Your reasoning is solid, and we're down to whether or not we agree that this bill will create meaningful (or perhaps any) reforms. Having been through both HAVA and my own state's legislative "election reform" process, I'm willing to admit that I'm biased, and am now much more certain of the shortcomings, unintended consequences and the power of the hidden hand (e.g., corporate lobbyists) than I am of the purported reforms.
I do hope I'm wrong about that, but there's not much in recent history to suggest I am...just look at the legislation we've been getting for the last few years and I think you'll see what I mean.
As an attempted analogy, if the direction that we're headed is off a cliff, then the only meaningful reform is changing direction. "Improvements" to our gauges, gas mileage or automobile performance only stand to accelerate our eventual crash. As another attempt, to play off the title of your post, a bird in the hand is not better than two in the bush if the one you're holding has the avian flu or west nile.
Thanks to Slashdot, I've been involved in this issue for several years now, and it's become clear to me that computers are simply the wrong "solution" to the "problem" of elections. Obviously, Slashdot isn't the place to look for a lot of agreement about that, so the best I'm hoping for here is that people at least start to consider true alternatives.
Sorry, one other point, although computers supposedly promise increased efficiency, I'm sure we can all relate to how that may not always be so. I sit at two computers because one of them is always busy doing something, it seems.
Related to this topic, you may know that in Denver last year, thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting system failed city-wide creating increased wait times of _hours_, and no backup (i.e. paper ballot) was available.
Thanks for the follow-up. I'm by no means here to defend the design of those sites, and I'm sorry about any inappropriate ads (insert some generic TOS language about no control over third party links).
Here's the page of more detailed analysis of the bill:
Certainly there are problems with the legislative sausage making process, but if ever there were an area where we need some absolutes, it's the protection of our election. While this bill may improve the current state of affairs, the current state of affairs is so abominable that may not mean much.
Anything that further legitimizes the use of DREs in elections is a mistake in my opinion. A very likely outcome is that this flawed bill passes and come next session, you hear something akin to "you already got your reform bill, now shut up and vote on the machine we're giving you"...
If this bill passes then we're going to waste another few billion dollars buying more bad computer systems to run our elections and further alienate voters.
The whole process would be much simpler (and much, much, much cheaper) if we used precinct counted paper ballots, like many other first-world democracies do.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Here are some follow-ups...
About voter verification and noticing:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4682
In her recently released doctoral thesis, "The Usability of Electronic Voting Machines and How Votes Can Be Changed Without Detection" [PDF], Rice University researcher and Doctoral candidate Sarah P. Everett reveals that review screens, presented to voters at the end of the voting process on DRE voting machines, fail to be effective. If you don't think that people overlook mistakes on receipts, I have a couple restaurants here to take you to...
Give them a _BALLOT_ and have them mark it, then they've verified it as they marked it, no "second step" has to be taken.
I'd ask you to rethink if you really want people taken out of elections. There's plenty of evidence that the difficulty level of switching votes in elections is much lower than you seem to think. We're talking about "normal" people running scripts and programs that they get from elsewhere, not programmers themselves having unlimited access to machines.
Ballot counting is only about accuracy, not efficiency. We may have to agree to disagree on this one.
As for computers counting correctly, well, do you remember the Pentium floating point bug? (There are other examples, of course, too). Just because they are often correct doesn't mean they are always correct, and even the geniuses at Intel and all their QA still let that one slip by. I'll take a human error over a machine error any day, again, we may have to disagree about this one, it's certainly more philosophical than anything else.
Finally, the banking vs. voting analogy was addressed in an earlier reply, the issue of anonymity makes the analogy fall apart. It's more like cash than an ATM.
There's a key difference between any banking system and voting, and that's anonymity.
EVERY transaction in banking and commerce is fully accountable for any/all parties involved.
Ideally, our votes are completely anonymous, so the analogy isn't quite right.
Take the authenticated identity component out of our banking system and I'll bet people would stop trusting it immediately. "Just slide your money through this slot, I promise you we'll take care of it..."
