US Elections Dominated By Closed Source. Again. 403
An anonymous reader writes "Another American election is almost here, and while electronic voting is commonplace, it is still overwhelmingly run by closed source, proprietary systems. It has been shown that many of these systems can be compromised (and because they are closed, there may be holes we simply cannot know about). Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems. By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests. The opportunities for fraud, tampering and malfunction are rampant. But nonetheless, there is very little political will for open source voting, let alone simple measures like end-to-end auditable voting systems or more radical approaches like open source governance. Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?"
Obligatory Daley (Score:4, Insightful)
Vote Early. Vote Often
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/classes/hmc.cs070.200401/votequote.html [hmc.edu]
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Who needs voter fraud, when you can have Voter [youtube.com] Intimidation [youtube.com]?
Since both of those links were to youtube videos of the same incident, one could conclude that one would want voter fraud because voter intimidation is not a significant factor nationwide.
Seriously, I can see how two black panthers outside one voting place in Philadelphia would be intimidating to voters, and since this would be the left, two guys in one location would be about the most organized voter intimidation conspiracy we could come up with, but you have to be badly deluded to equate the black panther
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In Illinois we're so patriotic that even being dead doesn't keep us from the polls.
Our last Governor was just convicted of a felony (and a hung jury on a dozen more, to be retried next year) and the Governor before him is sitting in Federal prison right now.
So proud of Illinois' political system...
Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available? ...there's lots of money and power behind closed source, which leads to corruption and back-room deals. QED.
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And open source company are really bad at lobbying.
Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The love of money" is the root of all evil.
Getting that particular quote right matters.
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See above:
I beg to differ. Women are the root of all evil OR equal to evil, depending on how you do your proof.
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Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available? ...there's lots of money and power behind closed source, which leads to corruption and back-room deals. QED.
And so far, no believable evidence that any errors actually changed the outcome of any election other than in those cases where it was so close that even human error could tip the balance. That's why mandatory recount rules kick in, in most states when races are very tight.
At least with the paper ballot reader systems you have the actual documents to count, and could count them on by hand or by an Open Source device after an election to prove or disprove any claims of errors.
But until that happens, even on a small scale, and demonstrates that the closed source systems delivered the wrong result there is just no motivation to do anything.
Of course the totally electronic voting systems, with NO physical record remains pretty much un-audit-able.
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Citation needed, from a reliable, non-biased source.
Every True Scotsman knows that any source that is reliable is alwayes biased, and vice-versa.
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Look, another Slashdotter that can't figure out how to use Google.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/politics/campaign/06ohio.html?_r=1 [nytimes.com]
http://makethemaccountable.com/articles/Ohio_s_Odd_Numbers.htm [makethemaccountable.com]
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696 [harpers.org]
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995 [freepress.org]
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud.html?q=2004votefraud.html [whatreallyhappened.com]
http://www.jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html [jqjacobs.net]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can actually get +5 Troll, but it would require some really weird mods.
Post with a Karma bonus score: 2
Mod Troll score: 1, Troll
Mod Troll score: 0, Troll
Mod Troll score: -1, Troll
Suddenly people realize that you are being oppressed
Mod Interesting score: 0, Troll (it uses whatever you have the most mods for)
Mod Informative score: 1, Troll
Mod Underrated score 2, Troll
Mod Insightful score 3, Troll
Mod Informative score 4, Troll
Mod Interesting score 5, Troll (Your total mod counts are Troll: 3, Informative:
72 reliable sources (Score:2)
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Personally I'm a big fan of the old Scantron-style systems that some states still use (Minnesota in particular). It's read electronically but still gives you a physical paper record to go back to. But then again some people are too stupid to fill in ovals correctly. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why they should be allowed to vote...
Re:Because... (Score:5, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error [wikipedia.org]
The error cropped up in Volusia's 216th precinct of only 585 registered voters. A Global Election Systems (acquired by Diebold Election Systems now Premier Election Solutions) voting machine showed that 412 of those registered voters had voted. The problem was that the machine also claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and in addition had given Gore a negative vote count of -16,022 votes
This margin of error alone was greater than the population of the affected riding, and is well beyond human error. It also caused a riding to appear it supported the candidate they didn't vote for.
