Open source voting booth code is one thing, but someone has to sit down and read through it.
Open source isn't a solution here, IMHO. How do I as the election inspector/pollworker verify that the software on the machine itself hasn't been tampered with? Keep in mind that you aren't dealing with me -- you are dealing with 80 year old poll workers.
Linux is open source. Given enough time you could read through all the source to a complete Linux distribution and tell me that there are no backdoors/anything nasty in it. But if I bring a PC running Linux into your office and give you half an hour with it, can you honestly tell me that you could find something I changed? A voting machine will be ever harder, as it's doubtful that you'd have superuser access to it, and most poll workers aren't IT people.
m registered as an independent, I typically lean Democrat on most issues, but prefer not to "belong" to anyone's party. Would I still be useful as an independent, as most things seem to require at least one Democrat and one Republican?
Depends on your county. Technically speaking the political parties themselves (on a county level) certify lists of inspectors to the county board of elections, who then assigns them where needed. In Broome County the Democrats will happily take you if you are registered Working Families or Liberal, the Republicans will take you if you are registered Conservative. I honestly don't know how it works if you aren't in ANY party at all. Your best bet would be to call your county board and ask them. Incidentally, are you registered in the Independence Party of New York or just a blank party enrollment? There is a difference that not everybody understands.
Do you generally work in the district where you vote, or are you specifically assigned another district, or do you just get assigned where needed?
I was able to get assigned to my own district. I don't know about other counties but in Broome, they have two types of assignments. Permanent and substitute. Once you have a permanent district assignment it isn't going to change unless you request it to. You could probably work as a substitute until an opening became available in your home district, if one isn't open already. In Broome County they will keep you within your own township, so you aren't that far away from home even if you aren't in your own district.
If you work in another district, do you have to vote absentee? (My understanding is that volunteers work the whole day, but let me know if I'm wrong on that account as well.)
You can vote absentee. But it's not a requirement as long as the chairperson in your district doesn't mind letting you leave to vote. I schedule lunch breaks for the inspectors at my location -- the only thing you have to keep in mind is the rule that at least one from each party needs to be present. So I'll send one Republican to lunch/vote at 10:30, a Democrat at 11:30, the other Republican at 12:30 and myself at 1:30. It's really up to the Chairperson of the Board of Inspectors at the particular polling place. Incidentally, the chairperson is chosen by a majority vote of the four inspectors assigned to that polling place.
It doesn't always quite work out that way in practice though. There are usually 3-4 people working when I go to the polls, so I haven't seen it personally, but I've had friends go vote and find only one person staffing the poll at that time (I don't know where the others were, out to lunch, bathroom, whatever).
That comes back to the age and competence of the poll workers. I wouldn't allow it to happen at my polling place. If you do observe this then you should report it to your County Board of Elections because it's a serious violation of the Election Law.
I've had minor problems with the people at my poll site in the past. Most of it related to them sleeping through our training sessions and then trying to do things their own way. As an example, we aren't supposed to sign more then two or three people in at a time. A) It becomes hard to keep track who has yet to use the machine if you sign more then two or three at a time. B) People sitting in line have been known to decide they have someplace they need to be and leave. All fine and good if you haven't signed the book -- you can come back later -- but if you sign the book and then leave before voting you are SOL, we can't let you into the machine.
There's four of us at my polling site. The youngest one besides me is 81 years old. They can't manage to do an affidavit ballot properly (I get to do all of those), they can't follow simple procedures like verifying the addresses in the poll book or not numbering the legal pad ahead, they spend time gossiping while people wait in line, etc, etc, etc.
This is going to remain a problem regardless of what kind of voting technology we use. I don't have a better solution then encouraging people to volunteer. The system we have in place now in New York is damn near tamper-proof. If we could get a decent number of young and motivated people to work on election day we wouldn't have any problems at all. The morons in Washington pushing electronic voting just don't understand this.
*sigh*, I think it's time to write another letter to my Assemblywoman (who happens to sit on the Election Law committee). And probably one to our AG, encouraging him to fight this suit with all the resources of New York State. And maybe a letter to my Congressman along the lines of "WTF? Why are the Feds forcing this on us?"
IAANYSIOE (I am a New York State Inspector of Elections)
That is, of course, assuming that the machine is working correctly and hasn't been tampered with
The machine is sealed against tampering with numbered seals as well as protective and public counters. We verify all of this information in the morning before we open the polls. This is one of the reasons that we have to be there at 5:30AM even though the polls don't open until 6:00AM. Once the polls close we re-seal the machine and document the seal number, public and protective counter numbers, etc, etc.
or that election workers aren't deliberately reporting false numbers.
There are checks and balances in place to prevent this:
The Election Law mandates that you have at least one election worker from each major party present at the polling place at all times. "Major Party" is defined in NYS Law as the two parties that had the highest and second highest number of votes in the last gubernatorial election, so in theory it need not be the Democrats and Republicans.
The Election Inspectors are only provided with the keys to open and close the machine for voting. We don't have the keys required to open up the machine to re-program the ballot or zero the counters.
