.
That's just one of the benefits. In practice, requiring strict neutrality from the people who make the systems is not just security theatre.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Think back to your US history classes. The popular vote doesn't elect the president. The Electoral College does. And the Electoral College doesn't have to follow the popular vote.
Some states require their delegates to vote the way the state vote goes but not all of them. That's why there's the ever-popular 'Superdelegates'. Those are the ones from states without the requirement and can be courted to vote however they want.
So any controversy over how the popular vote comes in is a joke.
Mod parent up!!
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
If the machine is so designed that any measurable fraction of the qualified voters can't use it, then it's broken.
I realize that this puts stringent requirements on the machine, but they are necessary requirements. The end user must be able to use the system, or the system is broken.
That said, I agree that any intelligent system for defrauding the vote wouldn't reveal itself so openly. As a result no secret voting machine should ever be trusted. This, however, doesn't imply that there aren't stupid ways of defrauding the machinery, and some of the reported hacks would allow extremely stupid people to hack the machines so as to defraud the vote. So that's not proof that the vote isn't fraudulent. Only measuring against a known good paper backtrail could show that.
Personally, I have no difficulty believing that some stupid hack has been applied to the voting machine, though I agree that it isn't proven. All that's proven is that people aren't being allowed to vote the way that they intend. That's enough, in my opinion, to invalidate the results.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ok, how does that fit into the fact that the error was demonstrated to and filmed by a camera crew?
Is the media part of the "elect Obama by any means possible conspiracy" now? Is everyone who disagrees with you part of this conspiracy?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
"These machines are not 'switching votes'. They're just not..."
Reading the rest of your post I think what you really mean is that "These machines are not *intentionally switching votes*."
Nonetheless, what you have here is a hypothesis (the "Null Hypothesis"). You cannot definitively say "they're just not" without direct testing. Sure, I've seen a lot of user error in my days, users thinking they did one thing when they didn't.
But you know what? I've seen nearly as many snarky IT guys or fellow programmers reject user observations out-of-hand, and have the users turn out to be correct in the end. So the "Alternative Hypothesus" is that the machines are in fact switching votes, intentionally or by software error.
I agree with you that switching to paper ballots will remove a lot of the opportunity for errors of all types.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The battle for e-voting has been lost. Just as many posts in this topic prove, the public is hyper sensitive and hyper suspicious of electronic voting. They aren't going to trust it no matter what. It matters not whether or not their fears are justified.
We should return to paper ballots. They are the only voting method that might be accepted.
I happen to believe that paper balloting is much more subject to actual fraud and abuse than any other method. There are centuries of history in finding creative ways to cheat on paper ballots. Still, actual fraud is irrelevant, only public confidence matters.
My preferred solution would require a constitutional amendment. Prior to an election, the authorities would declare a target margin of error. Say 5%. The margin would account for fraud, abuse, errors, miscounts, whatever. The winner would have to win a plurality with a margin greater than 5% over the second place candidate. If the results are closer than 5%, the election is declared a tie and a whole new election would be required. Sure, that might result in revote after revote after revote, but not an infinite series.
What? You didn't get a Dungeons and Dragons style game reference? Normally you'd have to be demoted to "geek in training" for that. But since you mentioned an obscure, and mostly dead, line of computers, you will just be lowered to "geek, second class". You are still allowed to use pocket protectors, but you may not use a slide rule or Debian based distribution.
Godwin's Law has been suspended ever since the term "Bushitler" was coined circa 2001. Didn't you get the memo?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Didn't you know that that is disciminatory and disenfranchises poor and minority voters?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Oregon's vote by mail is hardly a panacea. The fact that Oregon typically votes democrat is probably why the system has never been examined with any scrutiny.
Every election, there are stories of people whose votes weren't counted because their signature didn't "look quite right", and there is no way to prove identity by the time the invalidation is issued. Heck, most people don't even know if their vote was allowed or not because that process is hidden in the back rooms of the county election offices. If you vote in person, you know your vote went into the pot before you leave (except for provisional or special case ballots).
During the first few elections, there were stories of people who decided they weren't interested in voting in that election who took the ballot out of their PO box and threw it into the trash at the post office, where anyone could pick them out and vote them, or at least try.
We've still not investigated the amount of "family" voting. You know, where the Dad fills out everyone's ballot for them. Or where Dad is just too tired to actually fill in the circles so Mom does it for him. Or Dad just doesn't care at all.
5. Doesn't take time out of your busy schedule.
Mod me a troll for saying this, but _I_ think voting is important enough that if you can't take a half a hour out of your "busy schedule" to actually go to the polling place and can't prove who you are and that you are authorized to vote, you shouldn't BE voting. Period. Handing everyone a ballot and letting people who just can't be bothered to spend the time to understand the issues vote anyway is twisted democracy. The founders assumed that the people, through a free press, would be informed and express an intelligent self-interest in voting. Today's assumption is that if you don't let every person in the country vote, even if they aren't supposed to be here, you are somehow discriminating against them.
Yes, it is discrimination. Discrimination is not always a dirty word.
Fox News recommends that you are in West Virginia, and you want to vote Democrat, you should vote Republican, and let the machine flip it for you.
Yes, seriously. Just recall Bill Clinton's jockeying to dodge Congressional subpoenas and invoking Executive Privilege left and right...
Ok, and how does that help your argument? Are you saying it was ok for Clinton to do that? Is it ok for the Bush administration to do that? Are you saying that we shouldn't be able to hold people in executive positions accountable? What, exactly, is your point?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
What about your statement couldn't be said about an ATM?
Paper trail.
At an ATM you get a receipt. And there is an electronic trail through many systems. And if the bank regularly gets it wrong and it is not corrected then they go out of business and/or someone goes to jail. There are also means to correct errors. And there is (queue evil word) regulation to protect the consumer. A lot more than two words because the two are not the same.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
"(Yes, I'm sure you're going to point out that Washington had been a general. But move on to Adams, Jefferson and Madison and you'll find no military service in their resumes.)"
actually...
Madison was a Colonel in the Virginia Militia, Jefferson was a Commander in the Virginia Militia, and Adams served as chairman of the Continental Congress's Board of War (1776-1777), making him the simultaneous equivalent of today's Secretary of Defense and Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Presidents_by_military_service
There is no difference.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
> "When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, 'I'm absolutely positive.'"
> Yeah, just like a lot of users are "absolutely positive" that they did the right thing. No, they
> THINK they did the right thing. That's the only thing they are "absolutely positive" of.
Reminds me of that problem with Audi cars (?) that was on 60 minutes about 15 years ago, where some woman plowed through her son and her garage door after starting the car. She was certain she was stepping on the brake and had not stepped on the gas, and even claimed a bent brake footpad lever.
Yet a car's brakes are much stronger than the engine -- a firm brake depression will beat floored engine gas every time. Therefore, regardless of how faulty the gas mechanism may have been, the car wouldn't have gone anywhere had she been stomping on the brake, or even the brake and the gas at the same time, or the fuel injector went full open while the break was depressed.
I can see the lever getting bent AFTER most of the damage had been done in a desparate attempt to stop the car, and then her forgetting (conveniently or not) or never realizing that she had stepped on the gas first.
Also, in the case of voting, I don't know what the "fraud noise level" is, but I do know both parties plan for fraud to contest various election regions, then declare "ahh, nothing bad detected" when it becomes obvious they're gonna win in the count. Could this be preparatory work to be used by party hacks in the case a candidate one party wants doesn't win?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I voted absentee ballot in 2000 from Florida, as I did in 1998 for mid-term elections, we had a close Senate race. The card stock wasn't noticeably different... The absentee instructions were, punch the number on the card with the included tool, then when finished, turn the card over to remove any hanging pieces (don't recall if they were called Chads), stick in envelope 1, stick that in envelope 2, and you were supposed to sign one of them, maybe witnessed?
It wasn't that hard... Assuming the in person instructions were the same, people were responsible for clearing their chads before turning in the ballot. The dimpled chads were a made up issue by Palm Beach County officials trying to steal an election. The voter intent issue for non-punched chads were nonsense, if you pushed the tool in, the vote counted. The paper system with chads was bad for a close election, because each recount caused more chads to fall off, causing the numbers to shift.
While elections are counted to the vote, our vote counting systems always had a margin of error, which is the reason for hand recounts in close elections.
At least that would probably keep his intern blow job coefficient relatively low.
Mechanical buttons - and enforce proper security measures
So since you are so very Concerned over the issue of experience, you backed Gore to the hilt in 2000, right? He had 30 years of varied public service, whereas Bush's resume consisted of going AWOL on his Air Guard commitments, running businesses into the ground, and serving five years as the 2nd most powerful executive in Texas (lt gov has more power than gov in TX).
Actually, the voting machines are manufactured by a Halliburton subsidiary. So, yes, they are changing votes, and are so powerful and arrogant that they don't feel it necessary to be secretive.
There is no difference.
Sure there is.
I think McCain is out of touch, unsuited, AND unqualified. Obama merely unqualified. None of those states are mutually exclusive neither are they synonymous.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I would just like to point out that the stink of impropriety is just as bad as actual impropriety. The appearance of a conflict of interest is in fact a conflict of interest.
There is no excuse for these machines behaving like this period. It matters not who the mistake/error/perception of error favors. If it continues they should be taken off line and in fact should have been taken off line immediately when the first complaint happened. Sorry for the inconvenience but that is what should have happened.
Why are people so in love with convenience that they allow even the appearance of a conflict to persist.
Why bother
http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/CIDsummary.php?CID=N00006424&year=2007
Estimated net worth for John McCain is about $28M.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Really, though, pedantry shouldn't be necessary. It's voting. There are challenges in doing it accurately, even today, to the extent that anyone who argues that the electoral college is obsolete on the grounds that accurately counting votes is no longer a problem is wrong. (The other arguments against it are not subject to this point, of course.)
But even with those challenges, it's voting. How hard can this be? What solutions are there to the problem of people who are too prideful to ask for help when they don't understand how to vote? Surely something is possible.
Actually, no, I'd like to know, that who I'm voting for will be who hands the power over to the next president-elect. I don't want an opportunist, who "adapts and changes" with the latest breeze.
Fixed that for you.
The most severe problem with them is the transaction processing. 50%-70% of the time when you complete the entire process, it times out when authorizing your credit card or debit card, forcing you to complete the entire process again. On busy nights the problem is worse up to 90% of the time.
When talking to senior management, they confirmed the problem as well as confirming the model they had previously used in other theatres don't have this problem. However as the new machines have tamper proof mechanisms, they feel they are still the best choice and had no plans to look at other options.
Shouldn't the requirement be at least an officer rank, maybe even general staff work if it's about experience in commanding troops? A random grunt won't really know much more than a civilian about the large scale of strategy the commander in chief has to work with.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
If you make a voting machine, you are building a product to sell to governments. If you are selling to governments, you must engage in lobbying, because that is how governments operate. If you engage in lobbying, sometimes you can just buy both sides, but usually you need to play favorites. If you want to build voting machines that are actually purchased and used, you must be HEAVILY engaged in politics, so districts controlled by your side buy your machines.
Our system is corrupt, because any time you get to spend other people's money, it tends towards corruption. The out of town salesmen with an expense account tends toward corruption (buy the pretty girl a drink, it's on the company)... non-profits that steer contracts to the friends of employees become corrupt. Governments steering tax payer dollars are corrupt... it's not a function of government, it's a function of the disconnect between the people whose money you are spending and the people deciding, the bigger the gap, the more corruption.
How much would I have to pay you to overpay by $100 for a $100 item... I want you to pay me $200, and it's only worth $100... you assume that there is a catch and demand more than $100. Let's say you are a parent on a sports team (10 players), and you are deciding on the uniform maker... it should cost $10, but I want you and every parent to pay $20... If I get you to do that, I make $200 instead of $100, so I'm happy to pay you any amount under $100. For you, any amount over $10 and you win... If I give you the uniform for free and take you to a $40 lunch, think you'll find a way to rationalize picking my uniforms? So I collect $180 for 9 shirts, pay out $40 for lunch, and I walk away with $140, that's better than the free market price of $100.
