Look, if someone can't understand the concept of "make an X next to the correct candidate; one X only", then I'm hard pressed to come up with a voting system that would be able to accurately gauge that voter's intent.
The point is that there are a million ways to fill out that ballot that accurately indicate the voter's intent but because he didn't do it that specific way his vote won't be counted and he will not be told it won't be counted and has no way to correct his error. And this isn't counting elections where the voter is expected to select multiple candidates (say, two open seats for five candidates). It is placing more importance on the voter following arbitrary directions than communicating his intentions.
The only ballots that I've seen rejected have been deliberately spoiled by the voter by marking X in all of the circles or scribbling across the entire ballot.
So it is your contention that it is impossible to fill out that ballot in such way that two people would have differing opinions on whether or not it was valid?
If you are unable to mark a simple X in a circle, are you any more able to work an electronic voting machine? If the paper is to confusing is an electronic voting machine any less confusing?
An electronic machine can inform the voter he's selected too many candidates (especially when the voter is supposed to pick two or three out of ten or twelve). An electronic machine can verify ("You have selected X. Is this correct?") the voter's intentions. An electronic machine would also allow the voter to correct a mistake without having to get a new ballot. If the interface is designed correctly, it need be no more confusing than a paper ballot (which can also be designed poorly a la Florida's butterfly ballot). It would eliminate the discounting of an improperly filled-in ballot because the computer would simply not allow it. It's called input validation and computers have been doing it for years.
Consider we are talking about a system most people have used for years (a 90 year old grandmother is likely to have voted before) as opposed to a brand new system no one has ever seen.
My guess is even your 90 year old grandmother can be shown how to use an electronic voting machine in a couple of minutes. But also have plain paper ballots available for those who want them.
One more time.... it's a freakin' X in a circle! This is not rocket science. Either there's an X in the circle, or there isn't an X in the circle. Sometimes there's multiple Xes in multiple circles. That would be a spoiled ballot. Other times there's no X at all. That, too, would be a spoiled ballot. Otherwise, how bloody difficult is it for you to comprehend an X in a circle? Sheesh!
So if my X is super tiny or fills the whole page it will still be counted? What if it's on the edge of the circle? Which side of the circle mark defines "inside". What if my hand is shaky and the lines aren't straight? What if I draw a "V"? The point is that the voter should have some way to know that his vote is valid without having to guess. Some form of feedback that doesn't compromise his anonymity. People make mistakes. Validation would reduce a lot of them. If the vote is important, then reducing mistakes should be important. If it's not, then neither is security.
There are alternate means of voting for people with disabilities that prevent them from putting an X in a circle.
In most cases the solution is to have someone else fill out the ballot for them which compromises their anonymity and, in the cases where the voter is blind or can't read english, forces them to trust the person is filling it out correctly.
If you spoil your ballot, you can take it to the people running the poll station and ask for a new one. If you shove the spoiled ballot into the box, it's your own fault if it doesn't get counted.
This all relies on the voter being able to tell that the vote will or will not be counted: a subjective decision being made by another human being. He has no feedback and cannot get it without violating his anonymity. And he can't even find out later that he did it wrong. He could vote wrongly for his entire life and never know it.
The regulations allow for ordinary mistakes,
If by "ordinary" you mean "blindingly obvious".
and the only spoilage comes from maliciousness or complete incompetence.
Define "complete incompetence". The inability to read an unknown person's mind?
It's funny. I think that person shouldn't even be allowed to vote. For Christ's sake, they aren't allowed behind the wheel of a car, they've probably been removed of all legal decisions to a relative, why should voting be any different?
People who are mentally incompetent are already not allowed to vote. Driving depends greatly on your ability to see. What exactly about having poor eyesight makes someone not qualified to decide who should be in office?
If you're blind, you probably can't use a touchscreen electronic voting machine
There are interfaces available for the blind and electronic systems can also present the ballot in many different languages for those whom english is a second language if they speak it at all.
