Usually a little more than 50% of registered voters votes in a presidential election. I'm not sure how that compares to the overall population, but its worth noting [reletively] recent Moter Voter laws have made it easier for people who are on the fringes about voting to get registered. This is a good thing, but something that needs to be kept in mind when people bemoan decreasing turnout rates
WRT internet voting, while it has been piloted in a few situations (most recently in the Michigan primaries), Internet voting is an extremely BAD idea.
First there is the protential for technical malfeasence: denial-of-service, spoofing, viruses that record keystrokes, etc. As report in the DOD's SERVE internet voting system mentioned previously states articulately:
"These vulnerabilities are fundamental in the architecture of the Internet and of the PC hardware and software that is ubiquitous today. They cannot all be eliminated for the foreseeable future without some unforeseen radical breakthrough. It is quite possible that they will not be eliminated without a wholesale redesign and replacement of much of the hardware and software security systems that are part of, or connected to, today's Internet."
Second there is the potential for procedural malfeasence: employers, pastors and friends who "help" people to vote on the internet, internet voting salons sponsored by candidates that make it easy for you get a free t-shirt (or a pint of your favorite beer) with your vote, etc.
My favorite quote in this vein is Orville Wright saying that when he and his brother invented the airplane they imagined that it would make future wars impossible.
"We thought governments would recognize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy." - Orville Wright
Actually, Austraila is moving toward e-voting for exactly the same reasons that the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and others are--election administrators see advantages to these systems.
As I post below, these advantages usually don't have to do with speed of reporting, but rather long run cost, accessibility, and "second chance" voting.
There are a few reasons why e-voting advocates offer it as superior to paper and pencil. Speed of reporting and ability to do recounts usually aren't the selling factors, rather:
1) Lower cost in the long run over printing paper ballots. This resonates particularly well with election managers who are forced to *reprint* a bunch of ballots because of a mistake or change in the race.
2)Electronic voting systems can be used to accommodate voters with special needs. Electronic voting machines can often display a ballot in several languages and large print and can be designed to provide Braille or audio through headphones. Currently, in many districts, the blind don't have an entirely secret vote. This is temping for election administrators as accessibility requirements expand.
3) Touchscreen e-voting systems often provide an opportunity for the voter to check and confirm his or her votes, and can reduce the need for election officials to divine the "intent of the voter" that occurs in some pencil and paper, optical or punch systems. This is attractive to managers since Florida.
Oh, and your point is also well taken that touchscreen (DRE) and optical scan voting machines are different beasts and need to be treated that way. However, I think that both fall into a larger discussion of how we select and use technology in elections.
I'd say that the implications for e-voting have more to do with the procedures with which we select and certify voting equipment. The problem in Napa County was discovered through a state mandated manual recount.
1) Many paperless e-voting machines in CA currently don't allow for this sort of legally required manual recount.
2) Other states don't require manual recount that can uncover technical problems that lead to missed votes.
Your point is well taken though that the tinfoil hatters are distracting from a legitimate discussion of how to select, develop and audit election technology.
Kerry is proposing tax incentives for companies, that keep jobs in the U.S. I don't think he is talking about increasing taxes for companies that move. Slight difference, hopefully a similar effect if the company is competing with other U.S. firms that chose not to outsource.
Of course, this only works for companies that actually consider themselves U.S.-based for tax purposes. Is it Halliburton or Tyco that keeps a Post Office box in Jamaica so that they can avoid U.S taxes?
Of course. I'm suggesting that you shouldn't press releases based on unseen reports paid for by biased organizations. For one thing, while random sampling is a common practice for surveys where you actually want to determine something (rather than *prove* something), the press release never mentions that random sampling was used. What I am suggesting in my previous post is that the list of "consumers" called might have benefited from the lists that DMA member organizations have of people who have made purchases from unsolicted [rather than opt in] emails.
What's that? The *Direct Marketing Association* released a report saying that spam sales accounted for $11.7 billion?
But wait, isn't the DMA the very organization that represents the interests of the spam houses?
Gee, I wonder if they would have an interest in convincing people [particularly retailers] that spam is a successful form of advertising?
