Slashdot Mirror
US Elections Dominated By Closed Source. Again.
An anonymous reader writes "Another American election is almost here, and while electronic voting is commonplace, it is still overwhelmingly run by closed source, proprietary systems. It has been shown that many of these systems can be compromised (and because they are closed, there may be holes we simply cannot know about). Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems. By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests. The opportunities for fraud, tampering and malfunction are rampant. But nonetheless, there is very little political will for open source voting, let alone simple measures like end-to-end auditable voting systems or more radical approaches like open source governance. Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"
Vote Early. Vote Often
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/classes/hmc.cs070.200401/votequote.html
Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available? ...there's lots of money and power behind closed source, which leads to corruption and back-room deals. QED.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
I think a big part of it (from the public's perspective, anyway) is a misconception about open source. Many non-technology-oriented people I know think open source automatically makes it less secure, since "anyone can see what makes it tick."
Personally, I think it has to do with money more than anything else (duh.)
Living With a Nerd
Who's "we"? The American people aren't choosing to have the current, unverifiable voting systems in place. They simply have no idea of the alternative, and no power to bring it about even if they did. Frankly, I don't think it matters. The American political system is broken. What does it matter how they count the votes, when those votes mean so little?
It can be go tiem now plees?
So here's a question:
Does there currently exist a complete open source voting solution? Something that you could drop in in place of a Diebold or what have you.
It seems like we'd make more headway with local governments if we could say, "Here it is, it's free, it's ready to go, all you have to do is okay it." and I'm not sure if that solution yet exists?
Because those in power don't want transparency to be a two-way street. They want to be able to peek into every aspect of our private lives, ostensibly to seek out some tiniest sliver of evidence that we maybe once upon a time didn't think it was necessarily all that great an idea to disembowel Osama bin Laden and stuff him with pork sausage on live TV. But they don't want us to be able to peek into their private lives, or even the seedier aspects of their public ones, so they take any opportunity to shut us out. The closed-source voting machines are just one facet of a much larger situation.
A great example of the way public officials form a "blue [pinstriped] wall" has just come up in the news again, Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. A right-wing bloc in the all-male Senate of the day tore into every minor aspect of Hill's own sex life to try to discredit her in the eyes of the American public. They protected Thomas partly because he was a Republican but mostly because they knew how they would feel if their own mistresses (or male lovers, for that matter) came to Capitol Hill and aired out their dirty laundry, and how they would want the Congress to deal with those situations.
> Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?
Because. We are still in the dark ages. We are still ruled by the same tyrants as back then.
Democracy is just an evolved form of Feudalism.
It is a way of enslaving people, yet convoluting and making non-obvious that fact, thus leading the people to believe they are free. It also protects the tyrants from beheading by the people, as the people can not easily figure out who the true rulers are.
Any transparency would be the opposite of them having absolute power and possibly expose the fraud of democracy.
I've still yet to see any open source alternative though. I mean, there are projects, but it seems they haven't actually developed anything to show and say "this could be an alternative, and it's secure!". It's a chicken and the egg, but counties aren't going to throw away their contracted, and expensive voting machines until there's a real alternative that they can actually know will be available next voting cycle. It's a crappy situation, but complaining it hasn't happened yet is not productive. Talk to your Senator, Congressman, etc. Except, of course, if they LIKE unverifiable voting. Then, umm, call your AG or THE National AG.
Let's see: those closed source voting machines will either be biased towards Big Oil (Republicans) or towards Big Entertainment (Democrats). Open source voting machines won't be biased: they'll pick up the winner using the random(3) function (hopefully properly seeded). OR... let's follow the example set forth in Asimov's story Franchise and let Multivac decide and save the costs of elections.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The I.T. friends of the government don't use open source products or implement open source solutions therefore neither does the government.
YES the White House used Drupal (or whatever they used) for there website but that isn't nearly "as critical" or "as important" as "the integrity of a voting system".
Bureaucracy my friends, bureaucracy.
"Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"
Because it would take a politician to change the law. But both parties like the broken system we have now because they each want to game the system for their own advantage. Fair and accurate voting doesn't help the political parties or the candidates, it only help the voters!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
what's the big deal. Most of you don't vote anyway.. what does opening the source do? it won't prevent bugs or hacking or cheating (which has nothing to do with the source). There are many things that affect our lives that aren't open. Why voting?
did you forget to take your meds?
If Closed Source:
Con - Companies can secretly build in flaws to exploit trust.
