Actually, your OCR idea is better - the machines should use the same "codes" that the humans do. There are fonts which are specifically designed to be human readable and still have a high degree of accuracy for typical OCR algorithms.
Science is based on repeatable observations. Religion is based on human whim. This difference should be pointed out in no uncertain terms when impressionable young minds are being indoctrinated.
Your proposal WILL go back to the old days of vote buying. If there's a legal way of finding out how any given voter has voted, somebody will figure out a way to take advantage of that. It's happened in the past, and there's no reason to believe it won't happen in the future.
You are also incorrect about the automatic corruptability of anonymous voting. There are voting protocols which work fine, and have been used in the past - it just that they are not being implemented by incompetent or corrupt elections officials.
I believe the existence of that button video camera would be pretty good physical evidence that would come up in a trial that could end up with your "boss" in jail (especially if you're not the only one the boss has been handing button video cameras to). It's one thing to conduct voting extortion in a way that leaves no evidence, but it's a whole new level of stupidity if you're handing out direct physical evidence.
You've left out a mechanism to make sure that the numbers which are called into the "central tallying" place are actually the numbers which were counted.
Instead of central tallying place, why not let the various interested parties do the sums themselves (i.e., have their own tallying places)? If there's a significant discrepancy between their counts, then they'll have to figure out where the discrepancy occurred & resolve the issue with the other parties.
In a secure voting environment, any voter can fill out their ballot without worrying about someone effectively "looking over their shoulder". This preserves voter anonymity. With absentee or mail-in voting, there is no such secure voting environment.
The main benefit for absentee or mail-in voting is for convenience. It is also perceived as being slightly more "secure" than electronic voting, but that's setting the bar REALLY low for a standard.
1. Bribed voters won't go back to "correct" their vote.
2. Even for intimidation, you're not taking into the account the phenomenon of the extreme partisan behavior that has been the norm in many places.
How many abused wifes/girlfriends are going to fight the abuser's orders?
How many extremely-poor people desperate to support their family are going to fight a manager who keeps them all under surveillance and will fire them at the drop of a hat if they don't toe the company (or the manager's) line?
What about a union situation where every other union member might be looking to snitch on whether you voted "correctly" (followed by a goon squad visit the following evening if you didn't)? (This last occurred pretty regularly during the bad Chicago political machine days from what I've read.)
Most of these last examples are caused by decentralized forces, where individuals or small groups of people will do almost anything for their "side" to win. There doesn't have to be a centralized organization controlling attempts to corrupt an election. You just need partisan fervor & the belief that you can get away with it.
If you're going to use an electoral process which has a known, unenforceable flaw, then you'd got to be aware of the ways that it can be abused. It's even better to use an electoral process that doesn't have that flaw (assuming you don't introduce new ones of course).
3. I'm not arguing for electronic voting, I'm stating that absentee ballots or mailin voting has a electoral privacy flaw in it that can be exploited. There's a difference. Unfortunately, that flaw can't be closed because there is no way to have a secure voting environment with mail or email-type electoral procedures.
The only electoral setup we have which addresses the anonymity protocol is the original setup of private polling booths (minus the electronic voting machines of course). The only benefit of absentee balloting & mail-in voting is convenience.
As far as increasing the voting turnout, my personal opinion is that the government should go all-out to encourage voting: declare work holidays on the voting day so that no one will skip voting because of work, and perhaps subsidize public transportation for people to get to and from the various polling locations.
Of course, my other personal opinion is that no citizen should be prevented from voting, even if they are convicted felons (you'd probably have to set up polling stations in the prisons), but that's a whole 'nother discussion topic.
Look, I've lived in Oregon most of my life, and voted as soon and as often as I was allowed. I have most certainly participated in the mail-in-voting process (essentially the same as absentee except you don't have to request the ballot) and am quite familiar with the protocols.
The basic reason that this process violates the anonymity protocol is because you are not filling out that ballot in a secure location. It doesn't matter how many envelopes, safes, seals, encryptions, codes, etc, you use AFTER you fill out your ballot, if there was no effort made to protect your privacy while you were in the process of filling out the ballot & sealing it in the first place.
There are many historical incidents where knowing someone's votes have allowed either bribery (money for voting a certain way) or intimidation (physical, loss of job, etc). Even just the potential of this kind of activity, whether it has been detected or not, compromises the integrity of the resultant voting totals.
There are damn good reasons for making sure someone can vote with an anonymous ballot, and mail-in-voting or absentee ballots don't meet that criteria.
When you collect enough different correlations (positive and/or negative), and identify non-correlations, then you can start making some empirical/statistical arguments about causality.
It depends on how bad the economy gets during the course of the politicking.
