E-Voting Reform Bill Gaining Adherants 161
JeremyDuffy sends us to Ars Technica for a look at an e-voting bill making its way through Congress that is gaining the support of the likes of Ed Felten and the EFF. Quoting: "HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available."
How to refute the proprietary "rights" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
A step in the right direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, not quite. (Score:2)
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Knowing how congress works though, the final form of this bill will probably require closed-source unlocked internet-connected diebold-only machines.
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Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
In all these discussions about e-voting, I don't really understand why the emphasis on Open Source software for voting computers. Why? The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? How?
Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really.
That's the whole point of a paper trail. Essentially, it makes the counting black box irrelevant (as long as the paper trail is considered the authoritive result, that is). Wrong vote stored on flash? Who cares, as long as the correct vote is written on the paper output (and the voter can verify that before leaving).
At that point, what's inside the black box doesn't matter much anymore, and basicly serves to make voting easier, or help to get a quick (preliminary!) count of what the end result might look like. Closed source software, or unknown hardware inside? What's the problem as long as the correct votes are printed on dead tree, and verified by the voter?
But also at this point, the 'added value' of a voting computer becomes a mystery to me. Why not just ditch them? If you want quicker results, organise better or get more people to count votes. Good organisation (and paper!) is really all you need for elections that are both fair, and with quick results.
Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem with paper ballots is the need to determine voter intent. Suppose you have two boxes checked for one office, but otherwise a straight-party ballot - did they intend to vote straight party across the whole ballot? How about a small line in one box and a big one in another. How about a check with an X over it in one box, and a check with a circle in the other? If the race c
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The problem is that when the loser of an election loses by 3 votes by people who wrote checks instead of X's in his box, your utopian vote-counting system will face a court trial. Now, checks instead of X's is an obvious case, but now picture EVERY shade of gray imaginable - humans are VERY good at not following directions - unlikely computers...
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Moreover ballot "reformers" at the end of the nineteenth century pressed for the introdu
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People in the US have a pretty strong, well defined right to cast their vo
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There is a little more to an electronic voting machine than simple tabulation. There's the presentation of each individual election, and the presentation of the candidates. What if the Demopublican party's candidate's picture was shown colorful and vibrant, while the Republicrat candidate's picture was washed out black and white? What if the major parties get their candidates on
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But on the whole, I actually agree mostly with the top level poster in that pencil and paper are perfectly adequate to the task of recor
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Actually the answer is, in general, yes. The software vendors must turn over "source c
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You may not be able to trust, blindly, the executable, but if you are presented with the binary, and everything else, you are able to test it to see exactly what it does. You can, if you want, watch as it changes the buffer, registry, etc. You can then watch the same information on a voting machine and verify that it is doing the same actions. Memory locations will obviously change, but if you have the source code you can make sure that the differences match what should happen. Yes, there are ways to mess
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I feel that it also doesn't relieve copyright on the source, though it would prevent any "trade secrets" on any of the process. With regards to eVoting, the process should be completely open, and systems should be allowed to inter-operate with each other.
I feel that there should be provisions for
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Granted, e-voting with a paper trail is rather a step backwards environmentally because now you're not only using up a lot of paper, but you're using a lot of electricity as well. In general though, electronic machines can be made to run more efficiently as their design improves. Elect
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Verifying the compiler should be a little easier, since the source is open and it should be using a standard compiler it should be possible to create a checksum using the same compiler and verify the compiled binaries match. This is dependent on the source code being open. Without the open code, no external agency would be able to create a checksum. They d
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Just a note about the sponsor and his central NJ district, which should explain how such a sensible bill came to be introduced. The district runs across the state from the Delaware River to within a few hundred yards of the Atlantic Ocean, encompassing Princeton University, and encompassing or abutting the telecom R&D community that had been centered around Bell Labs in Holmdel, including AT&T Labs, Avaya, Telcordia, Vonage, and many small companies founded by alumni of these companies. Also in th
That's "Adherents" (Score:2, Informative)
Congratulations, you just killed it (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a case of sacrificing the good by demanding the perfect. If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source, then the bill would not have alienated so many parties with enough money to kill it.
Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.
Platform software (Score:5, Insightful)
But if only the program is transparent and the rest of the code on the machine is not, what's to prevent (for example) Steve Jobs for running for president and including a line of code that tells the MacOS voting machines that he always wins at least 50.1% of the vote?