And what's that you say? The $11.7 billion estimate is based on calls to 1000 consumers? I wonder how they decided which 1000 people to call? I'll give you a hint...I bet they didn't opt in.
Yeah sorry, I'm going to take the bait and disagree with you on that. The telecoms (wireline) bureau of the FCC is actually pretty good; having made reasonably sensible policy over time that has generally been in the consumers interest. These guys are pure economists that don't seem to get as much pressure to make political positions. This probably owes partly to the fact that phones aren't as public (if I swear or expose my breast over the phone, only the person on the other end--probably my mother--suffers) and partly because its an area where competition is actually increasing--due to cell, cable, etc--rather than having increased competition for limited bandwidth.
The media bureau is problematic, not as you suggest because they are unelected and unaccountable, but rather precisely because they aren't insulated from political pressure. The head of the FCC is a political appointee that often chooses/is forced to pander to those who want to limit what you are allowed to see/hear/think.
Several groups concerned with electronic voting are recommending that people vote absentee in their voting district plans on using electronic voting machines without a voter-verifyable paper trail (VVPT). In many places, the deadline for getting an absentee primary ballot has passed, but some counties using e-voting technoloyg in CA and MD are allowing people to vote on paper (though not always at every voting station in the county--often only at one or two central polling stations).
Heck, you can always just claim that you are Amish and are religiously forbidden from voting electronically. I don't know if this is true, but I doubt the poll worker would be able to call you on it.
The most robust system for getting people a secure voter-verifiable receipt that they take with them is described here.
Essentually people leave with an one of two copies of an encrypted receipt (the other copy is saved at the polling place and can be visually compared). The receipt contians the vote information and can for instance be scanned by a "trusted" organization to make sure that the code represents the voters intent.
While certainly rubust, this solution only complicates the matter of giving people paper receipts without actually solving any of the problems. Who has access to scanners? How do you keep them from the vote buyers and vote intimidators (particularly when you are giving them to the groups with the most stake in the election outcome)? Why should people trust any more that their vote will be counted correctly, and that poor code won't correctly interpret their intended vote, but then subtract one from the candidate the voted for instead of adding (as happened in one polling station in GA in '00)?
1) Spamming does make money, because some idiots actually buy things from spammers;
2) People don't actually buy directly from spammers, but for marketers of some products (illicit, low yield) mainstream media just isn't an option, so the only way to make people aware that these products exist is through spam. (i.e. I may not buy herbal viagra, or dental insurance or an MBA directly from the people flooding my inbox, but now I know that I can buy these things online. If me and 100 of my neighbors search for these products later, at least a few will buy from the original spammer.
3) Professional spamming shops are doing a good job of convincing retailers that 1) and/or 2) are true.
Electronic voting in Brazil is the perfect example of why its important to have users (in this case citizens) involved in the development of a new technology that is supposedly designed to "make their lives easier/better."
The same machines that are used and trusted in Brasil were used in Angola in 1992. However, in Angola (then political party and later rebel group) UNITA claimed that the machines spewed out fraudulent results, resulting in a bloody civil war that only recently ended.
I don't know that following the IKEA directions counts as hacking.
Now if you used all of the leftover pieces that for some reason you didn't "need" in the rebuild to create pulley system that saved you some trips upstairs (or an IKEAbot to do the work for you)... now *that* would be hacking.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but I was surprised that the article didn't make mention of it...
Imagine an email delivery protocol that allows the user determines whether or not a sender is charged for sending email. Sending an email requires a fraction of a cent deposit. I as a recipient only get to chose whether the sender is charged, and if I so chose the sender's fraction of a cent goes to pay for the overhead of maintaining the system (and not to me as a recipient... this is important). If I don't chose to charge the user within some arbitrary time period... say one week, the sender's deposit is returned.
Why isn't this being mentioned? Has it already been deemed unviable.. or just dumb?
Thomas Kuhn worte a great book in the 60's called The Structure of Scientific Revolution, which coined the terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" in terms of competing scientific ideas. A must read for anyone interested in this stuff.
