Computer Problems Already Affecting Florida Voters 688
TAGmclaren writes "The Sun-Sentinel is reporting on computer glitches already affecting the election in - you guessed it - Florida. Of the 14 early voting sites that opened in Broward County on Monday morning, 9 were reporting problems. In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed. More generally, SFgate.com is keeping track of all voting issues across the country - including lawsuits and other ballot problems." Update: 10/19 03:38 GMT by T : Thanks to reader Dale J. Russell for pointing out that "there is no Orlando County. The city of Orlando, Florida resides in Orange County."
That's orange county. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/18/diebo ld_among_sites_still_running_windows_nt4.html [netcraft.com]
According to this article, diebold is still running windows nt 4 internally. This is scary because because microsoft is scheduled to stop releasing all hotfixes for nt 4 on december 31st of this year. What does it say about the security of our election if the driving company behind the election machines has no clear upgrade path for their internal software? Does it imply that products they release may be released on unsupported, buggy platforms?
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Funny)
You already said they were running on Windows.
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Interesting)
Keep It Simple Stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in Mercer Co. Pennsylvania, and we went from ancient 7 foot voting machines to a electronic system. The systems appear to be running some sort of simple low power propritery system on a simple and inexpensive black and white passive lcd display which most likely saves the vote data to flash memory. You basicially just walk up, press the screen and you
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an honest question from a foreigner.
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Funny)
Soros is working for the devil. The Bush bagman are working for God. See the difference?
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Interesting)
The world wonders why America is not going nuts over Kerry and why Bush is so popular. Its because a third of the deep south is baptist and 90% are hard core Bush fanatics thinking they are serving the lord by being republican.
I give credit to the campaign strategiests for Reagan. They started teh movement and the religious folk fell for it and created a hard core radical wing of t
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I'm a Baptist. And not only do I not think that Bush is annointed by God, but I'm voting for Kerry. I believe that the government has no business regulating morality, really, so I'm voting for the person who I think will do better for the things I think the government should be regulating.
Just because someone is religious doesn't make them have a head full of mush.
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Informative)
I know. I vote there.
optical illusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that explains why there are problems (Score:4, Informative)
On a serious note, it's perhaps a very good thing that Florida DOES have early voting. They've got a few days leeway to fix problems, although it does mean that they have absolutely no f*ing clue whether the data they have is any good or not. It also means that, since voting is anonymous, the voters have no f*ing clue as to whether any of their votes have meant anything.
(Florida doesn't do printouts, so they can't exactly compare the computer data with hardcopy.)
If they can fix the problems quickly (yeah, right!) their best bet might be to null all the votes that have been cast so far and start over. AFAICT, that might be the only way they can be sure of getting anything useful.
Re:That's orange county. (Score:5, Funny)
No, but with luck he might learn that on November 2.
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Informative)
"flip flop" = a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, on the Iraq war vote, Kerry voted for the war on the basis of the evidence made available by Bush. We now know that the evidence for war was wrong, incomplete and selectively chosen by a broken system. If you believed the evidence that was presented at the time then voting for war was the only option (as it happens I didn't believe the evidence, but that is a freedom a popularly elected official doesn't really have if he wants to be re-elected). In the light of new evidence it appears that the case for war was not based in fact, but speculation (if you're feeling generous towards Bush), or greed (if you're being less generous). Faced with the new information I would be deeply concerned if someone did not change their point of view. It is a deeply valid thing to do.
Making a decision on the best available information is a good thing. Making a decision on ideological grounds and the selecting evidence to support your position is not a good thing.
Re:"flip flop" = a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
But didn't Kerry later say he would have voted for the war knowing what he knows now... that there were no WMDs?
To tell the truth, I don't believe what any politician says. The debates are beauty contests and ads are twisted spew. You can take anything out of context and turn any statistic in your favor. You're better off looking at the voting record and deciding what you app
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Informative)
"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity"
I think you might be stretching a bit far by assuming that GW Bush Inc knows this. The man's only political experience was as the executive of Texas, the state with the least powerful governor in the Union. Bush basically needed the state senate's permission to get airline tickets. With the cult of personality he surrounds himself with, its unlikely anyone challenges the hair brained ideas that pop into his head.