The machine has two counters. A protective counter (the total number of votes ever cast on the machine) and a public counter (number of votes cast that day). The public counter needs to match the number of people that signed the poll book. The signatures in the poll book are all verified. There is no way for us to cast extra votes without the tampering being discovered.
Lastly, when we canvass the vote at the end of the night and call in the results, those are the unofficial results. The official certified results happen when the Board of Elections opens up the machine several weeks after the election and verifies the counts match what we provided on election night.
I find it amusing that opponents of e-voting are so skeptical of the system's integrity, yet seem to have no similar concerns about the old methods.
The difference between the new methods and the old methods is that almost anybody can verify the integrity of the lever machines. You can't tamper with it and have votes go to another candidate because the machine isn't that smart -- each candidate has a counter that is mechanically linked to the lever. The Board of Elections can open up the machine and visually verify that each lever is attached to the correct counter. The inspectors at the polling place can verify that the ballot on the machine matches the ballot for the polling place.
Contrast that to a software based system. Now you need somebody with computer and coding skills to verify the software on the machine. Even open source software isn't a perfect solution here, because there is no way for the inspectors at the polling place to verify that the software on the machine hasn't been tampered with after it left the Board of Elections.
Disclaimer: I'm a Election Inspector in New York State. All of what I'm about to say is based on my experience running a polling place and what I've read of the New York State Election Law.
as long as there is some type of backup system (perhaps an absentee ballot to use in place of the machine if there isn't a second machine available on-site), it isn't an issue.
We have a backup system. It's called emergency paper ballots. If the machine breaks down we start using them. They are the same paper ballots that are used for affidavit voters (people who claim to be registered but whom aren't in the poll book) but they go into separate envelopes and can't be disputed or challenged. The end result is the same as if you had voted on the machine.
As for the latter, the machine keeps running totals on vote per candidate and total voters. You can't go add a vote for someone without adding to the running total, which is supposed to match up with the election roll count (ie, we have 357 people who voted at this station today but the machine count shows a total of 413 voters). How do you know which of the 56 votes shouldn't count without invalidating all 357 legitimate votes?
You don't. This is going to be a problem with any voting system. You have to trust the Election Inspectors to ensure that people have properly signed the poll book and meet the requirements to vote. I don't see how you can design any voting system (electronic or otherwise) that preserves the anonymous ballot while providing a way to delete votes that were improperly cast.
Not just that, but the machines are also prone to the poll workers, especially if there isn't someone from each party, deciding to vote on behalf of people who never chose to vote
The New York State Election Law mandates that there be at least one poll worker from each major party present at the polling place. Typically there's two Republicans and two Democrats. We schedule our breaks around this -- both Republicans don't go to lunch at the same time for example. Furthermore, if a voter requires assistance and we have to go into the machine with them, at least TWO inspectors have to go into the machine, one from each party. The Election Law defines the two major parties as the parties that had the highest and second highest vote counts in the last Governor's election. So in theory it need not even be the Democrats and Republicans.
The biggest problem we face is the fact that nobody young bothers to volunteer to work as an Election Inspector. The overwhelming majority of us are old retirees. I'm the exception at 26. The political parties and various county board of elections are constantly fighting to retain enough Inspectors. In some poll places we have had to resort to swearing in registered voters (the Election Law allows this) to serve as Inspectors because something happened (in one district both Republican inspectors had heart attacks within an hour of each other, shit you not...) and the County Board wasn't able to get anybody over to our polling place in a timely manner.
There's also a huge difference between somebody who is 26 years old and somebody who is 80. I could take two random people off the street in their 20s or 30s, spend 20 minutes training them and run the busiest polling place in the state without any issues. It's a different animal when you are working with people in their 80s and 90s. I've seen districts fall apart during primary elections with depressingly low turnout.
The solution to any perceived problems with voting in New York State is to encourage younger people to work as Inspectors. By in large our machines work just fine. Our procedures are just fine. We just need better people. I would encourage anybody who lives in New York State to contact your local board of elections and get put on the list. It's not that much time out of your life -- you have to attend one training class (they
McDonald's have learned that Hot Coffee can be expensive....
Random off topic musing on my part, but the idea that McDonald's had to pay because of the coffee thing is completely wrong. Their insurance company had to pay because of the coffee lawsuit, not McDonald's.
Was this the right thing for the framers of the constitution to do?
I don't think the framers of the constitution imagined copyright lasting for seventy years after the death of the author. How exactly does that help your poor staving creative artist?
No one should be getting bent out of shape regarding the "piracy" of 25 year old recordings. They should be PD by now (or nearly so).
They should be public domain within a reasonable amount of time -- say ten years -- of course, thanks to this however, they remain copyrighted for the life of the author plus 70 years.
How exactly this advances the progress of "science and the useful arts" is beyond me, but there you go:(
Actually, your ISP one of the few parties that have the power to decrypt your encrypted traffic using a MITM attack
Well, if they start pulling that shit, the next step is to build some sort of certificate verification functionality into the various p2p protocols. Granted, there wouldn't be a centralized certificate authority, but with the number of fairly smart people you have working on these protocols I'm sure that some sort of solution would be arrived at.
