ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue 175
Gottesser writes "Long-time election rights activist Bev Harris (she had an HBO special a while back where she hired Hari Hursti to hack an optical scan voting machine) just sent this out: 'Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it's not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software, and vote-by-mail authentication software.' Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight. Here's ES&S's press release. Wikipedia's got something on the ongoing string of ES&S controversies as well."
you asked for it! (Score:2, Insightful)
Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight.
Didn't we want to be just like all the other democratic countries? The private sector delivers, and now we're bitching about it. Voters -- 'ya just can't please them.
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Enforce Good Practices (Score:3, Interesting)
eVote requirements (Score:2)
I'm under the impression that requirements exist, aren't stringent enough, are being ignored left and right, and the public isn't even allowed to know that they don't pass (read: haven't been tested). Our own government is either sufficiently incompetent to give away our elections, or sufficiently corrupt to sell them.
It's a farce, and I'm not laughing.
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The issue here is not company structures and ownership, it's how e-voting works that is the issue.
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>>>e-voting is proven a bad idea.
Yes it is. The paper ballots most states used worked just fine. You take a pen, you draw a line next to your man, and then feed it into the central scanning machine which reads your mark. Easy. Efficient. And it left a paper trail that could be easily counted by hand, if necessary.
Yes Miami-Dade County's punchcard system was flawed, but *only* that place and a few others needed to be fixed. Most of the rest of the country has the scantron machines I described
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The democratic country I live in uses pen and paper to vote and it is run by a non-partisan government agency.
Voting is trusted here, now we just need someone trust worthy to vote for.
Kidnap their kids (Score:1, Insightful)
Rule the world.
Is this another stacked up hierarchy (Score:1)
I do know that the more competition to this sort of the thing, the better, though. And the better the documentation, word for word, every dash & dot in the right place, brings us closer to better/clearer/more realistic results.
----Yet another off-topic rant brought to you by the creato
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One question.
Why a company at all in the first place?
The mighty USA cannot even muster up enough resources to do what a private company can? If it was done by the government, the government will be *forced* by the opposition party to make the code/design public to maintain transparency. And if researchers can find out security flaws and exploits with such boxes when the code/design is secret, they can help fixing it sooner and faster if they were actually
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Funny. They can make nuclear bombs and make the computer networks and installations controlling them secure, but can't protect the democracy itself by just making secure ballot boxes too. Must be a lot tougher than making nukes, I guess.
In some ways, yes. A reasonable definition of "secure ballot box" is one whose operation is clear and understandable to the voter (meaning: the voter can tell if something fraudulent might happen). Informing a critical mass of voters about the inner workings of electronic voting machines, and allowing the public to verify each stage of machine construction, assembly, and programming is a near impossible task. Taking reasonable short cuts (COTS hardware) simplifies this immensely, but still leaves a ton o
FIRST!!11 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FIRST!!11 (Score:5, Informative)
I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists [wired.com]. A security analysis (pdf warning) [ucdavis.edu] has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission [act.gov.au] has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.
You should also check out Open Voting Consortium [openvotingconsortium.org] because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.
Electronic "voting" needs to die (Score:5, Insightful)
This should force the FEC to outright ban electronic voting. I guess my .sig is getting old by now.
While I also dislike electronic voting... (Score:1, Interesting)
I no longer think it would be impossible to implement decently. Google Tech Talk [youtube.com] has an interesting 1.5h video about the subject and Schneier [schneier.com] also has a small blog post, hinting that there could well be some self-enforcing algorithms that let us confirm the system is secure even if we don't know all the details to test it.
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I no longer think it would be impossible to implement decently. Google Tech Talk [youtube.com] has an interesting 1.5h video about the subject ...
Thanks. I'll watch that later. The GPP, though, wasn't talking about cryptographic verification. He was talking about mandatory VVPAT and audits (as per the link in his .sig). I too, have not seen an algorithm (cryptographic or otherwise) that allows voters to verify their votes after they leave their polling place without making it susceptible to manipulation or identity leakage of some kind. (granted, some are far better than others)
... Schneier [schneier.com] also has a small blog post, hinting that there could well be some self-enforcing algorithms that let us confirm the system is secure even if we don't know all the details to test it.
I'd be interested in hearing about them. Unfortunately, he doesn't
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I too, have not seen an algorithm (cryptographic or otherwise) that allows voters to verify their votes after they leave their polling place without making it susceptible to manipulation or identity leakage of some kind.
