Scantron ballots are a good idea, but people are stupid &/or prone to mistakes and will screw it up.
Adding a computer to the process does not magically prevent mistakes, it just introduces new errors: 60% of voters don't notice changes in their ballot on the review screen, some forget to validate their vote in the review screen, or the touch screens are misaligned making voting difficult, etc.
So not only does electronic voting annihilate any chance of a public oversight, they don't even have any usability advantage.
You can't run an election without a scanner of some sort. You'll need a scantron type solution for a state wide vote.
A lot of countries are having nationwide elections that don't involve any kind of scanner anywhere. If your election process is such that one cannot do an election without involving non-voter verifiable hardware, then your election process is flawed.
Scantrons to count, and paper ballots are the only way, unless we hand count (which I've got no problem with, but the computers generally do a better job, especially if you want to do accurate stats for funding of parties).
If your election process is correct, then hand counting will deliver accurate results and, more importantly, results you can trust.
The pieces everyone seems to be missing in that process are: transparent ballot box, party and public oversight of polling places until the ballots have been counted, no moving of ballots before counting them.
It was a fun gig, and I liked that I got to contribute to cleaning up some of the problems folks have with electronic voting. I took it very seriously.
You did absolutely nothing to solve the problem with electronic voting, which is that on election day a voter or part representative cannot check whether the voting computer has been rigged or not. This means there is no public oversight.
While I still think we should use paper ballots (what exactly does e-voting gain us?) it makes a world of difference if the code is open or closed source. Voting is all about trust, if I can see the source and verify that it doesn't have any major bugs in it that is a step in the right direction compared to closed source.
Debating about open-source vs. closed-source e-voting is the same as debating about electric chair vs hangings when you should be asking yourself whether the accused got a fair trial.
You may have inspected the source for months. It changes nothing to the fact that on election day you don't know and cannot know what code is running on the e-voting computer in your polling booth.
Until you solve that problem, there cannot be trust.
Machine-readable paper-ballots seems to be a decent compromise. Instant results with recount possibilities. A smallish number of humans can double-check some samples to ensure the machine results are correct, and trigger larger manual recounts if there is reason to believe the machines malfunctioned or were tampered with.
The problem is that no one will want to doa manual recount when the result is (thought to be) already known. Furthermore, if the recount is not done immediately in the polling station when the election closes, then it means you have to move the ballots and store them waiting for a recount. During that process they escape public oversight, be it while they are in a police truck being moved around, or while they are in the 'secure' storage facility. That opens plenty of opportunity for officials to tamper with the ballot boxes. Never lose sight of the fact that the people with the most to lose in an election, are those in a place of power, that is those organizing the election.
And this would be one which is selected by the government, in other words, the ruling party? When the time comes to decide who's going to rule millions of people and negotiate military and trade treaties with various foreign governments; there is no such thing as a third party, not to mention a trustworthy one.
You know... I can't verify my vote got sent in unchanged on paper.
You can. That's because in real democracies your vote is put in a transparent ballot box, and then counted by voters, right on the spot, under your watchful eye, as soon as the election closes. The results for the polling place are then announced publicly right there so you can take them home with you and check that the results published later match.
If your country does anything else, you cannot know for sure if the ballot counting is rigged or not.
I really can't see why we can't have a government-commissioned open-source system developed and mandated for use for public voting functions. I absolutely hate the thought of my vote being inputted in to a closed magical-mystery box.
Open-sourcing the code or hardware is no help for the simple reason that on election day you, the voter, cannot verify that the machine in your voting booth is running the open-source code or hardware you verified the day before.
Open-source is no help for the simple reason that on election day you, the voter, cannot verify that the machine in your voting booth is running the open-source code you verified the day before.
The only downside is its a tad convoluted. But I maintain that people that can't deal with even slightly complicated voting processes have no business casting a totally uneducated vote.
And thus you claim that someone who does not understand your convoluted voting technology also will not understand the political issues he is supposed to vote on. That's like saying someone who is bad at math will also necessarily be bad at literature!