Granted, they'd have to rewrite your and the other side's packets, but they could do it.
How much CPU power would it require to perform a real-time MITM attack on gigabits of encrypted p2p traffic? Can they afford it? More to the point, is it even legal for them to do this in the Western World?
So the end result will be that ALL encrypted traffic matching a certain set of patterns will be throttled and/or blocked. Basically, everyone is going to suffer because of a bunch a parasites that can't even be bothered to pay for the music or movies they enjoy.
Give me a fucking break. There are justifications for protocol encryption that go beyond warez and music. Like obtaining a decent download rate for your legal torrents, which you can't do without encryption because your ISP has decided that bittorrent is bad.
Sorry, but it's most definitely NOT "a good thing".
Why? As the volume of encrypted traffic goes up, those of us using encryption for whatever reason (be it privacy or the desire to mask something illegal) blend into the crowd better.
So yeah, the spokesman here is an idiot. Encrypted torrents will NOT help you evade responsibility for sharing copyrighted materials. Not even a little bit. This guy is a dumbass.
He's not a complete dumbass. Encrypted torrents will defeat the purposed ISP level copyright-filtering that some telcos (*cough* AT&T *cough*) are advocating. How do you tell if that encrypted data is the source code to Windows 2000, a Linux ISO or a collection of Chuck Norris jokes?
Granted, I think this is a good thing. It's none of my ISPs business what are in my packets.
Precisely my point, I'm not criticizing the administration at the time, rather the public opinion on how foreign policy should be done
Well, consider the events of the time. The United States intervened in the First World War, only to have most of our "allies" default on their war debts and completely ignore Wilson's 14 points in favor of imposing a harsh peace treaty on Germany. A peace treaty that arguably set the stage for the Second World War. Also consider the fact that the United States had a sizable German population not exactly eager to go to war with their native land and that the evils of the Nazi regime weren't exactly obvious in the late 30s.
I'm not defending isolationism because hindsight proves that it was the wrong approach. Just trying to explain it in the context of the times. In any case, I'd place the blame less on the United States for WW2 and more on Britain and France for appeasing Hitler (at a time when the German military machine was actually quite weak) and allowing him to over-run Poland while sitting on their collective butts and giving the initiative to the Germans.
Lol, I seriously apologize for the WWII analogies, it's the best example I could think of, Godwin should have an affirmative defense for logical arguments that actually make sense and are on-topic versus random name-calling.
Eh, I'm a WW2 history buff, so they don't bother me. And I think Godwin's law only relates to making comparisons to the Nazis -- not US Foreign Policy in the 30s;)
(No I didn't invoke Godwin the US was very much an isolationist nation back then and had we gotten into the war sooner it would have probably ended sooner.
Not very likely for a number of reasons. The least of which is the American public was completely opposed to the idea of getting involved and if FDR had tried he probably would have been impeached.
Beyond that, with the exception of the Navy, our armed forces in the 30s were a joke. They only started to expand them in 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor. Why do you think it took until 1944 before the Allies were ready for the cross-channel invasion of Europe? There is little to nothing that the United States could do early in the war that would have changed anything.
FDR did the best he could with the resources and public opinion that he had to contend with. He started to quietly build up our forces, work on public opinion and do everything in his power (lend-lease) to keep the UK and Russia in the war. I don't see what he could have done differently.
Does the gag order in the Grand Jury example you mention above prevent you from discussing matters in the case at hand with your attorney (not that I can think of a likely reason why you would want or need to, but that's irrelevant)? Somehow, I don't think it does, but as I understand, the Patriot Act prohibits discussing or revealing the contents of an NSL with anyone for any reason at all.
Ya know, I don't think I even realized just how Orwellian the term "National Security Letter" sounds until now. Scary stuff. But how do they prevent you from talking about it with your lawyer? Even if the letter of the law is that you can't discuss it with ANYONE, how are they going to enforce that? They'd have to prove that you talked about it with your lawyer and he can't testify against you -- attorney-client privilege and all that.
Understand that I'm not making a case for these practices because they scare the hell out of me. I'm just wondering how they would actually enforce a gag order as it relates to discussions with your attorney.
but preventing anyone who receives an NSL from discussing the Letter with legal counsel before taking action that might -- no, make that "DOES" -- violate the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without due process of law is every bit as big an issue
Well, let's assume it was a standard issue subpoena/search warrant. They'd be able to discuss it with counsel now, but they wouldn't be able to stop the police/fbi/whatever from executing said warrant while they called up the attorney. If the police show up at your door with a search warrant you can't bar them from entering your house while you get your attorney on the phone.
Did you catch that? "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Regardless of what the so-called "Patriot Act" says, we do have the right to speak out unless we choose to keep silent and let the government sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of "National Security".
I hate to break it to you, but this is nothing new. For better or worse Congress and the various states have made laws that abridge the freedom of speech. And I'm not even talking about the tired old "fire!" in the crowded theater example. Ever served on a Grand Jury? You are sworn to secrecy and can't discuss ANYTHING about the proceedings.