Pro - A chance at security through obscurity (not too much, of course, because exploiters KNOW the code exists, just not what the code says exactly)
Con - Companies can unknowingly build in flaws that can be exploited by those in the know.
If Open Source:
Pro - Everything is known about the code so any potential flaws are widely known and can be fixed.
Con - Fixes can be flawed, too.
Con - No standard will likely be settled upon-- partially because of the nature of the Open Source community and partially because for-profit companies will interfere as much as possible.
If hard-copy votes only:
Con - More human effort required.
Con - Human error expected.
Pro - There's also a LOT more oversight.
~~~
Still, I only vote on paper.
There are generally 2 main points that electronic voting needs - coding available for public scrutiny is one, but in my mind a more important one is a paper audit trail - the vote is recorded electronically, but the voter gets to see a paper record of their vote (they either see but can't touch or carry it to a ballot box) which can be used later for recounts and verification.
I'd rather have a proprietary system with a paper trail than an open system with no paper trail. But really we need to insist, at a minimum, on both.
The reason is simple. Our government would not be able to fix elections if it were more transparent or had adequate auditing.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Not enough people stand up and demand it, but even still when that happens they will just run some sort of back room deal and pass it through congress on Christmas eve when there is only like 3 people left in the building.
Oh also legally "protest" means that you don't like it but you'll do it anyways. so if you claim to be protesting, you are basically giving them an A-OK!.
"Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?""
Better for who? The answer ti this will give a hint of why...
I'm still waiting for Obama to post his genome.
McCain posted his, and all the little clones proved that he has 100% pure American genes.
So the fact that open source "isn't a magical cure-all" is the reason Linux hasn't taken off and not because of the massive marketing and propaganda mill that is Microsoft actively fighting against it, interesting.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
The failure of Linux on the desktop is not due to the viability of the platform itself.
It's due to the militant ideology that keeps content and functionality that people expect, and that work, out of the distributions.
Computers are all content and experience. Linux has a decent experience but little content. Windows has content but a generally poor experience. Neither has solved all the problems.
If you are suggesting that such stories are apocryphal *merely* because Republicans are in the lead... then you've made the point, because they are documentarily not apocryphal, and you are clearly so implying merely because you're a Republican partisan.
Read, um, *the links in the lede*.
... but coverage of this topic in Slashdot has been consistent across election cycles. Check out these examples from the 2008 campaign:
Fact checking isn't difficult. Here's a list of Slashdot articles about Diebold, if you don't believe me.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
hack the systems on election day.
Get scoobey doo elected.
go to jail.
Improve the state of affairs?
Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems.
Yes the problem with voting machines is the unstable closed-source operating systems, as opposed to the ultra-secure ultra-stable open-source operating systems that fix all of your crappy application programming issues.
New signature idea - TRY LINUX, IT'S MAGIC!!! PROPAGANDA INCLUDED AT NO EXTRA CHARGE!!!
For competing with Protools, wouldn't Ardour be a better choice?
All somebody needs to do is write an iPad app, and polling locations could be fitted with iPads behind the curtain booths. What could possibly go wrong?
A comparison between Vegas slot machines and Electronic voting:
http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.gif
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
No one in government sees it as a problem because there has been no issue involving the units.
If, for instance, There was a call for all Hackers and Tech people to rig the election.
Lets say they were asked to Exploit the system and force a third party like the libertarian party (www.lp.org) to win (They are on most if not all the ballots)
And say it just so happened that the Libertarian party won by a land slide. There would be a call to recount, with out the ability to recount all hell would break loose. Those in charge would be forced to review the whole mess and then we may see some standards arise.
But no one would ever openly call for the rigging of a US election ;)
If the insiders really wanted to systematically exploit the voting system, I don't think they would be dumb enough to rely on MS Access like Diebold did. The project would be a big budget extravaganza, managed by $POPULAR_MGMT_CONSULTING_FIRM. The complexity would be enormous, and there would be some sort of bizarre "national security" black box requirements that would be where all the dirty stuff lived.
Never attribute to malice that which can be just as easily explained by stupidity. Idiots outnumber evildoers by a wide margin.
The voting machine software I have seen looks like somebody drafted a half-baked specification, sent it to the offshore bargain bin and waited to see what they produced. Idiots.
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
Actually there is, for that (optionally, yes) certified software. The distributed software is built from source by the independent testing labs (in what's called a trusted build) and hashes are taken of all the components. The testing lab keeps escrowed copies and the hashes are also available from eac.gov.
