going storage neutral

Posted on April 1, 2008 | Leave a comment

Ed Felton’s excellent post An Inconvenient Truth About Privacy has inspired me to go storage neutral as well. We’ll see how long I can last – I’m guessing that I will tire of it quickly. Probably by tomorrow it will feel like a stale joke.

One of the lessons we’ve learned from Al Gore is that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. We all like to tool around in our SUVs, but too much driving leads to global warning. We must all take responsibility for our own carbon emissions.

The same goes for online privacy, except that there the problem is storage rather than carbon emissions. We all want more and bigger hard drives, but what is going to be stored on those drives? Information, probably relating to other people. The equation is simple: more storage equals more privacy invasion.

That’s why I have pledged to maintain a storage-neutral lifestyle. From now on, whenever I buy a new hard drive, I’ll either delete the same amount of old information, or I’ll purchase a storage offset from someone else who has extra data to delete. By bidding up the cost of storage offsets, I’ll help create a market for storage conservation, without the inconvenience of changing my storage-intensive lifestyle.
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Posted in calltoaction, humor

Follow up to Sacramento central tallying

Posted on March 25, 2008 | 1 Comment

The SacBee gives us some follow-up information to the decision to tally votes centrally in Sacramento:

mproper maintenance of some of Sacramento County’s voting machines – and the tint of the Feb. 5 ballots – were to blame for malfunctions that sidelined vote-counting scanners and delayed results of last month’s presidential primary, according to the county’s top election official.

The problems have been corrected and the scanners are expected to be used in the June election, Registrar of Voters Jill LaVine said in a report to the county Board of Supervisors.
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Because of the malfunction, all ballots had to be counted in the election department’s central command in south Sacramento – instead of some being processed as usual at the precincts.
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During its investigation, the county said that the vendor that supplies and maintains the scanners, Elections Systems & Software, conducted improper recalibration and preventive maintenance on the machines in December.

My take:

  • I’m glad to see that there was some sort of quality testing that occurred so that problems were noticed.
  • I’m surprised that the issues were universal at all precincts. For a problem of that scale you would expect that someone (ES&S – the vendor?) would be contractually responsible for their mistakes.
  • I’m not very comfortable with the resolution which was to use central tabulation. Central tabulation requires that there are observers of the counting and a strong chain of custody for the ballots. Precinct level counting is more robust in this regard. Perhaps a fall-back to manual precinct level counting might have been better.

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Posted in news, security, votingmachines

shenanigans in Chicago

Posted on March 25, 2008 | 2 Comments

From the Chicago Methods Reporter comes this story about poorly trained election administrators and misapplied overrides. One of the affected voters writes:

“Jim and I went to vote at 7 a.m. We were given Democratic ballots and pens. But when I got to the booth, my pen didn’t work — it was like a felt-tip marker with no ink. So I went back to the desk and was told — along with several other confused voters trying to swap out their nonfunctional pens — that these were “invisible ink” pens that would not leave marks on the ballot but would absolutely be read by the scanners.

Except that they weren’t. The optical scanners were spitting out ballots until one of the election judges used a key to override the system and get the ballots into the box. After my ballot was rejected once, I got a confirmation that my vote “counted” (when the number on the ballot box blipped from 19 to 20), but Jim was given a regular ballpoint to fill in his, and it counted right away.”

The voter made enough of a fuss that they managed to get the precinct to try to “make good”. They did this by contacting the first 20 voters at that location and inviting them to re-vote.

The Chicago Tribune covers this too.

(Aside: There are voting systems that really do use special pens. For example the soon-to-be publicly described Scantegrity II system uses invisible ink on part of the ballot that is only visible when highlighted.)

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Posted in incompetence, news, punchscan, votingmachines

the case for the electoral college

Posted on March 23, 2008 | 5 Comments

I found an interesting article that purports to present the pros and cons of the Electoral College System. As I read this article it heavily favors having the electoral college.

It gives these reasons to prefer the electoral college to a national popular vote:

Continue reading →

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Posted in electorial_college, national_popular_vote, NPV

VVSG Open Forum

Posted on February 2, 2008 | 2 Comments

Rick Carback of punchscan has asked me to help publicize a project of his.