I don't see a problem with a gag order that's imposed that prevents you from talking about an ongoing criminal investigation. Society has an interest in making sure the suspect doesn't flee the jurisdiction before they can be arrested and brought to trial. I do have a serious fucking problem with the fact that they can force ISPs to turn over all of this information without so much as a court order. THAT should be the issue here.
There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux
I hate to break it to you, but A) the WRT54G isn't an access point, it's a NAT router that happens to have an AP built into it and B) the new versions DON'T run Linux, they use vxworks. Presumably Cisco wasn't very impressed by being forced to release their code and opted for a solution that they could control better.
They still release a version that runs Linux and can be flashed easily -- the WRT54GL -- but it's not nearly as mainstream by any means.
Do tell me what "significant negative impact" a Gore administration would have had.
I could ramble on and on about this and go much further then "we wouldn't be in Iraq right now", but those debates are pointless so I'm not going to bother.
I don't see how implying Bush is an idiot translates into "calling people retards who disagree with his political opinions". And, frankly, I think you'd have to admit that everything about Bush (particularly his style of speech) makes it very easy to mock him. Even my Republican friends would agree with that. I've seen Stewart go after hypocrisy on the left many times. Hell, with the possible exception of Giuliani they've been spending a lot more time mocking all of the Democratic candidates then they have the Republican ones. And Giuliani is easy for them to mock, since the show is based in friggen NYC and he was mayor there for years.
For one the republican Shills like Hannity *admit they are shills*..
Well, if by "admit" you mean claim to be be an independent and lie about your party affiliation (Papa Bear O'Reilly) then, yeah, I guess they admit to being shills.
Well, without getting into too much quoting here, I just don't see your picocell/mesh-network idea as being very feasible for cellular. How is that going to translate into coverage on the interstate system (typically where even the low coverage carriers, like T-Mo, have coverage)? Or rural areas? If you agree that it isn't feasible then the barrier to entry (spectrum) still stands. But regardless....
Which does bring up a secondary point I don't think I made very well. Telco's by themselves, are not very profitable or useful anymore. It is the telco's PLUS the various anciliary ecosystems, their clients and customers, that are valuable. And ever since MICOM, that ecosystem has been diversifying. 40 years later, I am not at all certain that it will even exist as a distinct entity for much longer. While US Telco individual firms, CMCC is actually the old China Telecom, which is actually the Chinese government. It is a government, with vast resources, great influence, and very little checks on its power, that the US telco's will be facing, not a company.
What do you mean by "Telco's by themselves"? The telco's are hugely profitable and useful. Hell, forget about all the end user applications (wireless, ISPs, POTS, etc). Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are all Tier 1 carriers. They own large portions of the internet backbone. Hell, with the exception of NTT, all of the Tier 1 carriers are American companies. And again, I just don't see the American government allowing the Chinese government to subvert our telecommunications industry.
have been in IT since the 1960's, and have worked with or for the telco's many times during that period. I would like them to succeed, I do have some good memories (and some bad ones, to be honest)
I also have a lot of good memories of the telco's. I've worked a lot with Verizon and Frontier (a regional telco out of Rochester). I have nothing but nice things to say about their products and the grunt workers (linemen, splicers, co techs, etc) that make them work. My problems have always been with the people in the business office and the policies behind their products.
Let's say I bought into your theory that they aren't competitive and your Chinese company is going to come here and kick their ass. While I find that doubtful, I could also point out a time when the telco's made a similar mistake. They initially sat on the technology for DSL, because they preferred to sell dedicated lines for data. Once the cableco's started rolling out cable internet, they rushed DSL into production.
Sitting on that technology was a huge mistake, motivated by greed, but it wasn't the end of them by any means. They are still around, they still have a large portion of the broadband market and they still make tons of money. In any case, I'm sticking with my theory that China has enough problems of it's own to worry about right now. And I have to say that reading your post, it comes off like you think America and/or American businesses would be helpless to compete with China. I think we will compete just fine in the coming decades.
You just pulled a link out of your ass that used $8/mbit as the figure for bandwidth costs. I couldn't find anything more recent then 2001 on that webpage, but I find it hard to fathom that bandwidth costs have gone up since then. In any event, you glossed over my point that even if ip transit costs are the issue, it's fucking stupid for Comcast to be going after seeders.
If you buy into IP transit costs being the problem (which I don't, but for the sake of the argument), then you can justify their bandwidth capping practice. But you can't justify this fucking Sandvine main-in-the-middle attack bullshit.
Great proposal. For $60/month form the subscribers, provide service that cost you $150/month per subscriber. Good answer. ISPs buy bits. Buying a bigger pipe and greater monthly traffic isn't free.
It's not that expensive either in the grand scheme of things. But regardless, p2p is just the favorite whipping boy because it's used for a lot of illegal activities. What happens when ip-tv catches on? What happens when more archived video content (think of The Daily Show) becomes legally available?
The people like you whose entire argument boils down to "bits cost money" conveniently ignore most of the reasons why the people like me are upset. If they are actually losing money over p2p/heavy bandwidth users then they need to change their fucking business model. The cellular industry (hardly a group of pro-consumer people....) doesn't advertise un-metered calling plans and then interfere with your calls or terminate users who use over X minutes per minute. They advertise a set number of minutes for a set price with overage rates if you exceed them. They also provide unlimited calling during off-peak times.