Of course, this does assume that the systems have been so certified (optional at the Federal level, but mandated by law in some states/counties) and that the supervisor at the district (county, whatever) level bothers to check.
Open source software is no cure-all either. While the voting systems may include commodity computers, a lot of components (ballot scanners and tabulators, interfaces for disabled voters, etc) will have custom hardware and firmware in them. (And yes, the independent labs review and test this stuff too.)
However, as someone who worked for a testing lab, I can say that the most likely reason that vendors don't want their source made visible to the public at large has nothing to do with competition or potential vote fraud, but with embarrassment at how god-awful some of their code is. But that's true of a lot of proprietary code.
-- Alastair
Why shouldn't the voting system be any less corrupt than the candidates?
My point is it's going to take a lot more than an election to clean house on the hill, and even then it's an uphill battle to keep the country from sliding into a full-fledged military dictatorship, instead of the secret one it already is. For example when a military can get away with firing radioactive weaponry into civilian populations on at least two occasions without so much as a slap on the wrist, they are above the UN, much less their own government, and democracy has long since left the building.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
i can deal with OCR machines, but you need to vote on paper. this provides a picture of actual voter intent that is harder to lose/ fake/ destroy/ etc. of course you can have fraud in any election, but the difference between electronic and paper is that you need an army of saboteurs and an ongoing conspiracy with paper, and with electronic you just need one guy with the right code for a few milliseconds
additionally: attack vectors. there are dozens of way to cheat on paper voting. there are order of magnitude more ways to cheat on electronic voting
and its about perception, not actual voting irregularities and fraud attempts. i can touch paper, i can see it, feel it, trust it. electronics represents a black box where your vote goes in, elected official sausage comes out the other end, and who knows what happens in between
technophilicity is the problem of believing throwing more technology makes something better no matter what. no: for the sake of transparency, trust and legitimacy, the richest democracy and the poorest democracy should vote the same: on paper
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With optical scan there is a paper trail so theres less temptation to screw things up.
CowboyNeal 2010, anyone?
Great opportunity to let your congressmen and women and the President know your feelings on the subject. Lets /. them on this.
Actually, I'd say Linux's failure to launch as a desktop OS has a lot less to do with Microsoft's 'propaganda' and a lot more to do with the fact that "open source" isn't much of a selling point to an average consumer, and that in that segment of the market, ease of use and consistent, familiar interfaces are the driving factors.
Linux users tend to like the opportunity for endless fiddling with options and distros and packages. They like computers. For them, "open source / free operating system" is a feature. For Joe Q. Consumer, they want to sit down, check their email, browse the web, upload a few photos, and not have to worry about learning a whole new piece of software for doing that. For those people, endless choice & variety is less of a feature and more of an annoyance.
Couple that with the fact that nobody - including Ubuntu, and Dell - has been able to produce or support a desktop system with Linux pre-installed 'for the masses,' and you're looking at a recipe for commercial failure as a desktop OS.
If you feel that way, could you explain to me what benefit open source electronic voting actually has?
You can confirm your vote was recorded correctly when you drop it into a box, but how do you know that box doesn't get swapped out? Or that another stuffed box doesn't get set right next to it?
You can confirm that there exists some software in source form that is free of obvious defects and lacks backdoor exploits, but can you confirm that THAT version of software was installed on each and every voting machine, and that the numbers reported by each and every machine were not tampered with after the polls closed? Can you confirm that the compiler itself was not tampered with, or that the dynamic libraries weren't modified, or the OS itself? Can you confirm that a user-mode file system was not installed that intercepts data and modifies it?
I don't see the benefit in knowing it's accurate when you voted if you don't know whether or not it's accurate when it's counted.
I don't see the benefit in knowing it's accurate when you voted if you don't know whether or not it's accurate when it's counted.
what's wrong with paper ballots - ignoring the pathetic wingnut canards about vast flocks of illegal aliens voting, of course. Helluva lot easier to change a number in an unprovable database than stuffing boxes with the requisite tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
In short; after a brief (though hardly satisfying) two-year interlude, Idiocracy is returning next month; this time for good.
Apparently the Internet needs a "Let Me Scroll To The Bottom Of The Page For You" service as well. See the talk page for additional primary sources.
When the Libertarians win a major election, martial law will be instituted and all voting machines and personnel will be quarantined until the source the corruption is found.
If it was open source software running on a micro architecture, it still wouldn't matter. The fact that they are machines is what the problem is. In NY we use a lever system - they are also problematic for the same reason, though at least you can look inside the thing and see what it's doing - and tell when tampering has occurred. With a computer you can NEVER EVER look inside and see what it's running, no matter how clean you think the millions of lines of open source code you looked at last week are.
