Becasue the telecom immunity would have protected the office of then president as well.
How is that?
The telecoms need only to provide documents showing legal justification for their actions, and they're basically off the hook.
Guess who doesn't want any investigation of said legal justification?
take away my money to give it to someone else
Go live in your libertarian utopia and take your attitude with you. I suggest though that you work out a lot first, as the first person stronger than you will have plenty of fun with you. You will find that everyone eventually meets someone stronger or faster, and without the protection of civilized society, things get seriously uneven seriously quickly. The purpose of taxes and the occasional leg up for people down on their luck is an efficient way to restore their productivity, so they can make net contributions to the society.
The point of helping people out is to get them productive: it's an investment, not a giveaway. There are times when the investment doesn't work out but by and large, people tend to want to produce.
And some of us remodeled our homes so the computerRoom/office has a picture window overlooking our back yard. Lot of good that did though... Can't see much during traditional programmer work hours from 7:00PM till 1:00AM. Floodlights are only mildly helpful...
Oh, wait, what's this... I feel the pull of the basement right now. It's calling my name, oh so softly, oh so relentlessly...:-):-)
There are several inexpensive ARM boards available in small quantities, look in any recent Linux Journal. I am currently running several systems built by Gumstix which work well for me and for my customers.
I have no financial relationship with Gumstix. I have several of their systems. Cheap, effective, and supported by an exceptionally active, friendly and supportive mailing list.
Your post doesn't describe required specs or desired features, so it's not easy to know what you're looking for.
Physical implementation cannot take advantage of Moore's Observation (great phrase, by the way). This is why my new quad phenom with 3 Gbytes RAM and 500 Gbytes of disk costs $750 but my VW Passat wagon cost me $25000 (and that's getting a great deal on it in 2002!)
You are right that it will be like the matrix or Hogan's story (sounds like an interesting story, I'll have to check it out).
A fully virtualized environment benefits directly from precisely the same exponential improvements that have occurred and will continue to occur in information processing technologies.
I would bet a fair chunk of change that the first entity that passes the Turing Test will be found in a virtual world. And in the virtual world, "holodeck" is exactly what it is, no new development necessary. Other than that slick neural interface. I don't see that happning, though...
I'd bet that we will implement Kruzweil's plan, which is to "download ourselves" to a virtual environment in order to get those benefits. I liken it to a transporter replication process, where the replicant (did I say that?) ends up in the virtual world and the original copy remains in meatspace. Or should the still perfectly viable living meat-based original person be terminated after the replication is complete, following the rule that "There Can Be Only One"?
They are not stupid. Venal, sick, monumentally evil, and they know exactly what they are doing.
The Linux kernel and free software in general represent a world wide missed opportunity to tax developers and users, and these people aim to stop it before it becomes a trend.
SCO has received enough funding to lock this case up in appeal all the way to a freshly packed supreme court. Novell will run out of money 40 times before SCO's funders will even begin to notice the dent in their portfolios. IBM has deeper pockets and masterful lawyers backed by solid evidence, but even with those advantages, a well-enough funded opponent can bleed them pretty good in today's legal and political environment.
And let there be no mistake: This issue reaches into politics in a big way. I believe that if the Linux kernel and and various supporting tools and applications were given a clean bill of legal health, many very powerful people will not be able to assert the control that they think they deserve over the way we earn our incomes.
The guys funding SCO are merely funding an ongoing threat to those who would implement freely available productivity tools. This is a small skirmish in a much larger war. These guys have financial resources that are literally, uncountable, because they have so many layers of corporate veil. I had no idea the SCO linux issue would bubble so high up into the chain of command...
This is the "other shoe dropping", the "pipe fairy waving the magic wand".
Mr. Norris knows EXACTLY what he is doing. This SCO investment is only part of an overall plan to control significant areas of economic development, worldwide. Study the Carlyle Group sometime, and note that they are very well connected, international, quiet and powerful.
Mr. Norris is backed by *huge* money, $1e8 isn't even pocket change for them. They won't even notice the investment, but that relatively minor investment will have exactly the effect that their friends and minions want. This infusion of cash will enable a continued attack on those who freely implement significant productivity tools, such as the Linux kernel. They want *every system* that people depend on, to include the monetization tax that people like Microsoft wish to impose.
Students of history should recognize this event: It is reminiscent of the Guild System in Europe.
The implication that any digital system is inherently less secure than any paper system is inherently Luddite, all the way down.
Your focus is too narrow. Nobody says "paper ballots are secure". We say "it's far more difficult to swing an election with paper ballots without it being detected and corrected than with electronic systems."
For an individual precinct, it can be argued that paper is subject to (within an order of magnitude) similar levels of manipulation for particular insiders as electronic systems.
However, to really swing an entire election, the decentralized nature of paper ballots requires the concerted cooperation of a far larger population of manipulators with inside access to the ballots' chain of custody. On the other hand, a single easter egg in one version of voting system software can allow one *voter* in each of several, possibly many, precincts to secretly engage the easter egg's incantation to swing that machine's vote totals.