That's because a system like that is impossible. If you can verify your vote after leaving the booth, it defeats the whole point of a secret ballot.
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There are some who claim just such a system. A few of them actually look like they work until you examine them very closely.
It's a very appealing notion, which is why it keeps resurfacing. I too believe it to be impossible, but I will continue to debunk them one at a time.
Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor... (Score:4, Informative)
optical scan, personally I never understood the motivation for touch screen voting other than gee whiz technology.
When they proposed touchscreen voting to replace punchcards in palm beach county, it cost $20 million while optical scan cost 2 million.
When voters demanded a paper record for recounts it turned out to be cheaper to implement optical scan than to equip
touchscreens with printers.
Sure voters may undervote but at least its their own damn fault and not because of some computer error or dirty tricks.
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I've been an Elections Inspector in New York State for the last five years. Every time one of these stories crop up I wrote a detailed summary of the procedures and technology we use. In spite of these procedures including the retention of paper ballots I still can't convince the tinfoil hat crowd that our elections aren't being decided by a shadowy cabal working out of the Diebold offices. I've about given up on trying to convince them otherwise.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding so-called DRE (
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Actually Black Box did show how the Optical Scan system could be pwned! Access to the cards that hold the counts, even for a couple of minutes, could result in the election being rigged!
The only good part, is you still have the ballots. Reset the counting machines, use a card that is good, and the election results will actually (more or less) reflect the votes. I say more or less because the ballots are still filled in by Sheeple, and some of them, even after years of doing it, cannot fill out the ballot
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Which is why those cards are stored behind numbered seals. Next you'll say that the seals aren't perfect.
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Actually the grandparent poster has a point. When I lived and voted in Maryland, the previously-scanned ballots were just sitting in a cardboard box. It would have been rather easy for an election worker to say, "Hmmm... this guy voted for Joe Smith. I'm going to run the card through the machine a few more times," after I had left the building.
The GP is also correct when he says the existence of the paper ballots allows for a recount if foulplay is suspected. The same is not true for touchscreens.
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The GP is also correct when he says the existence of the paper ballots allows for a recount if foulplay is suspected. The same is not true for touchscreens.
In a word:VVPAT [wikipedia.org]. (now mandatory in many states)
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Just because a printed receipt says, "You voted for George Washington" doesn't mean the vote was recorded internally. In fact the vote could just as easily be recorded for John Adams instead. And yes you do have the receipts to count, but that only happens if there's a suspicion. If there's only a few misrecorded votes per machine, that may not be enough to notice but it is enough to change a national election.
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Good guess. You have been at this for a while. ;)
If seals can be made, duplicate seals can be made (and sometimes are, allegedly). Seals only increase the difficulty of messing with the hardware. If tampering occurs in spite of seals, it is most likely an inside job (but not necessarily). Given enough time and access, many seals can be forged that pass casual examination. Most seals will only be given casual examination anyway.
(Granted, I live on the West Coast, nowhere near New York. I have no clue w
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Kevin - Let's at least be fair here. Getting a hold of the ballot box (the card from a voting machine is the same thing) has been the way votes have been [reformation.org] (link goes to famous picture of Lyndon Johnson with Precinct 13 ballot box) rigged for years.
I don't care how you vote, what matters is that the process delivers a paper, human readable ballot in addition to the electronic count. This allows for a recount, and provides some assurance that the voter's vote was correct (at least on paper).
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Re:Florida abandoned touchscreen voting in favor.. (Score:4, Insightful)
it does NOT MATTER that you feel you have inside info that the voting system is 'trustable'.
widespread, we (the people) don't trust it anymore. too many reports of bad things happening in the last few elections.
even if those are all made-up (and we know they are not); we need to have trust, first and foremost.
yes, sometimes you have to sell a car (or trade it in) just so you can know you'll not be stranded on the side of the road. we have a used car, now, so to speak; and we just don't trust it anymore.
paper (canada uses that!) is trustable.
open source is trustable.
the lying bastards who 'pledge all they can do' to ensure one candidate gets in; is NOT trustable! it does not matter if YOU, some elections guy, think its trustable. the rest of us lost that faith years ago.
to restore it, we need to go to low-tech methods. high tech is not always the answer. in this case, its the anti-answer.
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widespread, we (the people) don't trust it anymore.
No, widespread a handful of educated computer literate people who follow politics don't trust it anymore. The majority of the voting population doesn't know enough about voting technology to care.
paper (canada uses that!) is trustable.
