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Electronic Voting To Enter Australian House of Representatives
The federal government has announced electronic voting will be introduced into the Parliament of Australia, with Leader of the House of Representatives Christopher Pyne confirming it will be implemented in the lower house next year. From a report: "The implementation of electronic voting will reduce significantly the time required for each vote in the chamber," Pyne said. "Voting outcomes will be transparent, accurate, and known immediately, freeing up more time for important parliamentary business to be conducted each day the house sits. Electronic voting will also provide an electronic solution for recording division voting and improve online accessibility to division process and results," he added. While the details are scarce at this stage, Pyne said the Department of Parliamentary Services will shortly call for tenders for the project, also giving "innovative" businesses and individuals an opportunity to contribute.
Hopefully they won't let the FBI meddle in their election too.
The Democratic Party troll farm just put your check in the mail. Keep distracting them from Spygate and Professor Stefan Halper!
We all know that a monopoly inevitably are turns into slothful, stupid machine on account of the fact that it can basically decree its income.
Well, government is the worst kind of monopoly; it is a monopoly that decrees its income at the point of a gun.
Is it any wonder then that we're getting an article about parliamentary "voting" becoming electronic? Government is a loser organization. Give up your reverence for this wasteful, soul-sucking, life-destroying loser. Government is not your friend; government is a parasite on productive society.
I'm not overly familiar with Australia's system, but I had thought that it was parliamentary, which almost always has voting along coalition lines. In the U.S. voting is also typically along party lines, but you occasionally have some blue dog Democrats or Republicans from the North East that will vote against the line on some issues.
However, I think this is where the open source community should look to get involved. One of the chief complains about electronic voting systems is an inability to audit the system to ensure that it truly is accurate and fair. It's also going to be a lot less expensive than the government foisting out huge chunks of taxpayer money to some corporate friends, who may not be any more capable of delivering than a group of remote individuals building such a system.
When the process isn't efficient, throwing technology at it will automatically make it faster, better and more secure. HELL YEAH! IT'S SCIENCE!
"Voting outcomes will be transparent, accurate, and known immediately,"
This is of course the same as saying "our software will be bug free".
What makes sense when you're ten levels high in management is known to be patently false when you're actually doing the work.
We won't even mention security issues or the concept of a high value target.
What could possibly go wrong?
With today's communications technology, are legislative chambers obsolete? Are the minds of any politicians changed on chamber floors, or should we instead film and publish records of where decisions are actually made (meetings in offices), and where productive, open, and non-partisan information exposure still occurs (committee hearings)? Are chambers still needed for some nation-binding rhetorical shows, such as those relating to crises and commemoration?
online vote = vote at work the bosses way or fired!
online vote = vote at work the bosses way or fired!
Not an issue for the majority of US Progressives as most still live in Mom's basement. The main positive among them for online voting is not having to expose their pasty-white "Goth-kid tan" to real sunlight nor interact with actual IRL people face to pasty face.
Ways to use technology to boost accessibility, information, and efficiency of voting are all great, but at the end of the day, we need this to be at least as secure as a mission-critical server. Your average volunteers at a voting location do not have the knowledge to secure electronic voting machines. They can positively affirm that they followed procedure, but they simply cannot be expected to match the black hats.
This has to come down to a human-verifiable process. A paper has to be filled out that the voter signs off on that is kept securely for counts and recounts. Paper ballots are standard in most countries, including developed nations whose elections are going rather more smoothly than the USA's. I am concerned that this conversation is being driven by those with money to gain off of building an overly elaborate, more failure-prone setup, and possibly by darker motives too.
Keep It Sweet and Simple, right??
This is not about voting in elections, it's about voting in the house of representatives.
"Vote at work the bosses way or fired" may well be true, but only the same way it's always been true. There's no secret ballot in parliament.
Australians don't vote on a work day, Australians vote on weekends. It is also common for Australians to use "postal ballots" if they cannot reach the voting booth on a weekend. Your boss is never in the picture for voting in Australia.
This is probably less complex (and hence safer from tampering) than citizen electronic vote, as parliament member vote is public.
Hence it is extremely simple for someone to check its own vote, and to make sure no fake voter has been added. The only risk I see is casting a fake vote for an absent parliament member: presence log has to be kept by a different system to spot that.
For those that haven't realised it, this is not about citizens voting for who we want to represent us.
This is about our representatives pressing a button (or doing something similar) to vote, rather than having to say yay/nay, and then walking to different sides of the room and being manually counted if the yays and nays sound close in number.
OH everything is trivial according to serial blathering faggot Bill here.
From the article:
freeing up more time for important parliamentary business to be conducted each day the house sits
The house sits and half the members are asleep or not paying attention anyway.
The point is the house already has too much to get done and Pyne wants to impose a system that burdens them further.
Why does the house have so much to get done in the first place? Is it because our "government" has grown too large or is trying to micro-manage too many things? Are bills to lengthy and filled with too many unimportant and sneaky clauses to slip through?
We should be asking these questions and not taking the word of a politician like Christopher Pyne.
online vote = vote at work the bosses way or fired!
a) illegal.
b) this isn't online.
c) completley irrelevant given what we're talking about here is not voting for government, but government voting.
Yay, electronic voting now gives the already vacant MPâ(TM)s further excuse to not be present in parliament to vote.
Not in my experience. In the rare days that members actually turn up to Parliament they spend six hours shouting each other down before the 10 minutes to actually vote on something. Then they're off to the pub to have a raging drunkard party.
All this will do is give them slightly more shouting time while making the voting system even less transparent.