If IP transit costs really are the issue then perhaps they need to adopt a pricing model similar to the wireless industry. Terminating people for violating an unpublished cap or interfering with their traffic is not an acceptable solution and I hope the FCC comes down on them like a ton of bricks for it.
Ever stop and ask yourself why it is that outfits like Verizon and Time Warner seemingly make money without using these practices? Something tells me they have their fair share of bandwidth hogs, but I don't see them injecting fake RSTs onto my connection.
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Open source isn't a solution here, IMHO. How do I as the election inspector/pollworker verify that the software on the machine itself hasn't been tampered with? Keep in mind that you aren't dealing with me -- you are dealing with 80 year old poll workers.
Linux is open source. Given enough time you could read through all the source to a complete Linux distribution and tell me that there are no backdoors/anything nasty in it. But if I bring a PC running Linux into your office and give you half an hour with it, can you honestly tell me that you could find something I changed? A voting machine will be ever harder, as it's doubtful that you'd have superuser access to it, and most poll workers aren't IT people.
Depends on your county. Technically speaking the political parties themselves (on a county level) certify lists of inspectors to the county board of elections, who then assigns them where needed. In Broome County the Democrats will happily take you if you are registered Working Families or Liberal, the Republicans will take you if you are registered Conservative. I honestly don't know how it works if you aren't in ANY party at all. Your best bet would be to call your county board and ask them. Incidentally, are you registered in the Independence Party of New York or just a blank party enrollment? There is a difference that not everybody understands.
Do you generally work in the district where you vote, or are you specifically assigned another district, or do you just get assigned where needed?I was able to get assigned to my own district. I don't know about other counties but in Broome, they have two types of assignments. Permanent and substitute. Once you have a permanent district assignment it isn't going to change unless you request it to. You could probably work as a substitute until an opening became available in your home district, if one isn't open already. In Broome County they will keep you within your own township, so you aren't that far away from home even if you aren't in your own district.
If you work in another district, do you have to vote absentee? (My understanding is that volunteers work the whole day, but let me know if I'm wrong on that account as well.)You can vote absentee. But it's not a requirement as long as the chairperson in your district doesn't mind letting you leave to vote. I schedule lunch breaks for the inspectors at my location -- the only thing you have to keep in mind is the rule that at least one from each party needs to be present. So I'll send one Republican to lunch/vote at 10:30, a Democrat at 11:30, the other Republican at 12:30 and myself at 1:30. It's really up to the Chairperson of the Board of Inspectors at the particular polling place. Incidentally, the chairperson is chosen by a majority vote of the four inspectors assigned to that polling place.
That comes back to the age and competence of the poll workers. I wouldn't allow it to happen at my polling place. If you do observe this then you should report it to your County Board of Elections because it's a serious violation of the Election Law.
I've had minor problems with the people at my poll site in the past. Most of it related to them sleeping through our training sessions and then trying to do things their own way. As an example, we aren't supposed to sign more then two or three people in at a time. A) It becomes hard to keep track who has yet to use the machine if you sign more then two or three at a time. B) People sitting in line have been known to decide they have someplace they need to be and leave. All fine and good if you haven't signed the book -- you can come back later -- but if you sign the book and then leave before voting you are SOL, we can't let you into the machine.
There's four of us at my polling site. The youngest one besides me is 81 years old. They can't manage to do an affidavit ballot properly (I get to do all of those), they can't follow simple procedures like verifying the addresses in the poll book or not numbering the legal pad ahead, they spend time gossiping while people wait in line, etc, etc, etc.
This is going to remain a problem regardless of what kind of voting technology we use. I don't have a better solution then encouraging people to volunteer. The system we have in place now in New York is damn near tamper-proof. If we could get a decent number of young and motivated people to work on election day we wouldn't have any problems at all. The morons in Washington pushing electronic voting just don't understand this.
*sigh*, I think it's time to write another letter to my Assemblywoman (who happens to sit on the Election Law committee). And probably one to our AG, encouraging him to fight this suit with all the resources of New York State. And maybe a letter to my Congressman along the lines of "WTF? Why are the Feds forcing this on us?"
IAANYSIOE (I am a New York State Inspector of Elections)
That is, of course, assuming that the machine is working correctly and hasn't been tampered withThe machine is sealed against tampering with numbered seals as well as protective and public counters. We verify all of this information in the morning before we open the polls. This is one of the reasons that we have to be there at 5:30AM even though the polls don't open until 6:00AM. Once the polls close we re-seal the machine and document the seal number, public and protective counter numbers, etc, etc.
or that election workers aren't deliberately reporting false numbers.There are checks and balances in place to prevent this:
- The Election Law mandates that you have at least one election worker from each major party present at the polling place at all times. "Major Party" is defined in NYS Law as the two parties that had the highest and second highest number of votes in the last gubernatorial election, so in theory it need not be the Democrats and Republicans.
