My Mother's World

I voted for Barack Obama this morning.

No big surprise there for those who know me. But I lay awake this morning in the predawn hours thinking about the election and the many that have preceded it, and realized that this one really is something special.

For me, elections are all about my mom. Some of my earliest memories involve her taking me with her to vote. In our precinct, the polling place was almost always in the multipurpose room at the elementary school on our block. Later on, that would be my school, and I would use that room for lots of other things: glee club, band practice, concerts, talent shows, hot-dog lunches, tumbling class, rainy-day recess. Truly, it lived up to its name. But to me, the room always looked wrong without the red-, white-, and blue-striped voting booths around the sides.

I got it drilled into me very early that voting is not optional. Mom truly voted religiously. It's not like church where lots of people go only on the big holidays. If there was an election, even if it's "just" a runoff or a local primary or something small, you vote. And you don't just show up and cast a ballot, you learn the issues and cast an informed vote, even if that just meant you read the ballot pamphlet and recognized the arguments for or against a proposition and learned to recognize which supporters or opponents were out there grinding the same tired axes again.

But most of the time, we had a horse in the race. It might be a local bond measure or a slate of right-minded school board candidates or a proposition of local or statewide import, but there was pretty much always some cause we were either supporting or opposing. So election day wasn't just a one-day event. It was the culmination of a campaign that we had probably been involved in before it was even a campaign.

I learned early and personally of the dangers of single-issue politics. I recall vividly when a group won the majority on our local school board running on a platform of "neighborhood schools," which I now understand to have been a euphemism for segregation, couched in terms of not busing children to schools away from their homes. So they won, and they gutted the district's very successful integration program. Unfortunately, they had no particular interest or skill in actually running a school district, and the quality of education went down for all (but at least we didn't have to ride buses to our declining schools!).

And somewhere along the line, I realized that although there were ebbs and flows and issues that came and went, there are underlying themes to politics that transcend some of the apparent issues, and these core values are really the bedrock of my political beliefs.

Interestingly, both of my parents came from very conservative (in the old sense) backgrounds. But my mom came to realize that there were some social institutions that needed changing, and she was particularly moved by the civil rights movement. Her sense of fairness and equality was one of the things that came through loud and clear. I knew who Martin Luther King was and why he was important from a very early age.

So seeing Barack Obama on the threshold of the highest elected office in the land holds a particular poignancy for me. In so many ways, this represents the culmination of what my mother has worked very hard for most of her life and all of my life. So much has changed in her 80+ years, not all of it for the better, but I hope she takes particular satisfaction in today's election. I know I do.

You're Doing It Wrong

Yet another clever comic from xkcd.

Oh, it's about electronic voting machines.

Ed Felten on Electronic Voting

OK, one more for today.

Just saw this clip on yesterday's episode of Rocketboom. It's part of an interview with Ed Felten of Princeton University, discussing recent issues with electronic voting machines, including the ways vendors are keeping outside experts such as Felten from testing and validating their machines.

It's short, but interesting. The whole interview is on WhyTuesday's website. Felten mentions that a good site for e-voting info is at VerifiedVoting. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Also, I don't recall whether I've talked/written about Rocketboom before. It's an eclectic little video log ("vlog") from New York City that tends to give a humorous slant to small news stories, but also sometimes slips in a serious report or a weird little "art" video. And they do a great job of keeping one up-to-the-minute with the latest in Internet memes.

Check it out.

Catching Up

I meant to post about this a while ago, but it slipped my mind.

My niece pointed me at this article about e-voting work being done by a professor at a place near and dear to both of our hearts, UC Berkeley.

My favorite quote is this one:

Soon, researchers and hackers discovered that, among other vulnerabilities, voting machines could be opened with ordinary keys from hotel mini-bars, and their vote counts could then be changed undetectably by simply swapping out their memory cards. In other words, any poll worker, driver, night watchman or other individual with unsupervised access to the machines could throw the results of a close election.

But Wagner maintains that there could be a positive outcome, eventually:

“I’m optimistic now,” says Wagner. “Four years ago, secure voting looked hopeless, but more and more states are getting it. Meanwhile, I’m also impressed with all the election officials I’ve worked with; they’re very dedicated and conscientious. There’s no money or fame in being a county elections officer. You do it because you care.”

It matters.