I think people with such disabilities are entitled to either (a) help in the voting booth or (b) absentee ballots.
Both of which compromise their anonymity and force them to rely on their helper filling out the ballot correctly.
Optical scanners can be rigged, sure, but so can just about anything else. At some point there has to be some level of trust in reviewed systems.
It is entirely possible to design an electronic system that is trustworthy and reviewable. That Diebold can't seem to (or won't) do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Optical scanners have the secondary benefit that if you don't believe their results, you can fall back on the much slower and possibly less accurate human-powered counting machines.
Which is why most proponents of secure electronic systems insist on a paper trail that can be used in the event of a discrepancy or a recount.
If you can't tell who they voted for, yes. They should have been more careful. Voting is a right; voting correctly is a responsibility.
So if they don't get it correct in the first try they lose their right to vote?
It's not a bloody test. If there were some way to validate the vote without compromising anonymity, don't you think it's worth exploring? Or would you rather write off a whole concept because one implementation of it was done poorly?
Either the vote is sacred or it's not. If it is then there should be mechanisms to ensure the intention of the voter is counted correctly. If it's not then the concerns about security are overblown. The assumption that paper systems don't have problems is extremely naive.
You mark an X or your vote doesn't count. It's a built-in safety mechanism.
We believe that if you're too intoxicated, stupid, or incompetent to mark a clear X in a circle, then you shouldn't be voting.
So it's a test, is it?
What if the X goes outside the circle? How far is it allowed to go? What if it doesn't fill the circle? Who decides whether or not it's valid? Can they be bought?
How about if they can't see or can't read? Should they be allowed to vote?
So tampering with a vote is absolutely intolerable but throwing them away is okay. You don't see the contradiction?
Just thinking that lawsuits seem to be very popular in the US and this seems to be the perfect time for one. Wouldn't it be possible for some group of you down there to sue Diebold
RTFA. They are.
at the very least it would make a heck of a splash in the media and might cause something to be done about it.
Four vulnerabilities described in a book, at what point is it beyond a reasonable doubt that the diebold system is intentionally compromised to allow the results of an election to be altered ?
There's an old saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Unfortunately it assumes that the malicious aren't also incompetent.
If it kills them... well, it probably saved a quarter of the Earth's population from an agonising protracted death from whatever mutie bug they were incubating.
Actually, the pattern of colluding is very easy to catch. You really only have to look for two people who are prone to continuously re-raise each other with another player caught in the middle, and most times one has nothing worth raising with. The online casinos can do this very efficiently with software.
Poker is played against the other players at the table, not the house. The house takes a rake of the pot, and the deck is shuffled after every hand, so card counting doesn't help you. They aren't taking money from the casino, they are taking money from other players.
Bluffing is a big part of strategy in poker, and seeing the facial experssions is key.
Being able to read a player can only help you if the player knows whether or not his hand is any good. The vast majority of people playing on internet sites have no freaking clue what a good hand is. Most of them play low limit holdem ten-handed like it's no limit short-handed because they were just watching Chris Moneymaker call all-in with 33 and get very lucky. I've seen people (many times) re-re-re-raise with bottom two pair when three of their cards are on the table, believing wholeheartedly that they had the best hand. There is no reading these people.
For those people, and they outnumber the good players by a bunch, internet gambling sites are very attractive because they can play for a half hour without leaving home rather than drive 3 hours to a casino.
I agree with you there, of course this assumes that collusion can be adequetely detected. A bot which colluded with other bots wouldn't have to be very smart to wipe everyone else out.
Two colluding humans can wipe everyone else out also. If the casinos can detect collusion (usually by analyzing the hands that were raised with), it shouldn't matter if they are bots or human.
Except that the Turing test is usually conducted by people with a computer science background while poker is played by people most of whom would be fooled by Eliza.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that ain't bad. -- Confucious
This is based on the assumption that most people who vote for Nader would prefer Kerry over Bush. It is not an unreasonable assumption and the main reason the Republicans are so anxious to see Nader on the ballot.