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The bill requires an automatic audit of 3% of the required voter-verified paper output, and also required signs encouraging all voters to check the paper copy before leaving.
So if that hidden line of code in the OS steals votes, it either
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Well then the bill is toothless, because the vendor could install 'backdoor' patches into the os and nobody would be the wiser.
A voting machine vendor can just al easily load a version of linux with wine (though maybe clunky) to run their voting machi
Re:Congratulations, you just killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps they reduced its support slightly, but no more than a very tiny bit. What good would the source do to anyone? Remember that there is nothing stopping the vendor from copyrighting the source code and adding a provision to the license which says that no one may make derivative works: all the vendor must do is make the code publicly available.
So a competitor can't really gain anything from the code--it can't be overly complicated (this is a voting machine) and even if they do, the moment they release their machine onto the market, their source must be published, and certainly a competing vendor would notice such striking similarities in code.
Of course, who knows, Diebold might sue Congress for a law which they were not expecting..... :-)
Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more, because the two together comprise a functioning embedded system. Auditing the application and ignoring the operating system is pointless, from a secure voting perspective. The Congressman has it right.
Besides, this is not a supercomputer. This is not an accounting system. This is a goddamn electromechanical counter, a mindless device which could be implemented with vacuum tubes, or discrete TTL, or a BASIC Stamp! There doesn't need to be an "operating system", unless you need it to throw up your colorful corporate logo or justify your "Microsoft Vista ready" sticker. I mean, we aren't talking some incredibly complex technological requirements here, although there are those with a vested interest in making it appear so. For crying out loud it's been done for centuries using pieces of paper. Any corporation that manufactures these things that makes "intellectual property" claims about its "advanced software" is FULL OF CRAP and trying to keep the public from knowing what a shoddy job it did, or worse. If you aren't willing to open up your voting system to public inspection from the chips on up, then you shouldn't be allowed to sell them to our government. Any of our governments.
More to the point, this is just the kind of system that should be only as complex as it needs to be
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Edited for brevity.
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Edited for brevity.
Edited for hilarity you mean. I say that as my graphics card just reset itself and Windows XP threw up all over me.
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However, the number of vacuum tubes necessary to provide full voting support for the visually or physically impaired, takes a bit of power, and it's kinda cumbersome the way they fill up the room. So let's strike them off the list.
Likewise, doing reliable scanning of hand marked (and mismarked) ballots in an optical scanner requires either a bunch of hard-coded crap, or a whole lotta vacuum tubes to interpret all the variations of "completely filled in"
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1) ATMs are required to have secure communications capabilities, but the voting machines are required NOT to have any communications capabilities.
2) ATM's are required to read a mag stripe, but the voting machines are NOT required to read a mag stripe{or any type of card}
3) ATM's are required to display and print a number of various types of forms and formats, but voting machines are NOT.
So the OS in the category o
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I read the bill too. All it did was remind me of this old automobile law:
The Locomotive Act 1865 set a speed limit of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns. The 1865 Act also provided for the then famous "man with a red flag". Walking 60 yards ahead of each vehicle, a man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and
Doesn't give the source away. (Score:4, Informative)
The version of "open source" required doesn't give away any copyright or patent protection, or transfer rights to USE the code to others - especially the competition. (It does puncture trade secret.)
If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source
This is not a minor issue: With control of the US Government at stake a LOT of engineering effort can be profitably applied to attempts to compromise the system - by political, economic, or foreign governmental interests.
Released code != open source (Score:2)
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I can read code, and I didn't know what happened with my vote this past election. Who knows what those machines do? I was giv
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What makes you think Sun sells an operating system that isn't open source?
(Actually, they do: when you buy x86 Sun hardware, you have your choice among three operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And of course one of those operating systems isn't open source. But by offering two open source alt
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WinCE will do. It's semi-open. (Score:2)
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Of course, Microsoft would never write such code anyway. Voting machines are probably profitable for the maintenance contracts, not the hardware or the software.
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Luddites oppose robotic death machines! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's better to vote and not have it count than to.. er.. get help voting and have it count?
I really hope that line from the article was a flawed summary from the reporter. If it's an accurate characterization, Snider is missing the point entirely.
Opposition to electronic voting is not blanket opposition to use of electronics in voting procedures. It's opposition to secret devices that follow hidden procedures and proclaim an official result -- without the ability of anyone to verify the correctness of the procedures or the result.