Prevent Unwanted Presidencies

Driving past the fabulous Grand Lake Theater today, I was tickled by the message on the marquee:

PREVENT UNWANTED PRESIDENCIES
AMERICA MUST BRING BACK
HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS

As my throng of long-time readers will recall, this is a hot-button issue for me, and I agree completely. 'Nuff said.

But while I'm thinking about electoral politics, I have to point to this terrific post on LGM about the late, unlamented, Richard Nixon:

By the time his career ended, it was as if the nation's brain had been infested by parasites or poisoned by arsenic; and forty years after his election, we're still cramped up, delirious and vomiting and scratching our skin raw because of what he managed to do in less than six years. And the fact that we got a couple of fucking pandas out of the bargain does not, in my view, set things right.

This was the best-written screed on Nixon I'd read since Hunter S. Thompson's note appended his book "Better Than Sex," which included this fine paragraph:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

As much as I like to excoriate the current administration, Nixon really paved the way for them. He deserves a special circle in political Hell.

I Touched the Future

Election day today, so I voted (of course!). Because we were not allowed to use the touch-screen voting machines, we used...PAPER ballots! Easy, quick, and reliable. And I got to personally place my ballot into the reader, saw that it counted the vote, and got a physical receipt torn from the ballot.

Apparently there is a downside to this sudden reemergence of paper ballots: Election officials actually have to provide enough of them:

An Alameda County Superior Court judge made the decision after several cities in the county - including Berkeley - had no real ballots for voters to use. Some voters used ballots that were paper copies of real ballots.

Oops. But it wasn't just my home county. There were plenty of others:

There were problems elsewhere during the region because of heavy turnouts.

In Santa Clara, one polling station ran out of ballots, forcing voters to use sample ballots from their election packets. ...

In Contra Costa County, so many independent voters showed up at the polls to vote Democratic that the county registrar of voters had to deliver stacks of extra Democratic ballots to polling stations. Eight precincts reported they were running short of ballots. In lieu of actual ballots, the county registrar was prepared to let voters use sample ballots.

Anyway, I was just remembering the little "I touched the future" stickers they gave us several years ago when we first used the new touch-screen voting machines. Now I wish I'd kept mine. Because the future is looking a lot like the past, as we manually submitted our votes. I particularly liked the "privacy shields" they gave us to put our ballots in between the booths and the reader. They seemed suspiciously like manila file folders!

All in all, par for the course. Democracy marches on, in a sort of wobbly, uncertain path.

Good Discussion of E-Voting

Over at slashdot. The head of the discussion is about using open-source software to get around some of the issues with proprietary voting systems.

I sort of like the commenter who says voting machines ought to meet the standards set up for gaming machines in Nevada, but ultimately, I fall on the side of the paper-and-pencil crowd:

You can't trust what you don't understand, so any voting system needs to be Universally Comprehensible. An electronic system based on Open Source principles -- where the blueprints for the hardware and the listings of the software are available for all to examine -- is still really only comprehensible to a minority of the population. It doesn't satisfy the goal. (In the worst case, you could conceal a deliberate design defect by a combination of hardware and software techniques: anybody examining the hardware and not the software, or vice versa, will miss it.)

Just forget the whole thing as a failed experiment, and go back to pencil and paper and manual counting. Everybody knows what all the possible failure modes are, and how to minimise their effects.

Tomorrow is "Super Tuesday," which means lots of voting around the U.S. (including here in my neighborhood). I hope it goes well.

The More Things Change...

...the more they go back to the way they were. And that can be a good thing. Witness, the resurgence of paper-ballot voting:

New state rules severely limiting the use of touch-screen voting machines in California have left many counties scrambling to prepare for elections using paper ballots. Napa, Santa Clara and about 20 other counties will have to move from their all-electronic systems for the first time in years.

Most of the article discusses the difficulties from the perspective that it might take a long time to know all the results. My response: Who cares? As long as you get the right answer, there is no need to hurry.

Voting Technology

Just saw a video clip of the California Secretary of State (among other things, the chief election official), Debra Bowen, doing research in New Hampshire.

It's nice to see that she's doing some field work. She seems extremely impressed with the technology they use in New Hampshire to provide a paper trail.

BTW, the clip is on an interesting-looking videolog (vlog?) called Why Tuesday? I like their slogan: "Fixing our voting system, one question at a time." That also led me to another blog about election reform, All About Voting. Election year...time to pay attention!

Failure of Imagination

That phrase was used to try to explain why the 9/11 attacks were able to happen and why the initial American response to it was so poor.