- The Election Inspectors are only provided with the keys to open and close the machine for voting. We don't have the keys required to open up the machine to re-program the ballot or zero the counters.
- The machine has two counters. A protective counter (the total number of votes ever cast on the machine) and a public counter (number of votes cast that day). The public counter needs to match the number of people that signed the poll book. The signatures in the poll book are all verified. There is no way for us to cast extra votes without the tampering being discovered.
- Lastly, when we canvass the vote at the end of the night and call in the results, those are the unofficial results. The official certified results happen when the Board of Elections opens up the machine several weeks after the election and verifies the counts match what we provided on election night.
I find it amusing that opponents of e-voting are so skeptical of the system's integrity, yet seem to have no similar concerns about the old methods.The difference between the new methods and the old methods is that almost anybody can verify the integrity of the lever machines. You can't tamper with it and have votes go to another candidate because the machine isn't that smart -- each candidate has a counter that is mechanically linked to the lever. The Board of Elections can open up the machine and visually verify that each lever is attached to the correct counter. The inspectors at the polling place can verify that the ballot on the machine matches the ballot for the polling place.
Contrast that to a software based system. Now you need somebody with computer and coding skills to verify the software on the machine. Even open source software isn't a perfect solution here, because there is no way for the inspectors at the polling place to verify that the software on the machine hasn't been tampered with after it left the Board of Elections.
Disclaimer: I'm a Election Inspector in New York State. All of what I'm about to say is based on my experience running a polling place and what I've read of the New York State Election Law.
as long as there is some type of backup system (perhaps an absentee ballot to use in place of the machine if there isn't a second machine available on-site), it isn't an issue.
We have a backup system. It's called emergency paper ballots. If the machine breaks down we start using them. They are the same paper ballots that are used for affidavit voters (people who claim to be registered but whom aren't in the poll book) but they go into separate envelopes and can't be disputed or challenged. The end result is the same as if you had voted on the machine.
As for the latter, the machine keeps running totals on vote per candidate and total voters. You can't go add a vote for someone without adding to the running total, which is supposed to match up with the election roll count (ie, we have 357 people who voted at this station today but the machine count shows a total of 413 voters). How do you know which of the 56 votes shouldn't count without invalidating all 357 legitimate votes?
You don't. This is going to be a problem with any voting system. You have to trust the Election Inspectors to ensure that people have properly signed the poll book and meet the requirements to vote. I don't see how you can design any voting system (electronic or otherwise) that preserves the anonymous ballot while providing a way to delete votes that were improperly cast.
Not just that, but the machines are also prone to the poll workers, especially if there isn't someone from each party, deciding to vote on behalf of people who never chose to vote
The New York State Election Law mandates that there be at least one poll worker from each major party present at the polling place. Typically there's two Republicans and two Democrats. We schedule our breaks around this -- both Republicans don't go to lunch at the same time for example. Furthermore, if a voter requires assistance and we have to go into the machine with them, at least TWO inspectors have to go into the machine, one from each party. The Election Law defines the two major parties as the parties that had the highest and second highest vote counts in the last Governor's election. So in theory it need not even be the Democrats and Republicans.
The biggest problem we face is the fact that nobody young bothers to volunteer to work as an Election Inspector. The overwhelming majority of us are old retirees. I'm the exception at 26. The political parties and various county board of elections are constantly fighting to retain enough Inspectors. In some poll places we have had to resort to swearing in registered voters (the Election Law allows this) to serve as Inspectors because something happened (in one district both Republican inspectors had heart attacks within an hour of each other, shit you not...) and the County Board wasn't able to get anybody over to our polling place in a timely manner.
There's also a huge difference between somebody who is 26 years old and somebody who is 80. I could take two random people off the street in their 20s or 30s, spend 20 minutes training them and run the busiest polling place in the state without any issues. It's a different animal when you are working with people in their 80s and 90s. I've seen districts fall apart during primary elections with depressingly low turnout.
The solution to any perceived problems with voting in New York State is to encourage younger people to work as Inspectors. By in large our machines work just fine. Our procedures are just fine. We just need better people. I would encourage anybody who lives in New York State to contact your local board of elections and get put on the list. It's not that much time out of your life -- you have to attend one training class (they
Random off topic musing on my part, but the idea that McDonald's had to pay because of the coffee thing is completely wrong. Their insurance company had to pay because of the coffee lawsuit, not McDonald's.
I don't think the framers of the constitution imagined copyright lasting for seventy years after the death of the author. How exactly does that help your poor staving creative artist?
They should be public domain within a reasonable amount of time -- say ten years -- of course, thanks to this however, they remain copyrighted for the life of the author plus 70 years.
How exactly this advances the progress of "science and the useful arts" is beyond me, but there you go :(
Well, if they start pulling that shit, the next step is to build some sort of certificate verification functionality into the various p2p protocols. Granted, there wouldn't be a centralized certificate authority, but with the number of fairly smart people you have working on these protocols I'm sure that some sort of solution would be arrived at.
Granted, they'd have to rewrite your and the other side's packets, but they could do it.How much CPU power would it require to perform a real-time MITM attack on gigabits of encrypted p2p traffic? Can they afford it? More to the point, is it even legal for them to do this in the Western World?
