US Paperless Voting Bill Advances 153
A couple of weeks back we discussed the effort to require voting paper trails in US federal elections. Now WhiteBoxVoter writes: "Democrats and Republicans in the US House of Representatives agreed today on a compromise that will push through a bill banning paperless voting machines and requiring a voter-verified paper record for every vote in the country, after government sanctioned hackers showed how they could break into all three of the top voting systems used in California." The NYTimes reported on Thursday that even if it passes the House, voting-machine reform that would take effect before the 2008 elections may die in the Senate.
One more chance... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, for some reason, politicians (not only in the USA) seem to be opposed to verifiable, reliable voting methods.
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Because, for some reason, politicians (not only in the USA) seem to be opposed to verifiable, reliable voting methods.
Well, yeah, because if they allow the technology to mature, then no longer will one candidate be able to waste tax payer money by suing for another vote count. One click of the mouse and voila, there is your recount. Want another? *click*
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What you'd rather have as a recount worker is completely irrelevant to me as a voter. This is not being done for your benefit. And it's not like you have to do this all the time. I couldn't care less how much time or sweat it takes you to get it right. I'd much rather see individual batches of votes corrupted in
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The problems in the US run rather deeper than
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Voting technology is centuries old and is already constrained by game theory to be as mature as it can get- if all players play optimally in a struggle for power within a democracy, they will necessarily have to assume that all other players share the wish to gain an unfair advantage by perverting the election process. Absent any compelling reason for a change voting technology cannot be "improved" upon without eroding confidence in the integrity of elections and shrouding them in suspicion. And no electronic system will ever be able to dispel mutual suspicion as effectively as paper.
When we run out of trees and can't print ballots anymore, perhaps the appearance of a conflict of interest will go away. Until then, the appearance means it is a conflict of interest- without a very good reason for screwing with them, it is simply not safe to assume that the true motive behind any effort to "improve" elections isn't theft. This makes the way we vote now unimprovable unless it becomes well understood by everyone involved that we need to improve it for a good reason. No such reason currently exists.
Bubbleheads on cable TV have sold many of us on the idea that democracy is in crisis somehow if they can't announce a winner within hours of election night- which is totally absurd. Recounts are quite cheap, we have months to get it right, and if we rush, the losing side has a legitimate, reasonable complaint that the election might have been unfairly decided. To put it delicately.
then no longer will one candidate be able to waste tax payer money by suing for another vote count.
As a taxpayer I am quite willing to pay for a vote count. An undisturbed recount in 2000 for example could have saved me a lot of money.
One click of the mouse and voila, there is your recount. Want another? *click*
That makes a lot of sense- optimize for speed when the demand is for accuracy. I weed guys like you out in interviews.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you! This need on the news providers' part, to "call" the election before that night's Late Show, has somehow infiltrated our mass culture to the point that plenty of folks accepted the dominant Republican talking point for the 200 recount: "But it'll take tiiiiiime! And mooooney!"
For chrissakes, people, the election is held over two months before the inauguration. We've got time. Perhaps the news providers are just concerned that our country's population of historical amnesiacs will forget there was an election by the time a fair hand count could be completed, but that's hardly a reason to fuck up peoples' expectations of their democracy.
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Wow, didn't even catch that typo with two previews.
I would like to point out that, yes, I am aware that emperor Caracalla was unelected, had already served a couple years by 200, and certainly garnered no support from any factions that might refer to themselves as "republican."
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Especially considering that plenty of countries, outside of the US, do manage to return results within hours using completly manual systems for counting ballot papers.
This appears to be a way to draw attention away from real problems such as well funded lobby groups, points of view unrepresented by politicans/candidates, politi
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because you have shallow economics skills doesn't mean that the people currently at the bottom don't understand the fundamental problem.
Minimum Wage Hikers like to pull out the "rising tide raises all boats" phrase that is also used by supply-siders to justify lowering taxation. But the problem is that a minimum wage increase isn't a rising tide. It's a boat-lift on a large number of small boats, which in a fixed volume of water means the tide itself actually lowers.
The supply-siders are also a bit shallow in their understanding, though. It's not the taxes, per se, that constrict the wealth generating power of the economy, but inefficient central spending. Inflation is just another kind of tax.