There is no corresponding requirement for legislation to control the behavior of human action. In fact, according to Blackstone's "Commentaries", law is supposed to define what persons may NOT do.
You have a very incomplete view of what law is. It also says you MUST pay your taxes, that you MUST have insurance for your car (at least in some states), that you MUST report to your case officer if on probation, etc.
In the case of HR 3200 (the specific case discussed in the article) it (presumably, I have not read it) defines how health care will work: define the entities, what each entity is responsible for, what its tasks are, who pays for what, etc. This goes way beyond defining what persons may not do.
Why do you say that? Directional antenna would mean that the drone would only "listen" for communications coming from the positions of other nodes in the mesh network. Unless the enemy can put jammers all around, including in the air and above the drone aircraft, at least some comm would get through.
Right. Maintaining proper antenna orientation during a dogfight is going to be fun... Besides even directional antennas are susceptible to off-axis jamming as long as you jack up the power.
One time pad encryption means the enemy can't hijack the drone.
The size of the one-time pads determines the maximum amount of data you can send. That seriously limits their usefulness, especially in this type of application (network communication). Anyway, encryption is not the weak point of drones (except in movies).
It's not like you can hack 1 million votes into one computer and escape undetected.
You don't have to make one voting computer return 1 million votes for your candidate. All you have to do is hack the election software used in 30% of the polling places to give a 5% lead to your candidate. That will give you well over the 1 million votes you want (in the US) and leave no physical proof.
The only way to detect such fraud would be through statistical analysis, trying to correlate results with voting computer model while eliminating the noise caused by the comparatively huge variations from county to county. But even if you get somewhere you would most likely be ignored just like the exit poll discrepancies in 2000.
You've pretty much described how it happens in France, especially the part about counting all the votes in public at the polling location (maybe that's not coincidence).
I'll just add that normally there are representatives from the political parties that oversee the counting; that they normally write down the results as they are announced at the end of the counting in the polling place; and that they immediately send them to their party's local headquarters by phone. So that essentially takes care of verifying the government's tallying.
And I think you're also right in pointing out that every other form of fraud applies equally well to paper or electronic based voting. They are probably becoming harder to pull off too as it's much easier nowadays to cross-check the voter databases country-wide, or with death certificates, etc. So it's all the more reason to not weaken the strongest link in the election chain.
Actually, I find it troubling that many people seem to believe that paper ballots cannot be compromised at all.
Paper ballots are not sufficient to prevent fraud. But with the proper procedures in place they can make it really really hard. Some of the points that are missing in the US (and many other places) are:
I did RTFPDF, and I read that this is an 80's-era system running on a Z80 processor. Nowadays, we have chips with memory management, lockable pages, execute-only pages, and other nice things.
So?
If you really read the RTFPDF article you would have seen that this 80's technology would only let you execute code that was in ROM. I'll spell that out for you: Read Only Memory. It's the same thing as lockable pages, execute-only pages and other nice things; only simpler, more secure and very inflexible. Yet, it still did not prevent the attack.
If you require that the contents of any card inserted be signed by the election commission before you'll even touch them, it would be a bit difficult to get an interface to the system in the first place, now wouldn't it?
It will only make attacks harder for every one but those with the most to lose: the incumbents.
Right, but TFA said that the electronic voting hack required a few private minutes with the machine. Could that happen in Grandma's district?
As the parent said:
Not to mention that there are about a half-dozen people watching the ballot box at any one time, from the start of the voting until the end.
So no, it's not possible during the election. It is possible before but the ballot boxes are (presumably) verified to be empty the morning of the election. In fact they should simply be transparent like in France. If the ballots are counted immediately, again like in France, then you won't be able to have a few private minutes with the ballot box after the election either. If you move the ballot box to another location, like in the US, then anything is possible.
After that its a simple matter to find the offending ballot papers (duplicate votes, and those cast by un-identified people are easy to find) and discard them.
Ballots are ANONYMOUS. That's a core foundation of democratic elections. There is no way to find the ballots cast by unidentified people and there is no such thing as a duplicate ballot.
