you still cannot simply reduce an un-"proven" election to the statement "the election was stolen". It's just as possible that any election fraud was perpetrated to help the person who ultimately lost the election, meaning that while someone attempted to steal the election, they were unsuccessful.
The election wasn't stolen from Kerry. Regardless of who "wins", if an election is messed-up, it was stolen from us.
The election was voted on by the electors and certified by the Congress.
Yes, how fortunate we are to have such technically literate politicians!
As far as Diebold goes, I'm sure those machines are as fine as anything else out there. In case you don't remember what happened in Florida in 2000, where people couldn't even figure out how to punch a butterfly ballot, they are probably even wonderful in comparison.
I hope you're not one of these people who insists that only Democratic elderly voters in that district were stupid. The ballot had a flawed interface- it introduced a systematic error that turned Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. Both paper and electronic systems are susceptible to bad interface design. When an interface design issue develops with paper, everyone knows all about it. Paper is tangible. With electronic voting, the problem may or may not be hidden from view- depending on the skill and competence of the manufacturer- but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. People complained in the last election about the way Bush was circled by default on Diebold's screens, for example. (The incumbent was the first choice). Votes for other candidates would magically revert to the default if you went did something like go forward one screen and then back. God knows how many votes went to incumbents because of that.
Interface issues aside, paper ballots performed remarkably well in 2000 under the extreme case of a near tie. Paper is auditable as hell.
Especially when it comes to tallying the vote - faster on the order of magnitude. Florida had its tally at a few hours after polling places closed. Ohio (paper ballot) finished the tally several days later.
This is completely unimportant, unless you work in the TV industry. You don't want the votes to be counted fast, you want them counted right.
You do understand that if a whistle-blower - an employee involved in the development of the voting machine - even CLAIMED that such shenanigans were abound, that this would be tramendously costly to the company. After all, the company wants to sell voting equipment, not get itself out of business...
That's comforting to an extent, but isn't strong enough by itself to support the validity of an election. Diebold has a total market cap of less than $4 billion. In the next election they'll be worth who knows what. They could do an Enron-style flameout right before the coming midterm election. We are woefully unprepared for an event like that if this is what we rely on to safeguard elections.
Plus, even if they're trustworthy, they're still nitwits who can't design secure systems, so their willingness to take a bribe or not is practically a moot point.
How can a boolean be something other than true or false? Are you arguing that the election was 'slightly stolen'?
There's more to a boolean variable than a single bit. There is also context and semantics associated with it. And also certainty. The value can be unknown or otherwise unavailable, in which case it can be assumed to be neither neither true nor false.
Since we can't do computations or make decisions based on unknown boolean variables, we can do several things.
We can use fuzzy logic, with a float instead of a boolean, where 0.0 is false with certainty, 0.1 is probably false, 0.5 represents no information, 0.9 is probably true, and 1.0 is true with certainty. That's a valid approach for many things in life, like elevator controllers. But this is not the approach taken by most law, including election law.
In a legal sense we approximate unknown (possibly unknowable) booleans by using a separate boolean that has a legally known value, with conventions that make sense for the parties involved to be able to legally turn the "flag" on or off. For example your guilt in a crime is an unknown boolean. We can't use unknown booleans to throw people in jail. So we start with a known boolean of FALSE- you're legally not guilty- and the state has to try to set the flag to TRUE. If they succeed, you're sent to jail regardless of the value of the "true value" of the unknown boolean.
In election law, we start a known boolean with a default value of TRUE- the election is considered stolen by default. The state, in preparing for the election, buying equipment, running tests, etc. is charged with the responsibility for setting it to FALSE.
If they buy Diebold machines, drop them from three feet without breaking a single Easter Egg, and certify them, the flag's value is still TRUE. Only Diebold knows the unknown flag's real value.
Either the election was stolen or it wasn't. Seems that if you cannot prove that it was stolen, it must not have been stolen.
Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:
Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.
But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.
They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.
It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.
(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)
What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.
why is the program any more complicated than just storing a hash table of votes that occurred? It just seems like a really simple app, I don't get how there can be so many problems with it.
Lots of programs would be trivial to implement if everyone in the world just behaved themselves at all times. Almost all of the parties involved have an incredibly strong incentive to mess with the hashtable. And it has to be completely auditable, so you can see exactly what changes were made to the hashtable and when, by whom, and for what reason. It has to provide a way to guarantee that a vote for one candidate did not get stored as a vote for another. But you also have to avoid a system that will allow the winners of the election to punish anyone who voted "incorrectly", since it's only a matter of time before someone decides to crumple our beloved Constitution into a ball.