The ROI on lobbying government is huge. Obama's campaign is spending a total off $700M including the primary... that is 1/1000 of the amount of the recent bailout... that our government is for sale shouldn't be shocking, that it is so damned cheap is just sad. It's expensive to pay off the uniform example, cheaper for a non-profit, cheaper still for a local government... move up the chain, people are cheaper to buy.
Wal-mart doesn't let it's buyers meet with vendors at restaurants... in fact, they have to meet in Wal-mart headquarters in pre-selected rooms. They don't want their buyers bought off. Congress loves junkets, and they regulate themselves... of course they are for sale.
I'm saying, the conflict between Executive's ability to speak frankly with advisers and the Lawmakers' desire to know all about such talks has existed since, uhm, very long ago, that's all.
Whoever's side you are on in this conflict, my argument was not whether Palin was right or wrong to get around the law by using Yahoo! Mail, but that she was computer-literate enough to do so.
That Bill Clinton has sent only two e-mails in his 8 years of Presidency — while presiding over an 8-trillion dot-com bust — does not bother Obama's fans, they would've lined up behind either of the Clintons for President in a heartbeat. But that McCain, who is physically unable to type due to injuries, uses his wife's help with computers, is fair target of ridicule for them. Sure...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
user error
That being said, I think we need to go back to paper ballots. My mom STILL double clicks on hyperlinks. Also, people are still very distrustful of this new-fangled computer stuff.
I think the point is that nobody batted an eye when the Clintons told everybody that OOPS! thousands of emails were just, oh, I don't know, lost somehow between the time that they were subpoenaed and the time they went to collect them.
Oh, and by the by? Never was any ramifications for Clinton's behaviour. That means that legally what he did was ok. Amazing what saying "Oops!" can do for you.
There's also the really silly fact that any of these conversations via email that must be retained can take place over the phone or face-to-face and there is no requirement that everything the President says ever must always be recorded.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I never said any of those things. I simply pointed out "the point in learning a task if you can't do it anyway".
The fact that legislators don't do this is irresponsible, but that's another matter altogether.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, not experience. I was just defending the point, that Obama's support for two competing sport-teams is important (in judging his character) in the absence of much else known about him. If we had much else to go by with him, fine — I am not a sports fan myself. But we don't, and his willingness to please the crowd with such lies is telling volumes.
Appeal to a local sports-team must be a Democratic fixture... When Clintons settled in NY, Hillary claimed to have always been a Yankees fan. Yeah, right... But, at least, she didn't contradict herself in front of Mets fans the way Obama did.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You can't treat an individual's ignorance with regards to their ability to design a "beatiful UI" on a ballot as "intentional criminal election fraud." Please look up the definition of fraud and defraud. Next, please think before you type. Finally, if we begin equivocating ignorance with criminal action, then this whole debate will probably be moot as the less than stellar minds who are having such a difficult time voting would not be able to vote due to their criminal record.
If you think a paper tape really makes any difference, you really need to watch the videos attached to this article by the Computer Security Group at UCSB...
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/
-- thinkyhead software and media
You probably wouldn't be able to test the hardware other than to put software tests on it and make sure the numbers come out right every time.
lol: You see no door there!
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email. The 'myspace generation' has no idea what a MUA is. They think that sending messages on Myspace *IS* email.
Kids say email is dead.
Voting machine: You've made your decision then?
...
Me: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
Voting machine: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Me: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I?
Voting machine: Australia.
Me: Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Me: Argggg!
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
You really think law makers are knowledgeable and informed about the fields they regulate? LOL!
No, dumbass, the obvious point was that legislators should know something about the laws they are passing. Just how stupid are you?
Conspiracy solved. It's senior citizens that have fat fingers. Probably using half of their palm to touch the screen.
If they're concerned, they can cancel the vote and request a paper ballot.
This is most likely just pre-election conspiracy media fluffing in case Obama loses, which is still a possibility.
"their electronic vote for 'Barack Obama' kept flipping to 'John McCain.'""
Sure it did.
If you push "VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA" and "+1 VOTE FOR JOHN MCCAIN" comes up, why would you go home, think about it, then tell someone there was a problem.
It's impossible to turn around, call the attendant over (there are always a half-dozen helpers at these things), and say "look at this"?
I call complete BS.
-Styopa
buy the whole company company
I think you wanted the first "company" to be "fucking"
I think the point is that nobody batted an eye when the Clintons told everybody that OOPS! thousands of emails were just, oh, I don't know, lost somehow between the time that they were subpoenaed and the time they went to collect them.
I love how people always say things like this. Republicans got pissed about Clinton's behavior. Probably independents did as well. I'm always pissed when they pull that kind of shit. Of course Bush has done the same and Republicans give him a pass on it too. So I guess it just reinforces my beliefs about how idiotic the partisans on both sides are.
Oh, and by the by? Never was any ramifications for Clinton's behaviour. That means that legally what he did was ok. Amazing what saying "Oops!" can do for you.
It is amazing. But apparently the Bush administration took the lesson to heart and did the same thing. They used personal accounts and just happened to lose thousands of emails. No consequences there either. Accountability doesn't seem to exist.
There's also the really silly fact that any of these conversations via email that must be retained can take place over the phone or face-to-face and there is no requirement that everything the President says ever must always be recorded.
Not everything gets recorded. But what does get recorded must be preserved. If you don't want it preserved, then don't record it. That presents problems as well though, because the the people involved want to be able to hold others accountable as well. That means recording things. I think we need to make stronger laws in this area. Laws with big, sharp, scary teeth.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Hillary didn't run the country for 8 years. All she did was screw Bill.
Considering he had to resort to Lewinsky it looks like she couldn't even do a proper job at that.
Palin you might as well just forget about..just like history will.
>Make sure you've put in a bunch of voter registrations that get mailed to your address.
There are times when one can say "I disagree, but can see why a reasonable person might feel this way".
Your comment is not NOT ONE OF THOSE. Consider:
At worst, it's NO WORSE than the current system.
The current system in 06 had some Ohio districts counting votes that exceeded eligible voter counts...
At best, it's EASIER to catch fraud in mail-based voting, and with handwriting you have better evidence for a felony vote fraud case.
It's no coincidence that the same people against mail voting were also against Motor Voter Registration, federal funding for more vote stations in poor districts with the longest lines... heck, in times past reactionary conservatives also felt only property owners could vote, or only fair skinned people. The motive to suppress votes never dies.
I just voted by absentee ballot. I delivered it to the city clerk in person, so there would be no snail mail issues. My zip code is not poor, but in 06 I waited for over 60 minutes. I did see people walk away, but hopefully with absentee ballots the lines get shorter, and we can take back our government for a welcome change.
In a large city or residential area, you're right; making a photocopy of your absentee ballot won't do you much good. But in a small town, it may speak volumes.
We'll use my town for an example. At the moment, I live in a rural, 500-person town in Iowa. The county itself has only a few thousand people (and three stoplights total). Both are heavily conservative (the stoplights have no preference), though I was surprised to see a few Obama signs in town and by farms.
So let's say that I vote for Obama, and so do six people I know I town. Election results come out, and it says that my town put in 0 votes for Obama. With my shiny photocopy, along with the photocopies of the six others, I can easily call and prove fraud in my town. With such a small county this may even work on that level. The county would likely go to McCain given a correct vote count, but fraud in one area likely indicates other fraud nearby.
This scenario is highly unlikely, but still a real possibility, so in this case it would make sense if I were to photocopy my absentee ballot (I plan on going to the polls, personally). It's 99% likely to do nothing, but if you have an all-in-one printer, what harm can it do?
Yes, seriously. Just recall Bill Clinton's jockeying to dodge baseless Republican witch hunts left and right...
Fixed that, too. Things to keep in mind:
1) Republicans investigated and re-investigated everything from White Water to Vince Foster.
2) They came up with jack squat.
3) They finally had to settle on a manufactured perjury charge (which Clinton didn't even do)
4) The worst thing they could pin on him was a manufactured perjury charge.
Let's set Ken Starr on your ass with a $60 million+ budget to destroy your life and see how you you look, mmmkay? Not to mention the enormous hypocrisy over throwing Probable Cause and "innocent until proven guilty" out the window for Clinton, yet we know for a fact that Bush has broken laws, treaties, and the Constitution.
Vote by mail ... forces you to dispense with the notion of a private ballot.
No it doesn't.
In Oregon, the ballot is enclosed in an unmarked envelope which is then mailed in a signed envelope. The signature on the outer envelope is matched against the voter's signature and the inner envelope is then removed and put in a pile of unmarked ballot envelopes holding ballots to be scanned. Once the validation has passed, there is no connection of the person casting the vote with the ballot.
That is all.
Next time just stick to the facts " You failed to show a logical connection". And stop there. The rest of your post just seems lifted from youtube.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the user interface. I have used these machines several times even before they were used in the elections in Putnam County, I have used these machines in demonstrations. They are simple to use and easy to navigate.
I waited in line this past weekend for around 30 minutes to vote early in Putnam County, and based on my observations most of the people in there seemed to vote with ease. There were a few, especially some of the older voters, that seemed to have trouble embracing the newer technology. I have no doubt, however, that these are the same people who have always in the past had problems properly using the punch card ballots.
Of course let's say that the machines are changing votes from Obama to McCain. The machines are obviously smarter than the voter anyway.
Won't matter anyway given the 100s of thousands of dead/pet/disney figures who will vote Dem anyway.
Imagine if I put on my resume 'i got beat up lots as a kid' when applying for a programming job. They'd have no idea why I included it as it is NOT RELEVANT.
It could explain why YOU sound bitter and resentful. If the employer has any insight into your social ostracism and the way it affected your adult life, they would see that your continuation of a lack of social life leaves you TONS of extra time for projects! see, a positive outcome!! Say, you don't happen to have 8 years experience in JAVA and live in the DC area do you? I might have a job for someone with your um... lifestyle.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. "She's a whiz on the keyboard, and I'm so laborious," McCain admits.
Bullshit.
This article gives a very good description of McCain's ailments. In summary, he cannot raise his arms over his head which means he cannot do common things such as combing his own hair. Also, other activities that require him to stretch his arms at the shoulder, such as putting on a jacket by himself, become quite difficult for him.
Guess what: typing on a computer is not such an activity. From the point of view of his ailments, it's as hard as handwriting, something he actually does. Furthermore, you don't need to type a lot in order to just browse the web. And even if he really could not type at all, there are other ways to control a computer.
Face it, McCain doesn't use a computer simply because, like other elderly persons, he's afraid of learning something new and alien to him. Using his war injuries as an excuse is just pathetic.
That would disqualify George Bush too, or does snorting coke and not showing up count as serving?
As someone who is from WV let me tell you these machines are not switching votes these are just stupid people 6 people out of over 3000 voters had a problem. And for another thing The machines used in WV DO HAVE a paper print out that you can view just after casting your ballot to be sure it was entered correctly. I have voted with these machines three times now and not had any problems. My uncle who is blind was able to successfully vote for the first time on his own in this past election because of these machines. Considering WV is heavily controlled by union interest I think the vote switching would happen the other way if it happened at all.
In the video, the reporter is pressing the TOP of the button, which is right next to the button above. You can easily see how the screen could register the wrong vote because the voter's finger is right on the borderline between the buttons.
The UI design fails to account for the voter's behavior: the voter is not pressing the center of the button -- he's pressing the NAME OF THE CANDIDATE, which is right at the top. If the name were in the center of the button, we'd see far fewer of these complaints.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Unless that person is posting as an AC on slashdot.
Sen. Obama works out regularly and plays half-court basketball even at his age, like a college varsity player if not a pro.
