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John Edwards on Open Source Voting Machines
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jun 30, 2007 02:38 AM
from the let's-get-an-interview-set-up dept.
from the let's-get-an-interview-set-up dept.
goombah99 writes "John Edwards, the presidential candidate and lawyer, is standing out from the pack by showing himself to be a bit tech savvy. In 2003 he was a guest host on Lawrence Lessig's Blog, giving his view on the imbalance between property right protection and the good of public access. As of this week he has become the first presidential candidate to support 'open source code' for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records. He's even personally using Twitter. 'Currently, software used in election systems remains the proprietary property of vendors. This situation has created a continual problem when anomalous results have been reported and independent experts are denied the ability to review how the systems work. A growing body of critics oppose this privatization of the voting system.'"
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Open source election systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Open source election systems (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I've been thinking we needed open-source election software (if we are to use electronic voting) ever since the whole Bush election debacle originally occurred. Am I supposed to not care when a candidate makes a statement in support of that idea? The fact that this idea also happens to be popular today with geeks on Slashdot doesn't make it wrong.
And yes, I fully realize he would not be in a position to mandate open-source voting kiosks even if elected. But it is reasonable to judge our candidates based on their views (in addition to their track records, of course), right?
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Re:Open source election systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party. Many of the major laws passed in the last 7 years have been written entirely by White House staff and then handed off to a sponsor in Congress. Presumably if a democratic presidential candidate wins, that will mean the democrats have at least held congress if not built an even more significant majority, so Edwards' opinion on legislative matters is hardly irrelevant.
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I would submit that it is corporations and moneyed special interests that primarily get represented, even when the Congress and White House are held by different parties. Aside from a few issues like abortion, there just isn't that much difference between the Rs and the Ds.
Many of the major laws pass
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process transparency matters even more than open-source transparency
The two are not mutually exclusive as you imply. We need both.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
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1) The closed source system has a touch screen and no paper trail. The company making the machines likes George Bu...err...likes a particular candidate, and accusations fly that the company has embedded a mechanism to ensure that the shrub wins. The code cannot be reviewed to prove its security and consistency, so
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This is such an absurd theory, and yet it seems to be "accepted truth" around here. Think for one second. Who writes code? Here's a hint - it isn't upper level managers and company executives (ie those nasty Republicans). The only way something like this could happen is if low level employees (ie the engineers) were complicit. Do you think upper management *ordered* the engineers to make the code favor Bush, in whi
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Upper management can and usually do ask their engineers for such things. They have to bring home some bucks. Management simply has to select some programmers who are ideologically aligned, but most importantly need the job or can be blackmailed otherwise. As every employee knows, no one wants to hire a whistleblower anyway.
Re:Open source election systems (Score:4, Insightful)
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The implication is that dishonest hardware/software could be used for an election and swapped out later for honest systems so as to make the previous election appear legitimate.
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Open source voting machines are useless, unless you can verify that the software and hardware in use at the time you cast your vote is trustworthy. If you can't, it might as well be a closed-source system.
Nonsense. Open source voting machines don't allow you to walk on water but they do improve the transparency of the process. Yes, you need to verify the voting hardware/software also but regardless of that it doesn't change change the fact that open source makes it harder to compromise.
Just like "secu
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It's a joke. Laugh.
Fragmenting the vote (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Fragmenting the vote (Score:5, Informative)
Condorcet and/or approval voting solves this problem, but until we have that, we're stuck with partisanship and all the screwiness of plurality elections.
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Re:Fragmenting the vote (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't, and shouldn't. Being a geek is only one small part of who we are as human beings. Technology issues are important to us, and in that sense we could all probably get together on who supports the positions we espouse the best.
The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war. There's the "war on terrorism." There's the issue of things like the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's immigration and visas. Of course on top of all these relatively new (or updated) issues, we have issues like education, health care, social security, civil liberties, privacy, economic policy, foreign policy, taxes, plus many others.
These are all far more important and far-reaching issues, and ones where there will be a lot of different and valid view points. We should vote for the person we believe best supports our entire range of issues, rather than trying to band together to support the biggest technology geek running for office at the time.
We should all vote our consciences in that regard. What we geeks should do, however, is band together on these technology issues where we mostly tend to agree and become an influential force on those specific topics, regardless of who we voted for in a particular election or who ended up in office.
