Does the machine tell you who it thinks you voted for? If so, then this is another great way to get the total spot on. If not, it will still miscount some. (Very few, but it is still not 100%.)
"Good point. Is the guaranteed accountability of a paper system worth the additional inaccuracy it might introduce?"
They are not mutually exclusive. A DRE that has a paper trail has the best of both worlds: the theoretical 100% accuracy and auditability. After each election do a random sample of precincts to audit and count the paper trail; if they are the same or off by a margin within the margin of error of the paper machine, accept the electronic total. Otherwise you can have a full-blown recount with all the care you want.
"How many lines of code will a voting machine take? For it to be "fully audited", somebody needs to spend that $1000 per line of code.
"And don't forget that the voters are expecting a shiny antialiased GUI"
I'd argue that this is unnecessary. Look at, for example, ATMs. Do people have issues with how ATMs work? I hardly consider this a shiny GUI. I'd go so far as to say that a touchscreen is unneccessary; ATM style buttons down the side should be plenty. In case there are some people who are technophobic and don't like even ATMs, you can provide a paper ballot counted in the traditional way.
"...everything down to the disk access, kernel and filesystem needs to be verified."
So base it off of something. Surely there is already at least some sort of OS that has this degree of auditing, so build on top of it.
"It's a big job, just to reach the same standards that paper ballots already offer."
No, because once you have the audited system you have all the benefits of a DRE system (instant vote tallies, 100% accuracy, no overvotes/undervotes, easily verifiable results, etc.)
What? Read the documents... Only Diebold's TSx was banned. Other Diebold machines are on equal footing as far as certification status goes with other companies. That is, by the 2006 election there will need to be voter-verified paper trails.
"How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically?"
Any machine counting system (punch card, optical) has an error rate, no matter how small. Electronic voting is in theory 100% accurate. It's not susceptable to getting a ballot jammed in the machine (at which point it'd likely have to be discarded), or torn by the handlers, or misread by the machine, or tampered with by the handlers. A *secure* electronic system would be more accurate than anything you can do another way. It would also likely be cheaper than having three seperate machines.
(However, your solution would be better than current electonic systems.)
"Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer?"
This I'd be happy with either way. An electronically sent vote count both speeds up the counting (whether this is a plus or not is debatable) and, provided it's verified by later checks, doesn't really have any drawbacks I see.
"Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers?"
Two reasons I'd trust a fully audited system over a hand counted one. People can easily make mistakes, and exposure to the ballots makes me uneasy. I don't trust people. I would be satisfied if the people voting were blind to the candidate choices. However, the only way to ensure this is to not ever allow the ballots to pass through the voters' hands, because otherwise it'd be quite easy to deduce which votes represent who.
"I especially love the PDF export feature. It eleminates any compatibility issues for me when I need to send a document to someone, or take a file to the campus to print it out (I'm not interested in buying a printer that I'll use only every once in a while)."
A program such as PDFCreator (Google for it, I'm too lazy at the moment) allows PDF export through Word in Windows, and it's worth it to install so you can export from other programs too. It's not *quite* as convienient as the File -> Export as PDF, but gives more flexability as you can do many-up printing and other stuff.
Solution: have the "receipt" never pass through the hands of the voter.
The printer and collection basket are fully enclosed. When you are done voting, the receipt prints and appears in a window for you to look at and verify. If it is incorrect, the machine voids the vote and destroys the paper. If it is correct, the machine finalizes the vote and deposits the printout in the container.
"...there are no suprises like operator overloading.."
See, I *never* got this. When used properly, exactly how does operator overloading complicate reading the code? Sure, it can be abused, but I can make a function called add() that does nothing of the sort. I think someComplexNo = anotherComplexNo + stillAnother; is much more readable than someComplexNo = complex.add(anotherComplexNo, stillAnother);
"AFAIK, that error is primarily because of user error -- i.e., improper marks, not properly filled in bubbles (or whatever), etc."
Yes, blame the user. I'm sure the scantron machines we had in high school were of a significantly lower caliber than those used to count votes (at least I hope so), but I still had more than one test answer mismarked, and I think I'm pretty careful.
"Although you may get into "hanging chad" territory, inconclusive/inaccurate counting can be redone by hand, whereas it cannot be with voting machines such as these."
That's why the electronic machines need paper trails. After each election, do a random sample of a few precincts to compare the paper votes to the reported tallies from the electronic machines.