Excuse me, but Stephen fucking Hawking can use a computer and not move any part of his fucking body
Excuse ME, but maybe you didn't notice that SH can't even speak. Do you really think he'd choose to go through all the work he does to communicate through a computer if there were a more efficient way? Did you create your response with a sip and puff PC interface? No, a keyboard is easier for you - what's wrong with any person using what's easier for them? Are you saying that anyone who isn't a hacker doesn't have the intelligence to lead or be an expert in other areas? That's pretty damn narrow minded.
So "showing some love for the Rays" amounts to a flip-flop, much less a disqualifying one? Gumby would tear his arm out of his socket at the thought of reaching that far.
Until I can verify that my vote was actually counted, I don't see much point in nitpicking about whether the machine understands my choice.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
TiVo for president '08!
From your reply:
It would really suck if votes came out wrong because of a poorly-designed user interface.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the user interface. I have used these machines several times, even before they were used in the elections in Putnam County, I have used these machines in demonstrations. They are simple to use and easy to navigate.
I waited in line this past weekend for around 30 minutes to vote early in Putnam County, and based on my observations most of the people in there seemed to vote with ease. There were a few, especially some of the older voters, that seemed to have trouble embracing the newer technology. I have no doubt, however, that these are the same people who have always in the past had problems properly using the punch card ballots.
Of course let's say that the machines are changing votes from Obama to McCain. The machines are obviously smarter than the voter anyway.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
For what it's worth, Diebold is only one of a small number of players in the electronic voting machine market. ES&S and Sequoia are two others I know about
off the top of my head. Neither one of them has a CEO which promised to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George Bush", and both of them have had
well publicized security issues.
At the end of the day, I see electronic voting machines as being defined by the market. Cities and counties buy these things to save face by not looking like
Florida in 2000. But they don't want to pay too much, as the things only get used 1-2 times a year.
I don't see OSS as a panacea either. UI and documentation just aren't things that get done well in community projects ;)
My guess is that you'd see something like the projects that IBM has donated to Apache. Design decisions are made by IBM employees and major committers
are IBM employees. A few non-IBMers are part of the project, but it's essentially an OSS "frosting" on an IBM project.
Actually, that's the best case scenario. Worst case is gVoteBooth vs. kVoteBooth, MySQL vs. PostGreSQL (with a few SQLite zealots), and endless language and/or
build tool flamewars.
I know one solution but it wouldn't be acceptable. Someone who knows how to do it supervises everyone. You can't just have them look at the paper output, they have to know who the voter intended to vote for.
Nothing is obvious to everyone. Every first time voter is learning something new. Every second time voter brings his understanding of the previous system into the voting booth.
I even recall, when I was young, there was a PRACTICE ballot and voting booth freely available for anyone who wanted to practice voting before the real event. You could use both and then ask "did I do it right?" That means you have to be honest enough to say "I don't get it", and that's the problem.
Most of the ATMs I use have four mechanical buttons on either side of a screen with four corresponding labels. Usually the labels and the buttons are misaligned, so I have a habit of counting down from the top rather than hoping that each button will match the nearest label. This method works okay with a machine that I use every week and that reliably has as many labels as buttons.
But a voting machine that I use every two or four years (or for the first time this year) and that could have any number of buttons and labels? I'm not at all surprised that it could register differently than a voter intended.
If there's good design then the voter will get to confirm their selection and it will be easy to correct mistakes. But step one in that design is that it should be easy to hit the button you want and hard to hit the button you don't. I'll bet that not every voting machine is designed so well.
Too true. In Ohio 1% of people normally vote for the top name on a ballot. The first slot traditionally alternated between Dem. and Rep. every election. That is, until 2004 when K. Blackwell decided that Rep.s would keep the first slot two years in a row. Could have made a difference between winning and losing that year.
It might be a little easier to believe that it is just an honest error if every time this happened it didn't favor the Republicans. You never hear of these fucking machines accidentally switching the vote from McCain to Obama.
Um, Obama was born in 1961. Obama's "generation" is one in which email originated. And let's face it - although social networking sites may be replacing email as the choice for communication for many purposes, it's not killing email. Email is still and will continue to be used for business and personal uses for quite some time yet. The article you posted even said "To hear the teen panelists tell it, that means e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings." (And I think that suggesting it will be used strictly for business is a bit of a stretch.) And just because kids say it's dead, it doesn't mean it's dead. For example, I didn't use the postal system much at all until I was on my own... They'll adapt as their needs change, both in using previously sparsely used mechanisms and in new ones not yet invented.
Thanks for the sensible post. It's painful watching intelligent people who support Obama (which is fine) twist logic and facts to justify irrational attacks against his opponent (which is not fine).
It's done the other way as well; it's sad either way.
From your reply:
It would really suck if votes came out wrong because of a poorly-designed user interface.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the user interface. I have used these machines several times, even before they were used in the elections in Putnam County, I have used these machines in demonstrations. They are simple to use and easy to navigate.
I waited in line this past weekend for around 30 minutes to vote early in Putnam County, and based on my observations most of the people in there seemed to vote with ease. There were a few, especially some of the older voters, that seemed to have trouble embracing the newer technology. I have no doubt, however, that these are the same people who have always in the past had problems properly using the punch card ballots.
Of course let's say that the machines are changing votes from Obama to McCain. The machines are obviously smarter than the voter anyway.
If the problem is poorly aligned (or sized) touch screen sensitivity areas, it's certainly NOT a user error any more than if I move a switch to the position clearly labeled 'OFF' and the light comes on.
As for ATMs, if they were involved in a series of scandals where they recorded impossible results, bypassed audit procedures, and refused to provide a receipt or even permit a meaningful audit, then people would be a lot more likely to cry foul with those mis-alignments as well.
Voting machines need to be able to accommodate all citizens as much as possible. That includes people w/ a palsy and people who see a computer as a step away from black magic. Perhaps it just needs to be made clear that if you have any doubts whatsoever, you can have someone help you to fill out a paper ballot or assist you in using the machine. Preferably (just for people's comfort) you get to choose if a Republican, Democrat, or independent assists you.
Note that when a touchscreen alignment problem exists, it does LOOK like your selection was switched. You may even THINK you saw a checkmark briefly appear on your selection before it actually appeared on the other.
Company A provides a machine that handles the user's voting. The result is printed on a piece of paper that contains clearly printed names plus bar codes.
The voter then takes the printed paper to a second machine from company B that reads the bar codes and displays a confirmation to the voter: "you voted for...." Accept / revote? If they want to revote, they take their paper to the election workers for a second one and the original gets shredded.
Then you have two machines from two different companies with tallies plus a paper trail.
If someone does not know how to design a bridge, purports to be able to anyway (ie telling a falsehood for personal gain at the expense of others, an act of fraud), designs a bridge, and then that bridge collapses, we hold them criminally responsible -- even if they honestly believed they were capable of performing the task safely. Why should we treat elections as less important to our society? The engineering work that goes into the machinery involved should be held to the same standard.
(Of course, if someone is qualified, follows best practices, and makes no mistakes that should have been obvious at the time, and something still goes wrong -- then we investigate, but conclude that the mistake was notihng more than that. There's no need to hold voting machine engineers to a standard of perfection, but we should treat them the same as any other engineer with a task whos results are important to society.)
What irritates me about your post is that you are willing to accept error on the part of the votes, but do not even consider the possibility of error on the part of the system's developers.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
You are conflating being a war prisoner, tortured for years by the country's enemies, with your picked-on childhood?
Please don't vote. You should be grown up before you do that.
I'm afraid it does. I'm talking about the requirement to mark your ballot in privacy away from anyone who may be trying to influence your vote.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No, we just have to build the machines in such a way that it doesn't matter if the people building them have a COI. Such systems can be built and I think this is what the GP was aiming at.
In fact we already have such a system in place at the poling stations. The election volunteers are generally politically active (otherwise they wouldn't volunteer) but it's set up so everyone is watching everyone else all the time so (in theory) no one is able to act on their COI without getting caught.
Yes, I was overly agitated and missed a "fucking"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Who said anything about "hacker"? I just want a president who can read the CIA world fact book online without needing help from his wife.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Look, guys. You tried.
We know you did your best and you get a gold star for effort.
It is now time to face up to the fact that your system of government has failed. (in oh-so-many ways)
It is time for the USA to join Canada.
We are willing to bring you in as a province.
If you don't feel up to the challenge of running a provincial government we may consider taking you on as a protectorate instead.
McCain, ... has to have his wife sit and read email to him?
Being president isn't about working hands-on. Being president is about picking and motivating other people to do the actual work (or to pick subordinates to do it or pick further subordinatesx, ad fractalam).
Much like military officers standing with their hands behind them and ordering others to get things done.
If he can get his wife to handle his email and read it to him, rather than having to fight with the interface himself, that shows he's exceptionally proficient at such skills. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Gee, I hope she stays off the Vicodin
This pitiful use of McCain's POW status to excuse every one of his shortcomings is really sickening
He usually leaves out the part about making propaganda films for his captors, though.
Score: 5, Interesting, *not* Flamebait?
Wow.
I'm not really sure that a Senator or President should spend a lot of their time emailing or posting hate-rants on their favorite blogowebs. That seems like a job for their staff as, hopefully, they have more important things to do.
Because that is the way they were instructed to unambiguously indicate the vote they were casting. It is a very simple rule, understood by almost all people instinctively, and very simple to count.
You can't say "here is a piece of paper with names and boxes on it, do what you want" because people will do all kinds of things. They will cross out the people they don't want. They will circle the ones they do. They will mark in one box, then cross that out and mark in another. They will draw a line down the column through all the boxes. They will put a check mark somewhere on the paper. They will put checkmarks next to the names of the candidates they recognize, and then put a checkmark IN the box of the other candidate. They will put checkmarks next to names they DON'T recognize. They will tap the paper with their pencil as they think, which can leave marks -- in a box. As they move the paper and pencil around, they may make a line on the paper by accident -- in a box.
If you don't say "X in the box" as the rule, just how DO you count a vote that has a checkmark next to one candidate's name and a checkmark in the box for another? Do you ASSUME "any mark in the box" means a vote? What about people who have poor motor skills and tend to drag their pencil across the paper; they may have a sort-of checkmark in one box and a line through the box for the other candidate, too? Or do you say right up front, from the very beginning, printed on every ballot "here is how you indicate your intention"?
Remember, I got to see this first hand. This was a small rural township, a few hundred voters max. And yet, every election, people did it wrong. It was also a long time before scanned ballots, so people were not likely to fill in the whole box.
This ignores, of course, the reason I already gave, which was election fraud. It is trivial to make a "mark in a box" as you smooth out the paper. You simply have a bit of pencil lead in a bandaid on your finger. You make a line through the box for Obama, e.g., on half the ballots you open. If the person hadn't voted, they would be counted as Obama. If they had voted for Obama, no change. If they voted for McCain, the ballot would be voided. An X is harder to fake than a line.
How is it reasonable when ballots with one candidate unambiguously selected are thrown out because the boxes are filled in instead of checked.
Well, I already admitted that those ballots were probably counted. I don't recall. It's the rest of the cases where it IS NOT unambiguous that require a rule, and rules are best that are created BEFORE the voter votes and not after. This nonsense of "is the chad dimpled or not" as a means of creating a rule after the fact for determining "voter intent" is just that. Nonsense. It turns a change of mind into a vote. (I may have started to vote for X but decided not to. My pointer dimpled the chad. The RULE is that a hole counts. After the fact, the dimple counts, too. Had that rule been in effect when I voted, I would have gotten a replacement ballot. Counting the dimple stole my vote.)
The touchscreen is also part of the UI, and a touchscreen that is uncalibrated is an UI problem. "UI" encompasses the everything that's relevant to the user's interaction with the device. If the intended user audience can't reliably use the device, then the UI is most likely flawed.
Your attitude is one of the basic sources of usability problems: the failure to take responsibility for the end user's experience, and instead, whine with excuses when the users can't use the device. Excuses range from "this is a hardware problem, not a software problem" (when the end users just can't possibly care, because it's not relevant to them), to "the user is stupid" (when people are perfectly adept at performing all sorts of tasks that would provide the correct input).