That said, even if Bu
Re:That's orange county. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless your brother happens to be the governor of a key state and the person certifying the election used to work for you...
Re:That's orange county. (Score:4, Interesting)
%70 of Americans according to some polls think Bush is more decisive as a result. Especially this is true among independants who are leaning towards Bush. They do not like Bush but feel Kerry has no stand and flip flops left and right and is too unpredictable to be president.
Propaganda works.
If you let yourself be defined in debating you will lose. Kerry let Bush define him last spring as a flip flopper and now the label is permanently stuck with him.
Its a sad day when a military hero is descredited by someone who went AWOL due to negative campaign tactits.
Santayana (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell it to Boss Tweed [wikipedia.org]. "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!"
Now most people don't even look at the pictures [salon.com]. Pitiful, ain't it?
Re:That's orange county. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, at least not twice. Hopefully.
What really bothered me today (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
"more secure than paper ballots" would be a start. *ONLY* a start, mind you, as it doesn't begin to justify the additional expense, but it'd be a start. I'm not advocating a Chicken Little approach by any means, but sticking your head in the sand and singing "it'll all be OK because the person presiding over this mess said so" stopped being a viable response about when the war in Iraq 'ended'.
We know software that's as bulletproof as our democracy deserves can be written - it runs on mainframes day in and day out for years and years. Then the only reasons why the election hardware/software is so buggy is incompetence or malice, and either way we shouldn't be using it.
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:3, Insightful)
I see you've never made an honest mistake and forgotten to uncomment out a line of code before.
While a simple mistake on the part of one programmer is just a simple mistake, the company is being incompetent if these things are not picked up in exhaustive reviewing. As someone else has so ably pointed out, peer reviewing of the source code would help weed out mistakes.
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what, I have. Many times. Here's the thing, the real kicker here: when my code fails, nothing bad happens. When *my* code fails, no one's pacemaker stops. When my code fails, nobody's automatic medication overdoses them. When my code fails, planes don't fall from the sky.
When the code on a voting machine fails, democracy fails. The instant that a mistake is made there, in one of the most important systems in the world, catastrophy strikes. It is not exagerating in any way to say that forgetting to uncomment a line of code could result in the deaths of millions, as the minority's leader drives us into a war we don't want.
I don't bet the fate of the world (and don't tell me that electing the wrong official wouldn't affect everybody) on my 'honest mistake'. When that comes up, I expect more. I expect a lot more testing, a lot more review. We know how to write reliable software. It's a crime to surrender our nation by not doing so.
Precision vs. accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:3, Interesting)
Should we take your word for it?
With this type of application, bugs are not limited to programming errors.
Can you honestly say that there's no way to destroy votes, either digitally or physically, change votes, add fake votes, vote more than once, act as a fake client, act as a fake server, act as a man in the middle, obtain private voting records without a key, or prevent further users from voting. Or imagine 5 voting machines are intended for a certain area, and
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:3, Insightful)
You must have really low quality standards for your voting. The question is not whether the computer-based voting machines are as secure "as they could be made," but if they are more secure than the electro-mechanical or paper-based voting system they are designed to replace. And, at least at th
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
Conflict of interest? Or merely unqualified to "make sure"?
Holy Freaking Crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like saying, "I just got this new Ford Mustang, and it's the sweetest car I've ever driven. They forgot the brake system when they designed it, but I'm pretty confident in the air bag system, so I'll be fine. Sweet car, d00d."
Unreal.
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a machine A that's dialing (using PSTN?) an election computer B.
So has anyone made sure that only A can talk to B?
Or can C dial A's number just as A "picks up the phone to dial" B, and result in A talking to C but thinking it is talking to B.
Countermeasure: get Telco to ensure that no inward connections can be made on lines used for outbound calls.
Personally, given the US thought it was worth spending BILLIONS to choose the leaders of Iraq (a crippled country albeit with tons of oil), I don't see why you guys can't spend a bit more on choosing the leaders of the World's Most Powerful Nation, and do things properly.