In this case, IMHO, the problem is "appropriate technology"...and so it _is_ the computers because they are simply not an appropriate technology to provide universal accessibility to our elections...most people have no clue how to operate, verify and thus, trust them. You can count hand marked paper ballots in your precinct by candlelight, now that's reliability, and if we can't trust our neighbors, well, then we've got some other very serious topics we should be discussing.
And, given all the issues we've had with problems such as mass identity theft via millions of card numbers being stolen in a single swoop, do you really consider those systems secure, reliable and verifiable? Do the best of the security experts who read Slashdot feel that way?
PS - Remember, too, that cash still a tangible artifact, and, the most valuable cash in general use is, wait for it...Paper!
Read it, thank you. I still believe that anything that makes electronic voting "more acceptable" is a huge mistake...voters do not check their "paper trails", many voters don't notice vote switching when it happens in front of them, and ultimately, electronic voting takes our elections out of people's hands and puts it under the control of technocrats.
We need a system that _anyone_ can use (both as a voter/elector and as a pollworker), and the only system that meets that test is paper ballots (with vote markers to provide accessibility).
Remember that you can't take the people out of a democracy and still have one, democracy _means_ that there are people involved. It's not about "efficiency" (distributed precinct-based counting of paper ballots works at any scale), it's about participation.
Push button elections without human oversight produce push button governments without human oversight, and I think we've all (okay, something like 73% of us at last count) had about enough of that...
I don't doubt that the original author of this bill was well intentioned (there was so much to fix about HAVA, after all), but this bill is not the answer, and it's _not_ good. We don't want computers enshrined as the method of resolving or counting votes. The Canadian (and the Europeans, e.g., the Swiss) have it right. Paper ballots that are manually marked that _anyone_ can verify are the right approach. Slashdot is what got me involved in this issue originally, and it's thanks to the skepticism of computer professionals that we know how bad these systems are.
This bill is being called the "Patriot Act of Elections"...be sure to get all the facts before you decide it's a good thing, and I'm sure you'll decide it isn't. Here are two great resources to start with:
It doesn't come bundled with an analysis engine, but if you're looking to build your own corpus of material (e.g., by automating searches or harvesting large volumes of your research web pages) and you're on MacOSX, check out Anthracite web mining desktop toolkit... It makes it easy to build spidering and scraping systems, structure the output and feed it into a database like MySQL...all without requiring you to write a single line of code. Take that output and feed it into any number of the analysis and search systems on SourceForge or Freshmeat and you're going to get comparable results without all the fuss, although you should definitely write a press release about it! The Google API and regex support are built-in, and you can even run the data through any UNIX command (e.g., grep or Perl) without leaving the program if you need even more. As for speed, the new release is going to feature a throttle because a few customers are getting overwhelmed by the URL loading throughput. Yes, by way of full disclosure, I wrote the software and that's why I'm always busy promoting it.
In case you want to try this at home, presuming you're on a MacOS X box and you've got your own free API key from Google, you can easily access the Google API SOAP service using Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit. Combine it with AppleScript and you're off to the races making your own automated searches. In addition to the Google API interface, there's also a generic SOAP source object for accessing any other SOAP services you want to try. Several examples are included with the download, like how to build a ranked list of top keywords for any given search term. Not only does it get the search results, it will also go load the URLs returned for you automatically. Yes, I wrote the software, and that's why I'm always busy promoting it.
If you have access to a MacOS X box, Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit http://www.metafy.com/ can do this kind of work for you. It's currently being used by customers on four continents to build daily custom reports from large volumes of web based data, like the SEC Edgar filings. It's based on a visual user interface that allows non-programmers to quickly and easily create high value web data processing systems. If you need to automate running a grip of regexen against thousands of webpages daily, you should definitely check it out. It can possibly save you a lot of time, we've got one customer who quickly eliminated two days per month of this kind of labor intensive work. On FM with great vitality at http://freshmeat.net/projects/anthracite [PS - Yes, I'm definitely biased, I wrote the software;-)]
Slashdot Mirror
Your reasoning is solid, and we're down to whether or not we agree that this bill will create meaningful (or perhaps any) reforms. Having been through both HAVA and my own state's legislative "election reform" process, I'm willing to admit that I'm biased, and am now much more certain of the shortcomings, unintended consequences and the power of the hidden hand (e.g., corporate lobbyists) than I am of the purported reforms.