The whole point of usability design is to solve problems, not to blame them on other people. If the possibility of an uncalibrated touchscreen is a problem, then you need to take a hard look at whether you can avoid using the touchscreen at all, and use a more reliable input device that has fewer failure modes.
Are you adequate?
I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
That depends: Are they willing and able to take up arms and fight for their beliefs, either on their own or if a charismatic leader eggs them on? If so, I WANT the election system to measure their opinion.
Elections aren't about "making smart decisions". They're about figuring out how the war would come out and convincing the losers that they'd lose the war, too. Then the losers aren't tempted to hold a war to reverse the decision.
And that's why the issues with the electronic election systems are so dangerous: They weaken the belief of the losers that they've really lost.
(The easiest way to produce that belief is for the process to both BE honest and to be VERIFIABLY honest. The electronic election systems fail on (at least) the second part.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They ran tests on the machines and were able to hack them while standing in the booth to vote. With that hack it was imperceptible to the logs that anything was amiss... the safeguards were circumvented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/28/us/28vote.html
"The California reports said the scientists, acting at the stateâ(TM)s request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.
Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.
The reports said the investigators had created situations for each system âoein which these weaknesses could be exploited to affect the correct recording, reporting and tallying of votes.â
Paper, pencil. Hand count. Done.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
I understand there are a lot of gray areas, and I wasn't talking about those. If a ballot has clear markings in more than one candidate where only one vote is allowed then the ballot should be considered invalid.
I'm just talking about the case where there is an otherwise clean ballot with one candidate's box filled in. I think it would be unconscionable to throw that ballot out just because they filled in the box instead of using an X or a check.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Parent is Insightful? How about 'uninformed'?
George Bush was an officer and pilot in the Armed Services of the United States.
Of Course not, no nothing is going on here, move on, we know best: http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/AffidavitPhillipsShowsKerryCouldWinOhio.html
"Like Jones, Crosier tried to cast a straight party Democratic vote at the courthouse annex, âoeand it came up straight party, Republican party.â
Crosier recognized her election trainer, who was helping to monitor the polls, and called him over. âoeWe went back through the process and it did it again,â she said of the third time the touch-screen machine suggested she vote Republican."
http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/local/local_story_298161535.html
The machine IS flipping votes if she went over it with an election monitor and STILL couldn't get it to work right. Nice try though trying to blame the victim. If we get President McFascist and young earth creationist loon Moosolini in there despite being 10 points down in the polls, some of us won't be fooled that everything is fine, nothing to see here.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Here's something that intrigued me from TFA:
In Putnam County, early voters have the option of asking for either touch-screen machines or optical scan ballots -- paper ballots on which people mark in their election choices.
Why not give everyone the choice of either manually filling out an optical-scan ballot or using a voting machine to help fill one out for them? For many people, it will be much more intuitive or simply quicker to fill out a paper ballot rather than to go through a series of screens to vote. Since many will prefer to use the paper ballot, this will reduce the expense required to purchase the appropriate number of voting machines. And a well designed voting machine would be able to display a summary of candidates selected for confirmation by the voter before printing a ballot to reduce the occurrence of user error. When the voter is satisfied with his or her selections, pressing the "Print Ballot" button will print a ballot that would look identical to the manual paper ballot with the appropriate candidates' bubbles filled. The electronically-generated and manual ballots would be counted using the same process. You could even put Braille by each button and have a headphone jack so that a voter can hear "Press 1 for John McCain, Press 2 for Barrack Obama..." as he or she votes, followed by an oral summary of each selection before offering to print the ballot. With the exception of the blind (who already would need assistance to fill a paper ballot), voters could readily see if the machine switched their vote or spoiled the ballot (such as by filling in ovals for both McCain and Obama) before putting it into the box. Why can't we adopt a hybrid solution that can help reduce the number of spoiled ballots or misvotes (such as a inadvertently moving down a row when matching a candidate's name to his/her bubble on the ballot), cost less than an all-electronic solution and provide a verifiable paper trail at the same time?
What a load of crap. I am 42 i.e. younger than Obama and I always set up an e-mail client on a computer usually mail.app on a Mac or Thunderbird on Windows or Linux. Most mail clients have vastly better spam filtering than web based interfaces, are faster to check e-mail with, and allow for easy mailing of links from web browsers. So don't ASSume anything. And next time use the generally understood mail client rather than the pretentious MUA and save someone a useless time wasting google search. Kthksbye.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I think Carrot Top is available; if he's been in the military then I've never heard about it...
WTF is your point exactly?
George Washington was our first president and he lead the continental army to victory over Great Brittan in the American Revolutionalry War.
The Continental Congress appointed Washington commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces in 1775.
I think more accurately they didn't want being in the military to be a prerequisite to being president.
In times of war I'd certainly rather a President with that has been in war and understands the toll it has on soldiers and their families as well as an understanding that there are people you can't make peace with... like crazy islamic extremists than a greenhorn with a good talking game.
Digging around much? I swear, the racist remarks on /. have gotten ridiculous these past weeks.
I can only fear what will be posted if Obama is actually elected.
RyoShin: Election results come out, and it says that my town put in 0 votes for Obama.
First, criminals aren't going to steal all the votes from one candidate or another. They are going to steal enough to win, but not enough to raise suspicions.
RyoShin: With my shiny photocopy, along with the photocopies of the six others, I can easily call and prove fraud in my town.
Your photocopy or any other voter paper trail can be easily forged and, therefore, mean nothing. The fact that you are showing up in favor of a given candidate would have meant more to voting officials. What you are describing sounds a lot like a re-vote. If the re-vote was run the same as the first vote and if turnout were the same, it shouldn't produce different results. In any case, there are already mechanism in place to detect and deter election fraud regardless of how the vote was taken (paper or electronic) and regardless of voter paper trails.
RyoShin: It's 99% likely to do nothing, but if you have an all-in-one printer, what harm can it do?
At least you can admit that voter paper trails are 99% worthless. What harm can it do? Probably none, unless one gathers a false sense of security from it. I would likely make a copy as well, but I would know that it wouldn't go far in proving anything.
Again, voter paper trails are worthless for deterring or detecting election fraud. I will admit that paper ballots are harder to forge than electronic ballots currently are, but that is only a side-effect of the implementation of the electronic voting system. In the future, I believe that we will all feel much more secure with the use of electronic ballots, and we will find paper ballots insecure. Using cryptography, we can build an ultra-secure voting system from the top-down that can only be defeated if the encryption algorithm underlying the system is defeated.
Dear Uncle,
Let's get low bubble a miller copy paste all.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Let's use Obama's race as an excuse why he doesn't have the experience to be President. It's called Affirmative Action, and its why BHO is in the running.
POS: point-of-sale or piece-of-shit?
Uhm, did you people really just moderate a "Gore invented the internet" comment +5,Informative?
If it wouldn't turn into an impermissible literacy test or be unconstitutional for other reasons, I would be a huge fan of presenting people with an introductory question or a battery of them to test their ability to make proper selections, and discard ballots that get those questions wrong.
1. Are you eligible to vote in this election?
2. Do you intend to vote in this election?
3. Do you understand how to vote in this election?
4. Are you just saying that because you are too arrogant or ashamed to ask for help?
5. Who is the current, sitting President of the United States of America? [Choices would, this time around, be "George W. Bush", "Ralph Nader", and "Jefferson Davis".]
No, it's trivial to avoid.
There are many ways a man building complex voting machines could introduce a bias into the results -- even subconsciously.
It's hard to think how a man making pencils and paper could do the same.
If you're building the machines then you can set them up to misreport the results and nobody is the wiser. Systems can be built to defeat this, but why would such a person build one?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
And how often has that happened? Lots of ballots going to a single address would be rather suspicious...
NC votes flip to Obama
Votes switched from Bush to Kerry
Sorry to disappoint you.
These are just errors. It goes both ways.
I didn't say I was comfortable with Diebold's CEO saying what he did...but he didn't say he would "do anything to help the Republicans" (your obvious implication being he'd do anything, including rig his company's voting machines...even though it would take likely literally hundreds of people in the process to actually pull off what many people think happened in a coordinated fashion). What he said in a fundraising letter in his capacity as a Republican business leader in Ohio was, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
And even though Diebold had paper trail systems as options for many of their products, they often weren't purchased by municipalities because they weren't required by law.
And I didn't say e-voting was superior. I said that it was thought to be superior by those in Congress (many Democrats, including those who sponsored the legislation which resulted in the increases in electronic voting machines, ostensibly to make the process modern and fair). The major oversight was And if you read my post, I agreed that paper voting is the way to go, if only for a reason of maintaining confidence in the process. That alone would be worthwhile.
You can't even pretend to be informed about e-voting, at all, if you had never even seen a case of votes being "switched" to anything but Republican, when there are plenty of examples of both ways. It's just that the bloggers and activists who think it's all a vast right-wing conspiracy to steal elections are a lot louder.
I'm definitely looking forward to your reply.
What do you do with Secretaries of State, such as Jennifer Brunner (D) or Katherine Harris (R), who play games with who can register, who gets kicked off, how verification works, etc?
There are vested interests working every facet of the election, from the company that makes the paper to the company that makes the machines to the poll workers watching you to the officials watching the poll workers to the officials watching the officials. Eliminating conflicts at any one of those steps doesn't solve the problem since there are dozens of other vectors for conflicts of interest to arise.
Even if every poll, elections board, or Secretary of State office had equal representation of both major parties, they would still team up against the third parties, consciously or not. That's not to say we should do nothing, just that pointing the finger at a single level effectively does nothing to prevent fraud and irregularities.
Stop Koolaid Politics
I say this in every election. In Oregon, we have an all absentee system. No lines, no 95 year old poll workers, no machines, and there is a paper trail. We get an optical scan paper that we fill out, place in a secrecy envelope which is then placed in the mailer envelope and signed. Sooooo much smoother of a process. I sometimes wonder why the rest of you constantly complain, when it is YOUR attorneys general that pull the strings. This isn't a deibold issue, or a party issue, it's a state issue, and it's up to YOU to solve the problems of the state. Pick your attorneys general wisely and quit bitching about voter fraud every 2 years.
(actually, one can't type at all), but they still read and write emails: they use voice recognition software.
From the article, it sounds like McCain has found a similar solution, he's just using voice recognition wetware.
Yeah, but can Dragon Dictate® show you naked breasts ? No ?
Thus the wife® solution is clearly superior.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
True. However, it could be compared against the actual vote. (I don't know how long paper votes are held; hopefully a while. Nor do I know if you'd be able to match them, as voting is supposed to be anonymous.)
Some official could easily say "We never got those" or "They're lost, but trust us" and your point still holds.
I support well-done, transparent electronic ballots. It paves the way for voting-from-home, which would likely improve voter turnout as well as be convenient for most everyone. But if you're doing an absentee ballot, and want to make a copy, I say no one should deter you.
Pointless? Perhaps. But it's easy to do, and you never know when you'll need it.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
No, that would be fine. The problem isn't that the guy in charge of designing this vote counting system might put in a bias, but that nobody can tell.
It wouldn't matter if the Republicans themselves get to build the voting machine, if Democrats (and anyone else who's interested) got to fully audit all involved hardware and software.
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes.
You're right about that. There wouldn't be any point in changing the vote displayed on the screen if one wanted to cheat the system. It would be akin to leaving a business card after committing burglary.
The problem sounds like touch-screen calibration problems. I understand that the machines in question are ES&S iVotronic units. The touch screen must be calibrated before use to line up properly with the pixels on the LCD. If there are a lot issues/candidates per screen, then calibration problems are exacerbated.
I am not a crackpot.
If you had to teach them how to use it, that's poor interface design.