Please gain some sanity - you can never EVER trust these machines. It's a PHYSICAL impossibility. Wise up.
Pen and paper is the least problematic, most accurate way to do polling. It's even the cheapest - but it's the hardest to tamper with - which is why politicians don't like it. This isn't hard to understand, so let's get with understanding it.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Want sources for irregularities in the 2004 United States election? Have seventy-two of them.
Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?
Because the government is a bureaucracy with inertia. It takes time and effort to change it's course, and unless there is a perceived critical issue, there is very little drive to change things.
It seems sad to have to say this, but it is going to take some serious criminal hacking and blatant manipulation of an election to get a proper open source election system in place in within the next decade. A scandal will need to occur that gets on the radar of the major news orgs, and then people will get pissed off enough to deluge elected officials' offices with calls and letters. Then, and only then, will you see any real movement to change. Extra haste will be applied if the hacker(s) in question have hazy connections to China.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Obviously there's no method for voting on the scales we see where you can guarantee the results are accurate. The benefits of electronic voting are that it can be cheaper and faster with near instant results and no recounts. I also believe that with enough work an electronic system can end up being harder to tamper with than a paper one. I mentioned that in a little more detail elsewhere in this thread.
Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way
It already does. Go look up the laws that cover hacking. I believe it is worded as 'altering or accessing data without permission'.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
thank you for bringing up the problem of the blind and the only urdu speaking (rolls eyes). of course if there are problems with using paper ballot they can do something else accommodating. none of which has any value when evaluating the voting system for 98% of people
and yes, we have to know results at 9 pm on election day. anything is a travesty. pffft. i already said ocr was acceptable
you apparently think election night graphics on the news channel is more important than integrity of the process. fuck you, you're dead wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Closed Source and Open Source are a bad idea as far as voting is concerned. It takes a process that should be open, transparent and easy to understand and makes it complicated and something that only a programmer can understand.
Electronic voting will probably be on of the biggest internal threats to American Democracy that our generation will need to address.
I am curious. From reading your posts, you seem to be saying that things are wrong and there is nothing we can do about it. So, why are you still here? Why are you even bothering to comment?
It's never open source's fault. There's always an excuse blaming something else.
Open source, open blame. Makes plenty of sense to me...
It is a little amazing to see the number of replies to this article already, and how many of them ignore the links in the original article.
1. It links to open source voting systems.
2. It links to a better way to audit voting systems
3. It links to open source governance, a way to overcome all the corruption and suppression by politicians (this kicks ass, btw)
Click these links. Read. learn. Then post.
(But of course, you will be the 379th post, so everybody will ignore it.)
Otherwise known as the Golden Rule:
Them what has the gold, makes the rules.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you don't know this fellow and you're into election politics, you should-- he's the Republican consultant who is adamantly against electronic ballot counters that are connected to telephone/Internet infrastructure, because tests have repeatedly shown that anyone can hack in through the network interface and change the internal ballot counts.
I still remember his solution for vulnerable electronic voting systems: "Hand-counted paper ballots. Paper ballots. Paper. Ballots." They can do it in Britain and many other industrialized nations efficiently and expediently, yet we have this impression that hand-counting ballots will take forever.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Cheaper, maybe. The machines and people to inspect them and maintain them are not free. A complicated machine with "software" requires a trained inspector. Paper is pretty simple. Paper ballots do, indeed, grow on trees. "Is the box empty when you started" and "is the counter on the scantron 0" are pretty simple concepts that the normal poll worker can comprehend.
"Faster" isn't necessarily a benefit. Why do we need to know withing five minutes of the polls closing who won? I don't know of any election where the winner takes office as soon as the polls close, or even within a month. Maybe special elections to fill a vacancy, but then, it took time to hold the election and if the office can be vacant for two or three months before the election, it won't matter if it takes a week or two to reach a final count.
By "no recounts" you mean 'no possibility of recounts', which I also do not view as a benefit. "We just found seven voting machines we didn't include in the total." Too bad, the result was certified five minutes after the polls closed and there are no recounts.
I also believe that with enough work an electronic system can end up being harder to tamper with than a paper one.
Perhaps. But OTH the training it requires to detect tampering with a paper system is pretty simple and can be accomplished by most poll workers. Tampering with an electronic system, not so easy. The very fact that it may be harder to do means some people will work harder to do it and figuring out that it happened will be harder, too.