I do hope I'm wrong about that, but there's not much in recent history to suggest I am...just look at the legislation we've been getting for the last few years and I think you'll see what I mean.
As an attempted analogy, if the direction that we're headed is off a cliff, then the only meaningful reform is changing direction. "Improvements" to our gauges, gas mileage or automobile performance only stand to accelerate our eventual crash. As another attempt, to play off the title of your post, a bird in the hand is not better than two in the bush if the one you're holding has the avian flu or west nile.
Thanks to Slashdot, I've been involved in this issue for several years now, and it's become clear to me that computers are simply the wrong "solution" to the "problem" of elections. Obviously, Slashdot isn't the place to look for a lot of agreement about that, so the best I'm hoping for here is that people at least start to consider true alternatives.
Thanks for taking the time to discuss it!
Sorry, one other point, although computers supposedly promise increased efficiency, I'm sure we can all relate to how that may not always be so. I sit at two computers because one of them is always busy doing something, it seems.
Related to this topic, you may know that in Denver last year, thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting system failed city-wide creating increased wait times of _hours_, and no backup (i.e. paper ballot) was available.
Thanks for the follow-up. I'm by no means here to defend the design of those sites, and I'm sorry about any inappropriate ads (insert some generic TOS language about no control over third party links).
_ holt_ii_bill_to_amend_hava
_ blunders
Here's the page of more detailed analysis of the bill:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/hr_811_the
Maybe in particular check out Bruce O'Dell's analysis:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/hr_811_ten
I'll see if I can find additional links that are more directly related and useful.
Thanks!
Certainly there are problems with the legislative sausage making process, but if ever there were an area where we need some absolutes, it's the protection of our election. While this bill may improve the current state of affairs, the current state of affairs is so abominable that may not mean much.
Anything that further legitimizes the use of DREs in elections is a mistake in my opinion. A very likely outcome is that this flawed bill passes and come next session, you hear something akin to "you already got your reform bill, now shut up and vote on the machine we're giving you"...
If this bill passes then we're going to waste another few billion dollars buying more bad computer systems to run our elections and further alienate voters.
The whole process would be much simpler (and much, much, much cheaper) if we used precinct counted paper ballots, like many other first-world democracies do.
Luckily, we're still free to disagree!
About voter verification and noticing:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4682 In her recently released doctoral thesis, "The Usability of Electronic Voting Machines and How Votes Can Be Changed Without Detection" [PDF], Rice University researcher and Doctoral candidate Sarah P. Everett reveals that review screens, presented to voters at the end of the voting process on DRE voting machines, fail to be effective. If you don't think that people overlook mistakes on receipts, I have a couple restaurants here to take you to...
Give them a _BALLOT_ and have them mark it, then they've verified it as they marked it, no "second step" has to be taken.
I'd ask you to rethink if you really want people taken out of elections. There's plenty of evidence that the difficulty level of switching votes in elections is much lower than you seem to think. We're talking about "normal" people running scripts and programs that they get from elsewhere, not programmers themselves having unlimited access to machines.
Ballot counting is only about accuracy, not efficiency. We may have to agree to disagree on this one.
As for computers counting correctly, well, do you remember the Pentium floating point bug? (There are other examples, of course, too). Just because they are often correct doesn't mean they are always correct, and even the geniuses at Intel and all their QA still let that one slip by. I'll take a human error over a machine error any day, again, we may have to disagree about this one, it's certainly more philosophical than anything else.
Finally, the banking vs. voting analogy was addressed in an earlier reply, the issue of anonymity makes the analogy fall apart. It's more like cash than an ATM.
There's a key difference between any banking system and voting, and that's anonymity.
EVERY transaction in banking and commerce is fully accountable for any/all parties involved.
Ideally, our votes are completely anonymous, so the analogy isn't quite right.
Take the authenticated identity component out of our banking system and I'll bet people would stop trusting it immediately. "Just slide your money through this slot, I promise you we'll take care of it..."