I don't argue that a computer voting system is perfect. I don't even argue that today's computer voting systems are better than a paper ballot. However, it would not be hard to make electronic systems that *would* be better than paper ballots by a significant enough margin that it's worth to change. An auditable trail (i.e. paper trail) would be by far the single most important step to this point. The potential errorless aspects of electronic voting is necessary; elections are too close for even half of that of current paper methods.
See, the Daily Show isn't really fake news. That's the thing. What Stewart talks about is actually news. Usually when they are being outright false they are obvious about it, such as many of the "translations" they have. The problem, if there is one, is that many people use it as their source of news. Probably almost no one who saw this clip saw the actual interview it was from, and few heard details about that particular study.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though they are not a serious news outlet, because they are baseing the show entirely off of actual events (and because a somewhat alarming number of people actually use it for their news), they have a responsibility in my opinion to not be deceptive, either by just presenting things as-is or in a blatently false manner.
Paper scanners are still not entirely accurate. (The best numbers I can find, from an MIT/Caltech study, seem to say that on average abut half a percent of votes are misrecorded.) Computer voting systems should get essentially 100% accuracy. The only case where I can think of where it wouldn't would be a hardware failure. All you need to do is "candidate[voterchoice] += 1" and it'll increment. The accuracy issues all come from security, and the occasional hardware failure. However, having storage on both the individual voting machines and one central location per voting location should essentially negate that.
Jon Stewart: "But these things can't be that insecure..." Some security researcher: "We broke into the board of elections and completely changed the result, erasing all of our traces and got back out" Stewart: "...um, but sure, you give a guy a day and..." S.S.R.: "We did it in 5 minutes."
[Paraphrased, but the idea is here... Also, it's possible that the last statement by the SSR was not referring to the entire operation; the Daily Show appearso to have a habit of making deceptive cuts. But who knows...]
"Masculine or feminine don't refer to people, only to words..."
Or to attributes. In fact, "1 a : MALE b : having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man" is the first definition in Merriam-Webster.
If you were sending the pigeons back and forth, and you had a finite number of them, then doubling the distance would halve the bandwidth. The pipe capacity would actually stay the same no matter what the distance; you have the same number of pigeons.
Free speech software almost implies free beer software. All it takes is one person who is generous (if that's what you want to call it) enough to buy it then plop it up on a website, from which it spreads. Presuming he follows the GPL and whatnot, this is completely legal.
The distinction btw. visible light and infrared probably shouldn't make a difference in the visible appeal. Most of the pictures you see of extraterrestral objects have had their color manipulated, and many are completely false color. In fact, ALL of the pictures you see from Spitzer would be false color, unless you can happen to see infrared light.
17 USC 1201:
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter."
Surely you can provide a list of the sources from which it was gathered, or at the very least give a description of the process.
Also, at any rate, it would still at least theoretically be up to the plaintiff/prosecution to prove that you *didn't* gather the information independently, though probably if you didn't have a description of the method that would go some way toward that goal.
I hate to spoil the party by not only actually reading the article, but the raw legislation, but you're wrong about this part:
"If somebody else collected the scores for the same time period, their database would violate your copyright, even though they did the same work."
See Sec.4, paragraph (a) at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108:1:./tem p/~c108Clq22s:e10301:
"(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."
Not that I'm saying this law is a good idea--it isn't--but this is not one of the reasons.
However, this is the US we are talking about, specifically New Mexico. The argument would hold better water in Europe, but here in the US there are *very* few diesel powered cars, even among SUVs.
"yeah, it's much worse than the warm-up time a diesel needs.... see diesel arguement."
Yes, and because of the very large majority of cars that are sold with diesel engines, this is a good argument.
Even ignoring that, this is an entirely different matter: Diesel engines take a long time to warm up because that's how they work, not because there's an ignition interlock on the car mandidated by law with too little reason.
With all due respect, I don't see the alternatives to RIAA controlled music that much more appealing than the alternatives to Microsoft for most people.
I listen to mostly classical music and still I'd say 1/3-1/2 of my CDs are from one of the RIAA labels, despite labels like DG being more promenant in classical music. When you get into more mainstream music--no matter what your opinion of its quality, it is popular--the choice is greatly lessened.
In both cases I think that you have to have at least somewhat eccentric tastes to see the alternative as something that provides enough in as good of quality as is needed to counter the major choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the machine tell you who it thinks you voted for? If so, then this is another great way to get the total spot on. If not, it will still miscount some. (Very few, but it is still not 100%.)
"Good point. Is the guaranteed accountability of a paper system worth the additional inaccuracy it might introduce?"
