Posts by Matthew Poole

Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First

  • Legal Beagle: Tastes like democracy,

    US elections... There's no real reason why they couldn't count the votes by hand

    Something that's said time and time again on Slashdot, whenever the broken US electoral system is raised. Marks on paper, OCR, it just scales beautifully. The larger your electorate, the larger your pool of counters and scrutineers.

    somethings are easier than in NZ as people have to vote at a particular fixed polling place

    "fixed" for what value? I choose my polling place, I don't have one assigned to me except by the vague boundaries of my electorate. I've been in a different electorate for every election so far, so there's no pattern, but I'll choose a polling station that's close to home. This year it'll probably be Epsom Girls again (same place I voted in '02, when I was in this electorate), because it's the closest. If there's somewhere closer, I'll go there. Votes for a particular electorate are cast in multiple locations. Don't forget the out-of-electorate votes, too.

    the downside though is that they vote on so much in each election - and people expect to get results on TV that night

    Americans have the attention span of a Ritalin-deprived ADD sufferer. We know this. That they choose to vote for the dog catcher through to the chief of police on the same day as they vote for "the leader of the free world" and the rest of their national government is their bloody problem. Morons, one and all. A crap solution pushed by thoroughly vested interests won't fix that problem.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: Tastes like democracy,

    I have no idea why some countries vote on a week day

    Maybe something to do with a tradition that only the landed gentry were entitled to participate, and thusly the voters didn't have to worry about fitting it in around their working day? Certainly to my cynically-distrustful-of-politicians view it makes total sense. After all, if you're trying to keep the lower classes out of things it's entirely logical to make it as hard as possible for them to get involved.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: Tastes like democracy,

    And as for electronic voting, the security problems are so overwhelming I don't think they'll ever be fixed - hell, look at all the problems the US has with verifying voting by computer on-site

    A lot of the problems the US has stem from the fact that their implementation was poorly-planned, driven largely by the vendors of the "solution", and rushed. By allowing the likes of Diebold (who vacated the election machine space last year, because it was just too much of a headache and because their original business of ATMs and physical security was much more lucrative) to drive it all, they ensured from the get-go that they were fucked.
    Compare the time-lines. The NZ CEO started looking at internet voting in 2006. They're discussing a limited trial in 2014, doubtless after a lot of thought and investigation, and discussions with Census over how to handle some of the logistics. It might be rolled out for the complete general election in 2023. That's 17 years, and it's a maybe. In the US there were problems with the 2000 election and now, eight years later, they've got nationwide utilisation of a solution that barely existed at the time. As I said, rushed.

    Also, look at the nonsense around security. When you have people such as Professor Ed Felten (whose name may not mean much to thread contributors here, but who's a big name in security research) getting sued for daring to challenge Sequoia Voting Systems over their proprietary e-voting machines you know that something's really fucking wrong[tm]. We will probably use a home-grown system. It won't be written by commercial vendors who believe that absolute secrecy is the only way they can make money. Hopefully it'll be done under an open source licence, and released onto the 'net for scrutiny by the masses. NZ has sufficient numbers of clueful coders to give any such system (which should be fairly simple, too) a thorough vetting. Felten and Bruce Schnier and other security luminaries would probably look at it too, to hold it up as an example for their own wayward government on how e-voting should really be conducted.

    I don't buy the security argument as a big reason not to do internet voting here. Security can be done. Verification of the vote is by far the biggest concern for me. If something goes wrong (computers are notorious for attracting Murphy!), how do you re-validate the results if it's all ephemeral?

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: Tastes like democracy,

    my understanding is that New Zealand is pretty liberal when it comes to registration

    Not really. Not registering is an offence, and people do, from time-to-time, get fined for it. Given that there's no obligation to actually vote, being required to register is a pretty minimal imposition.

    As to the opening post, I'm split on the issue. A friend and I were discussing 'net voting the other night, and in a matter of minutes our two minds were able to sketch up the basics of a system that would ensure authentication of voters and also a secret vote: authenticate to one system, which then passes you on with a random time delay to another system on which you actually cast the votes. It would be possible to correlate votes and voters, theoretically, but the random delay would make it non-trivial. And it's far more secret than the situation in some of the small rural polling stations where a handful of people vote.
    The catch is the verification of votes. It's all back on a system that must, by necessity, be absolutely secure. If that security fails in any way, the entire poll is suspect. It's all very well for electronic voting machines to be verifiable, but they're fairly easy to secure by locking and sealing them and removing any network connection. An internet voting system, by definition, must be connected to the internet.

    I like the openness of NZ's system. I like that if I could be bothered I could watch the counting at my local polling station. I can be absolutely certain of the validity of the count, and that's comforting. If there's a dispute, the ballot papers can be counted again. A point on which I had several arguments with one of the "Direct Democracy" crowd on usenet, several years ago, was their insistence that it's good enough to have a closed system that can only be inspected by "certified" persons. The proposal was that the code be proprietary, uninspectable by the majority, even by Jo(e) Coder who probably knows more about writing secure code than the people who produced it. That was just wrong to me. Democracy dies in secret, the saying goes, and for something like that it's absolutely true. If secrecy is required to count the ballots, then something is wrong with the process.

    The flip side, though, is that computer-based systems make it easier for disabled people to cast their vote for themselves. The blind can use a screen reader in the privacy of their own home. Tetraplegics and others who cannot use their hands can use their head pointers or whatever they use in the privacy of their own home. They're not compelled to reveal their choice to another person in order to exercise their democratic right. That's the biggest argument in favour of going to internet voting, and it's pretty compelling. However, the security and validity issues are massive.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: If we only had time,

    I don't think the funding is really a problem if the will is there. All it takes to get some extra dosh lined up is ten minutes around the cabinet table on a monday morning.

    It's that easy for the Chief Electoral Office to get extra funds? Really? I find that rather hard to believe. There's a reason that the Budget is handled in legislation.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: If we only had time,

    D'oh!

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: If we only had time,

    Ian, nearly right. It's not -- if you want __italics :)

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Travelling Gravely,

    Kyle, I only got a C+ for my compulsory stage 1 stats paper (two years ago, too) but I'm pretty sure that's not how cumulative odds work. It's more like the number of cops multiplied by the chances of any given officer having had to use a firearm in anger in any given year multiplied by the average number of years of service of all of the police officers serving. And I don't even think that's entirely accurate.

    I could email one of the stats lecturers and ask them, but they've got the better part of 3000 stage 1 stats exams to mark so I won't bother them just now.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: If we only had time,

    Ian, you use the <qutoe></qutoe> (correctly spelled) tags to enclose whatever you're quoting. That handles the indent. Putting two _ characters either side of the text you want italicised does the trick.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

  • Legal Beagle: If we only had time,

    Wasn't the first CIR basically "do you like firefighters?"

    I was rather too young (14 at the time) to vote on that one, but that's a very, very simplified version of the matter. "Do you think Roger Estall is an insurance industry stooge who wants to save his pals lots of money at the expense of public safety?" would've been equally accurate.

    As for the semantics, a "justification" as you put it isn't an automatic way out of prosecution. If it were, she of the riding crop and cane would never have ended up in court. Similarly the cops up on assault charges for spraying and beating a prisoner in a cell would be exempt because police officers are permitted to use force in the execution of their duties. So, clearly, a justification isn't an automatic pass.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2007 • 4097 posts Report Reply

Last ←Newer Page 1 389 390 391 392 393 410 Older→ First