Actually, they can be audited if you want your vote as part of a public record. In that case, the parents/employer/mafia/dictator will demand you vote in a certain pattern.
Let Me Google That For You isn't enough (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently the Internet needs a "Let Me Scroll To The Bottom Of The Page For You [boston.com]" service as well. See the talk page for additional primary sources.
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That's why mandatory recount rules kick in,
Oh whew, good thing too. 'Cause as we all know, partisan politics or outright corruption could never stop a mandatory recount. That's crazy talk.
Rampant Corruption and Fraud, oh my! (Score:2)
Because the government is a bureaucracy with inertia. It takes time and effort to change it's course, and unless there is a perceived critical issue, there is very little drive to change things.
It seems sad to have to say this, but it is going to take some serious criminal hacking and blatant manipulation of an election to get a proper open source election system in place in within the next decade. A
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> To me the conflict is between the secrecy of the ballot and the ability to verify results. If there is no way to link a completed ballot to an eligible voter, you can never be 100% sure.
Correct. But there are ways to do even that, most of which, alas, involve crypto that the civilians won't trust.
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What if the ballot had your name and Voter ID # on it, and those records existed until the election was certified, at which point the records were destroyed.
Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way or to proliferate it to anyone.
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Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way or to proliferate it to anyone.
Well, if that's all we need, why not just have everybody email me their votes? Legislation could make it a felony for me to miscount or reveal the votes, and make it a felony for anyone to email me more times than they're allowed to vote.
Laymen won't trust crypto, but they shouldn't trust plans that would make elections easier to subvert.
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There is a lot of personal information held by the government right now that is less protected and more significant than this.
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Unfortunately, you can have good privacy or good security. Not both.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Interesting)
But again, that is not germane to the question at hand, because you need a really REALLY close election to pull off that kind of tom foolery.
Even manual counting with 5 sets of eyes on every ballot would not protect against this kind of corruption in a tight election.
Even if you could link ballots to voters (and were willing to suffer the inevitable intimidation and reprisals and vote buying of that practice), there is no way to assure the ballots found in the trunk are not tied to people who ALSO have other ballots tied to them, perhaps in different precincts, or different counties.
Close elections are a fundamental problem not solvable by technology, and for the most part, in the grand scheme of things, if society is unable to clearly choose between A and B there is probably no significant difference anyway, and you end up with a tempest in a tea pot over an emotional issue.
Re:Because... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh geez, you're one of those Coleman Kooks.
Coleman is a carpet bagger. He moved here from new york, pretended to be a democrat to get elected into local politics then changed parties once he was elected. Franken moved here as well, but at least he was born and raised here. The guy is dishonest, a cheat, and even if he'd won the election he'd have serious legal issues to deal with that came to light during the election. Anyone that could support that in a candidate should just crawl in a hole and die.
And you're being dishonest about "found" votes as well. That was bogus talking points the republicans spread and you believe it.
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Your qualms about what you perceive to be my political positions are not relevant to this discussion.
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Where did I claim you claimed to be? I called you one.
The fact is, even close elections tend to follow pattters that are visible from more general results. Whinging about felons and "found votes" is the sign of someone grasping for straws to get their candidate certified.
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(Personally I'm just as worried about eligibility - it was shown positively that enough felons voted in this election to tip the scales to Franken, but once an election is certified - even if verifiable fraud happened - there's no way to change anything.)
No, you are not. You are worried about having someone whom you don't favor elected to office. All you've done is bitch about unverifiable "facts" that you believe tipped the election in Franken's favor. If it had gone the other way, you'd have insisted that the system worked "just fine". Conspicuously absent from your post, is any meaningful demand for a system that would eliminate at least some of the opportunities for fraud. Every citizen should be screaming for that. That they (the citizens) are not is d
Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but people seem not to realize that the whole concept of "democracy" is these days merely a marketing gimmick.
As long as the ignorant masses have an illusion of participation and influence on the government, everything is "fine".