If things seem to be fairly stable (albeit a bit financially tight), then people will not want to make drastic changes in the status quo, and will feel comfortable voting for someone like Obama or Edwards, who will pull back from the Bush brink and try to put bandaids & use some OTC drugs on the situation, hoping that the system will recover by itself as long as no severe shocks occur to it.
If things seem to be heading down the shitter fast (ala Great Depression) however, I think you'll find that people will be looking for someone with a sharp scalpel and a willingness to use it on the federal government. (I suspect many Dr. No supporters believe we have already reached this trend.)
Unfortunately, being an absentee voter doesn't really guarantee you much more of a paper trail - not only is the anonymity protocol violated (there's no way to make sure people aren't forcing or bribing you to vote a certain way), but there is also no way for the counters to make sure all of the absentee votes make it to the counting table (or whether they have been selectively pruned).
Also, many places use the optical scanning machines to sum up the absentee ballots, then add the votes to the database of the central tabulator machine being used to count the votes from the balloting machines.
That being said, at least the paper is existing somewhere at some point (and the voter has had a chance to look at it), so it could be looked at as a marginally better process than the paperless machines. Absentee balloting is just the best of a bad process though.
There's a difference between being educated (book learning), and "eddicated" - as in practical lessons of life.
In the past, a lot of the latter got handled by the parents & other associates (or by the hard knocks of life), but it seems like nowadays things are moving a little too fast for the normal transmission of common sense to occur.
If you're down and out to begin with, and you're desperate enough to take a wild chance on one of these scams, you might not have the resources to recover from the mistake.
If each spam message received removes 0.001% of empathy or sympathy from your conscience about bad things happening to a spammer, then it doesn't take too long before all but the most stubborn pacifists to reach 0.0%.
I had to monitor a "catch-all" email address for a small business, to find any legitimate email in the thousands of spam messages we were receiving per day. I reached my 0.0% a LONG time ago.
It worked out for the public, who he was supposed to be working for, however.
People elected to positions of high power should have every aspect of their lives recorded 24/7, with the idea that any funny business can be reviewed by a court to see if something illegal has occurred. Any attempt to interrupt that recording should be regarded as attempted felony coverup, with the relevant people thrown in jail.
Then the RIAA should be making the argument based on his uploading activities.
They're trying to get the legal precedent that normal ripping activities (i.e., Fair Use), are also illegal, so that they can control all aspects of music distribution, including people who are merely space-shifting their legally-purchased music.
Physicists like the simplest answers that fit all available observations. If a simple answer doesn't fit all available observations, then it is TOO simple.
The fact that most people don't understand those "simple" answers is more a reflection of our intelligence & education, rather than implying that the answer hasn't been made "simple" enough.
I'm a CAD developer; my employer would probably regard my work as a "trade secret". (I doubt anything I've done is brilliant enough for any other competitor to copy it, but it gets the job done.)
Without IP laws, I imagine a lot of software would be written to help someone provide services - not as a product in itself. This is a perfectly logical approach of designing better tools to do a better job. The people with the best tools will have a competitive advantage.
As far as my statement "there's no real reason for IP laws", perhaps my opinion would be clearer if I stated it as "there's no GOOD reason for IP laws". The usual "acceptable" rationale is that IP laws encourage innovation, but this is always stated as axiomatic or just "common sense", but I have never encountered any peer-reviewed studies which show this effect. To me, it goes against common sense that a social mechanism (IP laws) specifically designed to restrict the flow of information will encourage creativity.
So basically, you're saying that we've put ourselves in the situation where our entire way of living depends on the cooperation of the governments of other countries, who happen to have very loose ideas about "intellectual property", and who are desperate to reach our standard of living.
When you figure out how OUR "intellectual property" laws are going to keep our economy going in the face of countries who don't give more than lip service to them, be sure to get your Ph.D. in economics.
As long as it was fully attributed to me, then I wouldn't care. In the Nazi situation, as long as they didn't try and pretend that I was supporting their position (which I would regard as a form of fraud), then I wouldn't care.
I write software for a living, and get paid fairly well for it. Like any craftsperson of physical products, I don't expect to try and control what people do with my work after I have released it, as long as they aren't introducing untruth in its distribution. (In the situation where I did care, then I'd have them sign a contract with me with an explicit description of the terms of distribution.)
There's no real reason for intellectual property laws, except to perpetuate the current industry which is based on IP laws.
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Actually, your OCR idea is better - the machines should use the same "codes" that the humans do. There are fonts which are specifically designed to be human readable and still have a high degree of accuracy for typical OCR algorithms.