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
I suppose you could call failing your mission and spending the whole war as a POW "service". I would call it disgrace.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email. The 'myspace generation' has no idea what a MUA is. They think that sending messages on Myspace *IS* email.
Kids say email is dead.
In other news, kids are still stupid.
I would never, EVER use social networking sites for communication beyond arranging to communicate through some other, more private means.
I wonder how dead email will be when these kids find out their potential employers wrote them off after looking at their myspace columns.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Parent is Insightful? How about 'uninformed'?
George Bush was an officer and pilot in the Armed Services of the United States.
Who never saw action and went awol.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
They use windows on the machines.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
we use good old pen and paper down in Aus and the ballots get kept. Technology is not the answer to every problem, especially not when faulty software/hardware can cause a moron to get elected president of one of the most powerful countries on the planet... you should let the people elect the moron without the aid of technology.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
I disagree with the last part. I would say that there should be safeguards such that no single person nor company can control or fix an election. Everyone has the right to participate in the election process, no matter the level.
The local county registrar (the top person in charge of voting, at least where I live) shouldn't be able to "fix" votes any more than any other person, and of course should also be able to vote. If the local county registrar did "fix" votes the others in their office should be able to detect this and blow the whistle.
As an aside, I heard recently that a bunch of town folks (in a nearby small community of less than 10K) objected to a local pastor running for city council (improperly citing separation of church and state). Again, I take issue with that, and say that the folks should just speak with their vote, and not try and tell someone they cannot run for office. State should not dictate the church/religion. There is nothing unconstitutional with church/religion telling state what to do (in a legal manner). Walk into any church right now and you'll find all of the pastors with any spine telling their congregation to vote their beliefs - not party, not canditate, but vote how they believe.
"If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly"
You treat this premise as if it were self-evident. It's not.
Your logic throughout this post seems to be based on a binary between ballots cast without error and those cast erroneously and maliciously. You're eliding the fact that there needn't be malicious intent on the part of the voting machines or their designers for them to record votes erroneously.
For a while, voting machines should be created like this:
As you make any and all selections, the electronic machine records them.
At the end (or even as you go), it prints your selections on to a carbon-print receipt.
On the way out of the booth, you have to deposit one of the carbons in to a box as well. The carbon will have a barcode that "commits" your vote.
When the electronic machines initiate a count, random districts get audited and the paper trails must match the electronic votes, at at least some significant number (I say six nines at least) of the paper must exist for the district.
Is Cindy going to sit next to him in the oval office and move the mouse around for him?
Could just be the photo ops, but I don't recall seeing any computers in the Oval Office in any photos I've seen.
Someone as important as the US President should have someone to read his e-mails for him; he's got gazillions of age. The important ones can be printed out or summarized for him.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I've seen ATMs with really bad alignment. How about a pinball flipper button with a 2x40 LCD screen next to it for each position/candidate? Then hav an LED next to the button to show which one was active before the voter hits the VOTE button.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Hey, President Bartlet had a bad arm, and look how good he did!
Not sure why everybody assumes I think that the people who build voting machines should be forbidden from participating in the political process. A much simpler and more foolproof solution to the dilemma I pose is to simply not use voting machines in the first place.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
If John Adams were a general in the revolutionary war we would pry still be at war with the British or would have an American king.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Look, if you want to see if he's qualified, then let's see how he holds up in a few rounds of Stratego
What?
It all comes down to fucking moron Democrats who can't figure out how to vote.
Just look at it as Democrats removing themselves from the political gene pool.
Easy to hack a touchscreen even accidentally. Touch your trackpad in two places, the mouse jumps from one to another and the average of the two.
Wet bottom right corner (McCain) of touchcreen - when user touches screen in top left (Obama) jumps to McCain.
Uh... GWB served in the military.
Serving in the military is not a requirement to be able to serve competently as Command in Chief. Understanding the military should be and you can understand the military without having served.
Let's assume x represents your line of work. Would you agree that I can understand x as well as you without experience?
I just don't buy it.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I find the 5, Funny much more offensive than the joke.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I say the opposite is true. We should make it moderately difficult to complete a valid vote. That way the final tally will reflect the subset of voters with basic reasoning skills.
Generally it's the negative mods that are abusing the anonymity, but occasionally there's a bit of positive abuse.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Oh my LORD! You may not actually be one, but you certainly WRITE like a paranoid schizophrenic.
Actually, I don't think the governor of Texas is in the top five for actual power in the state. They wanted a very weak executive, and they hard-coded things that way in the state's constitution. I think the railroad commissioner might be #2. Or maybe it was the agricultural commissioner?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Obviously, if you vote for Hussein Obama and the machine changes your vote to John McCain, it's a serious problem. However, if you vote for John McCain and the machine changes your vote to Hussein Obama, then it's an important feature of the voting machine. That's the problem I have with the popular culture and the so-called mainstream media. If the machines inadvertently changed McCain votes to Obama votes, it would be NOWHERE to be found on this site.
I don't know about you, but I'm voting for JOHN McCAIN!"
The machines flipping will likely balance out the ACORN fraudulent voter registrations, etc...so, maybe the end results will actually be close to accurate?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Try convincing the machines to vote for Obama... that's your biggest challenge. I don't think you're up for it. I predict a win for McCain based on the machines.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
Same should go for people in charge of media outlets then, too? Lots of people who are "involved" in the mechanics of an election are also involved politically - it would be hard to place limits on that activity in a civilian setting - the military does place restrictions on political activity but that's because it is easy for them to enforce it.
Wow, a 7 digit ID - let that be a lesson in the perils of procrastination.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the user interface. I have used these machines several times even before they were used in the elections in Putnam County, I have used these machines in demonstrations. They are simple to use and easy to navigate.
I waited in line this past weekend for around 30 minutes to vote early in Putnam County, and based on my observations most of the people in there seemed to vote with ease. There were a few, especially some of the older voters, that seemed to have trouble embracing the newer technology. I have no doubt, however, that these are the same people who have always in the past had problems properly using the punch card ballots.
Of course let's say that the machines are changing votes from Obama to McCain. The machines are obviously smarter than the voter anyway.
Well, actually, to be fair, the republicans sent Ken Star to act on Whitewater. Star went to the justice department and got approval for the other investigations and only had to go to the republicans for increased funding. Sure, there might have been republicans rooting or cheering him on but they didn't sick him on those other charges.
And no, the perjury charge wasn't manufactured. He lied in court and even though the impeachment failed, the judge cited him for it, made him pay the Paula Jone's attorney fees, and he settled the case out of court when they appealed the dismissal. Susan Weber Wright waited until after he left office before making her charges public though. Bill also lost his license to practice in front of the Supreme Court over a complaint relating to his perjury and agreed to give up his Arkansas license and pay a fine to end matters there. The only think in question is whether or not the chief law enforcement officer in the land should have stayed in office after getting caught lieing in court.
Bush served in the military. He was a pilot in the guard.
I think you mean he never went to the war which it does appear the he avoided while in the service.
I'm not sure why this is even an Issue. Clinton made it clear that military service didn't matter anymore.
They could split the scren vertically, then Height isn't an issue.
Provided people are able to stand in front of the machine (i know, the level of technical expertise we IT folk demand of people is just so unreasonable! Is this thing even switched on....?) neither should the X-Axis be.
Invaders must die
I think your a little off there. Hawking knew how to use a computer before he was disabled. His disabilities came over a long period of time which gave him the opportunity to transition more gracefully then someone who is injured and restricted before they become popular.
This is a stark contrast in difference where the one is like a person going blind and learning to read braille when they were 20 after knowing how to read while the other was blind until they tried to teach him at age 50 and the bumps hurt his fingers. Take a guess at who is going to learn it and who is going to use others to help.
Well, actually, to be fair, the republicans sent Ken Star to act on Whitewater. Star went to the justice department and got approval for the other investigations and only had to go to the republicans for increased funding. Sure, there might have been republicans rooting or cheering him on but they didn't sick him on those other charges.
Arkansas Project
And no, the perjury charge wasn't manufactured.
1000000% manufactured. What actual underlying crime that was supposed to have been committed? We have courts and prosecutors in this country to punish the guilty, not to make innocent people jump through hoops until you can trip them up and charge them with perjury.
He lied in court and even though the impeachment failed
Completely false. Read the link. The only way you can prove he lied was to have physically read his mind.
the judge cited him for it, made him pay the Paula Jone's attorney fees, and he settled the case out of court when they appealed the dismissal
Which he could have easily appealed, as he was just following her instructions to the letter. But she also ruled that even if Clinton did exactly what Jones accused him of doing, that it wouldn't amount to harassment. She also ruled that whatever happened between Monica and Bill was irrelevant to what happened to Jones and Bill. And if it's not relevant, it's not perjury - even if he lied through his teeth, which he did not.
And that means he was never in the military? For both of those to be true, Bush serving in the military needs to be true too. That was the point being addressed.
Why would you not want it to have a cancel button? Do you never err, and want to punish other ATM users who do?
If I were to get a job, walk off as soon as customer requests started flooding in, then put it on a resume and go looking for another more important job, their HR would spew their coffee through their nose laughing at a reference to it as "experience".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Then you obviously have never served in the military.
BTW, your experience playing Rainbow 6 doesn't count as military experience. I wonder how well you would do with real live bullets and missiles targeting you. My guess is that the outcome would have been about the same expect you would have a little more shit and piss in your britches. Military people at that time were more or less pawns sent to get killed. The Vietnam erra saw tons of this trading bodies for objectives that had little meaning. If you lived and made it back, you got ready to die one more time.
There is a big difference between 'can't physically' and 'doesn't know how' which is what McCain explicitly stated. Which is back to my original point, if a person does not understand technology, they can not reasonably be expected to run a country based largely on said technology.
A President has advisers to help him/her make decisions. A President does not need to know nor ever will know every answer. How many Presidents have we had who have a medical degree? Should the lack of one disqualify him/her for the POTUS position because any legislation or policy regarding healthcare will not be understood by him/her? The same goes for a law degree and anything else. We're not talking about an electrical engineering degree or a CS degree here, only whether a person knows how to use a PC, and you think that should disqualify McCain from running a country based on technology? You gotta be kidding me. You need to rethink your position (and logic) because it is obviously too far to the left to be unbiased.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
If I have the mod point I will seriously Mod You down. For someone who had served his country by being a POW without renouncing his country should be resognized because of his strength of will and his love for his country (and the honor of his country). Love him or hate him of Presidential candidate or even being a Republican in general should have nothing to do with respecting his effort, under difficulties, to keep his country's honor.
He paid the price of the failed mission by being captured and tortured. I don't think you need to pile on him by calling what he had to go through a disgrace.
Touch screen gambling machines such as video poker don't have this rate of error, but gambling machines are put through a more thorough(sp) error checking process than voting machines. It's just sad.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Excuse me, but Stephen fucking Hawking can use a computer and not move any part of his fucking body, and McCain, who is wealthy enough not only to buy a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking ($145 retail)
He did, but he found it so annoying to have to back up and delete "my friends" so many times that he just went back to using a human secretary for dictation.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The (now famous 90 minutes of how stupid and hackable these voting systems are) UCSB video definitely demonstrates that it is possible for poll workers to cheat in exactly the ways that these complaints describe.
My state is back to paper ballots. Good luck, the rest of you losers.
Phhhtt, no mere mortal human anyways.
On the other hand, us super huma-
Nevermind. Carry on.
Always be prepared! What if your mother shows up and rubs her slimy beavpie on your leg? You will need PANTS!
That isn't exactly what happened and you know it. Well, unless you didn't get the memo that the CBS document was created at least 12 years after he served because it wasn't until then that the type it was used in was created.
It is fairly obvious to everyone, that Obama is indifferent to the Rays or any other team (including "his own" White Socks). And I don't blame him for that — I too hold obsession with sport-teams in certain mild contempt.
What is a "disqualifying flip-flop" is lying, that you care... Hillary did that too, but, at least, she picked one team and stuck with it, unlike Obama, who picked a different lie for a different crowd.