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The National Federation of the Blind sold their integrity to Diebold for $1 million dollars [wired.com]. They do not deny that there was a quid pro quo, although they have issued a vague, non-denial denial [nfb.org].
Ed Felten's comments. (Score:4, Informative)
voting machines waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
KISS anyone? No, because then there are no kickbacks and bribes to take.
(lol verify word is "paranoia")
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so it will be much faster/cheaper to use the electronic records than if you had to manually count each vote by hand.
False dichotomy. Oregon doesn't use touch-screen machines, we use fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots and machine counters. Works great, and much faster during heavy turnout elections (where from an outsider's POV, touch-screen states just never seem to have enough of those glorified PC's around).
Oregon is vote-by-mail also, but that is an orthogonal issue.
All the same source-inspection
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- The voting machine result can be used whenever the particular precinct's results are uncontested, leaving all the advantages (except the "advantage" of being able to invisibly rig an election) intact.
- The auditability of the result will virtually eliminate any utility in rigging the machines (while bringing to bear draconian penalties for attempting to rig them and getting caught), greatly improving the reliability of the machines' results - to the point that they CAN be used with
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Because your elected lawmakers decided that you would.
Accessibility for the handicapped was a major driver. Issues with previous balloting systems were another.
As usual the legislative solution wasn't well thought out and had unintended consequences. Now we have to fix the fix.
Given the importance of visibly accurate elections
Try a hard question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because not all paper ballots are created equal, and paper ballots filled out by humans are more prone to error than paper ballots printed by a machine.
The current paper ballots involve things like hole-punches (hanging chads anyone?), filling in bubbles (fill in too many or too few or only partially), butterfly ballots, etc.
It's the same reason your college professors wanted you to type your papers. The machine, by default, makes the paper much more legible than it would be if the paper were written by hand.
Same with electronic voting. The machine makes the ballot much less likely to have an error on it than if the ballot is done by a human with a pen (optical ballots) or punch (punch cards).
There are other features you get with electronic voting. For example, you don't need to print the ballots in advance. You can just load the ballot into the machine the morning of the election, and when people votes, the machine prints out the office and the selected candidate. So instead of having to 'lock' the ballot a month in advance to allow for the ballots to be printed, you might be able to reduce that lead time to a few days or a week. Then when a candidate dies three weeks before the election, or somebody wins/loses a lawsuit, you have more time to correct the ballot.
You can also do neat things like randomize the order candidates appear on the ballot. One problem with elections is the candidate listed first tends to get more votes than other candidates. With electronic ballots, candidates can all be listed first an 'equal' number of times.
Electronic voting also gives you the ability to accommodate more people with disabilities.
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Voter 1 needs a ballot for District 13 in Portugese. Voter 2 needs a ballot for District 7 in English. Voter 3 needs a ballot for District 3 in English. Voter 4 needs a ballot for district 3 in Spanish for the Vision Impaired. With a fully realized electronic voting system, all of these people can be served by the same machine, at the same polling station, with the same basic procedure.
The statistical skew from top balloting or voter fatigue can be eliminated by displaying to voters equivalent ball
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France ... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people are against this evolution, as shown by a petition on the Internet : http://www.recul-democratique.org/About-us.html [recul-democratique.org], and they demand approximatively the same requirements. People have to trust completely the result of the elections and they can't rely on the report of a private expert claiming that the program is secure. So it means open source for the computer scientists originating this petition and paper trail for the vast majority of the population who don't feel completely safe about the whole dematerialisation process.
Excuse me for any spelling or grammar mistake, or correct me in french.
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An even better bill? (Score:2)
http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/ChangesNeed
It is time for the /. community to act! (Score:5, Informative)
The Bill's text and record are available at Thomas [loc.gov]. While there you can peruse the list of 200 Cosponsors [loc.gov] to see if your house rep is among them (and should be given a cookie for that) or not (and should be corrected).
If you both support the bill and are a U.S. Citizen or Resident, you can go to the U.S. House of Representatives Website at www.house.gov [house.gov], and Write your rep [house.gov] or contact them via their website [house.gov] (Recommended) to urge them to support the bill or thank them for already cosponsoring it.
With time to spare you can head over to the Senate [senate.gov] and urge your senators to back the forthcoming companion bill in the senate. Following that a stop off to contact The Executive Branch [whitehouse.gov] (va a aqui [whitehouse.gov] para Espanol) to urge signing of the bill wouldn't hurt.