So paper requires concerted effort by many insiders with the concomitant increase in likelihood of one of them screwing up and spilling the beans. Electronic voting systems require a collection of non-insiders to engage a secretly emplaced easter egg to modify entire elections. There is a possibility of detection there too, but it is significantly more difficult.
Electronic voting systems have already been used to affect an election: In central Ohio where I live, districts and precincts with a statistical democratic bias (metropolitan and progressive districts) had reduced allocation of voting machines, while outlying areas that tend republican had appropriate allocation. The result, widely reported, was lines of multiple hours in one case and rarely more than minutes in the other. Voting occurred on a work day, and many people simply could not or would not wait to vote because they had to get back to work.
To claim that people like me are luddites is entirely stupid, by the way. My code has been working in the signalling and switching systems (both STP and NCP) the long distance network for 15 years, has been running cockpit avionics communications for 25 years, and I am at present involved in several autonomous UAV flight control projects.
There are people who really want to manipulate elections and are trying to establish a context in which their manipulations could be done with the minimum probability of detection. The people who run and monitor elections are not embedded system developers with years of experience in authentication and security. They would be very hard pressed to detect, much less respond to, a situation where sophisticated election system developers could be manipulating the process. Note further that the election system vendors steadfastly refuse to show their code to anyone. That makes me very suspicious.
During the late 90's, the Nevada Gaming commission's slot machines were hacked by an insider who used his diagnostic validation unit to insert easter eggs in slot machines. His hack was not discovered for many months (I forget exactly how long it lasted). The Nevada Gaming Commission is loaded with money, expert developers, and a strong economic desire to avoide even a hint of dishonesty, and were hacked. Compare that to Boards of Elections who are overworked, underpaid, have very limited budgets, and absolutely ZERO experience in system security.
Myself, I try to stick to something like "there is some reason to doubt the integrity of the 2004 election, and the issue has never been throughly investigated".
In a word, yes.
I am very active in the central Ohio voting reform movement, and it is important to distinguish between statements I believe to be true versus statements that are demonstrably true. It's too easy to fall into a variety of traps and this work is far too important to lose credibility due to hyperbolic speech.
There is also the legal threat: Powerful, wealthy people are pissed off at people like me and I am watching my Ps and Qs carefully. The electronic voting systems people have been making *big* money here as they have been elsewhere, and they are no different from anyone else who does not want the gravy train stopped by a bunch of citizens insisting on honest elections.
I feel the best thing that could happen for the left would be to lose on abortion. That would take the wind out of the conservative sails for a generation and likely massively activate the left's base.
The "abortion" decision is not only about abortion, despite the fact that Movement Conservatives really really want it to be. Roe V Wade is about *privacy*, as was the previously significant decision, Griswold V Connecticut.
The "left" is about keeping government the hell out of the most sensitive personal decisions in peoples' lives, while making sure that there are broadly discussed and managed regulation of the interactions among the various interests, particularly economically.
My complaint about Movement Conservatives is that they are all about managing "personal decisions" (that we as individuals can actually control) by government fiat, while preventing individuals from having any significant input into decisions that affect all of us by economically powerful people.
So I think you are Right On with respect to the wealthy and corporate group description, but I am frustrated that conservative people (who have every right to participate fully in discussions of public policy) have not seen past the strawman arguments that the economic royalists have been building during recent decades.
I may owe everyone an apology... The *most charitable* characterization of their misbehavior is professional neglect.
In my heart of hearts, the execrable security performance of the top three electronic vendors is reflective of intentional misconduct. I simply don't say such things publicly as if they were factual, since it is possible that they were simply a bunch of putzes going for HAVA money.
It's a near statistical impossibility that in all but one instance, the variances between exit polls and the "official totals" favored one candidate, across all states, all precincts nationwide.
In New Mexico, the relationship between "surprisingly high" undervote statistics correlates nearly perfectly with paper versus electonic voting.
In the 2006 election in Florida district 13, there are 18000 undervotes in a contested congressional election. People took the time to participate in an off-year election in 2006, voted for other offices and issues, but *didn't vote* in the hotly contested big congressional race? Riight...
I live in central Ohio and saw firsthand during the 2004 election that progressive-leaning and democratic-leaning voting precincts and districts had waiting lines that didn't drop below 2 hours all day. During high traffic times, waiting times increased to 3 or 4 hours. In ex-urban districts, the waiting times rarely exceeded 20 minutes. This is not technical hacking, but it illustrates the "value" of having electronic systems to serve as a means for manipulating elections.
It is documented in "invisible Ballots" that many of the people who originated the company that eventually became Diebold Election Systems were all multiply-convicted felons. Their crimes? Variations on a common theme: computer fraud!
