Slashdot Mirror
US Election Year, Still No Voting Reform
An anonymous reader writes "A year ago, we discussed this on Slashdot: E-Voting Reform In an Out Year?. The point was that due to the hoard of problems with electronic (and mechanical) voting, it is best to approach reform in an out year, when it is not on everyone's mind yet too late to do anything about it. Well, we failed, didn't we? Another election year is upon us, and our vote is less secure, less reliable, and less meaningful than ever. To reference the last article, we still have no open source voting, no end-to-end auditable voting systems and no open source governance. So don't complain if this election is stolen. You forgot to fix the system."
... we have an election where close races are open to challenges based on the inability to have a reliable recount.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is there a good package that
1) protects privacy
2) is online
3) allows voter to confirm or change their vote
4) allows anybody to count the votes
5) have I missed anything?
We have one. It's called the "paper ballot".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No one worthwhile to vote for, and congress will screw up everything anyway, so even if you DID fix the voting, nothing would change.
If voting actually worked, they'd probably outlaw it.
You think voting is anything other than a public circlejerk to keep people busy.
Ahh to be young and stupid again.
E-voting cannot be transparent and therefor cannot be acceptable.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm more interested in the results that a different kind of voting system would produce, such as how the ability to rank candidates on a ballot would affect campaign strategy and the kinds of people we'd elect.
"We"? Who is this "we"? Here in New Hampshire, they passed a paper trail law in 1994 and we've not had any of these problems.
Liberty in your lifetime
I live in what the Europeans like to call the backwater redneck racist Christian "fly-over" part of America. I guess we are so stupid here that our voting system isn't worthy of being audited. We are so stupid that the state actually has a balanced budget.. what a bunch of inbred hicks we are.
All we have here are simple to fill out scantron ballots that are anonymous, simple to scan in, and trivially easy to recount in an offline manner if needed. We get our election results within hours of the polls closing on election day. Oh and as for software, the software in the system is so simple that Windows vs. Linux doesn't even enter into the equation because you don't need either.
Frankly, even if the voting software is "open source" on some website, you have zero guarantees that the voting machine you are using actually runs the wonderful open source software you spent months auditing in the first place.
We are so backwards here. I feel so inadequate compared to those places that blew tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on systems that don't work. You can tell they are *so* much superior to us.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
... get the basics right.
Like having an non-partisan public service, a non-partisan committee of civil servants administering the election and drawing the boundaries?
Like any non-banana republic?
From the point of view of other Anglo-Saxon countries, and Europe, the US is a basketcase.
Recent US elections, e.g. Florida during Bush Jr's reelection campaign, would make disgrace your average Third World shithole, let alone the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
People would rather blame an election on stolen votes instead of realizing the electorate really is that stupid.
The powers that be have both of their choices lined up. It's a win-win for them and a lose-lose for us.
Putting rhetoric aside, can anyone tell me what real policy differences there are? From what I've seen it's a matter of degree not direction.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In so much as it is the candidate my voting machine company has coded into the ballot software.
Well, that was about the same threat as the Diebold chief.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I guess the original article is a year-old Slashdot discussion for this one.... so some of us may *actually* have read it, but surely we don't remember and for the integrity of this discussion I hope nobody goes back and re-reads it.
Maybe this is a naive question, but what's wrong with bubble sheet voting ballots? Like those "A-B-C-D-E" forms you filled out when you took the SAT in high school. That's basically what we use in Minnesota, but just a little different because voting isn't just "A-B-C-D-E".
Everyone knows how to fill out bubble sheets, so they're dead simple to use. When you've voted, you insert them into a scanner (it's also a locked box, old-fashioned key-and-lock, so no one except election officials can access they ballots once they're inserted). The scanner checks for simple stuff like "Did you vote for more than one presidential candidate?" and immediately spits your ballot out if it finds a problem. I made a mistake on my ballot once, and there's a simple, established procedure where they destroy your invalid ballot in front of you and issue you another ballot so you can vote again. It's easy.