"Vote for the lesser evil."
Given our current "only indicate your first preference" system of voting where it is known beforehand that two candidates will get over 90% of the vote, it is, in fact, the correct choice. Given three candidates A, B, and C, a vote for A says nothing about the voter's preference between B and C. If the voter knows beforehand that only B or C can win, he should choose between those two.
"Don't throw your vote away." and the even more misleading: "It isn't throwing your vote away, but it won't change anything."
90,000 people voted for Nader in Florida in 2000. If those 90,000 people instead decide not to vote, nothing changes. He got 3 million votes in the country and didn't win a single state. If those 3 million people stay home instead, nothing changes. Monica Moorehead got 1800 votes in Florida. She was only on the ballot in four other states for a total of 51 electoral votes. She could not win (unless she gets a huge number if write-ins, but if that were the case, she'd be on the ballot). If one third of those people vote for Gore instead, Gore wins the election. If they stay home, nothing changes. I fail to see how voting third party changes anything.
Vote for the man you want for the job. PERIOD. Because one day, a non-Republicrat WILL WIN.
The problem is that unless enough people are going to, few people will want to. The risk that voting third party carries is not indicating your preference between the two most likely (by far) to win. The benefit, unless enough people do, is nothing. The only way to convince enough people to do it is to convince them enough people are already doing it and if enough people are already doing it they don't need convincing.
You can vote third party if you like, but don't fool yourself into believing it will change anything. If you want to change the system, you have to start with the system.
All of this hinges on the belief that the views represented by the two major parties is broad enough. Many people, as evidenced by the lack of voter turnout, do not agree.
Both parties take funding from corporate sponsors. Many people don't like this but the fact is a candidate can't get elected unless he does. And the corporations are not backing the long shots. They are only backing the two people who can give them the most return on their investment. So already the two majors have a distinct advantage even having their platforms heard. Of course people are going to select one of those two, they don't know anything about the other options. In this case, the view represented is very narrow. The only difference between them is who they're accepting funding from.
The reason people don't vote for third parties isn't "that they can't win." It's that people place a higher value on priorities which may run counter to supporting particular third parties.
This is not true. The vast majority of voters see an election, supported by the media and past history, as a race between two candidates. Logic dictates that they make their selection from the only two that have a chance of winning. There is also the fear of inadvertantly helping your last preference by not voting for the candidate that can beat him.
The implied statement was that there is no diversity of opinion within United States politics.
No, the statement was that the diversity of opinion was not wide enough. Yes, there are a lot of different views represented by the two major parties. There are many views which get no representation at all. Your argument seems to be that they get no representation because they don't have any support. My argument is that they don't have any support because they don't have a voice.
These things have happened. If they didn't, we'd still be voting for Federalists and Democratic Repbulicans.
The last time this change happened the country was only 80 years old. It's 150 years later and we still have the same two parties. In the past 100 years, independents have never held more than 4% of the Senate and 3% of the House. I maintain that it is the election process itself which supports a two party system and not the lack of any "real" support for views represented outside these two parties.
So, in other words, your evidence that there is a wide spectrum of political opinion is that there are more than two political parties, and that only those two parties can win is evidence that the wide political spectrum is adequately represented. This is circular reasoning at best. It completely ignores the possibility that the election process itself greatly favors a two party system and that the reason people don't vote for third parties is that they can't win.
Yes. I just think it's interesting how often they rely on their audience's ignorance to tell the story, especially when the story hinges on some incredibly important, and entirely wrong, premise.
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Look, if someone can't understand the concept of "make an X next to the correct candidate; one X only", then I'm hard pressed to come up with a voting system that would be able to accurately gauge that voter's intent.
The point is that there are a million ways to fill out that ballot that accurately indicate the voter's intent but because he didn't do it that specific way his vote won't be counted and he will not be told it won't be counted and has no way to correct his error. And this isn't counting elections where the voter is expected to select multiple candidates (say, two open seats for five candidates). It is placing more importance on the voter following arbitrary directions than communicating his intentions.
