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 one. It's called the "paper ballot".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
... 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.
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.
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
... we have an election where close races are open to challenges based on the inability to have a reliable recount.
Not only that, but polling is down to such a near exact science someone *cough* Florida in 2000 *cough* could finagle staffing and access to voting centers which prevent a large population of registered voters passing through to cast their votes, thus throttling the representation of their precinct and overall vote count. i.e. Select some very slow or officious people to staff it, make sure there are no where near enough polling booths, transportation or parking is highly problematic and when the doors shut at 8 PM you've stifled the vote, because you knew ahead of time this area would go against your party.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is all your fault. I voted for Kodos.
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).
> 2) is online
No, that is just stupid. And so is mail in btw. Anything other than voting in person with a photo ID on election day with a paper ballot where the count is validated right after the polls close while poll watchers from all interested parties are there to witness is asking for fraud.
No, don't jump in with a reply until you STOP and think for a minute. Then you will realize I'm right. The problems with voting boil down to these:
1. Ensure that registered voters have unrestricted access to their polling place.
2. That inelligible people do not vote.
3. Ensure people only vote in the races they are elligible to vote in.
4. Ensure that the vote is secret and immune to outside influence.
5. Ensure that every vote is counted and only counted once.
Violate my formula in any way and one of those rules is impossible to ensure and thus the election by definition is unfair to some extent. Allowing a small percentage of absentee voting, contested ballots, etc. are perhaps acceptable compromises but must be understood as a compromise to prevent certain parties from trying to extrapolate those exceptions into bad general rules like universal mail in ballots, online voting, etc.
Democrat delenda est
Not to mention that the article blatantly exaggerates how much power we the people actually have in the first place.
The ohio election hack pretty much proves that we have no voice unless it is approved by the elite. It proves that the powers that be aren't afraid to lie, cheat, steal their way into office.
In order for the american public to change anything they have to unite against it. That implies that
a) they care (apathy)
b) they haven't already given up hope (learned helplessness)
c) they aren't already busy scrambling to survive.
a is entirely our own fault. b, not so much because who wants to get beat up for zero payoff?. c is blatant manipulation of circumstances to make it too expensive to resist. Keep everyone too poor to both protest and feed their families at the same time./
Funny how you never see anyone who has a credible chance of winning running on a platform of election reform...
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
doesn't have a subject.
fixed!
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.