Pretty sure I said our system retains the paper ballots. I hope we never have to use them but they are there if needed. Why do I hope we never have to use them? Because paper ballots wind up being entirely too subjective if they have to be counted by hand. One campaign will claim that a ballot with "Lizard pe
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The majority of the voting population doesn't know enough about voting technology to care.
Close. The majority of the voting population doesn't know enough about voting to care. Subtle difference, but important. Voters should be wary of new voting technology and techniques by default. They shouldn't need to know enough about the technology to be wary. History of vote manipulating techniques should really be taught in our schools. It's more interesting and useful that most of the junk rammed down our throats.
Pretty sure I said our system retains the paper ballots. I hope we never have to use them but they are there if needed.
What?!? Never use them?
I'm glad the paper ballots are there so we can audit the optical scan machines
"Can audit"? "Can"? I hope this is a grammatical faux pas.
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It's voting, the less tech the better. I don't need to alt-tab into a solitaire game, just vote.
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Now we just need to trust you.
If I were inclined to steal an election, I'd skip the difficult, expensive business of owning the voting process, and simply bribe the guy who declares the result to say that I won.
Just saying.
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>>>I've been an Elections Inspector in New York State for the last five years...
The last time I saw an Elections Inspector was on television while he appeared before the Florida Supreme Court. He walked into the room, confident that he knew all the answers, and would be able to explain why the Miami-Dade punchcard election machines were "guaranteed to produce accurate results" (his words).
He left the room visibly shaking, because the judges slowly-but-methodically tore apart his assumptions, presu
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I've been an Elections Inspector in New York State for the last five years. Every time one of these stories crop up I wrote a detailed summary of the procedures and technology we use. In spite of these procedures including the retention of paper ballots I still can't convince the tinfoil hat crowd that our elections aren't being decided by a shadowy cabal working out of the Diebold offices. I've about given up on trying to convince them otherwise.
It's a matter of where shadowy cabals may exists. Personally, I see Diebold as dangerously incompetent. The fact that it's possible for Diebold to have rigged elections is disturbing. (incompetence is sometimes just a ruse.)
There are legitimate concerns surrounding so-called DRE (direct electronic record) systems but why those concerns have morphed into people being suspicious of other technology is beyond me.
I need to be able to understand and see how fraud is being prevented at every step. If I can imagine fraud, the step where it may take place must be done in public view. Why all the rabid debate concerning electronic systems? It's because the first generation was so badly bungled.
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Wait, you don't want to use bleeding edge technology to solve a problem that could be solved by 70 year old technology? And you call yourself a geek! I guess this means you wouldn't endorse my voting system: A fully 3D, virtual reality MMPORG voting system where everyone signs in at once, moves their character to the camp of their chosen candidate and then the two sides do battle until a winner is declared. Sure it's massive overkill and would require billions just to get off the ground, but think of how
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Was letting two companies lose people's votes any better?
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So the trouble with the electronic voting is the inherent secrec
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its taking forever to merge sun and oracle; yet these other 2 BASTARD companies are allowed (we know they will be) to merge?
time for pitchforks and torches to be seen in the streets.
(now, we only need caring americans to carry them!)
yeah. hell will freeze over first.
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Agreed! We should put it to a national vote. Oh, wait...
Paper ballots (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Paper ballots (Score:4, Informative)
This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.
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Uh, we don't do a national ballot in the US, each district/precinct has their own layout consisting of national, state, local, and precinct candidates and issues. I guess you could make it modular where the national and state parts are all printed in one large run (and perhaps they are) and then the local and precinct ballots are inserts for that general ballot but you still have to p
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However, I think that the real trouble in the US is that they don't have a consistent electoral system. They have 51 individual systems for each state (or is it more based upon county?).
Elections are ran by counties, but ballots vary by precinct. It's pretty amazing that the whole system works, and really, rigging an election at any level above a single county level would be very difficult, just because of the social engineering requirements.
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Perhaps the first thing then is to simplify your elections. If for no other reason then it is hard for people to be informed about every candidate from street cleaner up.
Here in Canada we have federal elections, one position. Provincial elections, one position and municipal with to many positions.
Re:Paper ballots (Score:5, Insightful)
However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.
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However, *I* do personally care if people know how you voted because it makes it far easier for someone to pay and/or intimidate you to vote a certain way.
There is already a very easy way for any would-be intimidator to verify the vote - he just tells the victim to provide a photo of a ballot with the desired choice on it, with a cell phone, from inside the voting booth. The worst thing the victim can do in this case is to invalidate the ballot after vote by marking something else or just crossing it all out, but even so this is good enough to prevent people from voting for someone you do not like, and in many cases this is good enough. And no, this isn't the
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At least then there is evidence of intimidation - you get tons of people with pictures of their ballots.