Given that you must continue to maintain a paper-based system anyway (absentee, military), there are few benefits to creating an additional system. Here in Oregon we'd find it very hard to mail an electronic voting machine to every voter, and now that nobody has to go to the polling place to vote you aren't going to easily change us back.
No that's not right either.
There are issues with Linux and people who ignore those deficiencies continue to mantra of Linux is good as Windows. I don't have a problem with Linux, and I've installed it in many places including my in-laws house as a file/print server. But sharing the folder was not, is not as easy as right clicking and saying "share". And sharing a printer is even more difficult, provided CUPS has a driver for the printer.
That isn't to say that it isn't possible to do most things in Linux as is it is in Windows, but the difficulty level is higher, and heaven forbid it doesn't work at all.
Look, we're geeks, we get it. My father in-law who is quite adept at Windows might get it, but not without some headaches along the way. But there is no way I'm putting my mom on Linux, even though she is otherwise a perfect candidate for it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What is the point of caring? How can an individual affect change? Vote for the other guy? What else is there?
In the original post, there was a decidedly good solution, open source governance (also known as collaborative governance, open democracy, electronic direct democracy, etc.).
Instead of just complaining that democracy is dead, we now have a viable chance to build a new one by side-stepping the whole political process.
It will not be easy, nor will it be instantaneous. It will not be ready for something as huge as the US government for years. But you can help build it right now. Please check out the Metagovernment project and see if you can contribute. Everyone in the world is invited.
I did ask Barney Frank once why we had such a collection of numnuts in some electoral offices. To paraphrase he basically said we have to change the political culture that views these jobs as patronage gigs.
The result is we get some high level officials who are payed decently who owe their jobs to shoulder rubbing, usually with politicians in one of the major parties. Once a chummer, always a chummer, and these voting machine company sales reps can get pretty chummy. So, as one might expect, we have closed-source, broken, unmanageable and insecure voting software for the exact same reasons we have closed-source, broken, unmanageable and insecure software in any business/government environment -- the people who make the decisions when this happens don't want to do their homework, they want to go to Applebies with the guy who's selling the wares, and talk about how they knew each other's wives in high school.
Meanwhile the brain-numbing grunt-work gets done by poorly payed part-timers and volunteers. Typical.
Someone had to do it.
So, closed source is a problem. But there are other problems inherent to electronic voting that I don't think changing the license or opening the source will improve on.
As the summary says, there is no proof that a system behaves the same on voting day as it does on test day. How does open-source fix that? I don't think it does. Do you or me or any general public person get to audit the code on both days, and compare checksums or hashes on the binaries? How do we know that the test day binary wasn't swapped back in before the "after audit" to hide the fact that a malicious binary was running during voting?
If certifying equipment by registrars is optional, how does open-source fix that? I don't think it does. If something is optional, it doesn't matter what the code license is, only that the relevant people choose to exercise that option.
In general, how open-source do you want? Even GPL doesn't require that every citizen gets to see the sources. Only that those receiving the binary do. Who is it that receives the binary distribution such that they are also owed the sources? The registrars? The election officials at every polling place? None of them, because the machines are owned by the state, and only some state official gets to see it?
Even if a government election license states that anyone and everyone gets to see the sources, how can I know that what looks to me like acceptable source code is what is actually running when I cast my ballot?
In terms of tampering, how does open-source prevent that? I don't think it does. It really all comes down to how do we know what is running on that machine during times when we care. If someone can still use a standard file cabinet or hotel refrigerator key to swap compact flash cards back and forth, then it doesn't matter if your or I can parse the alleged source code or not.
I think there's a number of places where things can go wrong, and open source doesn't do much at all to affect most of those potential problems.
i.e. lust for money and sex which is the root of evil. Don't objectify what is within us as deep character flaws and propensities. Jealousy, greed, lust, (and the other 4 vices) can have violent expression, especially when the perpetrator perceives a difference in power and has a reason to believe any act committed would not be easily found out.
All I want is a trustworthy election system that has auditable controls, manual and automated methods of recount, verifiable by the public, and with strict rules for what to do when results are alledged to be suspect. Accountability, transparency of process, and enforcement of applicable laws where criminal action is found is key, regardless of system adopted.
Okay, and one more thing (starting my more opinionated seque).
I want the option to always be able to vote:
E) NONE OF THE ABOVE
If a majority were able to vote NONE OF THE ABOVE, then we the people could have the power to veto the current slate of candidates and force a new election with new candidates. If we don't want to live in a nation governed by the latte white whine party (best populism corporations can buy) or tea party revolutionary pity potty funded by billionaires (Koch bros.) and CEOs, we need to the power to say NO more effectively than any Republican representative in Congress.