So, I *believe* that there's massive fraud. But I have been prevented from investigating properly, as have been many others. So it's not possible to nail it down legally. The result is that I have to say "probable" and "incompetent" because I cannot legally say "they are liars and thieves".
The fact that Diebold's central tabulator used Microsoft Access?
(Reported in several stories, notably a DVD called "Invisible Ballots")
That their hardware is some of the most programmer-friendly ever (straight X86 CPU, SDcard, CompactFlash sockets)?
(This is a simplified, smaller version of a larger report. A quick Google search will reveal more.)
WindowsCE OS?
(Same report as above)
Executable Scripts on the ballot-definition CF cards?
(Demonstrated in "Invisible Ballots", also known as the Hursti Hack)
By one set of measures these sorts of decisions are hallmarks of el-cheapo implementation of systems that should have been designed to meet far more rigorous standards of security and reliability.
Finally, I refer you to the author of a nice little easter-egg that he was asked to write: Clint Curtis
The *most charitable* characterization of this issue is that these people are guilty of professional negligence. Anyone understanding the importance of elections to this society and that (especially recently) elections are extremely high value to some people, and are hotly contested, would understand that voting systems should be developed under the strictest, most disciplined methodologies.
It is clear that none of the major voting system suppliers have bothered with the most basic architecture, design, verification and validation methodologies.
Imagine that at any given moment, each element of the swarm has:
1) A "desire" to behave in a unique way, with some probability;
2) The ability to persuade some number of nearby elements to follow it, also with a probability.
Might be an interesting simulation problem. The hypothetical link with reality is analogous to human societies; some the desire and persuasive power (and are therefore opinion leaders). And at various times in history, such people have moved entire societies in unexpected directions.
Not to argue, but to provide a thought... I remember Andy Kaufman's performances well. Some of them were as good as just about anything Steven has ever done. IMHO however, Steven wins in the consistency department. Kaufman's characters had some gaps, while (still IMHO) Steven manages to carry off one of the most flawless narcissistic characters I've ever seen presented. It takes some major creativity cojones to deliver essentially every day as Steven does. And he does it with such panache, he's been able to "get" guests of essentially all stripes to join him in his performance. (Henry Kissinger? Introducing a guitar battle? With the Decemberists? Simply amazing...)
(A side note: I was a young worker at Warner Qube during a time when Mr. Kaufman was performing semi-regularly there. He was a genuinely interesting man, his talent was significant and worthy of our respect.)
Seriously, if this were fiction, it would be a breakout show.
If someone submitted this story to an editor, it would be summarily rejected as implausible.
Much like many other stories in our society... The truth is stranger than fiction.
Casper van Dien? Very creative casting choice!:-)
Ordinarily, I tend toward agreement with this sentiment. However, not completely. My responses are:
A single government worker (classical civil service worker) is simply a "one person nano-company" and in a strictly academic sense, the government would always be giving your money to private interests.
(as expressed very well elsewhere in this thread) SBIRs are intended to help exactly the correct class of company: People who are not Big Contractors. There is a substantial body of evidence that great innovations tend not to originate in organizations that have large investment in the way things are.
SBIRs are not big funding contracts. Phase I contracts are not sufficient to fund more than a fraction of a person, phase II contracts while better are not usually sufficient to fund the starting of a line-of-business.
SBIRs are, especially recently, very competitive with many companies submitting proposals for each topic. The fact is that money is getting very tight. I do not know the overall statistics, but the ratio of funded proposals to submitted proposals is very small. The companies who include SBIR in their business processes are working *very* hard for that money, and from a taxpayer's perspective, I think it's a great deal.
My disclaimer: I had refused several opportunities during a 30-year career to work in defense contracting, preferring to work in private industry. That was, until 2004 when a small company in my neighborhood hired me to help with their Linux/C++/controls development for a phase II SBIR.
My observation of that process is that SBIR, while being an imperfect process, is an excellent way to use taxpayer money to get ideas and work funded very efficiently.
(As stated by others in this thread) There is no need for an expensive middle-man in the voting process. Having comparatively delicate machines involved adds no security to the process.
My reason for making the suggestion about transforming DREs into very expensive pencils is that local governments are notorious for their inability to face the economic "sunk cost" problem: They claim that they paid lots of very limited money for the machines and they insist on Getting Their Moneys Worth. They also say that getting ballots printed is Very Expensive.
My wife and I, along with our friends in the hand-counted-paper-ballots coummunity are having a difficult time getting past the local election officials who just love their precious machines and think of paper ballots as backward and out of date. They Want To Be Perfectly Modern Government Officials.
Nearly every computer professional or security professional that is asked about electronic voting answers that it's either insecure or too expensive. Statements to that effect accelerate as they flow between the ears of local election officials.