Well, it appears that lack of imagination is rampant in government:

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

Wow. How dense does an elections official have to be to not get the gravity of this issue? If they don't take this stuff seriously, how can we expect voters to do so?

Here's the key: Those who run elections are paid to anticipate the problems in voting systems, be they verbal, physical, printed, or electronic. At this stage of the process with electronic voting, anyone who doesn't anticipate problems either hasn't been paying attention or is completely incompetent.

Knowing nothing about this Jennifer Brunner, I can't say one way or the other, but it doesn't speak well for her.

The E-Voting Scam

Just when you thought I was never going to write about anything except torture, here I am, back on the subject of electronic voting.

Just read an interesting piece by "looseheadprop" at firedoglake on e-voting in New York, which includes this:

Remember HAVA? The totally misnamed, designed to do the opposite, “Help America to Vote Act”? It was passed in the wake of the 2000 hanging chad scandal. It appeared to have some laudable goals, such as forcing the states to make the voting experience handicapped accessible, and provided money to the states to “update” their voting systems to comply with its requirements. Coming from the Administartion that LUVS unfunded mandates, it sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?

And by now you know why. It was yet another con, a really dangerous con if you believe in voting.

There's some great additional analysis. I recommend it.

While I'm on the subject, I should point out that the city of San Francisco is all agog over the fact that they have to hand-count all the results of Tuesday's mayoral election, and might not know the results for two to three weeks? It seems California's top elections official, Secretary of State Debra Bowen, ruled that although the City could use its electronic voting machines, they would have to hand-verify all the results, which will be a long and expensive process. On the plus side, the City is suing the manufacturer of the machines.

This is a story that is repeating itself in various ways, all over the country. At least Bowen is trying to ensure that the votes are counted properly, which is what really matters. It's a shame that it's such a costly process, but it is important to get it right.

I have no problem with the fact that it takes a long time to count the votes. It's a shame that the process is made less efficient by the very technology that was supposed to streamline things. But the goal of accurate vote counts is more important than the expense.

And a Quick E-Voting Note

A friend pointed me to this article, in which Diebold, a leading purveyor of electronic voting systems, is sort of, almost, spinning off its elections unit. Buried in the story is this gem:

Voting technology updates were encouraged by $3.9 billion of funding for the Help America Vote Act of 2002, following the disputed presidential election in 2000 that came down to a highly scrutinized recount of punch-card ballots in Florida.

Not that I'm suggesting that anyone would rush to market a product that didn't work very well, just because there was a lot of money available for such products.... Well, yes I am. $3.9B is a lot of reasons to sell junk. Of course, there is also this:

Diebold has often defended its voting machines and its own business intentions, even after its former chairman and chief executive, Wally O'Dell, sought with little success to convince critics his Republican politics and fundraising for President Bush were not the motive for the company's involvement in elections.

Political motivations can be almost as strong as financial ones.

E-Voting update

My sister points out that I haven't written about the latest flurry of bad news on the electronic voting front. Good point. And yes, I know that all those links come from one source, but that's kind of the point.

Basically, we've gotten confirmation that the machines don't work (right), but we still have to use them. Terrific:

[UC Davis computer science professor Matt] Bishop, however, said he was surprised by the weakness of the security measures, both physical and electronic, protecting the voting systems. His team of hackers found ways to get into the systems not only through the high-tech equipment in election headquarters but also through the machines in the polling places.

If the testers had had more time, they would have found more flaws, he added.

BTW, Dan Rather has done a bit of investigative reporting, and his report airs tonight. Unfortunately, it's on HDnet, which my cable company (Comcast) declines to include HDnet on its systems. I imagine some or all of it will turn up online shortly.

The machine makers and the county voting officials are upset with the Secretary of State (who oversees elections, statewide), thinking she's out to get the machine makers:

During her election campaign last year, Bowen made it clear she had little confidence in the security of electronic voting machines and vowed to review their use in the state.

"Voting systems are tools of our democracy,'' she said Friday. "We want to ensure that the voting systems used in the state are secure, accurate, reliable and accessible to all. This (study result) is not a big deal to me. It's a big deal for everyone in the country.''

And that's pretty much what I've been saying all along: Voting is too important to leave it to inadequate systems.

On the Paper, Dammit!

Some good news today on the electronic voting front. Congress is considering legislation to require paper ballots as an official record. California's Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, testified today in favor of the measure, despite having reservations about implementation.