Why couldn't we reject all the evil or suspect candidates instead of just the voting for whomever or whatever we hope is the least evil option? The election rules we have now (that 2.1 party system along with with the referendums ginned up by astroturfing corporations) which seems to ensure evil continues in some form or another. What sort of nation will we end up with when elections come down to which candidate sucks less than the other? Any 'third party' candidate is now typically funded deviously by one of the other parties, with the cynical intent to sap votes from one of a passionate subset of the chief opponent's party when it is believed that the margin for election will be close. (This has happened in Ohio and Florida in the last couple of elections.)
Bonus rhetorical arguments (understand there may be a high snark content):
A related problem is how political campaigns are running now versus prior to 1960's. We used to read speeches and transcripts of debates, position & policy papers, etc. and we'd go to "whistle stops" to see and hear a candidate speak in person, and the campaign season was a few months, not 18 months to 4 years. Now we watch TV, listen to radio, read blogs, maybe read a Sunday paper, perhaps some of us try to emulate and argue like some talk show host, while billions are spent on attack ads (TV, radio, web, and newspapers) and specifically designed to elicit fear and loathing in a demoralizing manner, instead of utilizing more honest debate, compare and contrast, logical reasoning regarding benefits and costs and social morals, etc. Each October, we now must endure the unreal Candidate Horror Show each October, with a guaranteed slimey, fear and hate-inducing October Surprise!
Even our flag-waving patriotic US Chamber of Commerce (where Greed is sacred, ordained by God, and globally necessity ) feels there's nothing to question as it funds many of these foul ads using money, not just from big businesses wanting the status quo, but those wishing to encourage outsourcing, outsourcing companies in India, ever eager to take more of our jobs. Our US CoC has ongoing seminars to encourage corporations to do just that while waving the flag, at least for shareholders. How long until Indian and the other workers benefiting from outsourcing by US corporations demand some representation in our electoral college and Congress? Sure, India's CEO's have some big powerful lobbyists and legal firms working hard for them along with CoC, generating enabling legislation and buying the Congressional votes to pass it, but it's not quite the same as being from the proud state of Montana and casting the state's handful of votes in the name of it's citiz
And, also, um...in what universe were the Republicans in the lead in the 2006 election? Even well before the election, it was obvious the Democrats would gain ground. I suspect he accidentally included that one.
There's a certain group of people who likes to see a conspiracy between Republicans and Diebold, which may or may not exist, I dunno. It really does seem a bad idea to have an electronic voting company that's clearly partisan, and holds political fundraisers.
But the entire idea of having computers count votes is just incredibly stupid to start with, and that has nothing to do with any political party. Anyone who thinks this is a partisan issue needs to have their head examined. The people making it a partisan issue just make it more likely for Republican voters to dismiss the concerns, instead of looking at the demonstrable fact that you cannot trust a computer that someone else built and programmed, no matter how much it is 'checked'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
> You can confirm your vote was recorded correctly when you drop it into a box, but how do you know that box doesn't get swapped out? Or that another stuffed box doesn't get set right next to it?
Oh, ghod.
Multiple human beings, from each party, write ballot serial numbers on paper logs and sign them.
Most of the problems with electronic voting come from wanting the machines to to *everything*.
As soon as you make the machines only do the 70% they're *good at*, the other 30% protects you from all the possible screwups.
How do they protect that system against vote-selling?
There is practically zero chance of revolution in the U.S. or most any other advanced society any time in the foreseeable future. Citizens constantly see TV shows about how the government can squash them like bugs if they misbehave. Plus they have enough appeasements that all-out revolution seems a little extreme compared to the nebulous concept of maintaining democracy.
So what you are effectively saying is that we are just stuck watching democracy die, right? It is only a matter of time until a Stalin or Hitler comes along and drives us into armageddon or 1984 or whatever other distopia you can imagine.
Now consider the alternative which "sounds good in theory." It is a practical, non-violent, easy way of getting real, participative democracy started in small communities. As it grows, adapts and gradually proves itself, it can demonstrate that it is a viable governance mechanism for larger and larger communities. Eventually, people will find they have the mechanism in place to run entire cities, and then even larger societies.
It might work, it might not. But given the alternative of totalitarian armageddon, doesn't it seem worth giving a try? Doesn't it seem worth actually putting some effort into it? You can at least join the list server and see what happens...