Or even better; what about a Windows Vista license for $10?
After all, still by your reasoning, it's not because I don't own the copyright to Vista that selling licenses for it would be illegal or wrong in any way. Right?
Want to spend a night in the presidential suite in the White House? Just send me the low sum of $100 for a one night reservation and enjoy your stay.
P.S.: Yeah, I guess it's not really my place to make this kind of offer but, by your reasoning, if you do send me the $100 dollars it's because you're too stupid, not because I'm a crook. So I might as well try!
So in the test case the quote was in the public domain. But AP presumably often quotes people ('Just before disappearing the president made this strange declaration: "Thank you all for your support and for all the fish"'), very likely without even asking for their permission. That's fine; it's what fair use is for.
Then you can buy the right to reproduce the whole article. Again that's fine (mostly, see below).
But if you select just the (11) words from the quote, their software should not sell you a license to these words since they don't own the copyright on it. This means they'll have to tag every quote so that their software knows not to sell licenses on them (or they need to build automatic quote recognition). Ouch.
So if you buy the whole article, do you pay by the word? If so, should the quoted words be included? Probably not.
Distribute an ADSL modem/WiFi box for free to all your customers so they can benefit from WiFi in their own home. Use this box to provide extra services to your customers and to differentiate yourself from competitors. WiFi is but the first service; you can add: printer server, 100Mbps network switch, etc. but more importantly revenue enhancing services like pay-TV-channels, phone calls (to cell phones or international destinations), video on demand, etc.
Let the user secure his WiFi network using WPA.
Add a separate WiFi network that works as an open WiFi hotspot. There you go: millions of hotspots at no extra cost. No need to negotiate with every cafe or bookseller for the permission to install your hotspots; no need to pay them.
Require one to log in on an SSL web page to gain access. This restricts access to only your customers, but using any device WiFi+web-capable: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux computers alike; iPods, phones, etc. No nasty software to install...
Only allow customers who enabled their open hotspot to use other customers' hotspots. It's tit for tat and provides incentive to enable the service.
Cap the bandwidth that can be used from the open WiFi hotspot (to 1Mbps, a small fraction of what your customers normally get, right?) so customers don't mind leaving it open.
Give users of the open hotspot an identifiable IP address so there's no issue with the RIAA suing the wrong person.
Let non-customers use your brand new hotspots to subscribe to your ADSL service and immediately get access to the net.
Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched.
Actually the study assumes a 20% average which is pretty pessimistic. So there's no need to introduce yet another safety factor and we could really do with just 2.5% of the land/shores globally, or 4.4% for the US. It also says that this could supply 5x the current world energy needs. This translates to needing 20% of the land/shores.
And if we don't give up on hydro, solar, geothermal, biomass, co-generation and basic energy conservation techniques (why should we?), then we could get by with even less.
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people.
Actually what the article is saying is that we could supply for our current electricity needs by installing wind turbines on just 2.5% (100/40) of the usable land and shores. Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched. That should be more than enough leeway to preserve those areas worth preserving. Even in the US you could get by with 4% to 17% land/shore use.
Now if you want wind turbines to provide for 100% of our energy consumption, i.e. also replacing oil, nuclear, etc, then yes it's probably trickier. But the fine article does not provide numbers there. That said it would be crazy to restrict ourselves to just wind turbines anyway. That would be like getting into a fight with a hand and a leg tied in your back.
Well, I think you should fill in the details then because as it is, there's a lot of blanks and that can only lead one to make some assumptions.
The hash is not to be used to verify a vote was counted. ONLY is singular, the hash may O*N*L*Y* be used in the way that I outlined.
Ok, so apprently only registered parties can bring in ballots to the officials and only in bulk. So, to take my previous example, they bring in 161 ballots, thus showing that they have one more than the claimed 32%. The officials then tell them that 1 of these (not saying which one) is a fake and so yes, party A really only has 32% of the votes. How do you prove the officials are lying or that the ballot counting machine has been tampered with? You're back to square one.
You apparently haven't seen the lengths that a political party will go to to prove that there was fraud when they lose. Collecting every ballot from their loyal members in a district wouldn't be that extreme.