Science is based on repeatable observations. Religion is based on human whim. This difference should be pointed out in no uncertain terms when impressionable young minds are being indoctrinated.
Your proposal WILL go back to the old days of vote buying. If there's a legal way of finding out how any given voter has voted, somebody will figure out a way to take advantage of that. It's happened in the past, and there's no reason to believe it won't happen in the future.
You are also incorrect about the automatic corruptability of anonymous voting. There are voting protocols which work fine, and have been used in the past - it just that they are not being implemented by incompetent or corrupt elections officials.
I believe the existence of that button video camera would be pretty good physical evidence that would come up in a trial that could end up with your "boss" in jail (especially if you're not the only one the boss has been handing button video cameras to). It's one thing to conduct voting extortion in a way that leaves no evidence, but it's a whole new level of stupidity if you're handing out direct physical evidence.
Like that means anything.
You've left out a mechanism to make sure that the numbers which are called into the "central tallying" place are actually the numbers which were counted.
Instead of central tallying place, why not let the various interested parties do the sums themselves (i.e., have their own tallying places)? If there's a significant discrepancy between their counts, then they'll have to figure out where the discrepancy occurred & resolve the issue with the other parties.
Boy, are you behind the marketing curve - obviously we're going to call it "next^2 gen".
No, it's not just like "real" voting.
In a secure voting environment, any voter can fill out their ballot without worrying about someone effectively "looking over their shoulder". This preserves voter anonymity. With absentee or mail-in voting, there is no such secure voting environment.
The main benefit for absentee or mail-in voting is for convenience. It is also perceived as being slightly more "secure" than electronic voting, but that's setting the bar REALLY low for a standard.
Oh go ahead, let it out. We've been doing everything we can to do deserve it.
1. Bribed voters won't go back to "correct" their vote.
2. Even for intimidation, you're not taking into the account the phenomenon of the extreme partisan behavior that has been the norm in many places.
How many abused wifes/girlfriends are going to fight the abuser's orders?
How many extremely-poor people desperate to support their family are going to fight a manager who keeps them all under surveillance and will fire them at the drop of a hat if they don't toe the company (or the manager's) line?
What about a union situation where every other union member might be looking to snitch on whether you voted "correctly" (followed by a goon squad visit the following evening if you didn't)? (This last occurred pretty regularly during the bad Chicago political machine days from what I've read.)
Most of these last examples are caused by decentralized forces, where individuals or small groups of people will do almost anything for their "side" to win. There doesn't have to be a centralized organization controlling attempts to corrupt an election. You just need partisan fervor & the belief that you can get away with it.
If you're going to use an electoral process which has a known, unenforceable flaw, then you'd got to be aware of the ways that it can be abused. It's even better to use an electoral process that doesn't have that flaw (assuming you don't introduce new ones of course).
3. I'm not arguing for electronic voting, I'm stating that absentee ballots or mailin voting has a electoral privacy flaw in it that can be exploited. There's a difference. Unfortunately, that flaw can't be closed because there is no way to have a secure voting environment with mail or email-type electoral procedures.
The only electoral setup we have which addresses the anonymity protocol is the original setup of private polling booths (minus the electronic voting machines of course). The only benefit of absentee balloting & mail-in voting is convenience.
As far as increasing the voting turnout, my personal opinion is that the government should go all-out to encourage voting: declare work holidays on the voting day so that no one will skip voting because of work, and perhaps subsidize public transportation for people to get to and from the various polling locations.
Of course, my other personal opinion is that no citizen should be prevented from voting, even if they are convicted felons (you'd probably have to set up polling stations in the prisons), but that's a whole 'nother discussion topic.
Look, I've lived in Oregon most of my life, and voted as soon and as often as I was allowed. I have most certainly participated in the mail-in-voting process (essentially the same as absentee except you don't have to request the ballot) and am quite familiar with the protocols.
The basic reason that this process violates the anonymity protocol is because you are not filling out that ballot in a secure location. It doesn't matter how many envelopes, safes, seals, encryptions, codes, etc, you use AFTER you fill out your ballot, if there was no effort made to protect your privacy while you were in the process of filling out the ballot & sealing it in the first place.
There are many historical incidents where knowing someone's votes have allowed either bribery (money for voting a certain way) or intimidation (physical, loss of job, etc). Even just the potential of this kind of activity, whether it has been detected or not, compromises the integrity of the resultant voting totals.
There are damn good reasons for making sure someone can vote with an anonymous ballot, and mail-in-voting or absentee ballots don't meet that criteria.
You go ahead and keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better.
IMHO, if the economy crashes then all bets are off.
A single correlation doesn't imply causation.
