Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] facism gaining ground in US

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

> >      http://www.eac.gov/annualreport_2003.htm#sec1
> >
> >      The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires the
> >      establishment of an Election Assistance Commission (EAC) headed
> >      by four commissioners, who are appointed by the President.
>
> The HAVA was what set in motion the current e-voting craze, I believe.
> And the EAC seem rather wedded to e-voting, Diebold-style. :-( Is this
> the kind of statement we want to see from a body entrusted with 
> "helping"
> states to conduct elections?
>
>   "Most importantly, the proposals requiring a voter-verified paper 
> record would force voters with disabilities to go back to
> using ballots that provide neither privacy nor independence, thereby 
> subverting a hallmark of the HAVA legislation. There must be
> voter confidence in the accuracy of an electronic tally. However, the 
> current proposals would do nothing to ensure greater trust in
> vote tabulations."
>
> The final sentence is the one I find Orwellian.
> A more frighteningly ignorant and/or duplicitous statement on e-voting
> I have never heard. Everyone who cares about democracy should be
> concerned at these type of attitudes (which seem to be depressingly
> common among elections officials in the US). As one Slashdot wag put 
> it:
>
>   "I wonder if they'd let me take control of their personal finances
> without a paper record - because the paper record would do
> nothing to ensure greater trust in the financial calculations."
>
> Isn't that a valid analogy? I think it is.


 Voting is kind of an interesting problem from a theoretical standpoint.

  1. It must be anonymous.
  2. It must be hard (nothing is impossible) to "game".
  3. It must be "countable" in a timely fashion.

 Since the debacle in Florida, people have wanted to add:

  4. People want a method to confirm how they voted without any of the 
previous
  precepts...

  But that's tough. As far as paper records go, in my industry 
(financial) the
paper records are almost useless, because getting 1400 individual 
pieces of
paper a day is overwhelming. There are plenty of financial transactions 
that
are purely electronic. In fact, those 1400 archaic pieces of paper are 
based on
transactions that were purely electronic. Where are we going to store 
those
50,000,000 pieces of paper we would generate each election?

> Either they do not understand even the more elementary problems (and 
> there
> are many problems, some elementary, some subtle) with current paperless
> e-voting systems... or they are actively and knowingly complicit in the
> electronic corruption of the election process!

  Hard to say from that small sentence. There is nothing "magic" about 
paper that
prevents cheating. I could develop a voting system that produced pieces 
of paper
that correctly reported how the voter voted, yet recorded something 
entirely
different. To catch it, you'd have to correlate all the pieces of paper 
with
the final results, which would involve manually counting 50,000,000 
pieces of paper.

 What happens if the polling place runs out of toner? Can no one vote 
then?

 I should say, I'm perfectly content with the punch cards we use in 
Arizona. It
would be nice if there was an addition where I could insert the card 
into a
reader, and it would display how I voted, but the card (chad's and all) 
is good enough
for me.

> And remember, just because someone's Black, doesn't mean they're 
> automatically
> a "good guy", or automatically care about racial 
> disenfranchisement.[1] Really,
> that's obvious to a five year old, but Pierce seems to tacitly assume 
> this.
> Likewise, just because a commision is "bipartisan" (Oh! So it's got 
> Republicrats
> and Demopublicans! How wide and all-encompassing a spectrum of opinion 
> is that!
> We clearly have nothing to fear!) doesn't automatically imply it's 
> neutral.
> The frightening quotation above demonstrates that bipartisan 
> commissions -
> gasp, even when Black people sit on them! - can come to the wrong 
> conclusions.

  Ah, but I have a much easier task. I don't have to prove that the EAC 
is:

   1. Good
   2. The right people to have the power to postpone an election.
   3. Doing the right thing with regards to voting machines.
   4. Black people care about racial disenfranchisement.

  I merely have to prove that:

   * We're not descending into Fascism run by Tom Ridge.

  I think I did that two ways:

   * Tom misread the article, its the EAC, not the DHS, and ultimately
      Congress would have to decide how/when/why.
   * The decision would have to be made by a bipartisan commission, 
which is
      how EVERY OTHER DECISION IN OUR ELECTORAL PROCESS IS MADE! (Ever 
worked
      in a polling place?)

  So I think that while its worth watching what happens when Congress 
decides
 this issue to make sure they get it right, we're not descending into 
fascism.


 Pierce