He describes it here as a discussion board-like setting for discussing the latest VVSG Draft.:

This week I started disseminating news of my latest project, the VVSG-OF. The idea is to provide a discussion board-like setting for discussing the latest VVSG Draft. The hope is that, through open discussion, a few new ideas might come up that would not otherwise happen in the short times available in conferences on the document.

This is not to be confused with EAC’s own comment tool, which is a convenient, albeit mostly one-way, avenue to express your opinions on the document. When the comment period is over in early March, I will print out all the comments and mail them to the EAC (by me on behalf of each commenter).

If you are at all interesting in the voting process and where that will be heading in the coming years, I urge you to take a look!

Continue reading →

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Posted in punchscan, votingmachines

Your friendly guide to stealing an election

Posted on January 29, 2008 | 4 Comments

‘Foreign Policy’ has an interesting article on how to steal an election. It’s focused on third world autocratic regimes.

Their list of techniques is:

  • Control the process
  • Manipulate the media
  • Keep out the observers
  • Misreport results
  • Foster incompetence and chaos
  • Resort to the crude stuff

In my perception some of this applies to the US. As an example, the US media is typically very shallow in it’s investigation or coverage of election irregularities. I don’t think that the US media is controlled by those in current political power but is driven by the rules of access, expediency, and a frame of reference that assumes a two party system without any critical thought of why such a system is so persistent.

Please share your thoughts on whether any of these techniques apply in any degree to the US.

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Posted in fraud

Bob Koehler on election integrity and voting machines

Posted on January 24, 2008 | 4 Comments

Bob has a short, well written article on election integrity entitled Conspiracy Theorist. It’s a good resource to point people to whose reaction to election integrity issues is to ask “What’s the problem? Just vote and trust that the votes will be counted accurately.”:

“We should at least get votes back on paper and get people counting them by hand.”
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This is not what I’d like to be writing about. Our nation’s soul is bleeding, its future up for grabs. The candidates jockey for a mandate — our mandate — and they’ll define it as narrowly as possible unless we define it for them.
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Why, then, must I divert my attention from matters such as this and ponder . . . memory cards and molded plastic deflectors? Ah, democracy! We can’t simply leave it to the voting machine vendors any more than we can leave it to the politicians. The O-rings and gusset plates of democracy are poised to fail in every election; every vote does not count. The media and most government officials are still in denial about this, still dazzled by glitzy, electronic voting technology or maybe just trapped in their billion-dollar commitment to it. Besides, when has technology ever gone backwards?

But the call for paper ballots and hand counting — however jarring and quaint it may sound in the 21st century — comes most urgently not from Luddites or flat-Earthers but the technophiles and self-proclaimed geeks who understand computers most intimately, and know their vulnerabilities.
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While security concerns are paramount in our financial and just about all other dealings…, we maintain a remarkable sense of denial that hunger for power could ever lead to breaches of democratic integrity. What are you, a conspiracy theorist?

No, but I’m from Chicago and I cut my teeth as a reporter back in the waning days of the Daley (Senior) Machine, when precinct captains didn’t need no conspiracy to know they needed to deliver their precinct, or else, and would do what it took. The quest for political power is raw and all too often dirty. That basic truth hasn’t changed.

My thoughts:

  • I’m glad to see more attention to the problems with electronic voting machines
  • The praise for the ritual of placing a ballot into a ballot box is bogus. That is just an argument for status quo and could be used to justify all sorts of poor practices – such as having voting occur on a workday (Tuesday).
  • I’m not a fan of electronic voting machines but it is unfair to say that there are no benefits to using them. I list a few benefits and problems below. To me the problems far outweigh the benefits.
    • Some benefits of electronic voting machines are: faster initial reporting of results, ability to handle many ballot variations with minimal waste (eg: variations for each precinct and for language preference), improved disability access.
    • Some problems with electronic voting are: very serious election integrity issues, cost (in my understanding), limited number of machines available in a location so unacceptably long waits when sufficient number of machines are not in a precinct, potential use in vote suppression via technology and access barriers.

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Posted in security, votingmachines