They are not mutually exclusive. A DRE that has a paper trail has the best of both worlds: the theoretical 100% accuracy and auditability. After each election do a random sample of precincts to audit and count the paper trail; if they are the same or off by a margin within the margin of error of the paper machine, accept the electronic total. Otherwise you can have a full-blown recount with all the care you want.
"How many lines of code will a voting machine take? For it to be "fully audited", somebody needs to spend that $1000 per line of code.
"And don't forget that the voters are expecting a shiny antialiased GUI"
I'd argue that this is unnecessary. Look at, for example, ATMs. Do people have issues with how ATMs work? I hardly consider this a shiny GUI. I'd go so far as to say that a touchscreen is unneccessary; ATM style buttons down the side should be plenty. In case there are some people who are technophobic and don't like even ATMs, you can provide a paper ballot counted in the traditional way.
"...everything down to the disk access, kernel and filesystem needs to be verified."
So base it off of something. Surely there is already at least some sort of OS that has this degree of auditing, so build on top of it.
"It's a big job, just to reach the same standards that paper ballots already offer."
No, because once you have the audited system you have all the benefits of a DRE system (instant vote tallies, 100% accuracy, no overvotes/undervotes, easily verifiable results, etc.)
What? Read the documents... Only Diebold's TSx was banned. Other Diebold machines are on equal footing as far as certification status goes with other companies. That is, by the 2006 election there will need to be voter-verified paper trails.
"How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically?"
Any machine counting system (punch card, optical) has an error rate, no matter how small. Electronic voting is in theory 100% accurate. It's not susceptable to getting a ballot jammed in the machine (at which point it'd likely have to be discarded), or torn by the handlers, or misread by the machine, or tampered with by the handlers. A *secure* electronic system would be more accurate than anything you can do another way. It would also likely be cheaper than having three seperate machines.
(However, your solution would be better than current electonic systems.)
"Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer?"
This I'd be happy with either way. An electronically sent vote count both speeds up the counting (whether this is a plus or not is debatable) and, provided it's verified by later checks, doesn't really have any drawbacks I see.
"Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers?"
Two reasons I'd trust a fully audited system over a hand counted one. People can easily make mistakes, and exposure to the ballots makes me uneasy. I don't trust people. I would be satisfied if the people voting were blind to the candidate choices. However, the only way to ensure this is to not ever allow the ballots to pass through the voters' hands, because otherwise it'd be quite easy to deduce which votes represent who.
"I especially love the PDF export feature. It eleminates any compatibility issues for me when I need to send a document to someone, or take a file to the campus to print it out (I'm not interested in buying a printer that I'll use only every once in a while)."
A program such as PDFCreator (Google for it, I'm too lazy at the moment) allows PDF export through Word in Windows, and it's worth it to install so you can export from other programs too. It's not *quite* as convienient as the File -> Export as PDF, but gives more flexability as you can do many-up printing and other stuff.
Now wait, was this before or after bin Laden changed from the "good" list to the "bad" list?
Solution: have the "receipt" never pass through the hands of the voter.
The printer and collection basket are fully enclosed. When you are done voting, the receipt prints and appears in a window for you to look at and verify. If it is incorrect, the machine voids the vote and destroys the paper. If it is correct, the machine finalizes the vote and deposits the printout in the container.
"...there are no suprises like operator overloading.."
See, I *never* got this. When used properly, exactly how does operator overloading complicate reading the code? Sure, it can be abused, but I can make a function called add() that does nothing of the sort. I think
someComplexNo = anotherComplexNo + stillAnother;
is much more readable than
someComplexNo = complex.add(anotherComplexNo, stillAnother);
"AFAIK, that error is primarily because of user error -- i.e., improper marks, not properly filled in bubbles (or whatever), etc."
Yes, blame the user. I'm sure the scantron machines we had in high school were of a significantly lower caliber than those used to count votes (at least I hope so), but I still had more than one test answer mismarked, and I think I'm pretty careful.
"Although you may get into "hanging chad" territory, inconclusive/inaccurate counting can be redone by hand, whereas it cannot be with voting machines such as these."
That's why the electronic machines need paper trails. After each election, do a random sample of a few precincts to compare the paper votes to the reported tallies from the electronic machines.
I don't argue that a computer voting system is perfect. I don't even argue that today's computer voting systems are better than a paper ballot. However, it would not be hard to make electronic systems that *would* be better than paper ballots by a significant enough margin that it's worth to change. An auditable trail (i.e. paper trail) would be by far the single most important step to this point. The potential errorless aspects of electronic voting is necessary; elections are too close for even half of that of current paper methods.