The standards that Diebold had to meet seem to come straight from the 19th century. The Diebold machines had to survive being dropped from three feet, for example. Nobody has ever updated the standards to account for the more complicated and potentially devious behavior of software-based systems as opposed to mechanical devices. This looks like an attempt to do so. Let's see how far it goes.
One of the primary arguments used by the technically illiterate pro-Diebold election commissioners was that fears of votes being lost or stolen were groundless. Because..... "people are delighted to use the new machines."
So unless it has a nice looking interface, you open source programmers out there, it has no chance of being adopted.
The article indicates that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are the primary proponents of this bill - though I'm sure Kerry also supports it.
This won't go anywhere. It's OBVIOUSLY part of the CONSPIRACY to get Hillary lawfully elected president in 2008- just like Hitler was lawfully elected in 1933. And you know what happens then. They take all our guns away and our testicles shrink.
It sounds like the Oracle and Peoplesoft merger. I'm not blaming the guys working overseas. They just happened to be at the right place at the right time- in a way. Then BoA will find a country where people are willing to work for half of that. It's turning into the textile industry.
You're thinking about the cycle in the linear congruential generator algorithm. Those have huge cycles. But you can inadvertently use one to create a smaller cycle if you aren't careful. If one were to take a playlist of 100 songs (for example), loop through every song, and use an LCG to assign a number between 0 and 99 inclusive to each one (representing the index of the next song to play while shuffling), you'd easily end up with behavior similar to what I remember seeing. (You'd be throwing away all but the first two digits of each random number, so the LCG's cycle is irrelevant in this case.) I can't believe anyone would implement shuffle that way, though. One-song loops would be easy to avoid (compare each song's index to it's "next song" index for equality) but two-song and three-song loops would be a real problem. Maybe to avoid cycles they've got some queue of fixed size in there (1 less than the smallest resulting cycle) that they run through for comparisons, to avoid short-period cycles. If that's what was happening then the queue had a length of about 10. I agree it's a trivial programming problem to do it correctly.
Bank of America seems to have a habit of acquiring other banks, laying thousands of people off, and shipping all the decent jobs overseas. They can proudly brag that they "engineer their own software" because they have access to a large pool of inexpensive overseas labor.
If the song that plays next is solely a function of the song that is playing now, the system will wander from song to song exploring the playlist until it finds a circular loop- unless care is taken from the outset to ensure that the entire playlist is one large loop. It would be mediocre programming, but I can see it happening. I seem to remember the shuffle in Windows Media Player doing this a lot with some MP3s I had- there would be a loop of ten songs that it seemed to "love". Once it hit the loop it never left it, and it always played the loop in the same order.
I used to do this kind of thing too when I was playing marbles around the age of 4. If things didn't go my way, I'd round up all my marbles and stomp off on my way home.
Wow. How did you engineer a secret backdoor into your marble game?
Well, that number has been "widening" every time ChoicePoint makes a "choice" to reveal more details. Currently the number is 145,000, which I believe is up from 120,000 and 20,000.
Remember the tsunami? The initial estimate was 10000 and every story that appeared on the wire jacked it up by 20000 or 30000. That's quite impressive, actually, for a corporate fuckup to reach the point where it reminds me of the tsunami.
ChoicePoint protects its data, but only to the extent that it values it. The hundreds of millions of people in ChoicePoint's databases are not ChoicePoint's customers. They have no power to switch credit agencies. They have no economic pressure that they can bring to bear on the problem. Maybe they should rename the company "NoChoicePoint."
The upshot of this is that ChoicePoint doesn't bear the costs of identity theft, so ChoicePoint doesn't take those costs into account when figuring out how much money to spend on data security....Until ChoicePoint feels those costs -- whether through regulation or liability -- it has no economic incentive to reduce them.
So they make an income from the registration details they take? By selling them on to marketers, one assumes. I'm afraid that like the GP, I'm no fan of spam-for-content as a business model.
Then don't register. I just paid my $30 or whatever it was and never see any ads or get any spam. I figured it was worth it, since it's less than a dime a day or so, and I don't simply expect everybody to work for free.
jeez, complaining about unprofessional summaries is fine, but to suggest thhey go and copy the style of news sources!? then we'd end up with the exact same BS, just formatted differently.
It could get you sent to jail. Entered into a sex offenders registry. Raped in prison. And it could be on your hard disk right now. What is it? We'll tell you more, at 11!