And bubble sheets are anonymous. No worrying about "Can someone figure out how I voted?"
Above all, bubble sheets are auditable. While the scanners can easily keep track of how many votes for Obama v Romney, election officials can always go back to manually count the bubble sheets in the case of a recount. You may have heard about our 2008 recount - they manually recounted the bubble sheets.
Full Spectrum Dominance: Why transactional data matters
During the Bush administration, at least on several occasions, the entire warrantless eavesdropping or wiretapping and FISA made the national news cycle for several days ---- yet each time, oddly enough, it was knocked off by the news of national immigration marches.
What exactly was really accomplished by those national immigration marches?
Other than occupying the news space on those days?
Next obvious question would be who owned those Spanish-language radio stations responsible for organizing those marches?
At that time, the major financial stake in those stations belonged to the private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, chaired by Peter G. Peterson, protégé of David Rockefeller.
During that time the Blackstone Group also had a financial stake in telecoms in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Portugal and Malta (Malta being an important nexus point, or physical exchange point, between Europe, North Africa and the Middle East), as well as one of the three major privatized global satellite networks at that period, New Skies Network (officially later sold off, but we never checked to see if Blackstone Group actually owned the company it was sold to?).
So those national marches, which knocked warrantless wiretapping off the news cycle and involved AT&T, were organized by Blackstone Group-owned radio stations, chaired by the fellow whose financial-economic-political mentor was David Rockefeller.
Now AT&T was broken up --- on paper at least --- but can anyone provide definite data to prove it was ever actually financially divested?
Negative!
Now, traditionally, AT&T was a Rockefeller-Morgan financial entity, which, by the way, happens to have re-conglomerated back to its original form, thanks in part to President Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996.
And who led the charge in congress to grant immunity to AT&T and those telecoms involved in that warrantless wiretapping for the government?
None other than Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia!
My oh my, how those coincidences pile up?
Recently, some very serious legislation has passed into law --- while other equally dangerous legislation has failed, for now --- although that failed legislation attacked net neutrality (equality of access to the Internet), it was really only to make into law that which is quickly becoming reality --- the end of net neutrality!
Laws have been passed, in America and Europe and elsewhere, requiring ISPs to retain your data for 1 to 3 years or more.
Why is this important to the ruling elites?
Transactional data, surrounding information, dot connection, global linkage.
Using existing DPI techniques (Deep Packet Inspection), they can virtually identify and extract information about you, your life, your family, the like of which most people cannot even imagine.
Data mining hit critical mass around 2003 to 2004; and all it then required to identify a person exactly was their age and zip code --- today it probably requires less.
A little while ago, a fellow from the New America Foundation wrote a book on ExxonMobil --- focusing on the personalities of its chief executives, and went on a book tour where not a single person who interviewed him (including NPR’s Terry Gross and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!) inquired as to the ownership of ExxonMobil?
Now isn’t that freaking amazing? ? ? ?
Of course, New America Foundation is funded by the Peterson Foundation, endowed by Peter G. Peterson, protégé of David Rockefeller. (ExxonMobil is a re-combining of the original Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Companies --- which were once broken up --- at least on paper --- as no valid data exists to suggest otherwise.)
AT&T? ExxonMobil? Are we beginning to note a pa
Another election year is upon us, and our vote is less secure, less reliable, and less meaningful than ever. To reference the last article, we still have no open source voting, no end-to-end auditable voting systems and no open source governance.
We also have no credible evidence of any organized tampering of the vote, either in mechanical or electronic forms. The systems may be wrong, but they are probably no worse than they have ever been, and I haven't seen any smoking gun saying that the machines were tampered with.
I do see 3 forms of election fraud/dirty tricks commonly alleged:
1. Fraudulent registrations. Indicated by people with no valid address or suspicious numbers of people residing at the same address. Not something an electronic voting system can address.
2. Felons voting while still on probation. Not clear that felons vote for one party vs another, but even if it is organized, not something that e-voting would address.