Still a long way to go on this. but at least it's getting serious consideration.

Remember, there is nothing more important in a democratic republic than verifiably fair elections!

Dumber and Dumberest?

A friend just pointed me to this posting on BradBlog, which indicates that the e-voting folks at Diebold have truly no sense of how to secure a system. Not only do they use the same key for all their machines, and a common, file-cabinet key to boot, but now this:

Of course, they'll only sell such keys to "Diebold account holders" apparently --- or so they claim --- but that's hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold's website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!

Yes, really. Just by looking at a picture of the key, someone was able to use a grinder to make one that worked.

Makes you kinda long for the days of dangling chads, doesn't it?

P.S. Sorry for not posting much. Things are crazy at work and in Real Life, too.

California moving away from e-voting?

This seems like good news:

California's electronic voting era could be facing a very quick conclusion as one of the nation's most visible e-voting critics will be supervising the state's approval of voting machinery.

Lowell Finley, a Berkeley attorney who's been involved in suits against voting machine manufacturers, the California secretary of state, San Francisco and Alameda counties and the ongoing dispute over electronic voting in Florida, is taking over as deputy secretary of state.

I haven't had time to think this over, but my initial reaction is positive.

Electronic Voting Update

Just stumbled across this update in InfoWorld on electronic voting issues.

I thought this exchange was telling:

IDGNS: Some of those ideas don't sound like they'd get around the "black box" question with e-voting -- that people don't see what's going on in the machine.

Spafford: There's something that I think has been overlooked by a lot of people who work in this realm. The average voter does not have the technological sophistication to have confidence that the mechanism preserves their anonymity and their vote. Some of the methods that involve cryptography, for instance, while scientifically very sound, would be used by people who don't understand the mathematics behind it and are mistrustful of the idea that they would have to take someone's word that it works.

The method of having a paper record is a technology people can immediately grasp and understand. That's really important. We want not only to protect the vote, but we want people to feel comfortable that their vote matters.

Anything that we do to make the system more complex or difficult to understand disenfranchises some people.

That last paragraph from Dr. Spafford is incredibly important. There's no point in spiffing up voting with new technology if it makes people even think that their votes are devalued. Voting is power, and arguably the only power we have that really counts. We should be finding ways to make people feel empowered, not discouraged.

Electronic voting is still a solution in search of a problem, much like high-tech weapons systems searching for a conflict to resolve.

This Just In: E-Voting is Bad!

Big shock to those of us who have been following the issue: The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has examined voting machines, and preliminary reports say that they come up lacking (PDF).

The standard they apply, and which I like, is "software independence":

A voting system is software-independent if an undetected change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome.

Essentially, that means that the ability of election officials to tally and audit election results cannot depend solely on the reliability of the programming of the voting machine.

News reports after the November elections indicated that some jurisdictions had issues when they went to verify results, like sometimes the machines reported different numbers.

Clearly, this is no way to run a democracy. A vote is a vote, and no matter how many times you count it, the vote should still come out the same way. I realize that in some cases (as we all learned in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, dimpled chads and all), there are ambiguities, and reasonable people might interpret the same data differently. But in those cases, humans should be able to examine the evidence and make a ruling, not just accept the "judgement" of a technological system.

I like this quote from the end of the Washington Post's story today:

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."

Anyway, enough ranting for the moment. More to come, obviously.

Election Day: Progress By Regression

How cool...that image looks just like the little sticker I got for voting.

Anyway, the best news is that not only did I vote (and apparently there was a mid-morning "rush," as all four little carrels were in use, with at least one person waiting), but I voted with a paper ballot! Apparently this time, unlike in the primary in June, we scrounged up enough scanners.

And the poll workers had a good attitude, chuckling as they handed me my "voting device," which looked suspiciously like a black ballpoint pen, and my privacy shroud, which strongly resembles a manila file folder. Cool.

So I voted. The way it should be, with human interaction. There's a paper trail. I even have the torn-off tops of my ballots so I can prove it.

And I have a little sticker, of course. Very important.

Make sure you get your sticker, too. Vote!

Voting with a Spork

If you can ignore all the typos, this article is pretty good. I particularly like this line:

Now we are trying to eat the soup of democracy with the spork of voting, known as electronic ballots.

Remember: we have an important election coming up. Make sure you vote, and make sure your vote counts.