The only ballots that I've seen rejected have been deliberately spoiled by the voter by marking X in all of the circles or scribbling across the entire ballot.
So it is your contention that it is impossible to fill out that ballot in such way that two people would have differing opinions on whether or not it was valid?
If you are unable to mark a simple X in a circle, are you any more able to work an electronic voting machine? If the paper is to confusing is an electronic voting machine any less confusing?
An electronic machine can inform the voter he's selected too many candidates (especially when the voter is supposed to pick two or three out of ten or twelve). An electronic machine can verify ("You have selected X. Is this correct?") the voter's intentions. An electronic machine would also allow the voter to correct a mistake without having to get a new ballot. If the interface is designed correctly, it need be no more confusing than a paper ballot (which can also be designed poorly a la Florida's butterfly ballot). It would eliminate the discounting of an improperly filled-in ballot because the computer would simply not allow it. It's called input validation and computers have been doing it for years.
Consider we are talking about a system most people have used for years (a 90 year old grandmother is likely to have voted before) as opposed to a brand new system no one has ever seen.
My guess is even your 90 year old grandmother can be shown how to use an electronic voting machine in a couple of minutes. But also have plain paper ballots available for those who want them.
One more time.... it's a freakin' X in a circle! This is not rocket science. Either there's an X in the circle, or there isn't an X in the circle. Sometimes there's multiple Xes in multiple circles. That would be a spoiled ballot. Other times there's no X at all. That, too, would be a spoiled ballot. Otherwise, how bloody difficult is it for you to comprehend an X in a circle? Sheesh!
So if my X is super tiny or fills the whole page it will still be counted? What if it's on the edge of the circle? Which side of the circle mark defines "inside". What if my hand is shaky and the lines aren't straight? What if I draw a "V"? The point is that the voter should have some way to know that his vote is valid without having to guess. Some form of feedback that doesn't compromise his anonymity. People make mistakes. Validation would reduce a lot of them. If the vote is important, then reducing mistakes should be important. If it's not, then neither is security.
There are alternate means of voting for people with disabilities that prevent them from putting an X in a circle.
In most cases the solution is to have someone else fill out the ballot for them which compromises their anonymity and, in the cases where the voter is blind or can't read english, forces them to trust the person is filling it out correctly.
If you spoil your ballot, you can take it to the people running the poll station and ask for a new one. If you shove the spoiled ballot into the box, it's your own fault if it doesn't get counted.
This all relies on the voter being able to tell that the vote will or will not be counted: a subjective decision being made by another human being. He has no feedback and cannot get it without violating his anonymity. And he can't even find out later that he did it wrong. He could vote wrongly for his entire life and never know it.
The regulations allow for ordinary mistakes,
If by "ordinary" you mean "blindingly obvious".
and the only spoilage comes from maliciousness or complete incompetence.
Define "complete incompetence". The inability to read an unknown person's mind?
It's funny. I think that person shouldn't even be allowed to vote. For Christ's sake, they aren't allowed behind the wheel of a car, they've probably been removed of all legal decisions to a relative, why should voting be any different?
People who are mentally incompetent are already not allowed to vote. Driving depends greatly on your ability to see. What exactly about having poor eyesight makes someone not qualified to decide who should be in office?
If you're blind, you probably can't use a touchscreen electronic voting machine
There are interfaces available for the blind and electronic systems can also present the ballot in many different languages for those whom english is a second language if they speak it at all.
I think people with such disabilities are entitled to either (a) help in the voting booth or (b) absentee ballots.
Both of which compromise their anonymity and force them to rely on their helper filling out the ballot correctly.
Optical scanners can be rigged, sure, but so can just about anything else. At some point there has to be some level of trust in reviewed systems.
It is entirely possible to design an electronic system that is trustworthy and reviewable. That Diebold can't seem to (or won't) do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Optical scanners have the secondary benefit that if you don't believe their results, you can fall back on the much slower and possibly less accurate human-powered counting machines.