So it does not really matter if the new "voting" systems are auditable, error-proof or if they are even functional at all. As long as the spectacle of "voting" is staged with all the appropriate lip service, posturing and grand proclamations, then the machines fulfill their requirements. In fact electronic voting machines do better in this than the traditional ones because of all the blinking screens, fancy graphics, the general air of "high tech" to the uninitiated (which means 90%+ of "voters"). They allow for the show to go on with the bonus theme of "progress" while stuffing pockets of various corporate cronies of the politicians along the way.
As for the "votes" themselves, nothing would appreciably change if the machines did not even bother counting them and replaced them with random noise as most candidates of all political parties these days are already pre-approved by the true rulers of the so-called Western Democracies, i.e. the aristocratic insiders who control all the traditional mass media and the central structures of all major parties.
No outright ballot-box stuffing, electronic edition, is needed. It simply does not matter anymore as the system is rigged far past the point of the need for such crude methods.
And this is the true reason why there is no interest in making sure the voting process actually works. Open source is only a tangent in this, because even without Open Source, other means of insuring validity of the votes exist, such as various paper trails etc. But they are simply deemed irrelevant by those who know that the voting and its outcomes are really meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Hence their different priorities and general disdain for any attempts to introduce any sort of "accountability" by well-meaning but horribly out of touch true believers in "democracy".
Common misconception (Score:4, Informative)
I think a big part of it (from the public's perspective, anyway) is a misconception about open source. Many non-technology-oriented people I know think open source automatically makes it less secure, since "anyone can see what makes it tick."
Personally, I think it has to do with money more than anything else (duh.)
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The attitude towards open source seems to be changing
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I don't understand why they can't use some Open Source Single Purpose Hardware - All it's supposed to do is tally votes!
That way - any tampering would mean someone literally has to attach something on the board to alter the results. And would be obvious upon investigation.
The whole "Connects to the internet" or "Antivirus" or "Pac-Man Simulation" things really bother me.
Is everyone too silly to realize that these things basically operate like a glorified turnstile?
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Additionally, even if the software that is used in electronic voting machines is open source, how do you know that the software installed on any voting machine is the same as the published source code?
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If you design the system properly (no counting in the terminals at *all*; they merely remember ballots, count printed ballots and spoils, and speak to blind people), then it doesn't matter: you have a Physical Vote, and *humans* can read it and count it if necessary, cause it's printed in OCR-A.
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Can I ask, though - since when is a manual recount, done with human hands and human eyes, performed by humans who are full of whim and malice, conducted in a subjective manner ("is this a legitimate ballot? No, that chat is still hanging with a bit too much paper attaching it, better discard it as invalid.", considered more reliable & less error-prone than a machine-conducted recount?
I'm not sure I understand this fetish for "a paper trail." I get the idea of open source, and open elections, in the se
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I just don't understand how "paper" is somehow better, or less error-prone when you introduce humans who have to interpret the marks made on the paper objectively, and who will no doubt try to find reasons to disqualify votes for "the other guy" while they do the recount.
Paper is not less error prone. Error is not the problem. Fraud is. Paper is less fraud prone because everybody can recognize fraud on paper ballots when they see it, not everyone can recognize fraud when they see it with electronic ballots. Worse, it is significantly easier to hide fraud with electronic ballots.
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Being open source doesn't magically make it any better. In fact, there was an article recently about an open source based voting system in (i think) Washington DC that was found to be riddled with security flaws and problems as well.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/05/2246215/DC-Suspends-Tests-of-Online-Voting-System?from=rss [slashdot.org]
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I know, right? I had to argue with the company I work for FOREVER to let me use Audacity at work.
IT guy in charge: "It's open source, anyone could look at it and exploit it!"
Me: "Or, since you seem to know everything, you could look at it and see if it's exploitable."
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I've been working on Audacity for years and love it. I've also been working for years to get my dad to use it for his audio business instead of buying Sound Forge or Pro Tools. It's slow progress...
OT: Audio Editing (Score:2)
For competing with Protools, wouldn't Ardour be a better choice?