Here's further support for your thesis:
I've stated elsewhere in this thread and other places that electronic machines constitute a perfect way to bias voting paterns in a perfectly legal way: Favored/wealthy precincts are allocated plenty of voting machines, while unfavored/not-wealthy precincts receive inadequate allocations. The result is that some voters have a strong time-based disincentive from voting. This amounts, in my opinion, to a denial of the vote to selected groups of people.
Many people that my wife and I work with (in the "election protection movement") believe that hand-counting is the only way to go. Their logic is that it takes the cooperation of a much larger number of people to screw with an election that was counted by lots and lots and lots of volunteers.
In America, the ballots tend to be larger, sometimes with many candidates and many issues on in a single election. That was the original impetus for using machines: counting would take "too long" for complicated elections.
I think the scalability and reliability of paper ballots outweighs the time-and-complexity issue. However, for those who like instant results, I am OK with an UNOFFICIAL quick "exit poll" report counted on optical scanners, for the late-night vote watchers.
I participated in a "parallel election" during the U.S. midterm election last November, and we were able to run a classical ballot-on-paper process which included completing the first handcounted results 6 hours after the polls closed (2AM; the polls closed at 8PM).
My favorite story relating to scalability is the under-allocation of voting machines in several districts during the 2004 election. People in urban and progressive distrcts waited an average of 2 hours, and sometimes as long as 9 hours (Kenyon College); people in ex-urban and suburban areas waited an average of 15 minutes. Many here believe that the variance in waiting-time was enough to skew the election. Since then, my primary reason for avoiding machines is the "artificial scarcity" problem. Paper has no such difficulty.
My favorite use for touchscreen ex-voting machines would be to drive a printer that generates human-readable ballots. Said ballots would be perfectly fine to count either by optical-scan readers or normal unaided humans.
Touchscreen "ballot printers" would go a long way toward eliminating overvotes and reducing undervotes (since a voter must be permitted to abstain from a particular race or issue).
As long as the Official Legal Ballot is durable and readable by unaided humans. The human can then manually scan his/her selections on the paper ballot before committing it to the official count. If the touchscreen system failed to record the voter's intent accurately, the voter can place the the machine-printed ballot in a rejection pile and fill in a paper ballot using manual methods (pencil, pen, etc.)
The point is that the voter must be able to audit his/her voting selections on the official legal record before committing it to the secure but open vote counting process.
But others say Cupertino is well within its rights to control its own device
When you buy a device from an organization that believes the above, you *truly* are on your own.
I only buy devices when after expending $600 (OK, $400) of my very very hard-earned money, it is not Apple's device, it's mine. Which is why I do not have an iPhone, despite its being a great looking platform and would be ripe for explosive growth as a personal communicator.
Assuming Apple were smart enough to sell it rather than merely licensing it to "customers", and without being locked in to a service provider that I have already rejected for many reasons.
The Linux community needs a "come to jesus" meeting, where we recognize the strength of worthy adversaries and study their moves, not dismiss them as unworthy of study.
There was a time when Microsoft was simultaneously a vibrant business and supported two sets of customers: Developers on one hand, and non-developer customers on the other. After they established their well-known near-perfect penetration of the "DOS" kernel marketplace but still needed to grow (for stock/financial/business reasons), they altered the deal they had with the "developer" customers. Depending on the marketspace in which a particular developer worked, Microsoft transformed into their harshest competitor essentially without warning.
I recognize the strength of Microsoft as a worthy adversary. I recognize that they are willing to destroy anyone that they decide stands in their way, often after that business has already been successful. There is no way I will ever hold that style of business management in anything other than absolute contempt.
I work with Linux and remain involved in the FOSS ecosystem based on the premise that members of this community compete on the basis of their adaptability to the particular environments in which they work. We have studied Microsoft's tactics of destruction, often watching those moves blast away substantial business equity in the process. On the other hand, the FOSS community (in general) operates under the optimistic assumption that we can find viable niches, fill them, and in so doing produce both reasonable economic income and contribute to the overall progress of the industry.
In our neighborhood, which is a "progressive, 2-miles-from-campus" neighborhood, queue waiting times in 2004 were 1.5 hours.
In neighborhoods closer to campus, liberal areas and in-town areas, queue waiting times averaged 3 hours, extending in rare cases up to 9 hours.
In outlying, ex-urban, well-off neighborhoods, queue waiting times rarely exceeded 25 minutes.
A local advocate told me this weekend that when he set up a gathering after the 2004 election to allow people to describe their experiences, he hoped to see 20-40 people. Instead the meeting overflowed, with at least 500 people complaining that they either could not vote due to the long wait, or experienced even more direct interference.
I live in Ohio; the 2004 presidential election was a record-breaker in the number, depth and significance of the issues on the ballot. This had the effect on extending voter decision times, further exacerbating the machine allocation problem.
Correlation is not causation, but usually invites further investigation. Intentional or not, the 2004 election in Ohio had serious problems, which should be fixed. Electronic voting systems can serve as a "precious resource", subject to misallocation. Paper ballot systems on the other hand offer the potential for parallelized voter decision making, reducing opportunity for the sort of manipulation that I saw in 2004.