But no. Instead we see crappy machines like Diebold's being used.
Y'know, maybe the US should outsource their elections to India as well. The Indians seem to be able to do elections even if they can't do Tech Support.
Re:What really bothered me today (Score:5, Insightful)
mind blowback (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:mind blowback (Score:4, Insightful)
Their [the media] idea of balance is that when you have somebody on your show who tells the truth for 15 minutes you have somebody else on who lies for 15 minutes. What they never do is to say afterwards "this guy told the truth 80% of the time and this other guy was full of shit 80% of the time".
Not related to the ballot system (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not related to the ballot system (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not related to the ballot system (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not related to the ballot system (Score:3, Insightful)
Look what happened in the last election and what it meant. And after that you would have had 4-3.5 years to fix it. And you still show up on the news as having problems on day 1.
There is zero reason for not being able to connect to a database, not when you've had this much time to prepare for it.
This is /. right? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least we know the red and green phosphors are safe!
Stop 0x0000000A (Score:5, Funny)
"And in Orange County, voting ground to a halt after the touch-screen voting system crashed for about 10 minutes.
A senior deputy elections supervisor could not explain the brief outage, but speculated a faulty Internet connection may have been to blame."
Yeeeehaw! Let the games begin. [about.com]
Re:Stop 0x0000000A (Score:5, Insightful)
these things are great!! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm posting this message from a Florida Voting machine. Browsing under IE is great! Had to download and install flash plugin for a few sites, though. I have no idea why all these posters are saying this electronic voting system is insecure. Everytime these popup windows appear telling me they need to confirm my credit card information, the numbers are displayed as asterisks (*) when I type it in. This voting machine seems plenty secure to me.
Gotta Love Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit of self fufilling prophecy. We've had 4 years to sit around wringing our hands and worrying, of course we're gonna have problems.
And we'll have the inevitable lawsuits, recounts and when someones declared the winner, the losers will yell about how it was stolen.
Re:Gotta Love Democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans love democracy so much...they really should try it some time.
It puzzles me how somebody who won the vote of less than 25% of the population [wikipedia.org] can claim to be democratically elected.
Better yet - can claim a mandate as the leader of the "democratic free world". Hey, if the US president wants to be the leader of the democratic free world, let's open the election up to the rest of the free world...using a sensible electoral process [wikipedia.org].
BTW - now that Iraq has been "liberated", shouldn't they also be allowed to participate in the election of the "leader of the democratic free world"?
If the US presidential candidates don't want to open the ballots to the rest of the world, they should stop claiming to be our representative, and start ceding some power to a globally representative organisation [un.org]
Re:Gotta Love Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
That is because 50% of the people do not vote. Kind of the point of a democracy, isn't it? Forcing people to vote doesn't work as people forced to vote do not pay attention the the issues and just randomly check somebody.
Re:Gotta Love Democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gotta Love Democracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Forcing people to vote doesn't work as people forced to vote do not pay attention the the issues and just randomly check somebody.
As somebody who lives in a country (Australia) with compulsory voting, I can tell you that that is not true. Compulsory voting actually has the effect of making a greater number of people pay attention to politics. Only a small minority seem to vote randomly.
Compulsory voting does create a different political climate to what you would be used to in the US. There is no ne
Re:Gotta Love Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just an absurd line of reasoning. The Democrats are already a lock on all of both NY and CA, and by no means does that guarantee them the election. Doing away with the Electoral College would actually allow some of the Republicans in both those states to have their voices heard.
There's simply no rational reason why a vote in Ohio should have such a vastly more significant impact on the election that does my vote
Re:Electoral College and Slavery (Score:3, Insightful)
Take off the tin foil hat, it wasn't Jefferson trying to rig the presidential election. Ratification of Constitution - 1787, Election of Jefferson - 1800. So Jefferson planned the 3/5th vote for an election 2 presidents (including one of his rivals John Adams) later.