Nobody was forcing him to pick vi over emacs, or big endian over little. He did it himself and — by picking whatever was immediately expedient — shown himself to be untrustworthy.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I disagree. What is the standard of "basic reasoning skills", and who will make that decision. All citiziens over the age of 18 who are not recent felons are entitled by law to vote. Any bar of "basic reasoning skills" you set will by definition be discriminatory. Aren't stupid people entitled to representation too? Shouldn't people with strong political opinions but no technical sense be entitled to a voice in our democracy? At the best, setting a bar for voting of "basic reasoning skills" is elitist (and I would be considered a member of the elite by reason of education and Democratic Party leanings by many Republican no-nothings, so by your definition would probably be allowed to vote, unless you mean by "basic reasoning skills" not being a Democrat, which is a possibility.) At worst, such a bar is arbitrarily discrminatory because it can be set anywhere to disallow electoral participation by the bar setters of any group(s) they don't think should be allowed to vote. No, voting should be open to all. It should be easy and as unconfusing as possible. One shouldn't be requried to pass any implicit intellegence test to vote, and the only qualifications besides age, citizenship and not having recently committed any felonies should be the desire to vote and a decision as to whom to vote for.
Response time is most definitely a UI issue. Most non-functional specs that I see that go into the user interface design process specify minimum response times at some level or another. Sub-second response (ideally 1/10th of a second or faster) is ideal for showing a response in the user interface (such as button down/over/up states). Multi-second processes need to start with feedback indicating something is in progress. The fact that the poll clerk in the article mentioned that it can take several seconds for the machine to respond suggests to me that no such feedback is present, which is unacceptable in any user interface much less one of this importance. I can totally see how people would be confused. I suspect that the issue is that people, not seeing their presses get registered, start pressing other areas to try to get a response. The last button pressed is the one that overrides the others, so they only see the results of their flailing, now inaccurate attempts to press the button they wanted.
I would like to hear more about this Fucking Company. Will they have an IPO soon? are there job openings? is there a newsletter? is it illustrated?
Nope, but I learned something from your sig... a good deal of that manifesto exactly parallels socialist goals in this country today.
(And the artwork is very good to stunning. Too bad Hitler didn't stick to art.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What, he's not allowed to LEARN something? professing to not know something, then trying to learn it, is a contradiction??
At least he knew what he was ignorant of, and evidently set out to rectify that.
Also... I work with seniors on developing their computer skills. Nearly everyone over 55 or so adamantly asserts that they know nothing about computers, even when they are reasonably proficient at everyday tasks. They FEEL ignorant because computerese is a foreign tongue, but they get the job done nevertheless.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Because if I where your boss and found out you voted for Obama I would fire you."
No you wouldn't, because if Obama is elected, you'd go out of business first.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Richard Nixon
Spiro Agnew
Duke Cunningham
Ted Stevens
John McCain
Say no more, Dino
Damned good point. How does anyone know that camera-based documentation is any specific voter's experience??
Timestamps can be jiggered (especially for digital cameras) or just plain wrong, so the only way to show it is to make sure the voter can be identified -- which kinda defeats the point of a secret ballot.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
stephen hawking can move his eyes.
(as far as I know)
From the article:
Oh really?
It could also be the case that the machines are altering the vote - either because the software has been fiddled, or the design is (intentionally or otherwise) not suitable for the purpose.
Parallax error? What year vintage are these touch screens? How badly designed is the interface if a half-centimetre error in finger position results in a different box being ticked? How many hotspots does the screen have? How many candidates are represented in that space?
I've seen "touch" screens in the past which had arrays of LEDs and optical detectors arranged around the edge of the screen - is it possible that there are (for example) 8 x 10 hot spots on the screen, with several locations where a hotspot is between candidate buttons? Don't blame the user for poorly designed computer interfaces.
I guess there is one thing that is more worrying than not serving in the military before becoming Commander in Chief, and that is to actually go AWOL when serving. It shows serious lack of judgement.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
So does McCain. He dictates emails and his wife types them. Much more accurate than any software-based voice recognition I know of.
Not when the wife is a drug addict.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
We don't know much about Obama, and what we do know, is unflattering...
We have got to know every detail non-stop about Obama for the last 2 years, including how he voted present in 129 votes out of about 4000 made in the Illinois senate. And it has been discussed to death that Obama used the present vote to show that he was not satisfied with how the final law ended up (a common tactic in Illinois political system), while on some Obama cleverly also avoided to take sides on controversial issues.
What more do you need to know about Obama? That his middle name is Hussein?
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
I just read all 8 pages, (obviously quite day at the office), and the prevailing issue seems to be that because voting is anaonymous, it therefore cannot be secure.
Forgive my ignorance, I've only been here 40 years, but those people complaining that their votes were "switched" obviously don't give a damn about THEIR anonymity, so why is this such a big requirement.
WHY must a vote be anonymous ... if it was properly traceable WHO cast what vote, then there would be no issues about incorrect votes, incorrect counts, fraud, dead people voting, etc, because every man and woman would be identifiable and the traceability of the system would be complete.
And please, no Nth amendment bullshit ... just a common sense reason WHY it is so important for a vote to be anonymous, in a culture where suspicion reigns supreme, and every winning candidate "only won because of discrepancies".
That would, if found out, be clearly discernible as malice and cause a major uproar. And with the election being this close, it's not even necessary. You don't need to produce "Yeah, 99.8% of the population approve of the Great Leader(tm)"-style results from dictatorships, you just need to make sure that a fraction of a percent of the votes go to your desired candidate by some kind of unfortunate error.
If I had to guess, the way the ballot is organized in terms of candidate ordering probably makes it easy or possible to look like you're pressing the right area, but the boxes and/or your perception of the boxes' location isn't perfectly aligned with the touch sensing elements.
Yes. And this makes user errors more likely. And if you can make it so that these errors are biased towards your candidate, statistically you'll improve his chances of winning. A badly calibrated touchscreen _will_ do the trick, and can be explained away by "that darn technology" or sloppy maintenance. No malice required, see?
wtf happened to good old punch cards? they seemed pretty damn accurate to me. even more so than filling in the bubble.
e-voting = massive, massive fail. after the last two elections, no one can say otherwise.
in any case, it's two people (vp's don't count). how hard can this really be?!
I'm afraid it does. I'm talking about the requirement to mark your ballot in privacy away from anyone who may be trying to influence your vote.
Dude, if your bathroom door doesn't have a lock, or there are other barriers to privacy in your own home, being "pressured by outsiders" for a vote is not your biggest problem.
Florida mattered because of the way that elections are determined in the United States; we have an electoral system for reasons that are somewhat disputed. Electoral votes are not directly related to population of a state, thus a candidate can win the election if he wins enough of the right states even if he does not actually capture a majority of the popular vote. This is what happened in 2000. Gore won the popular vote, but failed to win the majority of the electoral votes. The way that things turned out meant that whoever won Florida, won the election, and the vote was extremely close in Florida. It was close enough that there was not a clear winner, and thus a recount was initiated in accordance with state law.
In accordance with Florida law, this put the deciding vote as to who would determine the Presidency in the hands of one Katherine Harris, who had been appointed to the position of Florida Secretary of State by Jeb Bush, (Florida governor, Bush's brother), and had been appointed George Bush's campaign manager in Florida by George Bush. She was granted fairly broad powers in her role as Secretary of State, which she basically used to rig the election, determining that Bush had won the election. At this point, a lawsuit was filed which reached the Supreme Court in record time. The Supreme Court halted the recount, on the grounds that having a democracy was unfair to G. Bush. You'll note my editorial opinion there, but I am outraged to this day that our President of the last eight years was installed not by vote, but by corruption and judicial fiat. Is it any wonder that the usurper ruled unjustly?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The problem with touch screen voting systems is that they need to be properly Calibrated so that when you touch the graphic for your desired action, it's that graphic/action that is the proper one. It's like when I use my credit card in a store and sign on the " X____________________ " line half the time my name actually appears under the line, not where the tip of the stylus is. Of course in a voting machine an unscrupulous tech could purposely calibrate the machine to record an unintented vote, or he might just be lazy and not calibrate it at all or properly.
-Eric
I guess that's why you want military advisers for. The president needs only his intelligence and common sense to take the right decision of the choices that have been put before him. One person cannot know ALL of military, economics, education, healthcare and so on.
Besides, at this point the US needs an economist in charge more than it needs a soldier.
If someone wanted to screw with an election via the machines, they wouldn't do it in WV.
If someone wanted to screw with an election and only has influence over the machines in WV, then he would do it there.
I mean come on. With Florida counting votes using the Jeb Bush system of "Once I run out of fingers to count on, we'll just call it Republicans win by a close call" and with Texas not even counting votes since only thems mex-EEEE-caaans and colored folks would vote against the Christian party. It's just not right that first we denied the state of West Virginia dental care and now we're ignoring their votes.
Did this election really need any more opportunity for jokes. I mean, let McCain have the spare votes from West Virginia. The entire state doesn't have enough electoral votes to worry about and we should let him feel like someone loves him.
Whether this was the actual problem here or not, are touch screens and other similar input devices really suitable for something like this?
I've often heard them touted as being brilliant from a usability perspective because they let someone interact directly with the presented information (in a sense) instead of having to go through a separate device somewhere. On the other hand, although I haven't worked with them much, anecdotally I've usually found them to be occasionally inaccurate, uncalibrated or clumsy in their current state -- especially for people who aren't used to using them.
Perhaps they're acceptable for something like an information booth, where the mis-interpretation of a user's clumsy fingers won't be critical, but voting machines? If voting must be completely digital (and I'm not convinced this is necessary), perhaps the input device needs to remain less fancy and more reliable. Surely it'd be possible to rig something up with large numbered physical buttons and then tell people to press the button that corresponds with their preferred candidate's position in a list. (If you want to make it less biased, randomise the order of the list before showing it to the voter.)
How hard can it be to create an e-voting system, there is no complex maths other than a bunch of SQL queries and the most complex code are the co-ordinates for the on screen button.....what's happening here?
I've sent e-mails without ever touching a keyboard - Vista Voice makes that pretty easy to do. Oh, wait, I'm on Slashdot I forgot...what's the Linux analogue? ;-)
Would you please repeat that? I couldn't make it out from behind the ms-cock in your mouth.
do you prefer that the rest of representatives just vote uninformed about legislation they don't understand or, often, haven't even read?
Personally I wish ALL legislators voted "present" more than "yea" or "nay". Cause I"m pretty sure they usually aren't very sure about what they are voting for. this would leave the voting to those who DO understand a particular issue. But, then people like you would condemn them for being human beings who do not know all, so they have to vote anyway, and we wonder why our political system promotes mediocrity so much.
Unfortunately, most just take the party word for how they should vote on any given piece of leglislation. There simply isn't time for independant research on everything that comes up the pike.
I am not an obama supporter, but that argument has got to be the weakest one ever and I'm sick of reading it. When I go to a voting booth, if I don't know very clearly how I want to respond to a given ballot item, I don't vote on it. I am VERY HAPPY that a legislator might feel the same way. An executive might not have that luxury but, then again, he will have a lot more resources at his disposal as well.
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email.
I was born two years *later* than Obama, and when I started work we had dumb terminals and an in house written messaging system running on an IBM mainframe. We didn't get to *start* using email for another five years.
It's good that no one is applying for the job of Commander in Chief, then. The job is President. Commander in Chief is only one of the duties of the president and not necessarily the most important one. The President's job is to preside over the Executive departments. The ability to preside over the Department of Education and Department of Health are just as important as that ability for the Department of Defense. We don't require that the President be a teacher or a doctor, either.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I have reported many times about machines stealing elections, and being pre-programmed to do so. I have also seen the voter blamed for the latest inaccuracies. WHen they vote Obama, and it says you voted McCain, the election officials are blaming the voters saying they did not use the machine properly! Tell me, when a machine can not be used easily and reliably to record your vote, whose fault is it? One thing is for sure, it isn't the voter's fault! Design the thing to work easily and record a proper vote and you won't have these issues! This is either stealing, or bad and lazy programming. Either way it is criminal, since designing a voting machine that is reliable and foolproof isn't that hard (I have designs that would work). Probably lazy programmers, and bad QA.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
Stares at palms of hands
"Crap, I've been driving on the wrong side of the street all these years!"