Well, it 'may' be some smart thinking then. I mean, what would happen...the chaos, the complete falling apart of the US economy, etc, if the oil were cut off tomorrow? Pandemonium....
And imagine why so many have been talking, pleading, asking, and demanding that we do some bloody research!!! Our dependence on oil renders all actions taken in the gulf region suspect. No matter what the real cause was (good or bad, justifiable or not), most the world thinks the U.S. invaded Iraq to control access to oil.
I really wish our "leadership" had the balls to engage us in research and development to gain independence from those whose oil wealth enables great evil.
Slashdot Mirror
The telecoms need only to provide documents showing legal justification for their actions, and they're basically off the hook.
Guess who doesn't want any investigation of said legal justification?
Go live in your libertarian utopia and take your attitude with you. I suggest though that you work out a lot first, as the first person stronger than you will have plenty of fun with you. You will find that everyone eventually meets someone stronger or faster, and without the protection of civilized society, things get seriously uneven seriously quickly. The purpose of taxes and the occasional leg up for people down on their luck is an efficient way to restore their productivity, so they can make net contributions to the society.The point of helping people out is to get them productive: it's an investment, not a giveaway. There are times when the investment doesn't work out but by and large, people tend to want to produce.
And some of us remodeled our homes so the computerRoom/office has a picture window overlooking our back yard. Lot of good that did though... Can't see much during traditional programmer work hours from 7:00PM till 1:00AM. Floodlights are only mildly helpful...
:-) :-)
Oh, wait, what's this... I feel the pull of the basement right now. It's calling my name, oh so softly, oh so relentlessly...
There are several inexpensive ARM boards available in small quantities, look in any recent Linux Journal. I am currently running several systems built by Gumstix which work well for me and for my customers.
I have no financial relationship with Gumstix. I have several of their systems. Cheap, effective, and supported by an exceptionally active, friendly and supportive mailing list.
Your post doesn't describe required specs or desired features, so it's not easy to know what you're looking for.
Check the research into reversible computing:
Widipedia
Control waste heat by managing entropy.
Physical implementation cannot take advantage of Moore's Observation (great phrase, by the way). This is why my new quad phenom with 3 Gbytes RAM and 500 Gbytes of disk costs $750 but my VW Passat wagon cost me $25000 (and that's getting a great deal on it in 2002!)
You are right that it will be like the matrix or Hogan's story (sounds like an interesting story, I'll have to check it out).
A fully virtualized environment benefits directly from precisely the same exponential improvements that have occurred and will continue to occur in information processing technologies.
I would bet a fair chunk of change that the first entity that passes the Turing Test will be found in a virtual world. And in the virtual world, "holodeck" is exactly what it is, no new development necessary. Other than that slick neural interface. I don't see that happning, though...
I'd bet that we will implement Kruzweil's plan, which is to "download ourselves" to a virtual environment in order to get those benefits. I liken it to a transporter replication process, where the replicant (did I say that?) ends up in the virtual world and the original copy remains in meatspace. Or should the still perfectly viable living meat-based original person be terminated after the replication is complete, following the rule that "There Can Be Only One"?
They are not stupid. Venal, sick, monumentally evil, and they know exactly what they are doing.
The Linux kernel and free software in general represent a world wide missed opportunity to tax developers and users, and these people aim to stop it before it becomes a trend.
SCO has received enough funding to lock this case up in appeal all the way to a freshly packed supreme court. Novell will run out of money 40 times before SCO's funders will even begin to notice the dent in their portfolios. IBM has deeper pockets and masterful lawyers backed by solid evidence, but even with those advantages, a well-enough funded opponent can bleed them pretty good in today's legal and political environment.
And let there be no mistake: This issue reaches into politics in a big way. I believe that if the Linux kernel and and various supporting tools and applications were given a clean bill of legal health, many very powerful people will not be able to assert the control that they think they deserve over the way we earn our incomes.
The guys funding SCO are merely funding an ongoing threat to those who would implement freely available productivity tools. This is a small skirmish in a much larger war. These guys have financial resources that are literally, uncountable, because they have so many layers of corporate veil. I had no idea the SCO linux issue would bubble so high up into the chain of command...
This is the "other shoe dropping", the "pipe fairy waving the magic wand".
Mr. Norris knows EXACTLY what he is doing. This SCO investment is only part of an overall plan to control significant areas of economic development, worldwide. Study the Carlyle Group sometime, and note that they are very well connected, international, quiet and powerful.
Mr. Norris is backed by *huge* money, $1e8 isn't even pocket change for them. They won't even notice the investment, but that relatively minor investment will have exactly the effect that their friends and minions want. This infusion of cash will enable a continued attack on those who freely implement significant productivity tools, such as the Linux kernel. They want *every system* that people depend on, to include the monetization tax that people like Microsoft wish to impose.