In practice, this is used far more often to buy votes than to intimidate people into voting the right way. Turns out that votes are real cheap, and when you can verify them, it is very much feasible to alter election results simply by throwing some money at it.
And, of course, a picture of a ballot proves nothing. After all, the alleged victim could easily fake intimidation by taking a photo of his ballot and sending it to someone, even when not actually asked to do so!
It also requires extra steps and effort and you could probably fake it if you wanted (just photoshop your photo).
This is trivially circumvented by putti
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That's a pretty interesting idea, but I don't think it's practical. Basically, it fails because it rests on the assumption that people will entirely honest.
Since only you know your own long string, there's nothing to stop you from claiming your string was not found and the election was rigged. Thus, you still end up with the original problem that a recount is impossible.
With paper ballots, you can verify the following phases very reliably:
1. Person submits exactly 1 ballot.
2. Each ballot by each person can
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When you get to the "bribes" and/or "gunpoint" stage for everyone involved in the election process (including observers), the exact method for vote count doesn't matter anymore. The result will be whatever the ones in power say, anyway.
In Russia, the rumor was that in 1996, Yeltsin's ass was saved from an electoral defeat by communists when the Central Election Commission simply injected the required number of votes directly into the (electronic) vote counting system on the final stage - after all ballots w
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If the choice is between two parties (not much of a choice, but ok), then observers from both parties can be present. It would be very difficult to engage in widespread intimidation and bribary while being directly observed at *thousands* of polling stations and NOT go undetected somehow.
What else is left? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the ingredients necessary and sufficient to engineer an election result undetectably and without pesky statistical red flags. George Orwell himself couldn't have designed a more riggable system.
Say goodbye to democracy.
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Democracy (in the U.S.) died some time ago. Gerrymandering [wikipedia.org] killed it. The election is already rigged when the districts are drawn.
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Except that the smart ones won't do that.
Let us assume The parties are named Party A, and Party B, that the population is reasonably close to being split 50/50 for the two parties, and party A is in power. LEt us also say for the sake of argument that there are 12 seats.
Party A starts by drawing 6 districts with nearly 100% support for a particular party. Four of those are party B districts, and two are Party A districts.
So with half the districts drawn, Party A gets 2 seat, and Party B gets 4 seats.
But of
Is there an Open alternative? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve.
I'm involved in the software development cycle as a tester. I hear that a lot, too. It never seems to be true.
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Is there Open Source software around to replace their product? I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve. What about a backing company who is able and ready to sell a complete package using it (hardware, support, training, etc.), who can be liable and responsible if anything goes wrong? With the low quality crap these Diebold people keep bringing out, you'd think there would be 100 other companies in line to take their place.
Or the solution isn't trivial and the Premier Elections stuff wasn't really crap... Nevermind, I believe everything I hear on slashdot.
WoW! Matter of time... (Score:2, Insightful)
So we're not even going to bother pretending we have fair and balanced elections now?
On the one hand. that's terrible. These people should all be shot for treason.
On the other... Yeah elections should go smoother since theres no confusion with a standard 'this is the only way' system.
Man... our country is so fucked... gonna be 10 years before the majority notices too. And another 50 to even think about fixing it.
Sucks to be US!
You have to hand it to these companies (Score:2)
Money-saving opportunity! (Score:2)
Sweet, now the political parties will only have ONE company they need to bribe donate to for all of their voting needs. At least that'll curb a bit of the government spending. That, or they'll just give themselves bigger bonuses. I'm sure they'll take the interest of the public to heart first though :P.
Thanks for reminding me... (Score:2)
It's time to re-read "The Stainless Steel Rat for President".
Congress passes "God-Bless-America-Bill" (Score:5, Insightful)
Washington DC
October 1, 2009
In a stunning display of bipartanship today, Congress saved the taxpayers several million dollars by suspending all future elections. Proponents of the bill point out that most people didn't even bother to vote last time, and that of those who did, polls show the overwhelming majority of them held strong opinions about issues they didn't even begin to understand.
"It was a ridiculous waste of the taxpayer's money," said Sam Rickenbaugh of the GAO. "We'd spend millions, billions even on holding elections, and the voters who even bothered to show up were the same mouth-breathing idiots who get roped into jury duty. It was a pathetic display, embarrassing even."