Yes you are right, many things in the constitution were done to preserve state's rights. States wer
The lawsuits will start coming fast and furious (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not normal to be this close, though. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't take my word for it. BBCNews has a nice little applet [bbc.co.uk] which lets you look at all of the past electoral college breakdowns for our past elections.
Now, the election counting definitely worries me, and I agree with a past poster that the more you know about computers, the more you worry that they control the receipt, storage, and counting of our votes. If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me. At least we all know politicians are dishonest. Until now, we probably had SOME faith in the voting system, as such.
What they failed to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
Upon contacting their support center, the issue was resolved shortly after the operators were instructed to turn the power ON.
Re:What they failed to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
Tech support: What's wrong?
Official: I just told you, it's not working.
Tech: How do you know?
Official: Because when I try to vote, the machine doesn't respond.
Tech: What does it say on the screen?
Official: Nothing.
Tech: Is it on?
Official: How do I tell?
Tech: The lights on the front will be lit.
Official: There are no lights.
Tech: So it's off? Hit the power button under the lights.
Official: You're not listening. There are no lights.
Tech: What do you mean, no lights?
Official: I mean there are no lights. There's a screen, two buttons, and that's it.
Tech: Wait - what does your machine look like?
Official: It's bright red, is made of plastic, and it's about 12 inches by 9 inches. Why?
Tech: Are you trying to vote on an Etch-a-Sketch?
Official: Vote?
Touche (Score:4, Insightful)
Aliens must look down at the US electoral process, and regard it in a similar way as the US has regarded other countries electoral systems - IE; Broken and unsatisafactory.
Re:Touche (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect you mean aliens in the "extraterrestrial" sense, but it's also true for aliens in the "foreign nationals" sense. Plenty of us live in democracies where there may be bitching about the result afterwards, but the actual election process itself isn't doubted.
The Hanging Chad Touch Screen (Score:5, Insightful)
I am trying to think of what the arguments will be...
Re:The Hanging Chad Touch Screen (Score:5, Funny)
When the poll worker asks why I spent 12 hours in front of the screen, I'll just say I was camping Al Gore, but he didn't spawn.
The right to vote is a fundamental human right. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is more than ironic that as the United States ostensibly seeks to promote democracy overseas, hundreds of thousands of tax-paying Florida residents are forced to stand mute on election day.
Florida is one of only 7 states that permanently deny all ex-offenders access to the voting booth. The consequences there are stark: some 600,000 Floridians are unable to vote, including more than 17 percent of the state's black male adults.
Some legislators raise bogus arguments about virtue being a prerequisite to voting--as though all those who have the franchise have led blemish-free lives. Underneath such pious sentiments are calculated partisan politics. Simply put, Republicans fear Democrats would benefit if Florida became a state that honored the fundamental precept of a free nation: the right to vote.
Five years ago, Human Rights Watch documented the outrageous consequences nationwide of felony disenfranchisement laws, including those in Florida. At the time, few Americans were even aware that nearly one and a half million ex-felons in this country were denied voting rights even long after they completed their criminal sentences. Somewhat naively perhaps, we assumed that once this fact became known, legislators across the country would promptly step up to make the necessary legislative fix.
There has been some progress--but not in Florida. Despite legislative debates and lawsuits, Florida stubbornly retains the law denying ex-felons the vote for life. An eighteen-year-old convicted of a single drug offense can never vote no matter how exemplary her subsequent life. The only option is to navigate the frustrating and cumbersome process of seeking a pardon or restoration of civil rights from the governor--and this is not much of an option. The current backlog of people seeking to have the vote restored is estimated to be more than 40,000.
The right to vote is a fundamental human right. It can be frustrated by hanging chads and butterfly ballots.
But Florida's felony disenfranchisement laws keep far more Florida residents from choosing their elected officials than these infamous--but not legislatively mandated--problems.
Re:The right to vote is a fundamental human right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I guess John was right (Score:3, Funny)
Curious (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize that it's popular these days to point out that these irregularities contributed to the last election outcome, but isn't also somewhat obvious that those same irregularities (or similar ones) have existed since the dawn of voting itself, I mean those punch machines of yore were around quite a while before 2000.