Students of history should recognize this event: It is reminiscent of the Guild System in Europe.
Your focus is too narrow. Nobody says "paper ballots are secure". We say "it's far more difficult to swing an election with paper ballots without it being detected and corrected than with electronic systems."
For an individual precinct, it can be argued that paper is subject to (within an order of magnitude) similar levels of manipulation for particular insiders as electronic systems.
However, to really swing an entire election, the decentralized nature of paper ballots requires the concerted cooperation of a far larger population of manipulators with inside access to the ballots' chain of custody. On the other hand, a single easter egg in one version of voting system software can allow one *voter* in each of several, possibly many, precincts to secretly engage the easter egg's incantation to swing that machine's vote totals.
So paper requires concerted effort by many insiders with the concomitant increase in likelihood of one of them screwing up and spilling the beans. Electronic voting systems require a collection of non-insiders to engage a secretly emplaced easter egg to modify entire elections. There is a possibility of detection there too, but it is significantly more difficult.
Electronic voting systems have already been used to affect an election: In central Ohio where I live, districts and precincts with a statistical democratic bias (metropolitan and progressive districts) had reduced allocation of voting machines, while outlying areas that tend republican had appropriate allocation. The result, widely reported, was lines of multiple hours in one case and rarely more than minutes in the other. Voting occurred on a work day, and many people simply could not or would not wait to vote because they had to get back to work.
To claim that people like me are luddites is entirely stupid, by the way. My code has been working in the signalling and switching systems (both STP and NCP) the long distance network for 15 years, has been running cockpit avionics communications for 25 years, and I am at present involved in several autonomous UAV flight control projects.
There are people who really want to manipulate elections and are trying to establish a context in which their manipulations could be done with the minimum probability of detection. The people who run and monitor elections are not embedded system developers with years of experience in authentication and security. They would be very hard pressed to detect, much less respond to, a situation where sophisticated election system developers could be manipulating the process. Note further that the election system vendors steadfastly refuse to show their code to anyone. That makes me very suspicious.
During the late 90's, the Nevada Gaming commission's slot machines were hacked by an insider who used his diagnostic validation unit to insert easter eggs in slot machines. His hack was not discovered for many months (I forget exactly how long it lasted). The Nevada Gaming Commission is loaded with money, expert developers, and a strong economic desire to avoide even a hint of dishonesty, and were hacked. Compare that to Boards of Elections who are overworked, underpaid, have very limited budgets, and absolutely ZERO experience in system security.
In a word, yes.
I am very active in the central Ohio voting reform movement, and it is important to distinguish between statements I believe to be true versus statements that are demonstrably true. It's too easy to fall into a variety of traps and this work is far too important to lose credibility due to hyperbolic speech.
There is also the legal threat: Powerful, wealthy people are pissed off at people like me and I am watching my Ps and Qs carefully. The electronic voting systems people have been making *big* money here as they have been elsewhere, and they are no different from anyone else who does not want the gravy train stopped by a bunch of citizens insisting on honest elections.
The "abortion" decision is not only about abortion, despite the fact that Movement Conservatives really really want it to be. Roe V Wade is about *privacy*, as was the previously significant decision, Griswold V Connecticut.
The "left" is about keeping government the hell out of the most sensitive personal decisions in peoples' lives, while making sure that there are broadly discussed and managed regulation of the interactions among the various interests, particularly economically.
My complaint about Movement Conservatives is that they are all about managing "personal decisions" (that we as individuals can actually control) by government fiat, while preventing individuals from having any significant input into decisions that affect all of us by economically powerful people.
So I think you are Right On with respect to the wealthy and corporate group description, but I am frustrated that conservative people (who have every right to participate fully in discussions of public policy) have not seen past the strawman arguments that the economic royalists have been building during recent decades.
I may owe everyone an apology... The *most charitable* characterization of their misbehavior is professional neglect.
In my heart of hearts, the execrable security performance of the top three electronic vendors is reflective of intentional misconduct. I simply don't say such things publicly as if they were factual, since it is possible that they were simply a bunch of putzes going for HAVA money.
It's a near statistical impossibility that in all but one instance, the variances between exit polls and the "official totals" favored one candidate, across all states, all precincts nationwide.
In New Mexico, the relationship between "surprisingly high" undervote statistics correlates nearly perfectly with paper versus electonic voting.
In the 2006 election in Florida district 13, there are 18000 undervotes in a contested congressional election. People took the time to participate in an off-year election in 2006, voted for other offices and issues, but *didn't vote* in the hotly contested big congressional race? Riight...
I live in central Ohio and saw firsthand during the 2004 election that progressive-leaning and democratic-leaning voting precincts and districts had waiting lines that didn't drop below 2 hours all day. During high traffic times, waiting times increased to 3 or 4 hours. In ex-urban districts, the waiting times rarely exceeded 20 minutes. This is not technical hacking, but it illustrates the "value" of having electronic systems to serve as a means for manipulating elections.