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LOL. You mean the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam? That's an invasion, not a war. Get over it.
For the Sunni and Shia, it's a war. For the foreign fighters, it's a war. We don't get to call it a war. When you go into other people's neighbourhoods to stir things up or bust heads and don't expect resistance, that's simply A Really Dumb Idea.
Or were you referring to the War on Insert-Your-Favourite-Vague-Concept-He
Support AB 852 (Score:2, Informative)
e-Voting never replaces public auditable elections (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want an election to be publicly auditable, then the only (!!) way to do it is to count votes manually by hand in public.
You can use an electronic voting machine to get a faster preliminary result, but if you give up on manual counting the electronic voting machine will become a black-box. Regardless what kind of software, security etc. you use and implement.
Re:e-Voting never replaces public auditable electi (Score:2)
Paper ballots cannot be lost, thrown out, replaced, or stuffed?
Just because there are flaws with the current implementation of electronic voting, you can't sit back and ignore how monumentally fragile the paper ballot voting system really is. Sure you can sit there and hand count a stack, but how can anyone ever prove that the stack is the exact same one cast by the voters?
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Bush may not be the most successful prez all round but he's been successful enough. And he's been a buttload more successful than leftie posterboys like Clinton.
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Canada leads the way. (Score:2, Informative)
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Open Source dosen't matter for voting systems (Score:3)
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How? Even if the BIOS is open source, how can you verify which code is actually installed in a given machine?
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Article in one sentence (Score:4, Informative)
the Edwards campaign stated that, "To ensure security, these machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records."
I know RTFA is uncalled for, or even RTFS, but maybe if I put this quote in the comments section I can head off the "It needs a paper-trail *snort*" comments. Already, those seem to make up 35% of the comments. Ron Paul comments seem to come in second at 25%, and comparisons to Canada and bad jokes seem tied at about 10-15% each.
Re:Article in one sentence (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an article from nist linked somewhere up that page (open source doesn't help..), that says something I never thought of before: even if you have a paper trail, a compromised machine could still effect the result - by (for instance) placing a candidate's name in a hard to see place or somehow making it a bit harder to vote for them. Given the fact that quite a few people only decide who to vote for in the booth and are lazy, I could see this swinging a close race.
Not to say that a paper trail isn't a good thing, just interesting that it doesn't solve everything...
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Can you really call it a Democracy with evotes? (Score:2)
*Must be a Diebold programmer to qualify.
Damn! (Score:2)
He could have asked Democracy what it's like being dead...
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Call me old fashion (Score:3)
Alternative (Score:2, Insightful)
There are things that humans are not so good at. Financial systems allow data to be processed at high speed, to be stored in much less space for long term retrieval, transported around and for the complexity of data to be represented in many different ways. The results are required quickly. They run repeatedly, so despite a high initial cost, they pay off in the long term.
Votes are the
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At the end of the day, these are counted by machine. If a recount is necessitated, then two things are verified at the recount: 1) that all of the options listed on the paper ballots are
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The airwaves and telephone networks would not exist without public land, pretending that allowing one corporation to own all that spectrum or all those acres of land is good for the consumer is ridiculous. The market forces do not ap
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Re:You're wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for both Sicko and your article, neither settles this debate as both rely far too heavily on individual cases than generally applicable logical analysis. Obviously, such analysis is difficult to express sucinctly, but to me it boils down to this: The government is motivated by getting enough votes. When it comes to healthcare it can do this by keeping taxes low and/or by providing better service. On the other hand, the corporation's primary objective is to increase share price. Which it can do only by increasing profits. Profits can be increased by growing the corporation's income and growing costs at a slower pace or by cutting costs (or a combination).
The above are the facts of the situation, my decision is a result of a willy nilly hash of how I feel the shit breaks down in real life: The corporation, unable to grow itself at a rate faster than the economy (which it must do to add value) is forced to cut costs, even if this means worse healthcare. Rather than improve services it games the system to avoid losing market share. Thus, it fails to provide the same level of healthcare efficiency that the government CAN (note: not "does") provide.
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The problem is that universal care means taking care of the 95% of the population who pay little to no taxes (comparatively).
The people who pay for
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