BTW, is something wrong with the blockquote tag? In the preview the little grey bar continues down next to the first line of my response, but only the part that I'm actually quoting is in grey. I bet it shows up correctly when I post and I look like an idiot for writing all this.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
No, but responding to an ad that states correctly that McCain is a computer illiterate with an article headlined "Obama Ad Ridicules McCain over War Injuries" is the very definition of a straw man.
Right. So we're clear on the fact that the reason McCain can not use a computer is due to his lack of knowledge in this area, and not (strictly, at least) due to his war injuries.
It's not just people over 55, a lot of people will protest that they "don't know computers" when it's simply the case that they have not used them enough to become comfortable. McCain's injuries, for example, may not prevent him from using one, but may make him slow and uncomfortable enough that it's just easier to get someone else to do it for him.
My dad is McCain's age, and has been using a computer for years, and you're right - he is proficient enough with everyday tasks. It's the finer points that trip him up: when to single or double-click, the difference between a file and a folder, where he left his glasses ...
If McCain's injuries are acting as a disincentive for him to learn to use a computer, that's an accessibility issue, and one that could likely be solved if he is sufficiently motivated. If he is not sufficiently motivated, all the training in the world is not going to help.
But going back to the original point I was responding to, the Obama ad truthfully stated that - by his own admission - McCain does not know how to use a computer. To suggest that the ad amounts to ridiculing McCain over his war injuries is simply exploitation of those injuries, and shows a real lack of respect for both candidates.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Oddly enough, it seems to me that NOT being in the military is an advantage in getting the job. Look at Dole vs Clinton, or Kerry vs Bush. The military man got his butt kicked in the election. McCain's military background isn't going to get him into office.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
A President does not need to know nor ever will know every answer. How many Presidents have we had who have a medical degree? Should the lack of one disqualify him/her for the POTUS position because any legislation or policy regarding healthcare will not be understood by him/her? The same goes for a law degree and anything else. We're not talking about an electrical engineering degree or a CS degree here, only whether a person knows how to use a PC, and you think that should disqualify McCain from running a country based on technology?
I don't need to have a medical degree to understand the huge failings of our current health care system, and see logical solutions. I don't need to have a law degree to be able to read and understand the constitution and make informed decisions that could enact or deter legislation with possibly catastrophic consequences (such as the Patriot Act). And I certainly don't need my CS degree to be able to understand computers or technology. I would however need to have fundamental knowledge of such things in order to make good decisions on something like net neutrality or defense of our nations computerized infrastructure. Smart advisers mean nothing if I just 'don't get' the fundamentals. So yes, I believe that is one of the many things that should disqualify McCain.
You need to rethink your position (and logic) because it is obviously too far to the left to be unbiased.
It's amazing how you have me all figured out. You're either a genius or just plain psychic. /sarcasm Seriously, the biggest problem in this country is morons like you that think politics are either left or right and you must chose a candidate based on said affiliation, rather than making an informed decision based on the merits of the individual.
I myself am very moderate and agree with certain aspects of both parties. I have voted (early voting in TX) for Obama in this campaign because I believe his capacity for rational thought and intelligent decision making is far superior to that of McCain's. I did however vote for John McCain in the 2000 republican primary, and possibly would have voted for that man again in this election if he were still around. Sadly though, John McCain is nothing more than a shill of his former self and does not merit even a passing consideration in this election.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
A POTUS certainly doesn't have to be an EXPERT on computers, economics, or military tactics. He DOES, however, need to be savvy enough to recognize such experts, and appoint them to advise him. Otherwise, we could end up with horse experts in charge of hurricane relief.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I would like to point out that serving in war is a good thing before sending young people into battle. Look at the present state of affairs. Maybe if Bush hadn't been a coward and hid in the National Guard and had smelled the burning flesh of his best friend maybe he would have thought twice before sending people into a war over a lie. War is something that cannot be described it has to be experienced. Once you have experienced it the horror never leaves you. I know been there done that.
And, considering that these "intended users" include the dumbest people in all parts of the country (including Florida), the UI needs to be pretty damn obvious.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I have no problem with the Diebold CEO being poltically active - as long as his machines are auditable by people who are politically active for the other guy(s).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Are you adequate?
Ok I'll rephrase.
Roy Sullivan has been hit by lighting 7 times, does that mean he should be appointed head of the department of energy?
Holy crap I got modded flamebait for saying torture isn't relevant job experience for running a country.
> ...somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
I would have to say that someone who is in charge of building voting machines is by definition politically active, in the same way that independent poll watchers are. What they have to be is politically agnostic, dedicated to the system, not the parties, candidates, or issues under vote.
If the Republican win this time, it was "stolen". The nation will have been stolen by a minority of its citizens, who actually got out and voted for their preferred candidate. So you lazy ass Democrats, make sure you get out the fucking vote by Nov. 4 or you're a living turd. Whoever wins will be seen by the rest of the world as America's choice. At that point it won't matter who you voted for, because you'll be universally reviled alongside your ideological enemies. And you should, because if you can't get up and vote then you deserve the worst president ever.
Hey, you ought not to elect a disabled man who is statistically expected to die before 4 years are out, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM?
There is way too much information to cover.
There is a long long list of cheating methods that have been used around the world since the beginning of voting.
Good security means being a bit paranoid and having an imagination; one doesn't have to go too far, but this is just voting and a TON can be reasonably done. An ignorant person might think I'm crazy when I say hand count everything and announce initial results by exit poll-- except OTHER COUNTRIES ALREADY DO and have a better system than the USA.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You're not a troll but you might be a mouth breathing troglodyte.
Case in point: Any point that begins with some drivel like "Every year you hear..." is a clear sign that you are lying, or you are making this shit up. Give me some hard numbers or don't, but don't give me a argument based on a third hand case study that was only used by the media becasue it was sensational in the first place. All this "point" indicated to me is that you are just too stupid to know that your brain is selectively retaining information to support your own bias.
Same goes for your "post office trash" story; bullshit and even if its true it won't effect shit in the general election.
In Ohio in the last election people in urban areas had to wait 6 hours in a cold November rain to vote. Six fucking hours. You know why? Because the partisan republican secretary of state wanted to make it as difficult to vote as possible for urban educated white and poor blacks. You think discrimination is good because it has never happened to you in any meaningful way ( having a bouncer let a hot chick into a bar instead of you doesn't count.) Read up on 2000, discrimination in Florida was state troopers blocking black people from voting, that is way more blatant and ugly then thing that has happened in Oregon in at least 50 years and shit like that doesn't go down because of the format of the ballot.
As for "Dad" voting, my Dad is a frighteningly smart, well educated, and directly knows or has worked with or gone to school with most of the people in local politics and the last 4 presidential elections. So when I ask my Dad what he thinks about the governor, or the VP, or the president and he can tell me that he took the bar with him or watched him make a ass out of himself in front of the whole school I value that opinion a whole lot more than yours, the media's, or the governor PR. In addition he reads 3 national, 2 international, and 3 local papers a day. So when I ask him about the real effects of a policy I am pretty sure he is well informed. Now I know that's not everyone's experience but it is mine and I like it.
I find you offensive because your basic premise is that people don't deserve democracy and because of that we should assume that they should pull themselves up by their boot straps and be a cracker ass wasp like you only less intelligent and more uncaring.
And yes, paper trails are certainly part of the solutions. Printed after the vote is entered, and in some scenarios formally recorded by scanning the paper trail after the voter has the chance to verify it.
There are other ideas you should investigate before assuming that the problem can't be solved.
Evidence bitch; give it to me or STFU. Wikipedia quotes "New fears over postal vote fraud" (Guardian, 13. April 2005) as saying "No Vote By Mail Project has also documented the rise of the multi-week vote counts, vote-buying, granny-farming, and many other problems and concerns that have arisen due to the increased use of absentee ballots and propagation of Vote-by Mail systems."
In fact the google news search: ~evidence ~fraud oregon "vote by mail" -"no evidence" for all dates gives no cited instances.
I did find this one "'We don't have evidence of fraud in the system, but it's a real concern,' said Bill Lunch, who teaches political science at Oregon State University" from "Oregon opts for mail over high-tech voting" 10/13/2004 3:51 PM By: Brad Cain AP
Oh wait the list goes on and on. But why use the internet to find data that may conflict with your world view when you can instead spout unfounded assertions based on your own navel gazing.
Well, The circumstances surrounding the so called AWOL is a little fishy. I mean he was never punished for going AWOL which the military was fond of doing during the Vietnam war. During this time he was supposed to of been AWOL, he was supposed to be working with someone's election campaign and he was in the area that he was supposed to of been serving in.
Anyways, I doubt there is a lot of truth to the AWOL story other then a privileged rich white boy getting slack duties because of connections in government. At best, there is a record that he waited too long to report in when he was transfered back to the Texas nations guard which shows two things, one, that he was actually transfered back which means that he had to of reported in at some point in time to the Alabama guard who claims he never did, and two, he wasn't scared of reporting back in even though he took his time in doing so (probably getting high).
You see, you can't transfer something you don't have or have access to. The AWOL claim on bush was that he never checked in after being transfered to Alabama. So Alabama couldn't transfer him back if they never received him. This throws a wrench into the claim. Think of it like this, If I give you $5 to give to your neighbor, you would have the $5 to give to him. But if I said I was going to give you the $5 to give him buy never did, you wouldn't give it back to me or to him because you never received it. So even though the records are missing, being transfered back to Texas means he was on record somewhere as being there.
At first I couldn't decide it that was a Ignoratio elenchi fallacy or a Package-deal fallacy until I realized that it is just that you are a racist of the first order; that was seriously one of the most fucked up things I have ever read on slashdot and said in such a sleazy passive aggressive tone as well. There's a special place for you somewhere...
Ah, so not all of the pieces of the pie have the same value. Here in the Great White North, we divide the country into a number of roughly identical (population wise) "ridings". Each riding corresponds to a seat in the House of Commons (similar, I think, to your House of Representatives). Each political party can field a candidate in each riding. On election day, the candidate with the most votes in the riding wins that seat. The party that wins the most seats forms the government. Other than the fact that a ridings boundary will not cross a provincial border, the existense of provinces within the country plays essentially no role in the election. (Thus, there are no such thing as "blue provinces" or "red provinces").
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Are you forgetting the entire Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit? That is where he lied and that is where he committed perjury on his own free will. Clinton was the one who attempted to stretch a definition to a point that didn't cover what he did. And yes, Clinton actually championed the ruling from the Supreme Court which said that the EEOC laws protect a person before the workplace became hostile and that looking into other aspects of a person's life was valid in attempts at gathering supportive evidence.
Or I can believe what the judge said when she punished him as well as understand that the person couldn't have been elected president and a lawyer as well as a Rhodes scholar and still that dumb at the same time to not understand what was being asked.
I don't remember saying that Clinton should have been impeached for claims of sexual harassment that happened before he was elected. I don't remember saying anything about Paula Jones except that Clinton did lie in court as which was supported by the ruling against him.
It also doesn't matter how irrelevant anything was, it's the same as with Scooter Libby, if they can't get to the truth of the matter, because of someone lying, even though ultimately nothing was found to of been illegal, they can't be sure about the truth in that because of the lie. Now Jone's attorney's used the ruling against Clinton for lying as the basis of their appeals and he settled the case before it went back.
And yes, the judge did specifically say that Clinton wasn't truthful in his testimony. That is a lie no matter how you play it.