In this case, IMHO, the problem is "appropriate technology"...and so it _is_ the computers because they are simply not an appropriate technology to provide universal accessibility to our elections...most people have no clue how to operate, verify and thus, trust them. You can count hand marked paper ballots in your precinct by candlelight, now that's reliability, and if we can't trust our neighbors, well, then we've got some other very serious topics we should be discussing.
And, given all the issues we've had with problems such as mass identity theft via millions of card numbers being stolen in a single swoop, do you really consider those systems secure, reliable and verifiable? Do the best of the security experts who read Slashdot feel that way?
PS - Remember, too, that cash still a tangible artifact, and, the most valuable cash in general use is, wait for it...Paper!
Read it, thank you. I still believe that anything that makes electronic voting "more acceptable" is a huge mistake...voters do not check their "paper trails", many voters don't notice vote switching when it happens in front of them, and ultimately, electronic voting takes our elections out of people's hands and puts it under the control of technocrats.
We need a system that _anyone_ can use (both as a voter/elector and as a pollworker), and the only system that meets that test is paper ballots (with vote markers to provide accessibility).
Remember that you can't take the people out of a democracy and still have one, democracy _means_ that there are people involved. It's not about "efficiency" (distributed precinct-based counting of paper ballots works at any scale), it's about participation.
Push button elections without human oversight produce push button governments without human oversight, and I think we've all (okay, something like 73% of us at last count) had about enough of that...
I don't doubt that the original author of this bill was well intentioned (there was so much to fix about HAVA, after all), but this bill is not the answer, and it's _not_ good. We don't want computers enshrined as the method of resolving or counting votes. The Canadian (and the Europeans, e.g., the Swiss) have it right. Paper ballots that are manually marked that _anyone_ can verify are the right approach. Slashdot is what got me involved in this issue originally, and it's thanks to the skepticism of computer professionals that we know how bad these systems are.
This bill is being called the "Patriot Act of Elections"...be sure to get all the facts before you decide it's a good thing, and I'm sure you'll decide it isn't. Here are two great resources to start with:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/
http://www.bradblog.com/
(and in particular on the Brad Blog, check out Ellen Thiesen's analysis of problems with this and the Senate bill currently being worked on)
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4678
It doesn't come bundled with an analysis engine, but if you're looking to build your own corpus of material (e.g., by automating searches or harvesting large volumes of your research web pages) and you're on MacOSX, check out Anthracite web mining desktop toolkit... It makes it easy to build spidering and scraping systems, structure the output and feed it into a database like MySQL...all without requiring you to write a single line of code. Take that output and feed it into any number of the analysis and search systems on SourceForge or Freshmeat and you're going to get comparable results without all the fuss, although you should definitely write a press release about it! The Google API and regex support are built-in, and you can even run the data through any UNIX command (e.g., grep or Perl) without leaving the program if you need even more. As for speed, the new release is going to feature a throttle because a few customers are getting overwhelmed by the URL loading throughput. Yes, by way of full disclosure, I wrote the software and that's why I'm always busy promoting it.
In case you want to try this at home, presuming you're on a MacOS X box and you've got your own free API key from Google, you can easily access the Google API SOAP service using Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit. Combine it with AppleScript and you're off to the races making your own automated searches. In addition to the Google API interface, there's also a generic SOAP source object for accessing any other SOAP services you want to try. Several examples are included with the download, like how to build a ranked list of top keywords for any given search term. Not only does it get the search results, it will also go load the URLs returned for you automatically. Yes, I wrote the software, and that's why I'm always busy promoting it.
If you have access to a MacOS X box, Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit http://www.metafy.com/ can do this kind of work for you. It's currently being used by customers on four continents to build daily custom reports from large volumes of web based data, like the SEC Edgar filings. It's based on a visual user interface that allows non-programmers to quickly and easily create high value web data processing systems. If you need to automate running a grip of regexen against thousands of webpages daily, you should definitely check it out. It can possibly save you a lot of time, we've got one customer who quickly eliminated two days per month of this kind of labor intensive work. On FM with great vitality at http://freshmeat.net/projects/anthracite [PS - Yes, I'm definitely biased, I wrote the software ;-)]