It is documented in "invisible Ballots" that many of the people who originated the company that eventually became Diebold Election Systems were all multiply-convicted felons. Their crimes? Variations on a common theme: computer fraud!
So, I *believe* that there's massive fraud. But I have been prevented from investigating properly, as have been many others. So it's not possible to nail it down legally. The result is that I have to say "probable" and "incompetent" because I cannot legally say "they are liars and thieves".
The fact that Diebold's central tabulator used Microsoft Access?
(Reported in several stories, notably a DVD called "Invisible Ballots")
That their hardware is some of the most programmer-friendly ever (straight X86 CPU, SDcard, CompactFlash sockets)?
(This is a simplified, smaller version of a larger report. A quick Google search will reveal more.)
WindowsCE OS?
(Same report as above)
Executable Scripts on the ballot-definition CF cards?
(Demonstrated in "Invisible Ballots", also known as the Hursti Hack)
By one set of measures these sorts of decisions are hallmarks of el-cheapo implementation of systems that should have been designed to meet far more rigorous standards of security and reliability.
Finally, I refer you to the author of a nice little easter-egg that he was asked to write: Clint Curtis
The *most charitable* characterization of this issue is that these people are guilty of professional negligence. Anyone understanding the importance of elections to this society and that (especially recently) elections are extremely high value to some people, and are hotly contested, would understand that voting systems should be developed under the strictest, most disciplined methodologies.
It is clear that none of the major voting system suppliers have bothered with the most basic architecture, design, verification and validation methodologies.
Or perhaps artists...
Imagine that at any given moment, each element of the swarm has:
1) A "desire" to behave in a unique way, with some probability;
2) The ability to persuade some number of nearby elements to follow it, also with a probability.
Might be an interesting simulation problem. The hypothetical link with reality is analogous to human societies; some the desire and persuasive power (and are therefore opinion leaders). And at various times in history, such people have moved entire societies in unexpected directions.
Not to argue, but to provide a thought... I remember Andy Kaufman's performances well. Some of them were as good as just about anything Steven has ever done. IMHO however, Steven wins in the consistency department. Kaufman's characters had some gaps, while (still IMHO) Steven manages to carry off one of the most flawless narcissistic characters I've ever seen presented. It takes some major creativity cojones to deliver essentially every day as Steven does. And he does it with such panache, he's been able to "get" guests of essentially all stripes to join him in his performance. (Henry Kissinger? Introducing a guitar battle? With the Decemberists? Simply amazing...)
(A side note: I was a young worker at Warner Qube during a time when Mr. Kaufman was performing semi-regularly there. He was a genuinely interesting man, his talent was significant and worthy of our respect.)
Ordinarily, I tend toward agreement with this sentiment. However, not completely. My responses are:
A single government worker (classical civil service worker) is simply a "one person nano-company" and in a strictly academic sense, the government would always be giving your money to private interests.
(as expressed very well elsewhere in this thread) SBIRs are intended to help exactly the correct class of company: People who are not Big Contractors. There is a substantial body of evidence that great innovations tend not to originate in organizations that have large investment in the way things are.
SBIRs are not big funding contracts. Phase I contracts are not sufficient to fund more than a fraction of a person, phase II contracts while better are not usually sufficient to fund the starting of a line-of-business.
SBIRs are, especially recently, very competitive with many companies submitting proposals for each topic. The fact is that money is getting very tight. I do not know the overall statistics, but the ratio of funded proposals to submitted proposals is very small. The companies who include SBIR in their business processes are working *very* hard for that money, and from a taxpayer's perspective, I think it's a great deal.
My disclaimer: I had refused several opportunities during a 30-year career to work in defense contracting, preferring to work in private industry. That was, until 2004 when a small company in my neighborhood hired me to help with their Linux/C++/controls development for a phase II SBIR.
My observation of that process is that SBIR, while being an imperfect process, is an excellent way to use taxpayer money to get ideas and work funded very efficiently.
(As stated by others in this thread) There is no need for an expensive middle-man in the voting process. Having comparatively delicate machines involved adds no security to the process.
My reason for making the suggestion about transforming DREs into very expensive pencils is that local governments are notorious for their inability to face the economic "sunk cost" problem: They claim that they paid lots of very limited money for the machines and they insist on Getting Their Moneys Worth. They also say that getting ballots printed is Very Expensive.
My wife and I, along with our friends in the hand-counted-paper-ballots coummunity are having a difficult time getting past the local election officials who just love their precious machines and think of paper ballots as backward and out of date. They Want To Be Perfectly Modern Government Officials.
Nearly every computer professional or security professional that is asked about electronic voting answers that it's either insecure or too expensive. Statements to that effect accelerate as they flow between the ears of local election officials.