Your kidding right? The open source issue is about transapency. Of course the business minded folk in the tea party would love to make a profit off anything they can, non-profit? thats un-American right? Well say you have your hands on the voting machines, and say some party approached you to maybe bias the count just a little to swing the election? for a little profit? well why not that is capitalism at its finest isn't it. No government is going to tell you how to run your business right? Well voting is not a business, its the right and responsibility of the people and the people's government. One vote one count. Checks and balances were built into our governmental system by our founding fathers, why? because people can't be trusted to play fair unless there is someone watching over their shoulders. So the open source issue is really Founding Fathers Patriotism! looking out for the common good, the will of the people (not corporations).
Because as cynical as I am I have never lost a fundamental hope that somehow, someday humanity will pull itself out of this cultural dark ages we're in, that we are somehow still better than we appear to be, that eventually our greedy self-absorption will wane and be replaced by more altruistic values. Or barring that, if I can somehow help to spark an open revolt, that works too.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I agree with that, it wasn't ready until about 2-3 years ago. I'd tried numerous linux distros over about a decade and they were all unusable disasters. Now though? I'd feel comfortable setting up a linux pc for my parents.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Congressmen Marblecake, TheGame, and CmdrTaco.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
It's still just marketing. No linux distro has ever had a solid marketing campaign behind it. And the availability of choice doesn't mean you have to make use of it. A default Ubuntu desktop would be perfectly fine for 90% of users. In fact, you could set it up with a windows theme and most people would never know the difference. As far as preinstalled systems go, nobody has ever made a real go at it. They've made half-assed attempts that offer it as an option without ever really explaining what it was.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Agreed, but Linux's failure to market itself successfully is a different problem than "Microsoft's marketing suppressing Linux in the marketplace."
Microsoft obviously thinks about Linux internally, but I can't think of the last time they took a shot at Linux in advertising - they're focused on what they view their key features as, and it's also clear that the recent successes at Apple are making them a little nervous.
A default Ubuntu desktop probably WOULD be fine for 90% of users, but if nobody's pushing it, and they're not marketing it... why would anybody switch from the known, comfortable Windows or Apple platforms they're familiar with?
I see this argument here a lot, and it still boggles my mind - if somebody thinks that there is this huge benefit & business opportunity to building & selling Linux desktops... why is nobody succeeding at it? If it's just as simple as "if you build it, they will come," then surely some company (or enterprising geek here) would have put together a successful run by now.
Not in open advertising, no, but MS has an entire PR department they send out to businesses and government agencies who are looking at platform options. No such thing exists for linux, there isn't one overarching "Linux" conglomerate that could compete with the powerhouse of Microsoft. In that MS truly displays their monopolistic tendencies. And it's much more apparent overseas than here. And the big thing holding back profitable linux desktops: gaming. That's the market linux needs to get to really take off as a desktop platform.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
So did Ohio, and it has significantly improved the credibility of our elections without taking much extra time.
Although the other reason for the improvement was that we replaced the very partisan Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell with someone who is actually interested in running a good election. For instance, Blackwell denied voter registrations which just so happened to be from neighborhoods that tended to favor the other major party because the wrong kind of paper was used to print the form. He also generally made sure precincts in those neighborhoods got insufficient numbers of voting machines, and did not train poll workers properly in those areas so as to nearly guarantee long lines on election day. In 2004 (the last election he ran), people in the neighborhoods he was suppressing the vote in had to wait 3-5 hours to vote, as opposed to 30 minutes everywhere else.
I am officially gone from
The first one that comes to mind kickbacks, someones getting paid for his support...
The second is even more corrupted, a desire to be able to abuse the system and get away with it.
The third is simply bureaucratic inertia. Open Source probably doesn't fit too well with standard procurement procedures.
Maybe there's something else, but those are the only reasons that I can think of right now.
"Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"
Quite simply, it's because the people who know how to beat the current system and get into positions of power know that they are not the same people who would get into power under a different, more fair, system.
Only the signature on the "secrecy envelope" (which has your name and address pre-printed on it, along with a place to sign, into which you insert your ballot), which is supposed to be matched against the signature on file for the voter. Of course, if you've sold your vote, you've probably included the signature for free.
This has created the wonderful situation that if the vote checker doesn't like your vote for any reason, they simply claim the signatures don't match and your vote is thrown away without any notice to you at all.
Further, the vote counters can keep your "secrecy envelope" with your ballot so that they can keep track of who voted what way, and you have to trust that they discard the envelope prior to looking at the ballot.