If we are complaining about them now, mabye we should have started when Jimmy Carter was elected. When are we going to stop the madness and realize that the only ones profiting here are lawyers not people. There isn't and will never be a perfect system for everyone.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Curious (Score:3, Interesting)
How about this system:
We'll set up a "psychic" (nominated by each state congress) in the capital of each state. On Nov 2 the psychic will read the brainwaves of the people of the state. He or she will then decide who the winner of that state is based on "vibes". And that's who gets the electoral votes (of course we'll keep the Electoral College).
Does that system seem more or less error-prone than the current o
Disaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, these computer problems were blamed on the Internet connection used to access the registered-voter database. No voting system, even if it uses a VPN, should be connected to the Internet. If remote data is necessary, do it over a telephone connection. That's worked for credit card companies for many, many years.
Second, the article references the general apathy of workers running the poll stations. It seems that democracy may end in this country, or at least in Florida, from this more than from any of our elected leaders.
Third, and most speculatively, what happens if a more serious error occurs on Election Day and a large portion of ballots get lost? Four years ago, we could go back and read hanging chads. What will the courts decide this year if an entire state's ballots go missing?
By all accounts, this election could be more dangerous to the future of the nation than 2000.
Re:Disaster? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here in Wisconsin, we have optical scan machines (think scantron where you don't fill in bubbles... just connect the line).. our machines have a modem to report the results, but the results aren't sent in until after the polls close. As far as I know, the actuall count they use to decide is the one taken from the paper readout from the machine.
I don't see why everyone doesn't just use these machines, or machines like them. They provide a means for recount (as in, the actual ballot the elector completes). The machines are durable, and hard to tamper with. But best of all, I've never seen one fail (I'm an election official).
The solution to every problem isn't to add more bells and whistles.
Re:Disaster? (Score:4, Informative)
All right, I've had it with these comments.
Look, the job of running a precinct is pretty complex. I do it. Once, twice, maybe three times a year. That's not often enough to feel completely confident about what you're doing, especially when law makers change the rules once or twice a year and you have to adjust.
Most poll officials are very civic minded and try to do the best they can. Most are also over 65. They are not apathetic, they are overwhelmed. Quit yer bitchin' and do it yourself. Our democratic process needs younger people doing this job. Take a day off of work. Trust me, the world will be better off if you skip writing a few hundred lines of code and insure the accuracy of a few hundred or a few thousand votes instead.
Just to give you an idea what's required, I go to 2-3 hrs of training before elections. That covers maybe 20% of what I need to know about how you handle all the different types of voters who show up in the wrong place to vote. I get a 50 page manual that covers maybe 90% of it. It is a lot of work; I have about 20-30 different pieces of paper that each have to end up in a designated folder, etc. in order to ensure everything is done "correctly."
Local election officials (the ones paid fulltime) work day and night to try to assure that everything goes well. They manage a team of (up to) thousands of near-volunteers (I get $125 for the day, which sure isn't why I do it) and have to try to figure out who the 2% who don't do their job are. They also have to provide clear instructions, in plain English, to their workers based on election law (not in plain English) that constantly changes.
I have to deal with failsafe voters, provisional voters, write in ballots, paper ballots, voter assistance forms, challenges to the right to vote. The list goes on. I'm 33, have umpteen years of education, and run a small precinct. I still find this a challenge.
Think this is an easy job, let me quote myself: Quit yer bitchin' and do it yourself.
What's worse (Score:5, Insightful)
These systems have been made so complex and closed source that there is no audit trail.
I get these images of a huge casino with electronic slot machines - whoever put them in did so with a view to making profit out of them. If you're the end user, you have no idea what they're doing under that screen - but you can be well assured you can't take them at face value. So if casino machines can statistically determine when or if they should pay out depending on the bank balance of the casino, what the heck are these voting machines doing?
In Australia we mark numbers on sheets of watermarked paper.
Re:What's worse (Score:3)
But of course the correct operation of casino machines is more important than the correct operation of electronic voting machines.