When you collect enough different correlations (positive and/or negative), and identify non-correlations, then you can start making some empirical/statistical arguments about causality.
It depends on how bad the economy gets during the course of the politicking.
If things seem to be fairly stable (albeit a bit financially tight), then people will not want to make drastic changes in the status quo, and will feel comfortable voting for someone like Obama or Edwards, who will pull back from the Bush brink and try to put bandaids & use some OTC drugs on the situation, hoping that the system will recover by itself as long as no severe shocks occur to it.
If things seem to be heading down the shitter fast (ala Great Depression) however, I think you'll find that people will be looking for someone with a sharp scalpel and a willingness to use it on the federal government. (I suspect many Dr. No supporters believe we have already reached this trend.)
Unfortunately, being an absentee voter doesn't really guarantee you much more of a paper trail - not only is the anonymity protocol violated (there's no way to make sure people aren't forcing or bribing you to vote a certain way), but there is also no way for the counters to make sure all of the absentee votes make it to the counting table (or whether they have been selectively pruned).
Also, many places use the optical scanning machines to sum up the absentee ballots, then add the votes to the database of the central tabulator machine being used to count the votes from the balloting machines.
That being said, at least the paper is existing somewhere at some point (and the voter has had a chance to look at it), so it could be looked at as a marginally better process than the paperless machines. Absentee balloting is just the best of a bad process though.
It was a sad attempt at dialect, which is why it was in quotes.
There's a difference between being educated (book learning), and "eddicated" - as in practical lessons of life.
In the past, a lot of the latter got handled by the parents & other associates (or by the hard knocks of life), but it seems like nowadays things are moving a little too fast for the normal transmission of common sense to occur.
If you're down and out to begin with, and you're desperate enough to take a wild chance on one of these scams, you might not have the resources to recover from the mistake.
Yeah, you're probably the only one.
If each spam message received removes 0.001% of empathy or sympathy from your conscience about bad things happening to a spammer, then it doesn't take too long before all but the most stubborn pacifists to reach 0.0%.
I had to monitor a "catch-all" email address for a small business, to find any legitimate email in the thousands of spam messages we were receiving per day. I reached my 0.0% a LONG time ago.
It worked out for the public, who he was supposed to be working for, however.
People elected to positions of high power should have every aspect of their lives recorded 24/7, with the idea that any funny business can be reviewed by a court to see if something illegal has occurred. Any attempt to interrupt that recording should be regarded as attempted felony coverup, with the relevant people thrown in jail.
Then the RIAA should be making the argument based on his uploading activities.
They're trying to get the legal precedent that normal ripping activities (i.e., Fair Use), are also illegal, so that they can control all aspects of music distribution, including people who are merely space-shifting their legally-purchased music.
Physicists like the simplest answers that fit all available observations. If a simple answer doesn't fit all available observations, then it is TOO simple.
The fact that most people don't understand those "simple" answers is more a reflection of our intelligence & education, rather than implying that the answer hasn't been made "simple" enough.
What part of your response was relevant to the subject?
I'm a CAD developer; my employer would probably regard my work as a "trade secret". (I doubt anything I've done is brilliant enough for any other competitor to copy it, but it gets the job done.)
Without IP laws, I imagine a lot of software would be written to help someone provide services - not as a product in itself. This is a perfectly logical approach of designing better tools to do a better job. The people with the best tools will have a competitive advantage.
As far as my statement "there's no real reason for IP laws", perhaps my opinion would be clearer if I stated it as "there's no GOOD reason for IP laws". The usual "acceptable" rationale is that IP laws encourage innovation, but this is always stated as axiomatic or just "common sense", but I have never encountered any peer-reviewed studies which show this effect. To me, it goes against common sense that a social mechanism (IP laws) specifically designed to restrict the flow of information will encourage creativity.
So basically, you're saying that we've put ourselves in the situation where our entire way of living depends on the cooperation of the governments of other countries, who happen to have very loose ideas about "intellectual property", and who are desperate to reach our standard of living.
When you figure out how OUR "intellectual property" laws are going to keep our economy going in the face of countries who don't give more than lip service to them, be sure to get your Ph.D. in economics.
As long as it was fully attributed to me, then I wouldn't care. In the Nazi situation, as long as they didn't try and pretend that I was supporting their position (which I would regard as a form of fraud), then I wouldn't care.
I write software for a living, and get paid fairly well for it. Like any craftsperson of physical products,
I don't expect to try and control what people do with my work after I have released it, as long as they aren't introducing untruth in its distribution. (In the situation where I did care, then I'd have them sign a contract with me with an explicit description of the terms of distribution.)
There's no real reason for intellectual property laws, except to perpetuate the current industry which is based on IP laws.