Which is why most proponents of secure electronic systems insist on a paper trail that can be used in the event of a discrepancy or a recount.
If you can't tell who they voted for, yes. They should have been more careful. Voting is a right; voting correctly is a responsibility.
So if they don't get it correct in the first try they lose their right to vote?
It's not a bloody test. If there were some way to validate the vote without compromising anonymity, don't you think it's worth exploring? Or would you rather write off a whole concept because one implementation of it was done poorly?
Either the vote is sacred or it's not. If it is then there should be mechanisms to ensure the intention of the voter is counted correctly. If it's not then the concerns about security are overblown. The assumption that paper systems don't have problems is extremely naive.
You mark an X or your vote doesn't count. It's a built-in safety mechanism.
We believe that if you're too intoxicated, stupid, or incompetent to mark a clear X in a circle, then you shouldn't be voting.
So it's a test, is it?
What if the X goes outside the circle? How far is it allowed to go?
What if it doesn't fill the circle?
Who decides whether or not it's valid? Can they be bought?
How about if they can't see or can't read? Should they be allowed to vote?
So tampering with a vote is absolutely intolerable but throwing them away is okay. You don't see the contradiction?
It's called a spoiled ballot, and you don't count it.
So, in other words, tampering with a vote is intolerable but it's okay to throw them out?
Ah, for the days of taking a pen and a sheet of paper with boxes next to names, and marking an X in the box next to the person you want to vote for.
Simple and relatively free from error.
Unless someone fills it out incorrectly. Or they're blind or can't read. Or from Florida.
I'm sure optical scanners today should be able to process these damned quick, too.
Optical scanners can be rigged, too.
Just thinking that lawsuits seem to be very popular in the US and this seems to be the perfect time for one. Wouldn't it be possible for some group of you down there to sue Diebold
RTFA. They are.
at the very least it would make a heck of a splash in the media and might cause something to be done about it.
It hasn't.
Four vulnerabilities described in a book, at what point is it beyond a reasonable doubt that the diebold system is intentionally compromised to allow the results of an election to be altered ?
There's an old saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Unfortunately it assumes that the malicious aren't also incompetent.
Sounds neat. What do you do if the person marks the ballot incorrectly?
If it kills them... well, it probably saved a quarter of the Earth's population from an agonising protracted death from whatever mutie bug they were incubating.
Okay. You go first.
Actually, the pattern of colluding is very easy to catch. You really only have to look for two people who are prone to continuously re-raise each other with another player caught in the middle, and most times one has nothing worth raising with. The online casinos can do this very efficiently with software.
Poker is played against the other players at the table, not the house. The house takes a rake of the pot, and the deck is shuffled after every hand, so card counting doesn't help you. They aren't taking money from the casino, they are taking money from other players.
Bluffing is a big part of strategy in poker, and seeing the facial experssions is key.
Being able to read a player can only help you if the player knows whether or not his hand is any good. The vast majority of people playing on internet sites have no freaking clue what a good hand is. Most of them play low limit holdem ten-handed like it's no limit short-handed because they were just watching Chris Moneymaker call all-in with 33 and get very lucky. I've seen people (many times) re-re-re-raise with bottom two pair when three of their cards are on the table, believing wholeheartedly that they had the best hand. There is no reading these people.
For those people, and they outnumber the good players by a bunch, internet gambling sites are very attractive because they can play for a half hour without leaving home rather than drive 3 hours to a casino.
I agree with you there, of course this assumes that collusion can be adequetely detected. A bot which colluded with other bots wouldn't have to be very smart to wipe everyone else out.
Two colluding humans can wipe everyone else out also. If the casinos can detect collusion (usually by analyzing the hands that were raised with), it shouldn't matter if they are bots or human.
Except that the Turing test is usually conducted by people with a computer science background while poker is played by people most of whom would be fooled by Eliza.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that ain't bad. -- Confucious
"A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!"