After all, with the former real money is involved. Whereas the latter is just for entertainment right?
Especially since it's
Re:What's worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Greg Palast says 200,000 won't be counted (Score:4, Informative)
Greg Palast was one of the first to look into voter fraud in Florida, and reported it on the BBC.
The New York Times is echoing the sentiment in an op ed by Paul Krugman.
So what do we *do*? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then what?
The Supreme Court seems to have made it's feelings clear last time around... what's the smart plan?
I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.
I guess if the chaos repeats, perhaps we'll have one ready for the next election?
MIT/Caltech Voting Project (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're talking largely about the MIT/Caltech Voting Project [caltech.edu].
As I understand it they're developing standards and a reference implementation. Many implementations is the goal. Yours is a g
One question (Score:4, Interesting)
Essential question (Score:5, Informative)
Before anyone says that e-voting is needed because the United States presidential elections are too big to process and count manually using pen and paper, please don't forget about the recent 2004 European Parliament election, when 343,657,800 people were eligible to vote, the second-largest democratic electorate in the world after India. It was the biggest transnational direct election in history and ten new member states elected MEPs for the very first time. With total turnout 45.5% it means 156,364,299 people have voted, 48% more than in the 2000 US presidential election.
What I mean is that we all talk about e-voting essentially taking it for granted. But has anyone ever answered what is wrong with pen and paper? Is e-voting better because it is high tech? Because it is supposedly faster? Is it? Even if it is, does it justify much less transparency and security? Could anything justify any unreliability in the very process of election, the most essential fundament of democracy?
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens? I quote those numbers to menonstrate that simple pen and paper can scale enormously. I don't think that Americans are less skilled than Europeans and cannot count paper ballots in an election on much lower scale such as the US presidential election.
These are all very important questions to answer before we start to talk about improvements to the e-voting status quo. The first question we need to ask is not "how" but "why."
Re:Essential question (Score:3, Informative)
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens?
I'm 30 now, I have been voting every electon (regional, national, EU) since I was 18, in the Netherlands. Always by machine, never by pen and paper. Although there are some districts where paper has been used longer.
It's not rocket science, you know. You press the button of your candidate, and press 'vote'. Your vote is printed to
Efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Efficient? By which you mean faster? Cheaper? Is it cheaper and faster? Even if it is, does it justify the lack of reliability? Does it justify the lack of transparency? Could anything justify it?
We are talking about democracy. The transparency and reliability of democratic election is something infinitely more important than any kind of efficiency could ever be, for without transparent and reliable election there can be no democracy.
Besides, what exactly is inefficient in using pen and paper? Please read my other post [slashdot.org] before you reply.
what is needed is basic good faith (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry folks, the issues in 2000 weren't technical.
To have a democracy, you need a critical mass of basically decent people. People who are prepared to lose, if need be. People who are prepared to agree to rules before the election, and stick with them, not swirl around in post-modern uncertainty.
Absent that, forget it. Why bother? If you're going to demand a perfection that is not of this world, you will never get it. And you'll obsess about the supposed illegitimacy of your opponents when they win. And you'll work yourself into a froth and decide that anything goes to oppose them.
Forget trying to "fix" elections with technology. Just reclaim decency. Stop assuming that your opponents are three-headed monsters that eat babies for breakfast. Stop accusing everybody of cheating. Just work hard and persuade lots of people to agree with you. Win by a big enough margin that none of this crap matters. And accept that it might not work, and that you might lose.
Re:what is needed is basic good faith (Score:5, Insightful)
I would just like to go off on a tangent here for a moment and address a commonly repeated fallacy regarding communism and democracy.
Communism and democracy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Democracy is a political system, and Communism is an economic system. They are not mutually exclusive or even related, at least not in a causal way.
Unfortunately, during the Truman years, the USA was greatly concerned about rising Soviet influence over the "Third World". I'm using this term in its original (cold war) context: those nations which did not belong to the capitalist west but were not allied with the Soviets, either. The term Third World as used today is mostly pejorative and I favor its retirement, but I digress.