As I said you'd need to gather on the order of 90% of the votes for your party. That's impossible. First you don't even know who voted for you. Second, even if you went asked every registered party member in the district you still wouldn't be able to reach the non-registered people who voted for you. So it's a virtual impossibility.
Keep in mind, the losing party need only prove a single tally ANYWHERE is wrong to cast a dark cloud over their opposition for years to come.
You're so naively optimistic here. There voting irregularities on a regular basis. In France it's been proven that some towns used voting machines that did not comply with the standard set by the government. Did the election get canceled? No, because the courts considered that it was not sufficient proof that the election got tampered with. So proving that there's a 1 vote discrepancy somewhere will lead you absolutely nowhere.
Keep in mind that I have also proposed making any sort of vote tampering a mandatory life imprisonment.
Lots of things are illegal: hold ups, murder, rape. And yet they still happen regularly for what looks like ridiculously small gains. Lesson: making something illegal, creating harsh sentences does not magically stop thieves, crooks, etc.
No, when the boss goes to check the ticket, they tell him nothing at all because that would be a crime. He is risking life in prison.
What crime? How would the officials know the ballot is not his? Do you again want to record both the voter's identity and how he voted on the ballot? Even so, why would it be a crime to help your unfortunate neighbor who does not have the time to check his ballot has been correctly recorded himself?
The only purpose of the hash is for a case where the Silly Party protests that the official tally shows 5 votes for them, but here's 100 ballots with votes for them right here.
Why would anyone hack an election in such a stupid way? Let's take an election booth with 1000 voters (typical size) and assume a 50% turnout. Let's say party A gets 35% of the votes and party B 30%. You want party B to win so you arrange for it to have 33% and party A 32%. Now with your scheme party A would need to gather 161 ballots for party A to prove the fraud. That's 91% of the existing ballots for party A for that election booth! Good luck with that. Of course you would not hack the ballot count of negligible parties like the Silly Party.
Nope, you give them the whole thing, and another that says what they wanted. The former can combat fraud simply by validating the hash. The latter can be used as they wish, including "proving" they voted the way their crooked employer wanted. but the hash won't validate so they can't falsely claim election fraud.
So you give your false ticket to your boss. He then goes check that 'his' vote was registered right. There they tell him he brought the wrong ticket because the hash won't validate. So he goes back and breaks your kneecaps.
Either that or when you go check your vote with the false ticket they tell you it's been registered all right so you don't really know if the one they took into account is your real vote or your faked vote.
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Scantron ballots are a good idea, but people are stupid &/or prone to mistakes and will screw it up.
Adding a computer to the process does not magically prevent mistakes, it just introduces new errors: 60% of voters don't notice changes in their ballot on the review screen, some forget to validate their vote in the review screen, or the touch screens are misaligned making voting difficult, etc.
So not only does electronic voting annihilate any chance of a public oversight, they don't even have any usability advantage.
You can't run an election without a scanner of some sort. You'll need a scantron type solution for a state wide vote.
A lot of countries are having nationwide elections that don't involve any kind of scanner anywhere. If your election process is such that one cannot do an election without involving non-voter verifiable hardware, then your election process is flawed.
Scantrons to count, and paper ballots are the only way, unless we hand count (which I've got no problem with, but the computers generally do a better job, especially if you want to do accurate stats for funding of parties).
If your election process is correct, then hand counting will deliver accurate results and, more importantly, results you can trust.
The pieces everyone seems to be missing in that process are: transparent ballot box, party and public oversight of polling places until the ballots have been counted, no moving of ballots before counting them.
It was a fun gig, and I liked that I got to contribute to cleaning up some of the problems folks have with electronic voting. I took it very seriously.
You did absolutely nothing to solve the problem with electronic voting, which is that on election day a voter or part representative cannot check whether the voting computer has been rigged or not. This means there is no public oversight.
While I still think we should use paper ballots (what exactly does e-voting gain us?) it makes a world of difference if the code is open or closed source. Voting is all about trust, if I can see the source and verify that it doesn't have any major bugs in it that is a step in the right direction compared to closed source.