If you believe in any of the things this bill does then a few minutes on the phone or sending a polite e-mail shouldn't be too much. As cynical as we all can be about the influence of money on elections a groundswell is too costly to be overrun.
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Yes, this *bill* does a lot. It doesn't mean that any of this will actually go through regardless of our contacting those in power.
What I want to know is why there isn't a provision to allow there to be pape
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The news media will report the results, real or imagined, instantly no matter what. The news media cannot be controlled by the government or blocked from reporting results based on exit polls and theories. We cannot choose whether or not such results are reported.
We get to choose whether or not the results are real. Imagine
More business (Score:2, Interesting)
sold. They can then sell new machines to these customers.
Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or printer and software upgrades.
If Diebold fixes the auditability problem I have no further gripe with the use of their machines. If buying an upgrade from them is 'way cheaper than replacing the machines outright, that's just dandy.
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing at a profit."
spoofing voting an election (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow (Score:2, Funny)
Audio interview with the sponsor of the bill (Score:4, Informative)
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The entire layer of computerized gadgets is not necessary by the accepted logic of keeping the paper ballots as a verified trail!
And if the only way we can trust the magic boxen is to perform recounts by margin trigger or random (not so random, see last election) selection of districts to keep them honest, why then not eliminate the entire electronic cloud and simply cou
Damn (Score:2)
In other words it doesn't have a hope in hell of passing, couldn't someone at least throw in some ammendment about a program to train Arctic monkies to do the recounts so legislators will consider it?
why not paper ballots? (Score:3)
The question I have is why not paper ballots?
Much of the rest of the world (Yes, including the first world) uses paper ballots that are tallied by humans. Electronic ballots can only be secure from abuse by having a per-ballot paper trail, so what advantage does the electronic ballot provide at all?
Honestly, I'm curious about why electronic ballots are a good idea at all, given the present state of the art.
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In the US there will be a winner announced before the end of the night after the voting is done. The news media will do this and it can be based on exit polls or real results. Real results could be partial or complete.
Electronic voting gets us back away from news media coronations. The last two presidential elections the news media c
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The US is slowed because we hold the election in different time zones, and we have to cycle people through, YES, loooonnngg lines to get to the damned machines. A card and a pencil can be used by an entire crowd simultaneously. We are also slowed by our weird voter verification process. More than slowed. Ground to a halt.
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I agree that "in the shortest possible time" is logically bullshit, but this is what happens when TeeVee gives everyone ADD. The sad thing is that this should be the perfect application for computers, since it's literally nothing but adding 1 to selected counters. *sigh*
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It's time for mark-sense ballots everywhere? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only is it machine-readable, but the ballots can be hand-counted quite easily in case of close elections.
That's odd.. (Score:2)
I thought April Fool's Day was yesterday!
Let's hope they manage to pass it. Common sense is hard to come these days.
Aero
standards for paper audit trail (Score:2)
Los Angeles County uses Ink-a-Vote which replaced those punch cards with ink blot bubbles. Nothing beats paper
Write your congressman! (Score:3, Informative)
easily write your Congressman from the contact form on the House web site - http://www.house.gov/writerep/ [house.gov]
While members of Congress may or may not read Slashdot, they or their staff do presumably read their Inbox, and I've gotten at least cursory replies (usually by snail mail) before.
I've posted the letter I just wrote below as an example, but it's probably more effective if you write your own words rather than using mine:
To the Honorable Walter B. Jones:
I just became aware of pending legislation via a number of technical industry news sites including Slashdot and Arstechnica that I feel is long overdue, H.R. 811: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.
As a constituent of your district, and as a registered voter, the integrity and transparency of election processes deeply concerns me.
Of particular importance and interest to me are provisions which provide for voter-verifiable paper trails in elections, provisions that require random auditing to insure that paper records match electronic ones, provisions that require the software used within electronic voting machines be open to public inspection, and provisions that provide for the emergency use of paper ballots in the event of system or equipment failure.
I realize that these measures create an additional burden on the states, however, I strongly believe they are needed to restore accountability, auditability, and voter confidence lost by the widespread adoption of electronic voting machines.
I urge you to strongly consider voting for this legislation when it comes before you, and to resist amendments which weaken or eliminate the strong provisions on election integrity it contains.
Sincerely,
Stephanie Daugherty
Not good enough (Score:3)
Make the paper record the authoritative source in any and all counts.