Slashdot Mirror
you still cannot simply reduce an un-"proven" election to the statement "the election was stolen". It's just as possible that any election fraud was perpetrated to help the person who ultimately lost the election, meaning that while someone attempted to steal the election, they were unsuccessful.
The election wasn't stolen from Kerry. Regardless of who "wins", if an election is messed-up, it was stolen from us.
The election was voted on by the electors and certified by the Congress.
Yes, how fortunate we are to have such technically literate politicians!
As far as Diebold goes, I'm sure those machines are as fine as anything else out there. In case you don't remember what happened in Florida in 2000, where people couldn't even figure out how to punch a butterfly ballot, they are probably even wonderful in comparison.
I hope you're not one of these people who insists that only Democratic elderly voters in that district were stupid. The ballot had a flawed interface- it introduced a systematic error that turned Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. Both paper and electronic systems are susceptible to bad interface design. When an interface design issue develops with paper, everyone knows all about it. Paper is tangible. With electronic voting, the problem may or may not be hidden from view- depending on the skill and competence of the manufacturer- but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. People complained in the last election about the way Bush was circled by default on Diebold's screens, for example. (The incumbent was the first choice). Votes for other candidates would magically revert to the default if you went did something like go forward one screen and then back. God knows how many votes went to incumbents because of that.
Interface issues aside, paper ballots performed remarkably well in 2000 under the extreme case of a near tie. Paper is auditable as hell.
Especially when it comes to tallying the vote - faster on the order of magnitude. Florida had its tally at a few hours after polling places closed. Ohio (paper ballot) finished the tally several days later.
This is completely unimportant, unless you work in the TV industry. You don't want the votes to be counted fast, you want them counted right.
You do understand that if a whistle-blower - an employee involved in the development of the voting machine - even CLAIMED that such shenanigans were abound, that this would be tramendously costly to the company. After all, the company wants to sell voting equipment, not get itself out of business...
That's comforting to an extent, but isn't strong enough by itself to support the validity of an election. Diebold has a total market cap of less than $4 billion. In the next election they'll be worth who knows what. They could do an Enron-style flameout right before the coming midterm election. We are woefully unprepared for an event like that if this is what we rely on to safeguard elections.
Plus, even if they're trustworthy, they're still nitwits who can't design secure systems, so their willingness to take a bribe or not is practically a moot point.
But we are dealing with a boolean, not a float.
Did you even read the rest of the post before replying? Doesn't look like it.
How can a boolean be something other than true or false? Are you arguing that the election was 'slightly stolen'?
There's more to a boolean variable than a single bit. There is also context and semantics associated with it. And also certainty. The value can be unknown or otherwise unavailable, in which case it can be assumed to be neither neither true nor false.
Since we can't do computations or make decisions based on unknown boolean variables, we can do several things.
We can use fuzzy logic, with a float instead of a boolean, where 0.0 is false with certainty, 0.1 is probably false, 0.5 represents no information, 0.9 is probably true, and 1.0 is true with certainty. That's a valid approach for many things in life, like elevator controllers. But this is not the approach taken by most law, including election law.
In a legal sense we approximate unknown (possibly unknowable) booleans by using a separate boolean that has a legally known value, with conventions that make sense for the parties involved to be able to legally turn the "flag" on or off. For example your guilt in a crime is an unknown boolean. We can't use unknown booleans to throw people in jail. So we start with a known boolean of FALSE- you're legally not guilty- and the state has to try to set the flag to TRUE. If they succeed, you're sent to jail regardless of the value of the "true value" of the unknown boolean.
In election law, we start a known boolean with a default value of TRUE- the election is considered stolen by default. The state, in preparing for the election, buying equipment, running tests, etc. is charged with the responsibility for setting it to FALSE.
If they buy Diebold machines, drop them from three feet without breaking a single Easter Egg, and certify them, the flag's value is still TRUE. Only Diebold knows the unknown flag's real value.
Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:
- Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
- Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.
But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.
It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.
(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)
a system which has served us for 200 years
What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.
Yes, Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro talk about "the public interest" all the time, don't they?
why is the program any more complicated than just storing a hash table of votes that occurred? It just seems like a really simple app, I don't get how there can be so many problems with it.
Lots of programs would be trivial to implement if everyone in the world just behaved themselves at all times. Almost all of the parties involved have an incredibly strong incentive to mess with the hashtable. And it has to be completely auditable, so you can see exactly what changes were made to the hashtable and when, by whom, and for what reason. It has to provide a way to guarantee that a vote for one candidate did not get stored as a vote for another. But you also have to avoid a system that will allow the winners of the election to punish anyone who voted "incorrectly", since it's only a matter of time before someone decides to crumple our beloved Constitution into a ball.