Here's further support for your thesis:
I've stated elsewhere in this thread and other places that electronic machines constitute a perfect way to bias voting paterns in a perfectly legal way: Favored/wealthy precincts are allocated plenty of voting machines, while unfavored/not-wealthy precincts receive inadequate allocations. The result is that some voters have a strong time-based disincentive from voting. This amounts, in my opinion, to a denial of the vote to selected groups of people.
Many people that my wife and I work with (in the "election protection movement") believe that hand-counting is the only way to go. Their logic is that it takes the cooperation of a much larger number of people to screw with an election that was counted by lots and lots and lots of volunteers.
In America, the ballots tend to be larger, sometimes with many candidates and many issues on in a single election. That was the original impetus for using machines: counting would take "too long" for complicated elections.
I think the scalability and reliability of paper ballots outweighs the time-and-complexity issue. However, for those who like instant results, I am OK with an UNOFFICIAL quick "exit poll" report counted on optical scanners, for the late-night vote watchers.
I participated in a "parallel election" during the U.S. midterm election last November, and we were able to run a classical ballot-on-paper process which included completing the first handcounted results 6 hours after the polls closed (2AM; the polls closed at 8PM).
My favorite story relating to scalability is the under-allocation of voting machines in several districts during the 2004 election. People in urban and progressive distrcts waited an average of 2 hours, and sometimes as long as 9 hours (Kenyon College); people in ex-urban and suburban areas waited an average of 15 minutes. Many here believe that the variance in waiting-time was enough to skew the election. Since then, my primary reason for avoiding machines is the "artificial scarcity" problem. Paper has no such difficulty.
My favorite use for touchscreen ex-voting machines would be to drive a printer that generates human-readable ballots. Said ballots would be perfectly fine to count either by optical-scan readers or normal unaided humans.
Touchscreen "ballot printers" would go a long way toward eliminating overvotes and reducing undervotes (since a voter must be permitted to abstain from a particular race or issue).
As long as the Official Legal Ballot is durable and readable by unaided humans. The human can then manually scan his/her selections on the paper ballot before committing it to the official count. If the touchscreen system failed to record the voter's intent accurately, the voter can place the the machine-printed ballot in a rejection pile and fill in a paper ballot using manual methods (pencil, pen, etc.)
The point is that the voter must be able to audit his/her voting selections on the official legal record before committing it to the secure but open vote counting process.
When you buy a device from an organization that believes the above, you *truly* are on your own.
I only buy devices when after expending $600 (OK, $400) of my very very hard-earned money, it is not Apple's device, it's mine. Which is why I do not have an iPhone, despite its being a great looking platform and would be ripe for explosive growth as a personal communicator.
Assuming Apple were smart enough to sell it rather than merely licensing it to "customers", and without being locked in to a service provider that I have already rejected for many reasons.
I recognize the strength of Microsoft as a worthy adversary. I recognize that they are willing to destroy anyone that they decide stands in their way, often after that business has already been successful. There is no way I will ever hold that style of business management in anything other than absolute contempt.
I work with Linux and remain involved in the FOSS ecosystem based on the premise that members of this community compete on the basis of their adaptability to the particular environments in which they work. We have studied Microsoft's tactics of destruction, often watching those moves blast away substantial business equity in the process. On the other hand, the FOSS community (in general) operates under the optimistic assumption that we can find viable niches, fill them, and in so doing produce both reasonable economic income and contribute to the overall progress of the industry.
In our neighborhood, which is a "progressive, 2-miles-from-campus" neighborhood, queue waiting times in 2004 were 1.5 hours.
In neighborhoods closer to campus, liberal areas and in-town areas, queue waiting times averaged 3 hours, extending in rare cases up to 9 hours.
In outlying, ex-urban, well-off neighborhoods, queue waiting times rarely exceeded 25 minutes.
A local advocate told me this weekend that when he set up a gathering after the 2004 election to allow people to describe their experiences, he hoped to see 20-40 people. Instead the meeting overflowed, with at least 500 people complaining that they either could not vote due to the long wait, or experienced even more direct interference.
I live in Ohio; the 2004 presidential election was a record-breaker in the number, depth and significance of the issues on the ballot. This had the effect on extending voter decision times, further exacerbating the machine allocation problem.
Correlation is not causation, but usually invites further investigation. Intentional or not, the 2004 election in Ohio had serious problems, which should be fixed. Electronic voting systems can serve as a "precious resource", subject to misallocation. Paper ballot systems on the other hand offer the potential for parallelized voter decision making, reducing opportunity for the sort of manipulation that I saw in 2004.
And imagine why so many have been talking, pleading, asking, and demanding that we do some bloody research!!! Our dependence on oil renders all actions taken in the gulf region suspect. No matter what the real cause was (good or bad, justifiable or not), most the world thinks the U.S. invaded Iraq to control access to oil.
I really wish our "leadership" had the balls to engage us in research and development to gain independence from those whose oil wealth enables great evil.