Anyway, throughout the cold war, much effort was made to slander communism as a system. It was therefore decried as being authoritarian in nature, but this was deliberate propaganda. A socialist "welfare" state is not authoritarian by definition, it just so happened that the USSR was.
Communism is a system (which probably can never truly exist, but that's a seperate matter) in which the workers own the means of production. It says nothing whatsoever about authoritarian rule, and doesn't require it -- in fact, Marx in his utopian viewpoint saw a large government as being antithetical to the communist ideal and hoped (unrealistically) that after the worker's revolution the leader of the movement would assume a temporary "benign" dictatorship. To place in this in American terms, it was his hope that a man like George Washington -- heroic and respected -- would be the one to lead the revolution, and then voluntarily step down once the necessary infrastructure were in place. Of course, as has often been noted by American historians, this quality is uncommon and George Washington is one of the few political leaders in history who could have been king but chose not to be in favor of the system.
Anyway, to get back to the point, socialism, the interim economic system which Marx theorized would "bridge" capitalism and communism, does not mandate a dictatorship. Many socialist states (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) are in fact very libertarian in nature. They pay very high taxes and have an extremely high standard of living -- Norway's is the highest in the world, in fact.
Similarly, there are many authoritarian capitalist states. Singapore is an example I frequently use, but it is hardly the only one. The People's Republic of China is increasingly becoming market capitalist -- very little of its communist infrastructure remains -- and yet it remains authoritarian. The US, in its campaign to secure access to Latin American resources, installed a number of capitalist governments that amounted to little more than dictatorships (in some cases against the wishes of the majority, as measured by socialist candidates elected).
Now, while I am politically left leaning, I am socially libertarian -- by this I mean that freedom from oppression and censorship is very important to me. The idea that socialism (and communism, which probably can never exist) is by necessity an authoritarian system is 1950s era propaganda. The USSR was undeniably authoritarian, but this was a result of the decisions of its leaders (especially after Lenin), not a result of its economic system. I do not deny that the rise of soviet-style authoritarian communism was a bad thing for pretty much anyone concerned.
However, I think that now that the cold war is over, and we can look back in a more objective way, we should try not to present communism and democracy as opposites, because they in fact have nothing to do with each other. Civil liberties are perhaps encouraged by a free market, because a free market functions better with little government intervention, but civil liberties are by no means guaranteed by one. Consider the PRC
Closed-source, user-beta rip off (Score:5, Informative)
"All 14 of the branch offices had problems with the database connection. Many of the sites had numerous voters lined up to cast their ballots.
A work-around was created by calling in each voter's name to the main Election's Office in Fort Lauderdale. Two office workers were assigned to each phone, Salas said, for a slowed verification process. The workers would plug into the database, and verify that the voter in one of the branch sites was indeed registered to vote."
Incredible that something was so poorly validated and still made it into the field. My precinct gets voter validation printed out from Motor Voter records. The DMV uses a pretty solid, fully computerized system (IBM) that has worked well for more than five years. Total time to verify I am registered? About a minute. I never wait (and I live in a densely urbanized area), step with up to the lever voting machine and my vote is recorded and verifiable.
How did places like FL fall for this sham? Being a beta user for software that was released before it was ready is one thing when it is a text document, but for VOTING? Jeezoz H. Keerist.
I've also done work in a Federal government office with purchasing power. I can see how cluster f$%^s like this can happen, because there is no ultimate responsibility and accountability for incompetence. If the sales pitch looks good and the vendor "demonstrates" the reliability of the product, no public "servant" will be held accountable. The vendor also likely got paid upon delivery and there is no recourse for going after them. The vendor, rather than getting blacklisted by the contracting office, will get to explain what when wrong and why it was God's Will or somebody else's fault.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only in America (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only in America (Score:3, Insightful)
Did anybody even claim that? I thought the _claim_ was that the US went to war for it's own security -- a claim that now appears false but was never exactly idealistic in the first place.