This is based on the assumption that most people who vote for Nader would prefer Kerry over Bush. It is not an unreasonable assumption and the main reason the Republicans are so anxious to see Nader on the ballot.
"Vote for the lesser evil."
Given our current "only indicate your first preference" system of voting where it is known beforehand that two candidates will get over 90% of the vote, it is, in fact, the correct choice. Given three candidates A, B, and C, a vote for A says nothing about the voter's preference between B and C. If the voter knows beforehand that only B or C can win, he should choose between those two.
"Don't throw your vote away."
and the even more misleading: "It isn't throwing your vote away, but it won't change anything."
90,000 people voted for Nader in Florida in 2000. If those 90,000 people instead decide not to vote, nothing changes. He got 3 million votes in the country and didn't win a single state. If those 3 million people stay home instead, nothing changes. Monica Moorehead got 1800 votes in Florida. She was only on the ballot in four other states for a total of 51 electoral votes. She could not win (unless she gets a huge number if write-ins, but if that were the case, she'd be on the ballot). If one third of those people vote for Gore instead, Gore wins the election. If they stay home, nothing changes. I fail to see how voting third party changes anything.
Vote for the man you want for the job. PERIOD. Because one day, a non-Republicrat WILL WIN.
The problem is that unless enough people are going to, few people will want to. The risk that voting third party carries is not indicating your preference between the two most likely (by far) to win. The benefit, unless enough people do, is nothing. The only way to convince enough people to do it is to convince them enough people are already doing it and if enough people are already doing it they don't need convincing.
You can vote third party if you like, but don't fool yourself into believing it will change anything. If you want to change the system, you have to start with the system.
The butterfly ballot was designed poorly.
I'm willing to bet most Americans can figure out "rate these candidates from 1 to 10 in order of preference."
Because it makes it that much harder to stop taking them when the patient has serious side effects to the medication.
All of this hinges on the belief that the views represented by the two major parties is broad enough. Many people, as evidenced by the lack of voter turnout, do not agree.
Both parties take funding from corporate sponsors. Many people don't like this but the fact is a candidate can't get elected unless he does. And the corporations are not backing the long shots. They are only backing the two people who can give them the most return on their investment. So already the two majors have a distinct advantage even having their platforms heard. Of course people are going to select one of those two, they don't know anything about the other options. In this case, the view represented is very narrow. The only difference between them is who they're accepting funding from.
The reason people don't vote for third parties isn't "that they can't win." It's that people place a higher value on priorities which may run counter to supporting particular third parties.
This is not true. The vast majority of voters see an election, supported by the media and past history, as a race between two candidates. Logic dictates that they make their selection from the only two that have a chance of winning. There is also the fear of inadvertantly helping your last preference by not voting for the candidate that can beat him.
The implied statement was that there is no diversity of opinion within United States politics.
No, the statement was that the diversity of opinion was not wide enough. Yes, there are a lot of different views represented by the two major parties. There are many views which get no representation at all. Your argument seems to be that they get no representation because they don't have any support. My argument is that they don't have any support because they don't have a voice.
These things have happened. If they didn't, we'd still be voting for Federalists and Democratic Repbulicans.
The last time this change happened the country was only 80 years old. It's 150 years later and we still have the same two parties. In the past 100 years, independents have never held more than 4% of the Senate and 3% of the House. I maintain that it is the election process itself which supports a two party system and not the lack of any "real" support for views represented outside these two parties.
So, in other words, your evidence that there is a wide spectrum of political opinion is that there are more than two political parties, and that only those two parties can win is evidence that the wide political spectrum is adequately represented. This is circular reasoning at best. It completely ignores the possibility that the election process itself greatly favors a two party system and that the reason people don't vote for third parties is that they can't win.
You do know movies aren't real, right?
Yes. I just think it's interesting how often they rely on their audience's ignorance to tell the story, especially when the story hinges on some incredibly important, and entirely wrong, premise.