In exchange for these problems, we've given up the need to actually go to a polling place, see your neighbors face to face, prove your identity, and use a fancy electronic box (with or without open source software). I'd say it's a fair exchange. </sarcasm>
Australia has been using paper ballots ever since the states joined together to create this country and it works just fine.
Even allows for easy recounts in disputed (or close) contests (as happened in our recent election)
For the US, just scale up the number of counters in relation to the number of voters.
All this talk about electronic machines, punch cards, scantron machines etc is just stupid.
Paper was used for elections for many years before they invented all this electronic and mechanical crap and it worked just fine.
You're correct, and I don't like mailin/internet voting for precisely this reason.
And the "well, only the people who want to" counter-argument isn't pertinent here, since it's the *system* that's being protected.
But at least, a voter can avoid "might be invalidated" by getting off their fucking ass and voting on election day.
``Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?''
I can only see one answer to that question: we aren't using anything better because the people who are in a position to make that happen haven't done so.
Apparently, they don't care enough about accountable voting that they have said "Well, the system X that we have isn't good enough, and system Y, which is good enough."
Incompetence or malice, the end result is that voters don't know if their vote has been recorded (much less counted) correctly. I'm surprised that America isn't up in arms about this. Here in the Netherlands, electronic voting went out of the door for that reason. We now vote using paper and pencil.
As an aside, the summary seems to suggest that things would be better if open source software were used instead of closed software. I don't see that. As far as I can see, the issues are largely the same: how do you know that your vote has been recorded correctly, without information that can tie it back to you, and how do you know that the votes are being counted correctly?
With paper ballots filled out by pencil and counted by humans, I understand and can observe every step on the way. With machines and software, this becomes much harder, even if the software is open source.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Politicians do not want you to vote as per your conscience.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I constantly see people decrying that democracy is a sham, but I don't see anyone trying to do anything about it.
Sure, it seems impossible to reform the system, given that the people in control have not the slightest inclination to help you reduce their power.
That's why people who actually want to fix this problem are starting from the ground up. And you are invited to join.
It may be a slow road, and the results may not be perfect. But it beats the alternative of just living under a totalitarian regime, does it not?
Those are your choices:
1. admit that you want to give in to totalitarianism and stop complaining.
2. start working with Metagovernment or one of the many projects linked from there and build real democracy.
> There's a certain group of people who likes to see a conspiracy between Republicans and Diebold, which may or may not exist, I dunno.
"Deliver the state of Ohio for the Republican Party"?
Yeah, that sounds like a conspiracy to me.
But as for "cannot trust a computer", as I've noted elsewhere: if the ballots are both machineable and human-readable simultaneously (IE: no barcodes or anything; just make the computer read the text, which is pretty frickin easy these days), then everyone who's interested can bring their own counting machine along, and count each batch of ballots.
It all comes down to transparency.
As long as the *process* is explicitly transparent at each stage -- *anyone who wants to* can watch, or audit, any part of the process -- then enough people *will* do that to keep things honest.
But as for "cannot trust a computer", as I've noted elsewhere: if the ballots are both machineable and human-readable simultaneously (IE: no barcodes or anything; just make the computer read the text, which is pretty frickin easy these days), then everyone who's interested can bring their own counting machine along, and count each batch of ballots.
Heh, that's exactly what I think we should use.
We've got plenty of OCR-able fonts, we can easily make ballots that print 'Senator: John Johnson (D)' on them that a computer and a human can read. No one will every argue over a 'light mark' or a 'chad', and no computer will ever tell us that 2000 people voted for someone when only 200 people voted. It's very damn clear, their full name and office.
And forget tiny cramped ballots. Print everyone an entire 8x11 piece of paper, with nice big text on it. (Obviously, watermarked paper or something. Then do the ballot counting with a blacklight turned on so everyone can see the watermarks.)
And we can make the machines do any sort of assistance required. (With blind people having their ballot checked by a sighted help, but that has to happen anyway.)
And, while we're at it, we can randomize the order displayed to each person, so there's no order bias.
I've very careful to call this 'paper voting', though, because otherwise the media will represent it and electronic voting as the same thing.
It's damn amazing and absurd how many people here seem to want to build a 'security voting system', and have no concept of how difficult actual 'secure' computers are, or the fact it's impossible to make computers that are 'secure' from the damn people who built them, and yet won't sit down and think 'Hey, we can use computers to make remove every single problem with paper ballots, and yet leave all the security of them.'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?