Debating about open-source vs. closed-source e-voting is the same as debating about electric chair vs hangings when you should be asking yourself whether the accused got a fair trial.
You may have inspected the source for months. It changes nothing to the fact that on election day you don't know and cannot know what code is running on the e-voting computer in your polling booth.
Until you solve that problem, there cannot be trust.
Machine-readable paper-ballots seems to be a decent compromise. Instant results with recount possibilities. A smallish number of humans can double-check some samples to ensure the machine results are correct, and trigger larger manual recounts if there is reason to believe the machines malfunctioned or were tampered with.
The problem is that no one will want to doa manual recount when the result is (thought to be) already known. Furthermore, if the recount is not done immediately in the polling station when the election closes, then it means you have to move the ballots and store them waiting for a recount. During that process they escape public oversight, be it while they are in a police truck being moved around, or while they are in the 'secure' storage facility. That opens plenty of opportunity for officials to tamper with the ballot boxes. Never lose sight of the fact that the people with the most to lose in an election, are those in a place of power, that is those organizing the election.
This is where you need a trustworthy third party.
And this would be one which is selected by the government, in other words, the ruling party? When the time comes to decide who's going to rule millions of people and negotiate military and trade treaties with various foreign governments; there is no such thing as a third party, not to mention a trustworthy one.
You know... I can't verify my vote got sent in unchanged on paper.
You can. That's because in real democracies your vote is put in a transparent ballot box, and then counted by voters, right on the spot, under your watchful eye, as soon as the election closes. The results for the polling place are then announced publicly right there so you can take them home with you and check that the results published later match.
If your country does anything else, you cannot know for sure if the ballot counting is rigged or not.
I really can't see why we can't have a government-commissioned open-source system developed and mandated for use for public voting functions. I absolutely hate the thought of my vote being inputted in to a closed magical-mystery box.
Open-sourcing the code or hardware is no help for the simple reason that on election day you, the voter, cannot verify that the machine in your voting booth is running the open-source code or hardware you verified the day before.
Voting machines should definitely be open-source
Open-source is no help for the simple reason that on election day you, the voter, cannot verify that the machine in your voting booth is running the open-source code you verified the day before.
The only downside is its a tad convoluted. But I maintain that people that can't deal with even slightly complicated voting processes have no business casting a totally uneducated vote.
And thus you claim that someone who does not understand your convoluted voting technology also will not understand the political issues he is supposed to vote on. That's like saying someone who is bad at math will also necessarily be bad at literature!
There is no corresponding requirement for legislation to control the behavior of human action. In fact, according to Blackstone's "Commentaries", law is supposed to define what persons may NOT do.
You have a very incomplete view of what law is. It also says you MUST pay your taxes, that you MUST have insurance for your car (at least in some states), that you MUST report to your case officer if on probation, etc.
In the case of HR 3200 (the specific case discussed in the article) it (presumably, I have not read it) defines how health care will work: define the entities, what each entity is responsible for, what its tasks are, who pays for what, etc. This goes way beyond defining what persons may not do.
Why do you say that? Directional antenna would mean that the drone would only "listen" for communications coming from the positions of other nodes in the mesh network. Unless the enemy can put jammers all around, including in the air and above the drone aircraft, at least some comm would get through.
Right. Maintaining proper antenna orientation during a dogfight is going to be fun... Besides even directional antennas are susceptible to off-axis jamming as long as you jack up the power.
One time pad encryption means the enemy can't hijack the drone.
The size of the one-time pads determines the maximum amount of data you can send. That seriously limits their usefulness, especially in this type of application (network communication). Anyway, encryption is not the weak point of drones (except in movies).
It's not like you can hack 1 million votes into one computer and escape undetected.
You don't have to make one voting computer return 1 million votes for your candidate. All you have to do is hack the election software used in 30% of the polling places to give a 5% lead to your candidate. That will give you well over the 1 million votes you want (in the US) and leave no physical proof.