Someone else wrote a book on the structure of ideas that classified them into three areas, I believe ideas, paradigms, and worldviews. I remember it being a poignant argument, but can't remember for the life of me the author or title. Perhaps someone else knows?
I liked the article and agree with a lot of the authors sentiments, but disagree with the overall analysis for a number of reasons:
1. Dean didn't have the kind of control over his Internet presence to force it to zig or zag. You're right, Dean didn't plan on being an Internet candidate he wandered into it, or rather it wandered in to him. The pissed off Internet masses were bubbling and looking for someone relatively mainstream to throw their support behind. This was a relatively large and vocal group that looked scary, but in the end was a mutual admiration society of bloggers and activists that was going to love Dean and/or themselves no matter what Dean did. However, as much as the zealots of this group have and will always love Dean, the realists in the group realized that ultimately he is unelectable. Right or wrong, he's been painted as angry and he vocalizes for a small section of society. These realists fled the cause for a more electable (and yes mainstream) candidate, come primary day.
2. The media is dumb. You said it yourself, look at the kind of crap that's on at any given time. Just look at the coverage that Jackson's Teatgate has received. There is no media conspiracy to prop up Kerry. On the contrary, the media bubble had been so Dean focused for so long, that he was bound to disappoint. Instead of being a solid contender now, he a washout, because the media had set such high expectations of his performance.
I think it's more to do with your right to produce (and for that matter to purchase) quality goods that aren't "dumbed down" due to federal pressure. Along the same lines as not having the "right" to sell G5s to China.
Or perhaps the the poster considers conterfeiting free speech in the same way that some consider sharing copyrighted goods online to be free speech... I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's Chicago. Who was it that said that when he died, he wanted to be buried in Chicago so that they could continue to vote?
Usually a little more than 50% of registered voters votes in a presidential election. I'm not sure how that compares to the overall population, but its worth noting [reletively] recent Moter Voter laws have made it easier for people who are on the fringes about voting to get registered. This is a good thing, but something that needs to be kept in mind when people bemoan decreasing turnout rates
WRT internet voting, while it has been piloted in a few situations (most recently in the Michigan primaries), Internet voting is an extremely BAD idea.
First there is the protential for technical malfeasence: denial-of-service, spoofing, viruses that record keystrokes, etc. As report in the DOD's SERVE internet voting system mentioned previously states articulately:
"These vulnerabilities are fundamental in the architecture of the Internet and of the PC hardware and software that is ubiquitous today. They cannot all be eliminated for the foreseeable future without some unforeseen radical breakthrough. It is quite possible that they will not be eliminated without a wholesale redesign and replacement of much of the hardware and software security systems that are part of, or connected to, today's Internet."
Second there is the potential for procedural malfeasence: employers, pastors and friends who "help" people to vote on the internet, internet voting salons sponsored by candidates that make it easy for you get a free t-shirt (or a pint of your favorite beer) with your vote, etc.
Well if I can't get my "Where in the World/Time/Your Mom is Carmen Sandiego?"(r), then I'm not interested.
My favorite quote in this vein is Orville Wright saying that when he and his brother invented the airplane they imagined that it would make future wars impossible.
"We thought governments would recognize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy." - Orville Wright
Actually, Austraila is moving toward e-voting for exactly the same reasons that the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and others are--election administrators see advantages to these systems.
As I post below, these advantages usually don't have to do with speed of reporting, but rather long run cost, accessibility, and "second chance" voting.
There are a few reasons why e-voting advocates offer it as superior to paper and pencil. Speed of reporting and ability to do recounts usually aren't the selling factors, rather:
1) Lower cost in the long run over printing paper ballots. This resonates particularly well with election managers who are forced to *reprint* a bunch of ballots because of a mistake or change in the race.
2)Electronic voting systems can be used to accommodate voters with special needs. Electronic voting machines can often display a ballot in several languages and large print and can be designed to provide Braille or audio through headphones. Currently, in many districts, the blind don't have an entirely secret vote. This is temping for election administrators as accessibility requirements expand.
3) Touchscreen e-voting systems often provide an opportunity for the voter to check and confirm his or her votes, and can reduce the need for election officials to divine the "intent of the voter" that occurs in some pencil and paper, optical or punch systems. This is attractive to managers since Florida.