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Unfortunately, needs to run on Windows. And he primarily uses Sound Forge. Now the studio he works at part time, however, might be HIGHLY interested in Ardour. Thanks for the info!
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Perhaps he knew he wasn't going to get paid for all the time it would take for him to do a full code review?
Re:Common misconception (Score:5, Insightful)
> However, I would actually consider the inability to have a recount a positive. It saves money for the taxpayer and reduces confusion and legal challenges after the election.
You sound like Tampa mayor Pam Iorio, who actually said that in public, and still got elected.
Would you both please go jump off a bridge, now?
Everyone else, repeat after me:
A VOTE IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT.
That's your mantra; use it well.
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Easy, because at every voting station there are representatives of all parties, who can watch the boxes at all times, right up until the point it's tipped out and the votes counted, live on TV. At least that's the way general elections were held in the UK when I lived there.
Re:Common misconception and "open source" (Score:2)
If you feel that way, could you explain to me what benefit open source electronic voting actually has?
You can confirm your vote was recorded correctly when you drop it into a box, but how do you know that box doesn't get swapped out? Or that another stuffed box doesn't get set right next to it?
You can confirm that there exists some software in source form that is free of obvious defects and lacks backdoor exploits, bu
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Electronically, who knows? Yes, there might be provably secure cryptographic solutions (NONE of which we're using now), but even then you have to trust the person who not just designed but IMPLEMENTED the system. That comes down to security
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Or it could be that encyclopedias are NEVER acceptable as primary sources for research? Doesn't matter if you've got the oldest working copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica Super Deluxe Edition on gold-plated acid-free paper - it's still not a primary source.
Just like wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, is not a primary source. It may help you flesh out your understanding of a particular subject, but it should be a starting point which allows you to dive deeper into a subject & find legitimate primary so
Alternatives? (Score:4, Interesting)
So here's a question:
Does there currently exist a complete open source voting solution? Something that you could drop in in place of a Diebold or what have you.
It seems like we'd make more headway with local governments if we could say, "Here it is, it's free, it's ready to go, all you have to do is okay it." and I'm not sure if that solution yet exists?
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i don't think that is the point. With the amount of money states/countries have spent renting/licensing these solutions. One of them, or a collection of them could have contracted the work for hire, and stipulated they receive the source code.
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With the amount of money states/countries have spent renting/licensing these solutions. One of them, or a collection of them could have contracted the work for hire, and stipulated they receive the source code.
Probably, but that's not really the way local government works. Custom software development tends to be reserved for things for which there can be no shrink-wrapped-ish universal solution, usually because that city/county/etc. has unique laws that make the more established solution somehow incompatible with how they have to do things.
The most effective way to get people to do the right thing is to make it easy for them to do the right thing.
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Does there currently exist a complete open source voting solution?
Yes, but you have to write it yourself. Oh, and once you finish if you wouldn't mind committing that back here that'd be great. God, don't you know anything about how open source works? ;)
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I'm not sure how you go about verifying any of that in a satisfactory manner. Even if you did shit like making sure the CPU's were acquired with a randomized off-the-shel
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Yes, it's called the goddamn paper ballot.
Some ten year old hanging chads would like to have a word with you.
My local district still uses a paper ballot, but let's not pretend it doesn't have its own limitations, too.
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Some ten year old hanging chads would like to have a word with you.
My local district still uses a paper ballot, but let's not pretend it doesn't have its own limitations, too.
And hanging chads are an artefact of - guess it! - voting machines. In this case mechanical ones. Pure paper ballots work just fine all over the world - voting machines are needless automation, and can and will fuck things up.
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You might be right, but until there's a viable choice, we won't know for certain.
If you build it, they might not come, but if you don't build it, they definitely won't come.
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Yes, there is. In Brazil, elections are fully electronic with Linux-based software and all the source used is public available.
Can you provide a little more information on this? Are there any known obstacles to using it for American elections?
My take is, if I didn't know about this, most of the people setting up local elections certainly don't.
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We covered it, 2 years ago:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/07/0029224&tid=266 [slashdot.org]
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Question: How do you know that this is the source used and not a modified version? How does anyone know? At some point there is always going to be opportunity for corrupt officials to "fix" things.