The only way to detect such fraud would be through statistical analysis, trying to correlate results with voting computer model while eliminating the noise caused by the comparatively huge variations from county to county. But even if you get somewhere you would most likely be ignored just like the exit poll discrepancies in 2000.
You've pretty much described how it happens in France, especially the part about counting all the votes in public at the polling location (maybe that's not coincidence).
I'll just add that normally there are representatives from the political parties that oversee the counting; that they normally write down the results as they are announced at the end of the counting in the polling place; and that they immediately send them to their party's local headquarters by phone. So that essentially takes care of verifying the government's tallying.
And I think you're also right in pointing out that every other form of fraud applies equally well to paper or electronic based voting. They are probably becoming harder to pull off too as it's much easier nowadays to cross-check the voter databases country-wide, or with death certificates, etc. So it's all the more reason to not weaken the strongest link in the election chain.
Actually, I find it troubling that many people seem to believe that paper ballots cannot be compromised at all.
Paper ballots are not sufficient to prevent fraud. But with the proper procedures in place they can make it really really hard. Some of the points that are missing in the US (and many other places) are:
That's not all there is to it, but these are the key points that everyone seems to be missing.
I did RTFPDF, and I read that this is an 80's-era system running on a Z80 processor. Nowadays, we have chips with memory management, lockable pages, execute-only pages, and other nice things.
So?
If you really read the RTFPDF article you would have seen that this 80's technology would only let you execute code that was in ROM. I'll spell that out for you: Read Only Memory. It's the same thing as lockable pages, execute-only pages and other nice things; only simpler, more secure and very inflexible. Yet, it still did not prevent the attack.
If you require that the contents of any card inserted be signed by the election commission before you'll even touch them, it would be a bit difficult to get an interface to the system in the first place, now wouldn't it?
It will only make attacks harder for every one but those with the most to lose: the incumbents.
Right, but TFA said that the electronic voting hack required a few private minutes with the machine. Could that happen in Grandma's district?
As the parent said:
Not to mention that there are about a half-dozen people watching the ballot box at any one time, from the start of the voting until the end.
So no, it's not possible during the election. It is possible before but the ballot boxes are (presumably) verified to be empty the morning of the election. In fact they should simply be transparent like in France. If the ballots are counted immediately, again like in France, then you won't be able to have a few private minutes with the ballot box after the election either. If you move the ballot box to another location, like in the US, then anything is possible.
After that its a simple matter to find the offending ballot papers (duplicate votes, and those cast by un-identified people are easy to find) and discard them.
Ballots are ANONYMOUS. That's a core foundation of democratic elections. There is no way to find the ballots cast by unidentified people and there is no such thing as a duplicate ballot.
Or even better; what about a Windows Vista license for $10?
After all, still by your reasoning, it's not because I don't own the copyright to Vista that selling licenses for it would be illegal or wrong in any way. Right?
Hi,
Want to spend a night in the presidential suite in the White House? Just send me the low sum of $100 for a one night reservation and enjoy your stay.
P.S.: Yeah, I guess it's not really my place to make this kind of offer but, by your reasoning, if you do send me the $100 dollars it's because you're too stupid, not because I'm a crook. So I might as well try!
So in the test case the quote was in the public domain. But AP presumably often quotes people ('Just before disappearing the president made this strange declaration: "Thank you all for your support and for all the fish"'), very likely without even asking for their permission. That's fine; it's what fair use is for.
Then you can buy the right to reproduce the whole article. Again that's fine (mostly, see below).
But if you select just the (11) words from the quote, their software should not sell you a license to these words since they don't own the copyright on it. This means they'll have to tag every quote so that their software knows not to sell licenses on them (or they need to build automatic quote recognition). Ouch.
So if you buy the whole article, do you pay by the word? If so, should the quoted words be included? Probably not.
Seems like US ISPs should come to France to see how to do it right:
Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched.
Actually the study assumes a 20% average which is pretty pessimistic. So there's no need to introduce yet another safety factor and we could really do with just 2.5% of the land/shores globally, or 4.4% for the US. It also says that this could supply 5x the current world energy needs. This translates to needing 20% of the land/shores.