Democrats and Republicans have agreed to share power across the aisle, and points of contention will now be decided based on who can gather the largest contributions for their side.
"Now this is Democracy," posts John Ringerton of My Country Right Or Wrong.com. "You got an opinion, you can put your money where your mouth is like God intended."
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I think elections are a great invention. They only have one small flaw, that was not thought through: The non-voters case!
So I propose the following solution pattern:
Every non-voter *counts*. Either trough making a law, that automatically makes you a foreigner if you don't vote, and adding a "none of the above" option on the ballot,
or more conservative, to automatically count people not showing up to have voted as "none of the above".
BUT: The "none of the above" gets all the same abilities as a party. In it
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Washington works best when they aren't working at all
I agree. Let's get a few more legal holidays thrown in for more 3 day weekends. Of course that may be tricky - ever notice that there aren't any federal holidays during August, the month when Washington is out on break?
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Most of this is utopian, but I honestly do not understand why you don't have "None of the above" on the ballot in U.S. Back when it was still there in Russia (we called it "against everyone", though - more to the point, I think), it was a great way to opt out of the system in a way that counts - it worked roughly the same way as you describe: if more than 40% voted "against everyone" in a parliamentary election, the election was considered invalid, and a re-election scheduled in no later than 4 months.
Presi
we need to get rid of mechanical voting too (Score:3, Insightful)
the most technophilic countries and the poorest should all vote the same way: paper
whatever convenience is gained with mechanical and electronic voting is lost by casting doubt over the legitimacy of the voting process. technologically souped up voting processes renders democratically elected governments open to criticism of illegitimacy, regardless of being just rumors or the truth. more technology in the equation creates dark areas, attack vectors, unnecessary complexity for such a simple process as recording and counting votes (too laborious? use OCR). its also more expensive
so you are basically paying a lot more money for a little more convenience and a giant dollup of doubt in the mind of the public about the legitimacy of their own government. which leads to social instability
yes, you can tamper with paper votes, but its hard and you need a mob of conspirators
mechanical voting increases the number of attack vectors an order of magnitude and decreases the number of people you need to make a dent in the vote, and its harder to trace your tampering
take that further, and electronic voting is a manipulator's dream: one guy with 300 milliseconds of access to a database can do more damage than an army of paper ballot tamperers/ stuffers/ truck drivers, and he can do it in such a statistically invisible way as to make his tampering forensically invisible. public servants are full of integrity and with such high salaries none could ever be paid to look the other way, right, right? and with electronic voting, you need only corrupt one or two obscure key guys, not an army of polling station workers as with paper. a conspiracy of two or three might be airtight with electronic tampering, but a conspiracy of dozens and hundreds with paper/ mechanical is what... more airtight?
as for attack vectors, with electronic voting, take your pick: there are millions where with paper voting there are only hundreds. those tasked with guarding the integrity of the electronic voting process can easily be routed around with the right creative hacker thinking up the right attack vector no one imagined but him. sure, yeah, no one is for hire to do that for a few million and then disappear to rio for the rest of his life, right? oh, and of course, there aren't giant gobs of money floating around politics that often winds up with shady power brokers, right?
electronic voting and mechanical voting must die, for sake of the integrity of our governments, upon which the entire stability of our societies rest. using anything besides paper is insane
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Problem being, paper ballots get a bit messy when you're having a super-election, as seems to be preferred. One might be voting for president, vice president, federal congressman, federal senator, state representative, state senator, state governor, state ballot measures, judges, prosecutors, chief of police, city mayor, city counselor, municipal bylaws and ballot measures, bond issues, and the city dogcatcher all at once.
And I cannot think of an optimal method to deal with this.
ocr dude (Score:2)
#2 pencil
names next ovals
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Just what I wanted to say.
From now on, please, people who can tag, tag all electronic voting stories "pencil".
Yes, we are geeks, and love complex systems, and efficiency... and they should be completely avoided for voting.
People are mystified by computers. They will defer to the geek in the room on nearly anything computer-related. Any anonymous voting system with a degree of automation is instantly more vulnerable to compromise than the simple ballot box.
We love trying to find ways around it, because that
to my knowledge, (Score:2)
These voting systems are all built on microsoft access database applications.
There isn't even a presumption of security on these machines. They are designed to be able to steal elections.
under lock and key (Score:2)
In my experience with paper ballot elections, everything is supposed to be under lock and key both before and after the election and the counting is done in a room with restricted access.