The standards that Diebold had to meet seem to come straight from the 19th century. The Diebold machines had to survive being dropped from three feet, for example. Nobody has ever updated the standards to account for the more complicated and potentially devious behavior of software-based systems as opposed to mechanical devices. This looks like an attempt to do so. Let's see how far it goes.
One of the primary arguments used by the technically illiterate pro-Diebold election commissioners was that fears of votes being lost or stolen were groundless. Because..... "people are delighted to use the new machines."
So unless it has a nice looking interface, you open source programmers out there, it has no chance of being adopted.
The article indicates that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are the primary proponents of this bill - though I'm sure Kerry also supports it.
This won't go anywhere. It's OBVIOUSLY part of the CONSPIRACY to get Hillary lawfully elected president in 2008- just like Hitler was lawfully elected in 1933.
And you know what happens then. They take all our guns away and our testicles shrink.
"At Microsoft... we see little white squiggly lines being drawn all over the kids in our commercials."
It sounds like the Oracle and Peoplesoft merger.
I'm not blaming the guys working overseas. They just happened to be at the right place at the right time- in a way. Then BoA will find a country where people are willing to work for half of that. It's turning into the textile industry.
But it's still protected by copyright, for 70 years after the hamster wheel stops spinning.
You're thinking about the cycle in the linear congruential generator algorithm. Those have huge cycles. But you can inadvertently use one to create a smaller cycle if you aren't careful. If one were to take a playlist of 100 songs (for example), loop through every song, and use an LCG to assign a number between 0 and 99 inclusive to each one (representing the index of the next song to play while shuffling), you'd easily end up with behavior similar to what I remember seeing. (You'd be throwing away all but the first two digits of each random number, so the LCG's cycle is irrelevant in this case.) I can't believe anyone would implement shuffle that way, though. One-song loops would be easy to avoid (compare each song's index to it's "next song" index for equality) but two-song and three-song loops would be a real problem. Maybe to avoid cycles they've got some queue of fixed size in there (1 less than the smallest resulting cycle) that they run through for comparisons, to avoid short-period cycles. If that's what was happening then the queue had a length of about 10. I agree it's a trivial programming problem to do it correctly.
Bank of America seems to have a habit of acquiring other banks, laying thousands of people off, and shipping all the decent jobs overseas. They can proudly brag that they "engineer their own software" because they have access to a large pool of inexpensive overseas labor.
If the song that plays next is solely a function of the song that is playing now, the system will wander from song to song exploring the playlist until it finds a circular loop- unless care is taken from the outset to ensure that the entire playlist is one large loop. It would be mediocre programming, but I can see it happening. I seem to remember the shuffle in Windows Media Player doing this a lot with some MP3s I had- there would be a loop of ten songs that it seemed to "love". Once it hit the loop it never left it, and it always played the loop in the same order.
I used to do this kind of thing too when I was playing marbles around the age of 4. If things didn't go my way, I'd round up all my marbles and stomp off on my way home.
Wow. How did you engineer a secret backdoor into your marble game?
But the code compiles so much faster when you turn it all into comments.
Well, that number has been "widening" every time ChoicePoint makes a "choice" to reveal more details. Currently the number is 145,000, which I believe is up from 120,000 and 20,000.
Remember the tsunami? The initial estimate was 10000 and every story that appeared on the wire jacked it up by 20000 or 30000. That's quite impressive, actually, for a corporate fuckup to reach the point where it reminds me of the tsunami.
And federal courts decline to hear them, citing variations in state law. The "reform" put an end to them without explicitly banning them.
You can always tell you're being fucked over when you hear the word "reform".
When is garbage day? It would sure be funny if it turned out that these guys weren't shredding their garbage.
So they make an income from the registration details they take? By selling them on to marketers, one assumes. I'm afraid that like the GP, I'm no fan of spam-for-content as a business model.
Then don't register.
I just paid my $30 or whatever it was and never see any ads or get any spam. I figured it was worth it, since it's less than a dime a day or so, and I don't simply expect everybody to work for free.
And ex-RIAA chief Hilary Rosen was sent to Iraq to write their intellectual property laws.
At least it kept her from writing laws here.
jeez, complaining about unprofessional summaries is fine, but to suggest thhey go and copy the style of news sources!? then we'd end up with the exact same BS, just formatted differently.
It could get you sent to jail. Entered into a sex offenders registry. Raped in prison. And it could be on your hard disk right now. What is it? We'll tell you more, at 11!