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Insiders (Score:2, Insightful)
Because those in power don't want transparency to be a two-way street. They want to be able to peek into every aspect of our private lives, ostensibly to seek out some tiniest sliver of evidence that we maybe once upon a time didn't think it was necessarily all that great an idea to disembowel Osama bin Laden and stuff him with pork sausage on live TV. But they don't want us to be able to peek into their private lives, or even the seedier aspects of their public ones
Malice vs. stupidity (Score:2)
If the insiders really wanted to systematically exploit the voting system, I don't think they would be dumb enough to rely on MS Access like Diebold did. The project would be a big budget extravaganza, managed by $POPULAR_MGMT_CONSULTING_FIRM. The complexity would be enormous, and there would be some sort of bizarre "national security" black box requirements that would be where all the dirty stuff lived.
Never attribute to malice that which can be just as easily explained by stupidity. Idiots outnumber ev
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There are some ordinary people whom I will call "collaborators" who think that we don't need to know the sordid details of how government works. These folks believe that we must trust the people we elect and then if the results are not to our liking, then they can be replaced with someone else when the next election comes up.
Doesn't occur to them that it's helpful to know /why/ we got to the point we don't like, or why we got somewhere we like.
Does it really matter? (Score:2)
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Should we instead be worried that voters are still choosing candidates based on height [wikipedia.org], order on the ballot [uvm.edu], the last commercial they saw on the boob tube, or other sadly irrelevant issues.
If you don't know who to vote for in your area based on your values and beliefs, check out VoteSmart [votesmart.org]
Because that's the way they like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it would take a politician to change the law. But both parties like the broken system we have now because they each want to game the system for their own advantage. Fair and accurate voting doesn't help the political parties or the candidates, it only help the voters!
Even open source has bugs (Score:2)
what's the big deal. Most of you don't vote anyway.. what does opening the source do? it won't prevent bugs or hacking or cheating (which has nothing to do with the source). There are many things that affect our lives that aren't open. Why voting?
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Because it is an excuse to not vote until something very unlikely happens. They aren't too lazy to vote, they just won't vote until it is open source, etc. etc. and so on.
Digital Voting in Elections = No Win Game (Score:2)
If Closed Source:
Con - Companies can secretly build in flaws to exploit trust.
Pro - A chance at security through obscurity (not too much, of course, because exploiters KNOW the code exists, just not what the code says exactly)
Con - Companies can unknowingly build in flaws that can be exploited by those in the know.
If Open Source:
Pro - Everything is known about the code so any potential flaws are widely known and can be fixed.
Con - Fixes can be flawed, too.
Con - No standard will likely be settled upon-- part
Don't Forget Paper Trails (Score:3, Insightful)
There are generally 2 main points that electronic voting needs - coding available for public scrutiny is one, but in my mind a more important one is a paper audit trail - the vote is recorded electronically, but the voter gets to see a paper record of their vote (they either see but can't touch or carry it to a ballot box) which can be used later for recounts and verification.
I'd rather have a proprietary system with a paper trail than an open system with no paper trail. But really we need to insist, at a minimum, on both.
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Of course I did not RTFA, but it does sound like it is misleading, perhaps yelling for open source when in fact what is needed is a paper trail.
A fully open-source machine that produces no physical result could still be reprogrammed at the last moment (well of course with closed source but that is not really the point) to throw the election.
A machine producing a voter-verified paper trail is what is needed. If the machine designers can't figure out how to draw text on the screen except by using Windows, wel
I'll tell you why we remain in the dark ages... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason is simple. Our government would not be able to fix elections if it were more transparent or had adequate auditing.
perspictive (Score:2)
"Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?""
Better for who? The answer ti this will give a hint of why...
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Sure it will.
But the *answer* is: "better for our democratic country, by the *objective standards by which voting and vote-counting systems are evaluated*", and there are such standards, and nobody much disagrees with them, that I'm aware of.
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You do not know anyone in power then.
I'm tired of these closed sourced candidates (Score:2)
McCain posted his, and all the little clones proved that he has 100% pure American genes.