Re:Are you saying voters are hallucinatory...? (Score:2)
In the USA, I thought it was illegal to allow hallucinatory delusional psychotics to vote in national, state, and local elections.
However, it is perfectly legal and USA Constitutional required to allow US Citizens with any form of silly beliefs in mythology to vote as their mythological delusional beliefs mentally and emotionally pervert them.
The spin-sway myth factor introduced (li
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm divided on two levels.
The first level is whether to respond to you earnestly or snarkily, as it seems that while you are somewhat flamebaiting, the ideas you are expressing are not exactly uncommon amongst the Slashdot crowd. Would it do to point out merely that many (probably most) of the monsters in humanity's history (and their many apologists) were earnest students of politics, history, art, sociology, science, and world history? Or does it bear mentioning that education and intelligence of a superior caliber is nearly universally consummate with superior arrogance and ambition? Or the further obvious fact that studying those things does not free a person from the grip of a desire to self-aggrandize or seek to support their own interests at the public expense?
The second level is my ambivalence regarding the underlying point. I'd sure like to believe that smart and well-educated people make overall better decisions in the public sphere. Certainly it is true that stupid and ignorant people make spectacularly bad decisions in that same sphere. On the other hand, the democratic model outright assumes that people, smart or stupid, will vote their interests and not their beliefs (and one might add that interests and beliefs ought to match in equivalent proportion to intelligence); if people don't do that then many of the underlying assumptions that validate elections and public politics are vacated. It is in the general domain of smart people to assume that being smart is superior in all conditions, much in the same vein that rich people assume that being wealthy is a superior condition to all others. And equally fallacious, for pretty much the same reasons.
Personally I find your brand of cynicism offensive, and for my part have met enough educated people to pray that academically inclined folk never ever wield disproportionate power to their numbers. They are the ones who are ruled by ideology to the exclusion of reality, and with overweening senses of self-adulation seek to save the 'dirty masses' from their ignorance and conditions. I am not impressed. Surely there are other ways of viewing the world that are equally destructive, and those I would also never wish to possess power wielded in excess of the numbers of people who possess them; this is why democracy is the worst system except all the others, and the one I'd rather try to get to work rather than spew pointless invective upon it.
Interestingly, with occasional recent counter-examples I will admit, stupid people tend to choose people smarter than themselves to represent them.
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You left out "intellectual snobs".
Very wierd that the richest country in (Score:4, Interesting)
We need to learn from the successful all-electronic voting system from the world's largest democracy India [slashdot.org].
I hate to see some many trees being cut down in the name of democracy to create those paper ballots.
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Just because they did it doesn't mean everyone else should. And just because you haven't heard about major problems caused by it, doesn't mean there weren't any.
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And even if there hadn't been any, that doesn't mean there couldn't have been any. If we're making an effort to improve the voting system, we might as well do our best to make sure it is as good as we know how to make it, instead of implementing a few improvements for show and waving away any remaining problems.
recycled paper? (Score:1)
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Unfortunately, support for better voting systems has been lackluster at best in the circles where the decisions about them actually get made.
Once again, it's not a matter of technical know-how, but of political will.
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Re:Very wierd that the richest country in (Score:5, Informative)
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Still a safeguard (Score:2)
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If somebody suspects the counting was rigged, they take the paper votes and count that, by hand.
To avoid something slipping by you could do a sanity check, by counting X% of the paper votes, and verifying that the percentages are close enough to what the machine said.
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Yes, the main issue is not the kind of ballot used, the issue is how do you "keep the bastards honest"?
It's not about a "perfect system" (there is no such thing), it's about minimizing the opportunity and scope for cheats. Provided the voter understands the ballot paper in the first place, a machine that prints the
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This is an absurd argument, which I've heard even from people who oppose no-excuse absentee ballots. It is extremely illegal for your boss or anyone else to make such a threat. If said boss tries to do that to a few people, it is extremely likely that one or two will be smart enough to contact law enforcement, and boss goes to prison for a very long time for tampering with a federal election.