And if we don't give up on hydro, solar, geothermal, biomass, co-generation and basic energy conservation techniques (why should we?), then we could get by with even less.
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people.
Actually what the article is saying is that we could supply for our current electricity needs by installing wind turbines on just 2.5% (100/40) of the usable land and shores. Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched. That should be more than enough leeway to preserve those areas worth preserving. Even in the US you could get by with 4% to 17% land/shore use.
Now if you want wind turbines to provide for 100% of our energy consumption, i.e. also replacing oil, nuclear, etc, then yes it's probably trickier. But the fine article does not provide numbers there. That said it would be crazy to restrict ourselves to just wind turbines anyway. That would be like getting into a fight with a hand and a leg tied in your back.
You assume way too much.
Well, I think you should fill in the details then because as it is, there's a lot of blanks and that can only lead one to make some assumptions.
The hash is not to be used to verify a vote was counted. ONLY is singular, the hash may O*N*L*Y* be used in the way that I outlined.
Ok, so apprently only registered parties can bring in ballots to the officials and only in bulk. So, to take my previous example, they bring in 161 ballots, thus showing that they have one more than the claimed 32%. The officials then tell them that 1 of these (not saying which one) is a fake and so yes, party A really only has 32% of the votes. How do you prove the officials are lying or that the ballot counting machine has been tampered with? You're back to square one.
You apparently haven't seen the lengths that a political party will go to to prove that there was fraud when they lose. Collecting every ballot from their loyal members in a district wouldn't be that extreme.
As I said you'd need to gather on the order of 90% of the votes for your party. That's impossible. First you don't even know who voted for you. Second, even if you went asked every registered party member in the district you still wouldn't be able to reach the non-registered people who voted for you. So it's a virtual impossibility.
Keep in mind, the losing party need only prove a single tally ANYWHERE is wrong to cast a dark cloud over their opposition for years to come.
You're so naively optimistic here. There voting irregularities on a regular basis. In France it's been proven that some towns used voting machines that did not comply with the standard set by the government. Did the election get canceled? No, because the courts considered that it was not sufficient proof that the election got tampered with. So proving that there's a 1 vote discrepancy somewhere will lead you absolutely nowhere.
Keep in mind that I have also proposed making any sort of vote tampering a mandatory life imprisonment.
Lots of things are illegal: hold ups, murder, rape. And yet they still happen regularly for what looks like ridiculously small gains. Lesson: making something illegal, creating harsh sentences does not magically stop thieves, crooks, etc.
No, when the boss goes to check the ticket, they tell him nothing at all because that would be a crime. He is risking life in prison.
What crime? How would the officials know the ballot is not his? Do you again want to record both the voter's identity and how he voted on the ballot? Even so, why would it be a crime to help your unfortunate neighbor who does not have the time to check his ballot has been correctly recorded himself?
The only purpose of the hash is for a case where the Silly Party protests that the official tally shows 5 votes for them, but here's 100 ballots with votes for them right here.
Why would anyone hack an election in such a stupid way? Let's take an election booth with 1000 voters (typical size) and assume a 50% turnout. Let's say party A gets 35% of the votes and party B 30%. You want party B to win so you arrange for it to have 33% and party A 32%. Now with your scheme party A would need to gather 161 ballots for party A to prove the fraud. That's 91% of the existing ballots for party A for that election booth! Good luck with that. Of course you would not hack the ballot count of negligible parties like the Silly Party.
Nope, you give them the whole thing, and another that says what they wanted. The former can combat fraud simply by validating the hash. The latter can be used as they wish, including "proving" they voted the way their crooked employer wanted. but the hash won't validate so they can't falsely claim election fraud.
So you give your false ticket to your boss. He then goes check that 'his' vote was registered right. There they tell him he brought the wrong ticket because the hash won't validate. So he goes back and breaks your kneecaps.
Either that or when you go check your vote with the false ticket they tell you it's been registered all right so you don't really know if the one they took into account is your real vote or your faked vote.