If the paper record (it's called a ballot!) is computer-generated, that's ok, as long as the voter gets to verify it, and as long as everything on the ballot is human-readable. (If it looks like a human-readable ballot but the actual vote is recorded in a barcode, that's subject to abuse; the voter has no way to confirm that the barcode matches the actual vote.)
And I don't think there's any good reason not to count the ballots by hand.
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If you want a real e-democracy that can make a difference....
http://www.blognow.com.au/edemocracy [blognow.com.au]
Re:Good, but so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are problems with our representative democracies, but effectively going back to a direct democracy won't solve anything. Representative democracy is a direct cause of the division of labour which is the main reason our civilization is as advanced as it is. Instead of everyone farming their own food, building their own tools, writing their own programs, performing their own surgery, being their own lawyers and making their own political decisions, we divide the labour. I farm, you code, Johnny performs surgery and Karen sues people and everyone is happy doing what they're best at.
The important thing to remember about representatives is not that they should vote AS their constituents, but that they should make INFORMED DECISIONS in the interest of their contituents. That's the labour we divide to our representatives, to inform themselves of what a political decision means or leads to in the future, to inform themselves of the political landscape and the compromises needed to get a certain policy accepted, to see the big picture, to enact long-term policies for the benefit of their constituents, even though it might be bad in the short term. And, most importantly, to take personal responsibility for the votes cast as an elected official.
You forget some things about political decisions that would get totally lost in your suggested system.
1) Most decisions are incredibly boring regarding concerns that are interesting only to a small minority of the population. With direct democracy, everyone would have to spend time informing themselves of the impact of the fishing quotas of the North Atlantic to make the best decision. But seriously, people won't, they'll just press a little vote button on your webpage and not care what was enacted as a result. Ooops, we bankrupted an entire industry, oh well, noone *I* knew...
2) There's a lot of decisions like the one above, with direct democracy, so everyone would have to check your webpage every day, vote on the issues in a sensible manner, taking time away from whatever else they were doing. Why should people do this every day for the rest of their lives? If everyone does not participate every day, then it's no longer the will of the people, but the will of the people who can be bothered to do this every day, or have time to do this every day. Your average working parent who make up the bulk of the taxpayers will not have time for this, making the "decisions" pretty skewed.
3) Everyone does not have access to the internet every day. Seriously, get some perspectives.
4) You may think that the representatives are biased or lobbied into submission or corrupt, but why would ordinary people be any better? If people believe in ads, what's to stop them from believing in every political ad on their TV, comfortably telling them what to vote for tomorrow?
5) Voter turnout here is about 80%. That means that 20% of the eligible population can't be bothered to make ONE decision every FOURTH YEAR. That's not a lot of work. And you want these people to make decisions every day or at least every week? About things they care even less for than high-level general political ideology?
6) Referendums always lack personal responsibility. "It is the will of the people" is a great way to not have to stand for your actions. Part of the job of being an elected official is to make decisions and take personal responsibility for them. If an official makes decisions that the constituents really dislike, he/she will be voted out of office and someone who makes decisions that are better in line with the voters will take his/her place. But if everyone is voting on every issue, who is responsible for the bad ones? What's stopping people from only making badly-informed, short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves financially in the short run, but are devastating to the country in the long run? You can't vote the voters out of office. You could never have a regime-change in your system, with all the benefits that follow those.
There is no Excuse for laziness. (Score:5, Informative)
This bill will not fix every problem that plagues our election system. It will fix some of the problems. Is that sufficient reason to pass it? Oh Hell Yes!
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I don't think this, or anything from the federal level is requiring the switch to a computerized eVoting system, but
Re:Good, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What good is a viable candidate if your vote doesn't count anyway? Accurate voting is an essential element of a democracy, and so it MUST be in place.
If you want a better system, you need to support each component of that better system when it comes along. Sticking your head in the sand and waiting for everything to completely match your dream world isn't going to get you anywhere.
One item this bill is missing.... (Score:2)
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I can see the newscast now (Score:2)
With 90% of the precincts of California in, we're calling the race in favor of the surprise write-in candidates "Heywood Jablome" and "Mike Hunt". Pollsters are at a loss to explain this phenomenon. Attempts to locate the apparent President- and Vice-President-elect have been thus far fruitless.
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The problem is that there is no "unique hardware" anymore. Patent protection isn't really going to work either. So some
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Don't forget that changes can b
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