There are plenty of ways to influence
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Were the richest country. (Score:2)
Well, kind of (Score:2)
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Not weird at all, especially considering that the consensus opinion of many of the brightest minds in computer security, worldwide, is that the state of the art in computer security isn't capable of producing a secure electronic voting system.
The only oddity here is that Indians trust their system to produce accurate results.
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So before attending to a problem that demonstrably allows a few well-informed people to completely alter the results of an election, we should come up with a costly and unconstitutional solution to a "voter fraud" problem that isn't a problem at all, at least according to the Bush Justice Department's own politically-motivated five-year study of voter fraud?
What a terrible idea. Good move, posting anonymously and all.
Like A Paper Trail Means Anything (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should you having a piece of paper saying you voted some way mean anything? Last election the exit polls indicated a result significantly different than what was declared official.
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one more thing to confuse the old people down in florida...
what do we need this for anyway? the hackers could do a better job at "voting" than the clueless idiots we have casting the ballots now.
Re:Like A Paper Trail Means Anything (Score:4, Informative)
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I've been thinking about this subject a lot since the 2000 election. I am against electronic ballots with no paper trail, but I now wonder whether a paper ballot can guarantee more than a warm fuzzy.
Spot checking N% of precincts as you suggest sounds good to me. How will these checks be implemented across the country? Could a Federal election rule be made to force all states to perform a check? If so, would states have the freedom to decide the process for performing a check? Were it left to the individua
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Geez, you don't have very
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I bet most California politicians of any stripe (Repub/Dem/Moonbat) disliked the idea of a cap on property taxes but somehow, that got on the ballot, and became law. What happened to citizen-sponsored referenda or propositions?
And I agree with other posters on this
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If every voter has verified that the paper version of his/her ballot is correct, then a hand recount is a nearly foolproof way to discern the will of the voters. Of course, the physical security of the ballots remains a concern, but that problem's always been around.
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Print one thing and record another.
Having the voting machine record the votes is part of the problem. The reason electronic voting became such a national issue was because of the error-prone ballots in Florida. The solution was to simply come up with a ballot that you couldn't fill out improperly. A simple electronic voting machine the produces a paper ballout which is simultaneously readable by human and machine is the ideal solution. It allows for quickly counting the ballots by machines and is easily v
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Heh, there's no such thing as idiot-proof, and since all that is required to be able to vote is age and lack of major felonies, there are a whole lot of idiots who do so
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The ONLY workable system is to keep all individual votes separate in both forms and re-tally them independently. It makes no difference then whether the paper copy is identical to the corresponding electronic copy, if the grand totals for each add up to the same value. In which case, why would it matter if the sequences were
Patent this (Score:1, Funny)
Use dice. It don't tax us voters too much, and probably end up picking the better (whatever that means) candidate more often. And save us a mint while at it.
Magic eight balls is also good, but I've seen pornographic versions of that, and now sure the conservatives from the bible belt will warm up to that.
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Why must we go with e-voting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think they're incompetent at all; they designed a system to allow them to sell the elections to the highest bidder, they sell elections to the highest bidder, they get mad paid. They do, quickly and efficiently, the [illegal] job they are hired to do, AND they get away with it. Remember, this is privatization at work - these are highly paid, influential lobbyist and contractors, not bumbling bureaucratic government functionaries.
Still absentee ballots are often bogus (Score:1)
Exactly .... (Score:2)
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-Lars
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That is the big problem with paper ballots - they can be incorrectly filled out.
I'm for a hybrid approach - GUI for ballot validation, secure voter-verified paper audit trail for counting...
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Which is why court mandates for recounters to accurately "determine the intent of the voter" are such nonsense. Throw out the incorrectly marked ballots.
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That would imply that each ballot passes through only one set of hands, which would be a terribly silly, accountability-free way to count votes.
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And define incorrect - 99%-101% filled in? Stray marks up to 10 microns in size? No paper ballot is perfect, so my stray mark might be your printing defect.
With a machine-generated paper ballot you can define specs and apply specs and six-sigma the final product to near-perfection. If you can make a skyscraper with 10,000 I-beams that doesn't collapse you can make a voting system that doesn't miscount votes. But not when everything is hand-made...
And whose votes a
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What percentage of ballots will validate OK in the first count, and have a stray mark in the recount?