Oh, and your point is also well taken that touchscreen (DRE) and optical scan voting machines are different beasts and need to be treated that way. However, I think that both fall into a larger discussion of how we select and use technology in elections.
I'd say that the implications for e-voting have more to do with the procedures with which we select and certify voting equipment. The problem in Napa County was discovered through a state mandated manual recount.
1) Many paperless e-voting machines in CA currently don't allow for this sort of legally required manual recount.
2) Other states don't require manual recount that can uncover technical problems that lead to missed votes.
Your point is well taken though that the tinfoil hatters are distracting from a legitimate discussion of how to select, develop and audit election technology.
Kerry is proposing tax incentives for companies, that keep jobs in the U.S. I don't think he is talking about increasing taxes for companies that move. Slight difference, hopefully a similar effect if the company is competing with other U.S. firms that chose not to outsource.
Of course, this only works for companies that actually consider themselves U.S.-based for tax purposes. Is it Halliburton or Tyco that keeps a Post Office box in Jamaica so that they can avoid U.S taxes?
Of course. I'm suggesting that you shouldn't press releases based on unseen reports paid for by biased organizations. For one thing, while random sampling is a common practice for surveys where you actually want to determine something (rather than *prove* something), the press release never mentions that random sampling was used. What I am suggesting in my previous post is that the list of "consumers" called might have benefited from the lists that DMA member organizations have of people who have made purchases from unsolicted [rather than opt in] emails.
Or how about a ton of salt.
What's that? The *Direct Marketing Association* released a report saying that spam sales accounted for $11.7 billion?
But wait, isn't the DMA the very organization that represents the interests of the spam houses?
Gee, I wonder if they would have an interest in convincing people [particularly retailers] that spam is a successful form of advertising?
And what's that you say? The $11.7 billion estimate is based on calls to 1000 consumers? I wonder how they decided which 1000 people to call? I'll give you a hint...I bet they didn't opt in.
Yeah sorry, I'm going to take the bait and disagree with you on that. The telecoms (wireline) bureau of the FCC is actually pretty good; having made reasonably sensible policy over time that has generally been in the consumers interest. These guys are pure economists that don't seem to get as much pressure to make political positions. This probably owes partly to the fact that phones aren't as public (if I swear or expose my breast over the phone, only the person on the other end--probably my mother--suffers) and partly because its an area where competition is actually increasing--due to cell, cable, etc--rather than having increased competition for limited bandwidth.
The media bureau is problematic, not as you suggest because they are unelected and unaccountable, but rather precisely because they aren't insulated from political pressure. The head of the FCC is a political appointee that often chooses/is forced to pander to those who want to limit what you are allowed to see/hear/think.
Several groups concerned with electronic voting are recommending that people vote absentee in their voting district plans on using electronic voting machines without a voter-verifyable paper trail (VVPT). In many places, the deadline for getting an absentee primary ballot has passed, but some counties using e-voting technoloyg in CA and MD are allowing people to vote on paper (though not always at every voting station in the county--often only at one or two central polling stations).
Heck, you can always just claim that you are Amish and are religiously forbidden from voting electronically. I don't know if this is true, but I doubt the poll worker would be able to call you on it.
The most robust system for getting people a secure voter-verifiable receipt that they take with them is described here.
Essentually people leave with an one of two copies of an encrypted receipt (the other copy is saved at the polling place and can be visually compared). The receipt contians the vote information and can for instance be scanned by a "trusted" organization to make sure that the code represents the voters intent.
While certainly rubust, this solution only complicates the matter of giving people paper receipts without actually solving any of the problems. Who has access to scanners? How do you keep them from the vote buyers and vote intimidators (particularly when you are giving them to the groups with the most stake in the election outcome)? Why should people trust any more that their vote will be counted correctly, and that poor code won't correctly interpret their intended vote, but then subtract one from the candidate the voted for instead of adding (as happened in one polling station in GA in '00)?