See, the Daily Show isn't really fake news. That's the thing. What Stewart talks about is actually news. Usually when they are being outright false they are obvious about it, such as many of the "translations" they have. The problem, if there is one, is that many people use it as their source of news. Probably almost no one who saw this clip saw the actual interview it was from, and few heard details about that particular study.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though they are not a serious news outlet, because they are baseing the show entirely off of actual events (and because a somewhat alarming number of people actually use it for their news), they have a responsibility in my opinion to not be deceptive, either by just presenting things as-is or in a blatently false manner.
Paper scanners are still not entirely accurate. (The best numbers I can find, from an MIT/Caltech study, seem to say that on average abut half a percent of votes are misrecorded.) Computer voting systems should get essentially 100% accuracy. The only case where I can think of where it wouldn't would be a hardware failure. All you need to do is "candidate[voterchoice] += 1" and it'll increment. The accuracy issues all come from security, and the occasional hardware failure. However, having storage on both the individual voting machines and one central location per voting location should essentially negate that.
Jon Stewart: "But these things can't be that insecure..."
Some security researcher: "We broke into the board of elections and completely changed the result, erasing all of our traces and got back out"
Stewart: "...um, but sure, you give a guy a day and..."
S.S.R.: "We did it in 5 minutes."
[Paraphrased, but the idea is here... Also, it's possible that the last statement by the SSR was not referring to the entire operation; the Daily Show appearso to have a habit of making deceptive cuts. But who knows...]
"Masculine or feminine don't refer to people, only to words..."
Or to attributes. In fact, "1 a : MALE b : having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man" is the first definition in Merriam-Webster.
If you were sending the pigeons back and forth, and you had a finite number of them, then doubling the distance would halve the bandwidth. The pipe capacity would actually stay the same no matter what the distance; you have the same number of pigeons.
Free speech software almost implies free beer software. All it takes is one person who is generous (if that's what you want to call it) enough to buy it then plop it up on a website, from which it spreads. Presuming he follows the GPL and whatnot, this is completely legal.
The distinction btw. visible light and infrared probably shouldn't make a difference in the visible appeal. Most of the pictures you see of extraterrestral objects have had their color manipulated, and many are completely false color. In fact, ALL of the pictures you see from Spitzer would be false color, unless you can happen to see infrared light.
It really isn't in Dictionary.com..
No entry found for gullibl.
Did you mean gull ibl?
Suggestions:
gull ibl
gull-ibl
cullible
glibly
He's selling it with a 10x markup, so it's very possible he did put in a lot of money to fix it up.
17 USC 1201: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter."
Surely you can provide a list of the sources from which it was gathered, or at the very least give a description of the process.
Also, at any rate, it would still at least theoretically be up to the plaintiff/prosecution to prove that you *didn't* gather the information independently, though probably if you didn't have a description of the method that would go some way toward that goal.
I hate to spoil the party by not only actually reading the article, but the raw legislation, but you're wrong about this part:
m p/~c108Clq22s:e10301:
"If somebody else collected the scores for the same time period, their database would violate your copyright, even though they did the same work."
See Sec.4, paragraph (a) at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108:1:./te
"(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."
Not that I'm saying this law is a good idea--it isn't--but this is not one of the reasons.
Yes. The organization behind it is the Federal Acronym Registration Team. That organization, ironically, goes by it's full name.
(With apologies to Jon Stewart...)
However, this is the US we are talking about, specifically New Mexico. The argument would hold better water in Europe, but here in the US there are *very* few diesel powered cars, even among SUVs.
"yeah, it's much worse than the warm-up time a diesel needs. ...
see diesel arguement."
Yes, and because of the very large majority of cars that are sold with diesel engines, this is a good argument.
Even ignoring that, this is an entirely different matter: Diesel engines take a long time to warm up because that's how they work, not because there's an ignition interlock on the car mandidated by law with too little reason.
With all due respect, I don't see the alternatives to RIAA controlled music that much more appealing than the alternatives to Microsoft for most people.
I listen to mostly classical music and still I'd say 1/3-1/2 of my CDs are from one of the RIAA labels, despite labels like DG being more promenant in classical music. When you get into more mainstream music--no matter what your opinion of its quality, it is popular--the choice is greatly lessened.
In both cases I think that you have to have at least somewhat eccentric tastes to see the alternative as something that provides enough in as good of quality as is needed to counter the major choice.