I'm sure it isn't 0.0000000%
A computer-printed ballot is more likely to be accurate on all passes, and I can't see any issues with this solution security-wise.
No solution is perfect - but we can aim for the best solution possible.
Windows... (Score:1)
Personally, I think that the level people are flipping out about these is ridiculous. From a software point of view, it should be relatively to do. You see applications where the userspace has no interaction with the OS all the time (i.e, publi
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because we can
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NO RECEIPT goes with the voter. This would create a market for buying/selling/coercing votes. "Bring me a vote for X and I'll pay $5!" or "Bring me a vote for X or else your house may spontaneously catch fire."
Probably offtopic, but (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it odd that our country spends the GDP of some small countries in campaign spending, and yet there is one small change that I think would revolutionize the way people vote: make Voting Day a holiday. Yes, just like the 4th of July, all companies close, school is out at all levels (elementary, middle/high school, and college.) Make kids realize that this is something important. I think anybody would be hard pressed to argue that celebrating the 4th of July is more important historically or iconically than voting.
Re:Probably offtopic, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that making it a holiday would hurt, I just don't think it would actually get too many more people to vote.
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People use tactical voting to mitigate the spoiler effect... which is the problem. With a rigged two-party system, people like me don't get a candidate that they can vote for, because you get parties which end up with alliances which de facto disallow candidates of particular combinations of positions. So, for instance you won't
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Anyone who cannot vote that day (religious scruples, health, travel, etc) can lodge a postal vote before hand.
Works fine.
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But it seems to me that what really need changing is the whole 'registered voter' thing, it needs to be abolished. Simply allow anyone with a social security number to go in anywhere in their precinct, and vote.
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Open Source Voting System ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Basic demands for any electronic voting system is that it is open, safe and that the results are verifiable. That means that the voting set-up/definitions as well as the machine output and logs must be in plain text (signed to prevent/detect tampering of course) and be made publicly available for all to verify. Not to forget the paper trail.
Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.
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Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.
No, you shouldn't be able to do that. Why? It provides a false sense of security. If the machine is compromised, it would be all too easy for the machine to lie in the dump. If you want to check the software, you should have to shut the machine down, and pull and dump its program storage -- which would make it
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Next election? That's rather wishful. (Score:2, Informative)
There. I said it.
Please let me be wrong.
-FL
Black Box Voting (Score:2)
well... (Score:1)
Both sides have problems (Score:1)
No difference between Democrats and Republicans? (Score:5, Insightful)
So I ask those who say this: Would this legislation have come to be in the House under the Republicans? (Answer: it didn't) Yes, it was a bipartisan compromise, but we all know that the compromise wouldn't be possible with the Republicans in charge.
Re:No difference between Democrats and Republicans (Score:2)
By which I mean, it depends on how you define 'differences' - and when.
Americans, by and large, seem to understand that power corrupts, and reflect that by looking at who is in charge and regarding them as corrupt -- which, by and large, is pretty accurate. As such, right now, most of us are looking at the Republicans and saying that things are just appalling. When Democrats have a firm grip on all three branches of the government and ar
Voting really isn't the issue... (Score:2, Insightful)
Start with cleaning up who can vote first, then worry about the vote itself. The vast majority of elections fraud so far has been cases of fraudulent registrations, not vote tampering. People voting w
Global Cogent Campaign for DEMOCRACY! End Tyranny! (Score:2)
Any USA Congressperson or Senator voting or corporatist, lobbyist, general
Re:Won't someone please... (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh you're one of those eh? "The Democrats do it too!"... so it's fine when the Republicans do it!
By the way, did you notice this story? [slashdot.org]. This is all about the brand new Secretary of State in California, Debra Bowen, giving the DRE manufacturers hell. There was no hope of getting these problems looked at under her Republican predecessor, Bruce McPherson... he loved DREs for some strange reason...
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Oh you're one of those eh? "The Democrats do it too!"... so it's fine when the Republicans do it!
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Of course, that's not what I said, but I suppose that strawman is easier to knock down.
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And in case anyone cares, I cited an actual case where the Democrat is doing a much better job than the Republian was. So much for the "there's no difference" argument...