3. Dirty tricks along the lines of too few ballots or machines delivered to certain precincts causing long lines. Or making precincts inconveniently large. These are potentially done by one party or the other, but a certain number of these snafus are certainly due to incompetence or unexpectedly high voter turnouts. Also not something that changing the voting machines would address.
So what is the problem that we are trying to solve again?
The problem is the voting system only allows one vote per voter. You can prove, mathematically, that a "pluralistic" voting system winds up electing better candidates. It also makes it hard/impossible for a 2 party system to push out 3rd party candidates.
There's a number of ways to do it. One is to give every voter N-1 votes and let them assign their votes to amongst the N candidates. Another is to have them rank the candidates in order of preference. (I.E. Johnson > Obama > Paul > Romney might be one ranking.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Look, tampering or wholesale stealing of the vote is about the worst thing that can happen in a democracy. No really.
So punish the people caught with VERY severe punishments, like multi-decade stints in prison (sorry I'm against the death penalty). That way, even if you catch a little fish, chances are good he'll squeal like a pig and rat out the higher ups.
My only fear is that some of the people who are crazy motivated might actually think that their cause is worth sacrificing the rest of their lives for. Fortunately the U.S. hasn't quite gotten to the point where those people are more than a tiny fraction of the population; otherwise you'd see suicide bombers at political events.
(Also, "dirty tactics" like fraudulent robo-calls which claim to be someone who they aren't or send people to the wrong polling place, should have their punishments significantly increased. Again, you're subverting the basic premise of a democracy).
No one's vote counts at the federal level. With 300,000,000 people in the country, there is no possible way to have representative government. Federal elections are as meaningful as beauty contests, only more corrupt.
This is the single biggest argument for federalism, i.e., limiting federal power and keeping government as local as possible.
In a local election, you can actually have an influence. Not only your vote, but your ability to contact and coordinate with some meaningful fraction of the electorate.
This argument can be applied recursively. What can be done at the township level, should be.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
It really isn't. What we're talking about here is voting platform reform. I don't really care how voting is done (via computerized terminal, via paper ballot, or even via Internet, after all I can file my taxes online). What I care about is that the system we have in place for voting for candidates almost always elects a candidate that a minority (generally a superminority) actually wants to be president. It also gives political parties extreme power based on sheer advertisement; most people view it as this-guy-or-that-guy and so they just pick the one they don't like and vote for the other guy. Political advertisement capitalizes on this behavior which is indeed caused by FPTP. It's also susceptible to gerrymandering and isn't friendly to new parties. And the entire electoral college is completely unnecessary given modern transportation systems, so we need to throw that out altogether.
Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
When we say "voting reform," I fundamentally mean that I want the actual voting system we use changed. We need a system that isn't susceptible to gerrymandering, that doesn't suffer from the spoiler effect, and that meets the condorcet criterion. Take your pick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system. On top of that, we need to shut down campaign contributions from corporations, political advertisement in main-stream media, and require all of the relevant information be gathered somewhere online like at vote.gov or something and make it accessible to everyone via public libraries, etc.
There's a lot of reform that needs to be done, the least of which is how we collect votes. Come on guys, this is such a strawman to the real issues. Having your vote for dumbass #1 stolen and given to dumbass #2 doesn't matter. You are getting a dumbass as president almost nobody wants either way.
That would require voter ID, and Democrats are against that.
Nice try but this is slashdot not Faux News.
The reality is that Democrats are opposed to voter ID laws that disenfranchise the poor. Many, many Democrats supports voter ID systems that do not create a disadvantage. For example, making sure that voter IDs are free, available to people in remote locations who can't travel, and available to people who don't have a copy of their birth certificate. If you're trying to catch actual fraud, you don't have to have a draconian system that is happy to turn voters away. All you need to do is keep track of the oddities and exceptions and then cross reference them or start from them when problems are reported.
The fact that so many people on the right who push voter ID aren't even honest about their reasons for wanting it is a substantial barrier to making it happen. Luckily voter fraud is less likely than death by lighting.