So when bigger states started switching to winner-take-all, suddenly the difference between a 45-55 decision and a 55-45 decision in New York, which might have made a difference of 5 or six electors before, was worth 40 electors. Guaranteeing a win in New York became very important for a potential candidate, and New York became disproportionately important.
Unfortunately today, New York and California are totally taken for granted and are effectively ignored by the candidates. The Republicans know they have no chance and ignore the state; the Democrats know the vote has already been won and ignore the state.
So I don't think you need to be politically naive to think that proportional assignment of electors would be a good thing for some states. It could shift the focus away from the 10 or so "battle ground states" and potentially back to a more contested national race. It just wouldn't be good for the current "battle ground states".
I stated that unless the source code was open to inspection that the public had no way of trusting the voting process.
Why do people always bring up the source code has to be open. Open source has absolutely nothing to do with this issue.
This isn't a binary you are going to build and install on your home computer, you have no way of knowing that the source code in escrow was used to build the binaries on the voting machine. In fact, Diebold has been repeatedly caught installing uncertified software on voting machines used in elections.
The real solution is providing the voter with a printed ballot showing who their vote will be counted for - then having the municipality store that ballot for use in any required recounts. Without ballots outside the voting machines, there is no protection from malfunctions or deliberate malfeasance.
Not so. As I type, my little brother is making $25/hr to sit in a running pickup truck next to a public water supply and play starcraft on his laptop.
Back to the original point, unless your brother is protecting a national monument or such, the funding for his $25/hour is coming from the local community in the form of state or local taxes.
He wants that if in Word CTRL+X is "cut", then in every single program it's still "cut". He wants that if F1 is "Help", then by God, it better be "Help" in all programs. And if one program's scrollbars behave in one particular way, then it better be the same way in all programs.
If you want to make that comparison, stick to menu layouts. Keyboard shortcuts do not remain the same even in MS applications. Try CTRL+F in Word and Outlook and notice the difference. As long as you use the mouse, the Windows UI is very similar across apps. Of course with the "personalized menus" option, the command locations within a specific menu will no longer be consistent across applications either.
My idea is to conceal the polling places, so that only people who are willing to go to some effort can find them.
While that was probably tongue in cheek, it would be interesting to see what would happen if the straight party ticket block was eliminated and it was against the law to print party affiliations on the ballot itself. This might actually mean that you would have to know something about who you are voting for...
You can't use images. That would preclude use by blind people (American's with Disabilities Act), which gets us back to the whole question of why are we doing this complex system? Since you can't see who you voted for, you must still trust that your vote was not tampered with or miscounted.
Why not just mandate spot hand counts of x% of the precincts to make sure the machine counts are accurate. If there is above a pre-determined percentage of errors or the race is close, perform a recount by either rescanning or manually reading and counting the ballots. This is another place where their system falls short - from my reading it sounds like it would be extremely difficult to hand count a large number of ballots if there were questions about the system accuracy.
Just skip the whole verifying your vote was counted after the fact system, and have the printed ballot scanned before you leave. This gives you a chance to correct a misprint or otherwise bad ballot.
What can be proven outside the voting booth is that the vote was valid and counted in the process. What the actual vote was cannot be proven without releasing every audit step... and part of the paradigm is that half of the audit steps are released.
Then why go through all the complicated receipt junk? Why not just assign the voter a number that they can look up on the web site? The number could be encrypted and embedded in a two digit bar code on the paper ballot to prevent anyone from reading the number during a hand recount.
In my opinion, the paper proposes a very complicated system that has minimal benefits over a simple dumb terminal that prints ballots which are both human readable and scannable. Just separate the whole ballot recording/generation from the counting process.
Besides, if you see on the web page that the vote wasn't counted - what are you going to do about it? The time to figure out there is an error in the ballot has to be before the voter leaves the polling place - any time after that is too late.
Anytime you start a closed-source program, faith in the coders/packagers is what makes you believe that nothing will go wrong.
While open sourcing these e-voting systems is a good first step, it is not a solution. Taking the skepticism one step further, how do you know that the source you have seen generated the binaries installed on the voting machine? What about the system collecting the reports from all the e-voting machines?
The only viable system is one that produces a human readable copy of the completed ballot (can optionally also have a bar code to be machine readable). These ballots can then be used in recounts or to spot check the accuracy of the machines.
The Diebold systems provide no way to verify that they have accurately recorded the votes. Therefore regardless of any software changes or open sourcing, these machines are fundamentally flawed and need to be redesigned.
That being the case, how many here think the EU will actually bother to stand up to Microsoft in the end?
Hard to say. One thing that must be remembered is that MS is a US monopoly that is also trying to leverage its monopoly to the detriment of several large European software companies.
MS certainly will not get the same level of sympathy from the EU commission that they have gotten from the US Justice system.
It is true that OpenBSD systems may be more expensive in terms of TCO than a $50 home router, but only if your time has value.
Or if you have to pay for electricity, or if space is limited.
The big question is whether the consumer router lets you do what you want/need with your network. The Linux/OpenBSD solution gives you the ability to do a lot of things that would otherwise require commercial grade equipment.
Researcher Darko Kirovski is developing a low-cost way for motor-vehicle departments and companies to create identification cards on paper. The system uses compression technology to turn photos into data and encryption techniques to make forgery nearly impossible, Kirovski said.
Someone could receive a driver's license by e-mail and print it out at home, Kirovski said.