The difference is not the security. The difference is whether the raw data can be gone through again if one wins enough court fights. Of course, there are plenty of recorded stories of destroyed/missing ballot boxes and precincts that have returned more paper ballots than there are registered voters. It's almost as if there
Who really cares? (Score:2)
Our votes don't change anything except the faces. The puppetmasters of those faces are not elected and do not care.
You really want to change things? Stop being a consumer of anything of corporate origin. Get your food, clothes and entertainment from your neighbors. Go off grid.
Drop out, turn on and tune out!
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Indeed. Now Diebold with have to go back to simply making ATM's and other devices that require great accuracy and reliability. But somehow, they just couldn't get a voting machine to work properly and securely.
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I take it you have never used a Diebold ATM.
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you have evidence that Democrats, as a group, are any less concerned about the inherent dangers of all-electronic voting systems than the population as a whole?
I'm a Democrat. I voted for Obama. I'm glad he's President. (Or rather, I'm glad McCain isn't President; not quite the same thing, but it's what we've got.) And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.
In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism. There are a lot of us who still care about the future of our country.
Re:Doesn't matter now. (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how bad things get, as long as we have honest elections, we have a chance to fix them. If we lose that ... forget it, it's over. Democrat, Republican, black, white, whatever: if the people in charge have the means to ensure they stay in charge regardless of the will of the people, they will use that power, and we are permanently screwed.
I hate to break it to you but they already have the means [wikipedia.org] to remain in charge regardless of the will of the people. What good does an honest election do you when the politicians get to decide who their voters are instead of the other way around?
In short, AC, don't assume everyone else shares your level of asshole cynicism.
What's wrong with cynicism towards the political parties? They are all a bunch of lying hypocrites. You just feel good about yourself because the guy you regard as evil happened to lose. That doesn't change the fact that the two major parties are both propping up a system that undermines our representative republic and that the major difference between the two of them is which freedoms you'll lose when they are in charge.
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unless they are moving state lines, gerrymandering does not seem relevant to presidential elections...
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What's your point? Only 1/3 of our Government and 1/2 of the part we get to vote for has corrupted the process? That's reassuring.....
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And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
That puts you and I squarely in the minority. I'm not an R or D, but much more towards the [fiscal, not social] conservative end, for what it's worth. The problem is our friends who vote for either party can't see past partisan issues to fix the ones that are actually important, like voting process integrity.
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Fuck you sheep who refuse to take up arms and revolt to save this country.
That's hilarious, considering that the extent of your action is to post to slashdot, and maybe complain a bit amongst friends ;) I mean, it's /possible/ you're going to be out there with whatever guns you've acquired, facing down a tank... but it's not very likely.
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He's not scared of tanks, he's a mage!
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Sure, a constitutional amendment that requires a 2/3 vote by the SAME FUCKERS that are reaping the gains from the corrupt status quo?
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Don't sweat it dude, they just want to make sure Ron Paul doesn't win in 2012.
Not at all (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So now . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
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The horrid technical issues could easily have been intentional. Let's say (purely theoretically of course) the person [wikipedia.org] charged with ensuring that voting machines got delivered was the state campaign manager for one of the presidential candidates. And said campaign manager knew that certain areas of Cuyahoga County heavily favored the opposing presidential candidate. Would it be any surprise that the voting machines that went to those areas just so happened to be the ones that failed most often?
By contrast, I
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Depends. How many dead voters can vote electronically in Chicago?
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The "hanging chads" were what made the news, but it was districts with electronic counting and/or voting equipment that should be blamed for the 2000 debacle. Why didn't we hear about the county in Florida that reported -16,000 votes for Gore, or the county that reported a vote tally at something like 125% of total registered voters?
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Why are hanging chads even an issue?
THe fact that the chad is even so fara s hanging is proof that the voter intended to vote that way.
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You have to come up with some sort of criteria as to what represents the intent of the voter. The local newspaper published samples of a few ballots in the recent Minnesota Senate race, to show how ambiguous these can be. (We voted by filling out ovals on paper ballots that were initially machine-counted - having the ballots retained meant we could do an effective recount as mandated by state law.)
The exact rules are, apparently, not normally set down beforehand. This means that they have to be made u
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Because then your vote could be verified by people with a vested interest in intimidating you into voting the way they want? Do you really want your employer/union official/wife/etc to be able to see how you voted? Having any sort of mechanism that allows individual votes to be identified after the election would allow this to happen.
monopolies aren't illegal (Score:2)
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's only illegal to act like one.
-T