Risk taking (Score:2)
Get scoobey doo elected.
go to jail.
Improve the state of affairs?
iPads (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no problem, until there is a problem (Score:2)
No one in government sees it as a problem because there has been no issue involving the units.
If, for instance, There was a call for all Hackers and Tech people to rig the election.
Lets say they were asked to Exploit the system and force a third party like the libertarian party (www.lp.org) to win (They are on most if not all the ballots)
And say it just so happened that the Libertarian party won by a land slide. There would be a call to recount, with out the ability to recount all hell would break loose. Th
Not quite that bleak -- and OSS isn't a total cure (Score:2)
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
Actually there is, for that (optionally, yes) certified software. The distributed software is built from source by the independent testing labs (in what's called a trusted build) and hashes are taken of all the components. The testing lab keeps escrowed copies and the hashes are also available from eac.gov.
Of course, this does assum
So? (Score:2)
Why shouldn't the voting system be any less corrupt than the candidates?
My point is it's going to take a lot more than an election to clean house on the hill, and even then it's an uphill battle to keep the country from sliding into a full-fledged military dictatorship, instead of the secret one it already is. For example when a military can get away with firing radioactive weaponry into civilian populations [globalresearch.ca] on at least two occasions without so much as a slap on the wrist, they are above the UN, much less
um, we shouldn't be using electronic voting (Score:2)
i can deal with OCR machines, but you need to vote on paper. this provides a picture of actual voter intent that is harder to lose/ fake/ destroy/ etc. of course you can have fraud in any election, but the difference between electronic and paper is that you need an army of saboteurs and an ongoing conspiracy with paper, and with electronic you just need one guy with the right code for a few milliseconds
additionally: attack vectors. there are dozens of way to cheat on paper voting. there are order of magnitu
Florida moved from computer voting to optical scan (Score:2)
With optical scan there is a paper trail so theres less temptation to screw things up.
Let your congressmen and the president know (Score:2)
Great opportunity to let your congressmen and women and the President know your feelings on the subject. Lets /. them on this.
Never understood (Score:2)
In short; after a brief (though hardly satisfying) two-year interlude, Idiocracy is returning next month; this time for good.
When the Libertarians win (Score:2)
When the Libertarians win a major election, martial law will be instituted and all voting machines and personnel will be quarantined until the source the corruption is found.
Oh for Christ's sake.. (Score:2)
If it was open source software running on a micro architecture, it still wouldn't matter. The fact that they are machines is what the problem is. In NY we use a lever system - they are also problematic for the same reason, though at least you can look inside the thing and see what it's doing - and tell when tampering has occurred. With a computer you can NEVER EVER look inside and see what it's running, no matter how clean you think the millions of lines of open source code you looked at last week are.
Pleas
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No.
It was the Help America Vote (The Way We Want Them To) Act that is responsible for most of it.
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It's due to the militant ideology that keeps content and functionality that people expect, and that work, out of the distributions.
Computers are all content and experience. Linux has a decent experience but little content. Windows has content but a generally poor experience. Neither has solved all the problems.
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Actually, I'd say Linux's failure to launch as a desktop OS has a lot less to do with Microsoft's 'propaganda' and a lot more to do with the fact that "open source" isn't much of a selling point to an average consumer, and that in that segment of the market, ease of use and consistent, familiar interfaces are the driving factors.
Linux users tend to like the opportunity for endless fiddling with options and distros and packages. They like computers. For them, "open source / free operating system" is a feat
Re: (Score:2)
If you are suggesting that such stories are apocryphal *merely* because Republicans are in the lead... then you've made the point, because they are documentarily not apocryphal, and you are clearly so implying merely because you're a Republican partisan.
Read, um, *the links in the lede*.
I guess we know your party of choice... (Score:2)
... but coverage of this topic in Slashdot has been consistent across election cycles. Check out these examples from the 2008 campaign:
Fact checking isn't difficult. Here's a list of Slashdot articles about Diebold [slashdot.org], if you don't believe me.
Re:Because: (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporatocracy is just an evolved form of Feudalism.
There, fixed that for you.