Give me a fucking break. There are justifications for protocol encryption that go beyond warez and music. Like obtaining a decent download rate for your legal torrents, which you can't do without encryption because your ISP has decided that bittorrent is bad.
Sorry, but it's most definitely NOT "a good thing".Why? As the volume of encrypted traffic goes up, those of us using encryption for whatever reason (be it privacy or the desire to mask something illegal) blend into the crowd better.
He's not a complete dumbass. Encrypted torrents will defeat the purposed ISP level copyright-filtering that some telcos (*cough* AT&T *cough*) are advocating. How do you tell if that encrypted data is the source code to Windows 2000, a Linux ISO or a collection of Chuck Norris jokes?
Granted, I think this is a good thing. It's none of my ISPs business what are in my packets.
Well, consider the events of the time. The United States intervened in the First World War, only to have most of our "allies" default on their war debts and completely ignore Wilson's 14 points in favor of imposing a harsh peace treaty on Germany. A peace treaty that arguably set the stage for the Second World War. Also consider the fact that the United States had a sizable German population not exactly eager to go to war with their native land and that the evils of the Nazi regime weren't exactly obvious in the late 30s.
I'm not defending isolationism because hindsight proves that it was the wrong approach. Just trying to explain it in the context of the times. In any case, I'd place the blame less on the United States for WW2 and more on Britain and France for appeasing Hitler (at a time when the German military machine was actually quite weak) and allowing him to over-run Poland while sitting on their collective butts and giving the initiative to the Germans.
Lol, I seriously apologize for the WWII analogies, it's the best example I could think of, Godwin should have an affirmative defense for logical arguments that actually make sense and are on-topic versus random name-calling.Eh, I'm a WW2 history buff, so they don't bother me. And I think Godwin's law only relates to making comparisons to the Nazis -- not US Foreign Policy in the 30s ;)
He probably got the offtopic mod because he said "I'll be hiding in my basement" instead of "I for one welcome our five limbed overlords" ;)
It is /. after all....
Not very likely for a number of reasons. The least of which is the American public was completely opposed to the idea of getting involved and if FDR had tried he probably would have been impeached.
Beyond that, with the exception of the Navy, our armed forces in the 30s were a joke. They only started to expand them in 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor. Why do you think it took until 1944 before the Allies were ready for the cross-channel invasion of Europe? There is little to nothing that the United States could do early in the war that would have changed anything.
FDR did the best he could with the resources and public opinion that he had to contend with. He started to quietly build up our forces, work on public opinion and do everything in his power (lend-lease) to keep the UK and Russia in the war. I don't see what he could have done differently.
Ya know, I don't think I even realized just how Orwellian the term "National Security Letter" sounds until now. Scary stuff. But how do they prevent you from talking about it with your lawyer? Even if the letter of the law is that you can't discuss it with ANYONE, how are they going to enforce that? They'd have to prove that you talked about it with your lawyer and he can't testify against you -- attorney-client privilege and all that.
Understand that I'm not making a case for these practices because they scare the hell out of me. I'm just wondering how they would actually enforce a gag order as it relates to discussions with your attorney.
but preventing anyone who receives an NSL from discussing the Letter with legal counsel before taking action that might -- no, make that "DOES" -- violate the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without due process of law is every bit as big an issueWell, let's assume it was a standard issue subpoena/search warrant. They'd be able to discuss it with counsel now, but they wouldn't be able to stop the police/fbi/whatever from executing said warrant while they called up the attorney. If the police show up at your door with a search warrant you can't bar them from entering your house while you get your attorney on the phone.
I hate to break it to you, but this is nothing new. For better or worse Congress and the various states have made laws that abridge the freedom of speech. And I'm not even talking about the tired old "fire!" in the crowded theater example. Ever served on a Grand Jury? You are sworn to secrecy and can't discuss ANYTHING about the proceedings.
I don't see a problem with a gag order that's imposed that prevents you from talking about an ongoing criminal investigation. Society has an interest in making sure the suspect doesn't flee the jurisdiction before they can be arrested and brought to trial. I do have a serious fucking problem with the fact that they can force ISPs to turn over all of this information without so much as a court order. THAT should be the issue here.
I hate to break it to you, but A) the WRT54G isn't an access point, it's a NAT router that happens to have an AP built into it and B) the new versions DON'T run Linux, they use vxworks. Presumably Cisco wasn't very impressed by being forced to release their code and opted for a solution that they could control better.
They still release a version that runs Linux and can be flashed easily -- the WRT54GL -- but it's not nearly as mainstream by any means.
If the President does it, then it's not illegal.
Ugh, it's not a fine. It's a civil judgment. If she can't get it overturned on appeal her options are to pay up or file bankruptcy.
Do tell me what "significant negative impact" a Gore administration would have had.
I could ramble on and on about this and go much further then "we wouldn't be in Iraq right now", but those debates are pointless so I'm not going to bother.
No offense, but I don't think you can apply "very bright" to someone that didn't think of unplugging an electrical appliance on their own......