Yes. They do. Therein lies the rub. Either:
1) Spamming does make money, because some idiots actually buy things from spammers;
2) People don't actually buy directly from spammers, but for marketers of some products (illicit, low yield) mainstream media just isn't an option, so the only way to make people aware that these products exist is through spam. (i.e. I may not buy herbal viagra, or dental insurance or an MBA directly from the people flooding my inbox, but now I know that I can buy these things online. If me and 100 of my neighbors search for these products later, at least a few will buy from the original spammer.
3) Professional spamming shops are doing a good job of convincing retailers that 1) and/or 2) are true.
For similar arguements, check out a recent op-ed by economist Paul Krugman and a recent article on outsourcing in the Economist.
Yes, I referenced an article from the Economist. I realize that makes me a f#$%'n prick.
Electronic voting in Brazil is the perfect example of why its important to have users (in this case citizens) involved in the development of a new technology that is supposedly designed to "make their lives easier/better."
The same machines that are used and trusted in Brasil were used in Angola in 1992. However, in Angola (then political party and later rebel group) UNITA claimed that the machines spewed out fraudulent results, resulting in a bloody civil war that only recently ended.
I don't know that following the IKEA directions counts as hacking.
Now if you used all of the leftover pieces that for some reason you didn't "need" in the rebuild to create pulley system that saved you some trips upstairs (or an IKEAbot to do the work for you)... now *that* would be hacking.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but I was surprised that the article didn't make mention of it...
Imagine an email delivery protocol that allows the user determines whether or not a sender is charged for sending email. Sending an email requires a fraction of a cent deposit. I as a recipient only get to chose whether the sender is charged, and if I so chose the sender's fraction of a cent goes to pay for the overhead of maintaining the system (and not to me as a recipient... this is important). If I don't chose to charge the user within some arbitrary time period... say one week, the sender's deposit is returned.
Why isn't this being mentioned? Has it already been deemed unviable.. or just dumb?
Thomas Kuhn worte a great book in the 60's called The Structure of Scientific Revolution, which coined the terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" in terms of competing scientific ideas. A must read for anyone interested in this stuff.
Someone else wrote a book on the structure of ideas that classified them into three areas, I believe ideas, paradigms, and worldviews. I remember it being a poignant argument, but can't remember for the life of me the author or title. Perhaps someone else knows?
After several attempts using Firebird 0.7, I couldn't download the Windows installer.
With IE it worked on the first try.
I liked the article and agree with a lot of the authors sentiments, but disagree with the overall analysis for a number of reasons:
1. Dean didn't have the kind of control over his Internet presence to force it to zig or zag. You're right, Dean didn't plan on being an Internet candidate he wandered into it, or rather it wandered in to him. The pissed off Internet masses were bubbling and looking for someone relatively mainstream to throw their support behind. This was a relatively large and vocal group that looked scary, but in the end was a mutual admiration society of bloggers and activists that was going to love Dean and/or themselves no matter what Dean did. However, as much as the zealots of this group have and will always love Dean, the realists in the group realized that ultimately he is unelectable. Right or wrong, he's been painted as angry and he vocalizes for a small section of society. These realists fled the cause for a more electable (and yes mainstream) candidate, come primary day.
2. The media is dumb. You said it yourself, look at the kind of crap that's on at any given time. Just look at the coverage that Jackson's Teatgate has received. There is no media conspiracy to prop up Kerry. On the contrary, the media bubble had been so Dean focused for so long, that he was bound to disappoint. Instead of being a solid contender now, he a washout, because the media had set such high expectations of his performance.
All I have time for. Discuss.
Did this actually happen, or was is just a line in "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"?
Excellent film by the way.
The real worry is when you start having government funded virus writers.
...oh wait. That's already happening. And its likely a boom market.
Or even worse: virus writers who are funded by spammers write worms that harvest email addresses or turn innocent computers into spam proxy servers...
I think it's more to do with your right to produce (and for that matter to purchase) quality goods that aren't "dumbed down" due to federal pressure. Along the same lines as not having the "right" to sell G5s to China.
Or perhaps the the poster considers conterfeiting free speech in the same way that some consider sharing copyrighted goods online to be free speech... I don't know.