Aha, it doesn't matter. Invite sent to tnh@panix.com.
Actually, wait -- Greg, who'd you send yours to? Don't want to duplicate.
Little bit of everything. You can't really see it in the pictures, but there was a roped off pathway up to the City Hall; every few minutes a couple would head up and into the building to the accompanyment of wild cheering.
It was incredible.
Huzzah, huzzah!
I made it to Cambridge City Hall tonight. If you will forgive the self-promotion: the best of the pictures and all the pictures (including the Morris dancers), full-sized. I wish I was a better photographer.
A little after midnight, we all sung the Star Spangled Banner. Take that, Fred Phelps.
IF the voting machine is generating human readable paper, then we have a useful audit trail. But if the voter cannot compare the audit trail vote to the counted vote, then there is no true audit trail.
Um, that's exactly my point. If the counted vote is a simple +/- counter, you can't compare it to the paper trail.
Erik: you're still completely ignoring the need for an audit trail.
And yes; you do need one above and beyond the paper ballots, because you damned well want to be able to catch the people who screwed with things. "Um, we know someone added 500,000 votes to Smith, but we can't ever figure out who."
Are there privacy implications? Of course. Which is an argument for not having electronic voting at all. I'm beginning to think it's not possible to both have auditable electronic voting and adequate privacy.
But a flatfile scheme exacerbates the problem.
Let's pretend they're not using Access for a second -- let's pretend they're using a full-featured real relational database like Oracle, henceforth an RDBMS.
Here's why you'd want to use one of those.
1. Reliability. Any decent RDBMS provides you with transactional integrity. You want to know, absolutely and without question, whether or not a vote has been recorded. You never want to be uncertain of the integrity of your database. An RDBMS gives you that certainty.
This is not a feature restricted to relational databases per se, but it's a high end feature that you won't happen to find elsewhere.
2. You can't have it both ways. One of the huge problems with the Diebolds is the lack of audit trail. If you don't store anything but +1 to Smith, you've completely lost any hope of an audit trail. If I can stroll over to the machine after hours, and add a bunch of votes without the time of the vote being recorded, we've got even worse problems than the ones that exist right now.
3. Big financial institutions use RDBMS all the time, and oddly, they do not run into problems with the rollback scenario Erik proposes. He's kind of blurring the issues (sorry, Erik).
Was there anyone (a country or their intelligence community for example), besides the first poster above, who seriously said Iraq did not have WMD prior to the war?
Seems to me that Hans Blix spent a lot of time saying that he needed more time to investigate before coming to a conclusion. I'm still waiting for any of the warhawks to apologize for the mockery directed at him.
Nah, not exactly. If too many people respond, the money winds up going to charity for music related purposes. (A little more complex than that, but that's the gist. Read the link for details.) That'd require, um, 13,475,000 people to respond.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2003 | 8 |
| 2002 | 1 |
Total: 15 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Bryant:
Show all comments by Bryant.