While you could add a digital signature so you would know I modified the data, short of equipping every police officer, bouncer, etc with digital readers to validate the signature - every high/college school student in the country would instantly become legal drinking age as they alter the human readable data printed on the license. It looks like someone isn't thinking this through completely.
But maybe that's the plan. After all they need to sell something new...
Even when you finally manage to prove to your boss that you can do excellent work outside the walls of the company, he/she often still clings to outdated ideas of time management and employee tracking.
I'll disagree with this. A good chunk of my value to the company I work for is the ability to steer some of the other developers back on track, identify problems, or just generally help them along. If we weren't in the same building, a lot of time would be wasted by people not solving the problem or waiting to exchange e-mails to get to the root of the problem.
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Unfortunately today, New York and California are totally taken for granted and are effectively ignored by the candidates. The Republicans know they have no chance and ignore the state; the Democrats know the vote has already been won and ignore the state.
So I don't think you need to be politically naive to think that proportional assignment of electors would be a good thing for some states. It could shift the focus away from the 10 or so "battle ground states" and potentially back to a more contested national race. It just wouldn't be good for the current "battle ground states".
Why do people always bring up the source code has to be open. Open source has absolutely nothing to do with this issue.
This isn't a binary you are going to build and install on your home computer, you have no way of knowing that the source code in escrow was used to build the binaries on the voting machine. In fact, Diebold has been repeatedly caught installing uncertified software on voting machines used in elections.
The real solution is providing the voter with a printed ballot showing who their vote will be counted for - then having the municipality store that ballot for use in any required recounts. Without ballots outside the voting machines, there is no protection from malfunctions or deliberate malfeasance.
Sure he did.
Try looking a little harder next time.
Back to the original point, unless your brother is protecting a national monument or such, the funding for his $25/hour is coming from the local community in the form of state or local taxes.
If you want to make that comparison, stick to menu layouts. Keyboard shortcuts do not remain the same even in MS applications. Try CTRL+F in Word and Outlook and notice the difference. As long as you use the mouse, the Windows UI is very similar across apps. Of course with the "personalized menus" option, the command locations within a specific menu will no longer be consistent across applications either.
While that was probably tongue in cheek, it would be interesting to see what would happen if the straight party ticket block was eliminated and it was against the law to print party affiliations on the ballot itself. This might actually mean that you would have to know something about who you are voting for...
You can't use images. That would preclude use by blind people (American's with Disabilities Act), which gets us back to the whole question of why are we doing this complex system? Since you can't see who you voted for, you must still trust that your vote was not tampered with or miscounted.
Why not just mandate spot hand counts of x% of the precincts to make sure the machine counts are accurate. If there is above a pre-determined percentage of errors or the race is close, perform a recount by either rescanning or manually reading and counting the ballots. This is another place where their system falls short - from my reading it sounds like it would be extremely difficult to hand count a large number of ballots if there were questions about the system accuracy.
Just skip the whole verifying your vote was counted after the fact system, and have the printed ballot scanned before you leave. This gives you a chance to correct a misprint or otherwise bad ballot.
Then why go through all the complicated receipt junk? Why not just assign the voter a number that they can look up on the web site? The number could be encrypted and embedded in a two digit bar code on the paper ballot to prevent anyone from reading the number during a hand recount.
In my opinion, the paper proposes a very complicated system that has minimal benefits over a simple dumb terminal that prints ballots which are both human readable and scannable. Just separate the whole ballot recording/generation from the counting process.
Besides, if you see on the web page that the vote wasn't counted - what are you going to do about it? The time to figure out there is an error in the ballot has to be before the voter leaves the polling place - any time after that is too late.
While open sourcing these e-voting systems is a good first step, it is not a solution. Taking the skepticism one step further, how do you know that the source you have seen generated the binaries installed on the voting machine? What about the system collecting the reports from all the e-voting machines?
The only viable system is one that produces a human readable copy of the completed ballot (can optionally also have a bar code to be machine readable). These ballots can then be used in recounts or to spot check the accuracy of the machines.
The Diebold systems provide no way to verify that they have accurately recorded the votes. Therefore regardless of any software changes or open sourcing, these machines are fundamentally flawed and need to be redesigned.
Hard to say. One thing that must be remembered is that MS is a US monopoly that is also trying to leverage its monopoly to the detriment of several large European software companies.
MS certainly will not get the same level of sympathy from the EU commission that they have gotten from the US Justice system.
Or if you have to pay for electricity, or if space is limited.
The big question is whether the consumer router lets you do what you want/need with your network. The Linux/OpenBSD solution gives you the ability to do a lot of things that would otherwise require commercial grade equipment.
Researcher Darko Kirovski is developing a low-cost way for motor-vehicle departments and companies to create identification cards on paper. The system uses compression technology to turn photos into data and encryption techniques to make forgery nearly impossible, Kirovski said.
Someone could receive a driver's license by e-mail and print it out at home, Kirovski said.
While you could add a digital signature so you would know I modified the data, short of equipping every police officer, bouncer, etc with digital readers to validate the signature - every high/college school student in the country would instantly become legal drinking age as they alter the human readable data printed on the license. It looks like someone isn't thinking this through completely.
But maybe that's the plan. After all they need to sell something new...
I'll disagree with this. A good chunk of my value to the company I work for is the ability to steer some of the other developers back on track, identify problems, or just generally help them along. If we weren't in the same building, a lot of time would be wasted by people not solving the problem or waiting to exchange e-mails to get to the root of the problem.