Why not combine Computer and Paper Voting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not combine Computer and Paper Voting? (Score:3, Informative)
Then you can always take the unmarked ballots out of the paper tray in the voting machine (the trays could be lockable with the poll workers holding the keys), give people sharpie pens, and have them manually mark them. My point was that the paper trail from the touch screen vote machine, combined wit
After the Election (Score:3, Interesting)
They've got some elections to do at the end of January, and certainly a generous donation of several thousand voting machines would help them along. No, they're not perfect, but they might be good enough. (does NT4 do Arabic?)
When they're done with their election they can keep them or bury them in the desert as they see fit. No return-address labels required.
We'll have a fresh start and four years to get something reasonable in place.
If there's a silver lining in this it's that the current machines will not be viable os/software wise in 4 years and the hardware will probably be kaput by that point as well.
I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Now here is the kicker... using fiber optic cabling, port security enabled on switch, and 5 redundant counting mechanism on 3 different machines, two machines which are off site. Oh and guess what... all I need to communicate between the site and the servers offsite is a 56k modem. Why so small bandwidth? Because passing votes around doesn't require much bandwidth... its not a movie or even streaming audio, its text, that would of course be encrypted using massive shared keys. So phone tapping won't work, shit, I will go ahead and implement an error checking mechanism ontop of the already existing modem error checking. Why can companies no do simple things simply. I bet a good portion of those machines are running windows... why because windows sounds good. Hell, I can remember a touch screen on Apple IIe computers, we can use one of them for our clients. They had modems for those... We can do some rudimentary encryption and error checking on them.... whats wrong? Afraid of using older simpler hardware to do a simple task.
Oh well, I got to rant, now I wonder if this will be modded troll or interesting.
Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Electronic voting in India a lot better! (Score:5, Informative)
The machines aren't too fancy -- certainly not fancy enough to run bloatware like Windows. However, they follow a simple low-tech protocol that works and shut down if tampered with. And, as with all things India, they cost $200 a pop, compared to $3000 per machines in the U.S.
The U.S. election authorities can learn a lot from India's last election. Read all about it here [msn.com].
Re:Electronic voting in India a lot better! (Score:3, Funny)
If you're leery of electronic voting . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . why not just vote via absentee ballot? I'm a Florida resident and I did. You've still got plenty of time.
Also, I think some credit is due to Florida for wisely giving people a chance to vote early. It's more convenient for the voting public, and allows officials to use the equipment with real votes before November 2, which is just not the same as testing stuff in a lab. This is the first time that electronic voting has ever been offered in many parts of our state. Instead of constant bitching, whining, and criticism, acknowledge that there are problems and things will be difficult the first few times, and have a little faith in people to fix the problems with the machines. The folks in the trenches fixing the problems are most likely not part of some evil Republican conspiracy to delete Kerry votes or change them to Nader votes -- they're probably just hardworking IT guys and girls like you who take pride in their jobs and just want to see things go smoothly.
Re:Elections have always been rigged (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Elections have always been rigged (Score:3, Insightful)
Both sides cheat (so why monitor or hold elections at all? Put 5 representatives from each party in a room with 10,000 ballots and see who comes out on top
International observers will influence our elections (the truth is not afraid of scrutiny...it is still the truth. If we want to play nation builder and be an example of democr
Re:Elections have always been rigged (Score:3, Insightful)
seriously.. is that the state of the usa democracy? that people are too jaded to even fucking care about the voting? what is it, land of the sheep or what?
Re:Foreplay is over (Score:5, Informative)
The founding fathers were also concerned that every region had a say in the running of the country. This means that a citizen living in a sparsely populated part of the country such as Utah has more voting power in the House Of Representatives than a citizen in a densely populated state like New Jersey.
I think you mean Senate, Not the House.
You could assign senators by state population the way the house works, but then the senate would keep expanding.
And here the founding fathers gave set the Senators at two per state to specifically insure that the large states could not overule the smaller states. They were worried about the "Tyrany of the Majority". Thats why every state has the same number of votes in the senate and why the House is assigned by population.
And next time write something yourself instead of copying it off of some website whos facts are wrong.
http://mindprod.com/election.html