It's like the difference between enrolling in college and actually passing your classes.
mediocrity rules, man
It's good to hear from a medical doctor who has examined John McCain and has a thorough knowledge of all the various injuries he sustained, instead of just the more publicly known ones. But does he know you're speaking about his condition? Aren't you worried about HIPAA laws?
Except that disenfranchisement to poor and minority voters has been used to justify prohibition of everything that could possibly prevent voter fraud. ID requirements, periodic purging of the voter rolls, purging of the dead and requiring actual proof of citizenship.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Comments on shitty mods are *NEVER* off topic, but thanks for helping to make my point, whoever you are, you spineless names piece of garbage.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The article I linked to is perfectly clear and gives very good examples of what McCain can't do and what is difficult for him. All revealed by the senator himself. That he can handwrite is clearly known. And we all know that there are ways of controlling a computer that are in now way related to typing (thus only answering emails would be too hard and need his wife's assistance).
Too bad you are so adamant about your political choices that you refused to read the article. But well, what can we do when people don't see a difference between politics and religion.
Your observation has nothing to do with the post you responded to. His point was that in attempted fraud in vote by mail the perpetrators were caught. That's not disinfranchisment, that is basic law enforcement.
No, it is more like enrolling into college and getting on the honor role compared to skipping classes and barely graduating.
He received an honorable discharge which is something that an AWOL service member wouldn't have gotten.
Are you sure? If I was going to write some vote switching code then I'd make sure there is some plausible deniability involved. What better way to switch votes than to make it look like the problem is caused by voter error? If it all happens internally, then if anyone does ever get to audit the code then it's blatantly obvious what has happened. But if I write a "bug" in the interface that makes it look like any irregularities are the fault of the user, then I'm both less likely to arouse suspicion in the first place, and less likely to get caught if someone does take an interest.
Here's an update on bradblog.com about bad problems down in Texas:
Brad Friedman's blog:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6584#more-6584
We've been reporting for the last week or so on the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines which are flipping votes from Democratic candidates to others in, so far, at least four states. We've showed you actual footage of it and how even after being "recalibrated" these machines still continue to flip votes.
[ snip ]
Unfortunately, it's not just the error-prone, hackable, wholly unverifiable iVotronics from ES&S which are failing. Error-prone, hackable and wholly unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems made by Hart InterCivic, Diebold and Sequoia Voting Systems are also having the same problems across the country. And the Democrats, who have the most to lose, continue to do nothing about it...
On Monday, we posted a video of a WV county clerk demonstrating the vote-flips on the ES&S iVotronic and suggesting that the problem was due to touch-screen calibration issues on the machine. The video then shows the clerk inserting a cartridge into the machine to recalibrate it, after which the machine still mis-records a vote.
[ snip ]
While recalibration has been ordered in many of these cases, it needs to be pointed out that there is no way that any touch-screen voting machine should ever have a cartridge inserted into it, for any reason, by anybody, after it's already been programmed for an election. That is the very moment these machines are the most vulnerable to malicious software and other forms of tampering and attack. That recalibration is being advised where these problems have occurred --- instead of complete removal from service, to be replaced by paper ballots --- is insane.
Recalibration, so far, has been the response prescribed by election officials and, to their shame, we have seen absolutely no sign that the DNC and Barack Obama attorneys have done anything to take appropriate action ...
Last week, from the Houston Chronicle:
[Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman's] office was informed early today that some of the first voters had cast straight-ticket Democratic ballots and then discovered that the electronic machines listed them as voting for John McCain in the presidential election.
In the report, Kaufman, as expected, tries to play down the reports of problems. Harris County (Houston), the largest county in the second largest uses the Hart InterCivic eSlate DRE. Though the eSlate is not a touch-screen --- voters use a wheel and a button to select candidates from the computer screen --- it's still an unverifiable DRE voting system.
Our friend Pokey Anderson, an election integrity advocate in Houston, and host of KPFT/Pacifica's Sunday Monitor program, confirmed with one of the first 30 or so voters to vote on the first day of early voting at the West Gray Multi-Service Center that her straight ticket Democratic vote was flipped to McCain ...
The machines most certainly are flipping votes. I watched it myself. I made the Obama touch-screen box X three times. EVERY TIME, it flipped to McCain a millisecond before the next screen came up. How many people do you think would catch that? The printout at the end is rolled up as fast as it can be printed, and you do NOT have the option of reviewing it. How many people can read at the spread of a tape printout? Yes, the computers are hacked to flip D to R, and NO, there are NO cases of it flipping the other way. Wake up and realize that the real world is run by Karl Rove, not Stephen Hawking. The "hanging chads" were caused by DELIBERATE use of much thicker paper shipped to elderly communities, where the paper wouldn't punch all the way through without force. The "butterfly ballot" was deliberately designed with names not aligning to their box. Do you really not understand that there is NO slimepit which the neocons will not swim in in order to keep power?
As a constitutional amendment would be required, the people who would have to make those decisions would be the people's representatives in the federal and state legislatures.
Limiting the vote to citizens 18 and over is also, by definition, discriminatory. So?
All people, including the under-18, for example, are entitled to representation; but not all people are entitled to participating in choosing their representatives.
Ideally, I think people capable of reasoned decision-making, and insightful judgment of character, and vested interest in the state of the republic, should be the ones selecting the representatives. Of course, that is far easier to say than to form a practical system for objectively determining those characteristics in people. Nevertheless, I think it is important to identify what the ideal would be. And in the ideal, strong political opinion, without the above qualities, does nothing to contribute to the system.
Basic reasoning skills is no more elitist than the age requirement. IMO, to the degree that it is elitist, it would be a good kind of elitist... sort of like the kind where they only let people with the appropriate education and experience design nuclear reactors.
Yep, and that would be the main obstacle to coming up with a reasonable system for doing it.
What gives age, citizenship, and recent felony conviction special status as acceptable bases of discrimination, other than that that is the current state of the law? Age is an implicit reasoning ability test. Citizenship (formerly land ownership) is an implicit vested interest test. Felony conviction is an implicit political test.
I'll keep this short. Firstly, "basic reasoning skills" as a bar is, as you seem to agree, arbitrary and difficult to define. Age, on the other hand, is objective and is based on our legal traditions going back centuries. It is also the basis of a legal definition of adulthood implying enforceabilty of contracts, legal liability, etc. While I agree there are a lot of 18-year-olds who don't have much judgement, they can at least put thier lives on the line in defense of the country in the military, and that carries some weight. To get back to basic reasoning skills, I can easily make an argument that the most erudite, educated, accomplished person who does not agree with me does not posess "basic reasoning skills". I might, were I in power, disqualify you. And you might disqualify me. What you seem to be arguing for is the establishment of something along the lines of, if not Plato's philosopher kings, at least political participation by those who some authority has deemed up to the task. The problem I have is that I wouldn't trust anyone to make that selection. You shouldn't either.
The sad part is, almost everyone believes, Hitler was "on the Right". Calling somebody a Leftist is bound to draw a response, that the opposing point of view is so Rightist, it is as if Hitler himself said it.
Well, Hitler's National Socialism was about as far Left, as Stalin's International variety...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah, that Hitler's variety of fascism was considered "far right" always seemed crosswise to me, but I couldn't quite tell what was wrong.. having never seen this particular manifesto before.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'm not sure how one CAN have a fascist state without being fundamentally socialist. The former might be viewed as the rigidly-enforced version of the latter.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
There's a ridiculously easy-to-recognize distinction between "inability to use the most important technological innovation of the past 100 years, if not further back" and "choice to do something other than serve in the military."
That being said, I think DQing McCain for inability to use a computer is idiotic. What's next? DQing someone for not being able to SMS quickly?
So did you use Dragon Naturally Speaking to input "gazillions of aides," or were you talking about McCain?
Well, at least I know with whom not to talk about foreign policy. I suggest you read our favorite pro-Iraq-War secular humanist on waterboarding. Hitchens: It's Torture. Just to point out, Hitchens had himself waterboarded to prove it wasn't torture.
And thus a civilian, not a military man. Regardless, the other guy's point still stands: The founding fathers made the CIC position a civilian position.
In my opinion, the CIC power is the least important Presidential power. For one, with a non-interventionist foreign policy, the CIC power is extremely diminished. The founding fathers (and many alive today) want a non-interventionist philosophy. Or, at least, a humble foreign policy, to borrow a phrase from a man who promised and did not deliver that.
The President's most important power is either to use the bully pulpit to push his mandate onto Congress, or to appoint federal judges (especially to SCOTUS justices).
The Gulf War made people donate some toys to children of vets. The Afghani and Iraqi Conflicts ("war [weren't] declared") have tarnished our image, but that can be repaired over the course of a decade.
SCOTUS appointments shape the next couple centuries of national development. We're still making decisions based on what they said 200 years ago.
Give me an expert in Constitutional Law (SCOTUS appointments) and someone who can inspire people to action (using the bully pulpit). That is what we need in a President.
The Texas Air National Guard is not part of the Armed Services of the United States. It's a Texas outfit. Need proof? It's URL is agd.STATE.TX.us.
If Bush went AWOL, then it he de facto did not serve. This is like saying you're qualified to run IBM because you went to business school. And not Harvard Business School, either.
As opposed to "fake torturing" like listening to Nickelback?
But it wouldn't matter if he got fired, because Obama just wants to take all of the working class's money and give it to welfare mamas and papas, right?
Sometimes I can't tell if Slashdot trolling is becoming /b/trolling, or if people are serious.
The problem is "IF". All we have to show that he did go AWOL is the lack of paperwork supporting his checking or reporting in when he arrived in Alabama. Oh, then there is the no one remembers seeing him there but I don't remember half the people I graduated with and I'm only 38. There is no record of punishment and he received an honorable discharge. Alabama had enough records of him being there to transfer him back to Texas. It's odd that you can transfer someone who never showed up. It's like you giving me an apply when you have none.
I don't need voice-to-text software; I'm perfectly capable of inputting my own Froidian phonetic typos with a keyboard.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Why don't we have a text, and spoken confirmation of each choice? "You have selected John Clusoe for the position of: Vice Chancellor, Are you sure [Yes] [No]". Seems like every other piece of computer software we use does this.
I also think we should have some system of voting receipts, such as a confirmation code. You can vote, get your confirmation code receipt, and then check a website to see if your vote got recorded properly. This would retain the anonymity, but also provide SOME level of transparency. The way we have right now, and the way it has always been, we cast our vote and have NO idea if it's ever counted in the total or not.
Blog
I'd remember if one of my fellow service members was the son of a congressman who was on the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee which oversaw the draft and could have brought the halting of the draft up for a vote. Who was also the grandson of a senator. And whose family was very wealthy. The Bush family is another Kennedy family.
You're telling me that people 30 years after Kennedy served in WWII don't remember serving with him? People sure remembered serving with Kerry enough to attack him heavily for things he supposedly did to NOT deserve honor.
There's a saying where I come from (New New York): That dog won't hunt, monsignor.
Lol.. There is no doubt that Bush was a spoiled rich kid who probably got assigned to jack off training in Alabama because he had no experience outside being an airman. Alabama national guard didn't have planes he was qualified on at the time he was assigned to him and he missed his Physical which got his wings stripped from him. It is likely that he served his entire duty there working for the senator that he was attempting to help the campaign out for.
Not only would that account for people not remembering him, (and we don't know that those who would remember are still alive, his commanding officer was already dead when the questions started getting raised, but would also give credence to the now Ret. Lt. Col. Bill Burkett who claimed to have witnessed Bush's aids throwing the records in the trash which Bush admits to doing/having done while governor of Texas. Apparently, people were attempting to get his military record and he instructed aids to remove anything that could be damaging to him which might as well have been the entire time in Alabama.
The dog will probably hunt if you stopped feeding him so much BS. I'm not sticking up for Bush, but lets be fair about this.
Oh, right, anybody who doesn't blindly hate MS and Vista... ...of course you're an anonymous coward so I guess I don't have to take anything you say seriously.
-B-