I don't see how implying Bush is an idiot translates into "calling people retards who disagree with his political opinions". And, frankly, I think you'd have to admit that everything about Bush (particularly his style of speech) makes it very easy to mock him. Even my Republican friends would agree with that. I've seen Stewart go after hypocrisy on the left many times. Hell, with the possible exception of Giuliani they've been spending a lot more time mocking all of the Democratic candidates then they have the Republican ones. And Giuliani is easy for them to mock, since the show is based in friggen NYC and he was mayor there for years.
For one the republican Shills like Hannity *admit they are shills*..Well, if by "admit" you mean claim to be be an independent and lie about your party affiliation (Papa Bear O'Reilly) then, yeah, I guess they admit to being shills.
Well, without getting into too much quoting here, I just don't see your picocell/mesh-network idea as being very feasible for cellular. How is that going to translate into coverage on the interstate system (typically where even the low coverage carriers, like T-Mo, have coverage)? Or rural areas? If you agree that it isn't feasible then the barrier to entry (spectrum) still stands. But regardless....
Which does bring up a secondary point I don't think I made very well. Telco's by themselves, are not very profitable or useful anymore. It is the telco's PLUS the various anciliary ecosystems, their clients and customers, that are valuable. And ever since MICOM, that ecosystem has been diversifying. 40 years later, I am not at all certain that it will even exist as a distinct entity for much longer. While US Telco individual firms, CMCC is actually the old China Telecom, which is actually the Chinese government. It is a government, with vast resources, great influence, and very little checks on its power, that the US telco's will be facing, not a company.What do you mean by "Telco's by themselves"? The telco's are hugely profitable and useful. Hell, forget about all the end user applications (wireless, ISPs, POTS, etc). Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are all Tier 1 carriers. They own large portions of the internet backbone. Hell, with the exception of NTT, all of the Tier 1 carriers are American companies. And again, I just don't see the American government allowing the Chinese government to subvert our telecommunications industry.
have been in IT since the 1960's, and have worked with or for the telco's many times during that period. I would like them to succeed, I do have some good memories (and some bad ones, to be honest)I also have a lot of good memories of the telco's. I've worked a lot with Verizon and Frontier (a regional telco out of Rochester). I have nothing but nice things to say about their products and the grunt workers (linemen, splicers, co techs, etc) that make them work. My problems have always been with the people in the business office and the policies behind their products.
Let's say I bought into your theory that they aren't competitive and your Chinese company is going to come here and kick their ass. While I find that doubtful, I could also point out a time when the telco's made a similar mistake. They initially sat on the technology for DSL, because they preferred to sell dedicated lines for data. Once the cableco's started rolling out cable internet, they rushed DSL into production.
Sitting on that technology was a huge mistake, motivated by greed, but it wasn't the end of them by any means. They are still around, they still have a large portion of the broadband market and they still make tons of money. In any case, I'm sticking with my theory that China has enough problems of it's own to worry about right now. And I have to say that reading your post, it comes off like you think America and/or American businesses would be helpless to compete with China. I think we will compete just fine in the coming decades.
Uhh, when? And whom?
Hes a partisan with great punchlines who spreads it around *just enough* to make it look like hes not a shill..I disagree, but regardless, that makes him different from all the Republican shills (Hannity et. all) how?
You just pulled a link out of your ass that used $8/mbit as the figure for bandwidth costs. I couldn't find anything more recent then 2001 on that webpage, but I find it hard to fathom that bandwidth costs have gone up since then. In any event, you glossed over my point that even if ip transit costs are the issue, it's fucking stupid for Comcast to be going after seeders.
If you buy into IP transit costs being the problem (which I don't, but for the sake of the argument), then you can justify their bandwidth capping practice. But you can't justify this fucking Sandvine main-in-the-middle attack bullshit.
Great proposal. For $60/month form the subscribers, provide service that cost you $150/month per subscriber. Good answer. ISPs buy bits. Buying a bigger pipe and greater monthly traffic isn't free.It's not that expensive either in the grand scheme of things. But regardless, p2p is just the favorite whipping boy because it's used for a lot of illegal activities. What happens when ip-tv catches on? What happens when more archived video content (think of The Daily Show) becomes legally available?
The people like you whose entire argument boils down to "bits cost money" conveniently ignore most of the reasons why the people like me are upset. If they are actually losing money over p2p/heavy bandwidth users then they need to change their fucking business model. The cellular industry (hardly a group of pro-consumer people....) doesn't advertise un-metered calling plans and then interfere with your calls or terminate users who use over X minutes per minute. They advertise a set number of minutes for a set price with overage rates if you exceed them. They also provide unlimited calling during off-peak times.
If IP transit costs really are the issue then perhaps they need to adopt a pricing model similar to the wireless industry. Terminating people for violating an unpublished cap or interfering with their traffic is not an acceptable solution and I hope the FCC comes down on them like a ton of bricks for it.
Ever stop and ask yourself why it is that outfits like Verizon and Time Warner seemingly make money without using these practices? Something tells me they have their fair share of bandwidth hogs, but I don't see them injecting fake RSTs onto my connection.