Don't call for "paper trails" when voting

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday October 31, 2008 · 9:47 AM PDT

2008/10/31 · 09:47

Don't call for "paper trails" in voting systems. They're marginally better than no paper trails, but there is an alternative which is faster, cheaper, and more secure: optically scanned paper ballots.

Kossacks are rightly outraged that DRE touchscreen voting as it stands is still in use in American elections. I expect the majority of the voters imagine that the whole system has been gone over up and down by top military security experts to ensure that no darstadly hackers can squeeze a single vote out of the system, but those here know that the opposite is the case - that the designs of the machines are secrets from the people who buy them, who simply trust the whole sytem to report a number at the end of the day, while the analysis of the open security community finds just about every kind of vulnerablility and failure mode you can imagine. And the top people in the field will tell you that even the theoretical state of the art in purely electronic voting is a long way from offering anything like the security that paper ballots do.

If we had paper trails, we would at least have some way of knowing whether the system was cheating on the count. However, there are still countless problems with electronic voting it doesn't solve.

Poll

123 votes Show Results

Well?

123 votes Vote Now!

Well?

We should demand optical scan, not paper trails

85 votes

We should demand paper trails

12 votes

We should demand hand counted paper ballots, not paper trails

18 votes

We should demand something else

1 vote

We shouldn't make demands about what vote count technology is used

3 votes

Something else, I'll comment

4 votes

What shall we do with the moderate Republican?

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday October 29, 2008 · 11:10 AM PDT

2008/10/29 · 11:10

We're all delighted to see how many self-identified conservatives and Republicans have come out in favour of Barack Obama, and we're buying popcorn in bulk for the gigantic theocrats vs plutocrats civil war the Republicans are lining up for following their upcoming crushing defeat at the polls. But what will we do with the refugees?

Poll

79 votes Show Results

How many Senators will we get before 2012?

79 votes Vote Now!

How many Senators will we get before 2012?

No Republican senator will join the Democratic caucus

31 votes

One Republican senator will join the Democratic caucus

21 votes

Two Republican senators will join the Democratic caucus

9 votes

More than two Republican senators will join the Democratic caucus

7 votes

I don't know

6 votes

Something else, I'll comment

5 votes

Chart for an imaginary election night

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday October 28, 2008 · 8:55 AM PDT

2008/10/28 · 08:55

Imagine it's election night, a week from now, and you're staying up to watch the results roll in. Over two dozen states have been called, but the race is not yet won.

Here's the chart I plan to have up to show how the battleground sits. (It uses JavaScript mouseovers, so I can't include it inline, sorry.)

Remember, this is an imaginary scenario at the moment. Actually I'm hoping to see Obama do much better than this when the real thing comes along :-)

Poll

44 votes Show Results

A chart like this during election night

44 votes Vote Now!

A chart like this during election night

Very helpful

25 votes

Somewhat helpful

5 votes

Not very useful

3 votes

I don't understand it

6 votes

I think it needs to change substantially

3 votes

Something else, I'll comment

2 votes

One picture shows what they need to win it

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 25, 2008 · 6:20 AM PDT

2008/10/25 · 06:20

I have to say, the red/blue maps that you're used to seeing to illustrate how the election is doing for the various candidates don't do much for me. It's hard to pull out what states are most crucial for victory, or how a swing one way or another would change things.

So I've been working on a different kind of diagram, one that throws away geography and instead ranks states based on the latest polling data.

Poll

202 votes Show Results

How do you find this diagram?

202 votes Vote Now!

How do you find this diagram?

Very helpful

103 votes

Somewhat helpful

55 votes

Not very useful

9 votes

I don't understand it

26 votes

I think it needs to change substantially

6 votes

Something else, I'll comment

3 votes

UK's Tories will show Republicans the future

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 18, 2008 · 7:22 PM PDT

2008/10/18 · 19:22

What happens when a right-wing party loses power in a crushing electoral defeat? That's exactly what happened to the Conservative (Tory) party in the United Kingdom in 1997.

After taking over from Thatcher in 1990, Tory Prime Minister John Major narrowly won the 1992 General Election. However, five years later things were not looking so bright. The country was suffering a recession, billions had been wasted on a futile intervention to prop up a key financial system, and the brand of the party was tarnished with scandal and sleaze, as well as a sense of overwhelming fatigue from voters. Opposing them was smart, capable and telegenic man in his mid-forties who had overturned the party he led in a bid to make it palatable to the media and thus to the majority of the voting public. Major's defeat was described by one professor of politics as not so much a landslide as "an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on Earth".

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday September 21, 2008 · 10:12 AM PDT

2008/09/21 · 10:12

I've been looking for how the right are going to spin the Sarah Palin Rape Kit story when it gets too big to ignore. The only writing in her defence I can find that seems substantial enough that it might provide an indication is this National Review blog entry: Six Points to Consider When Reading About Wasilla's Policy on Rape Kits.

As the title of the article suggests, they don't present a single coherent narrative thread around which a story can be woven in her defence; rather they seem to be exploring six different ways they might escape, but committing themselves to none. And I don't think any of them are going to work.

Let's go through it point by point.

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 19, 2008 · 10:03 AM PDT

2008/03/19 · 10:03

As I mentioned last time, SurveyUSA say that their poll shows the Democrats taking the White House whether Clinton or Obama is the nominee. However, in both cases it's a rather nail-biting victory, in a different way for each.

This chart illustrates the fight they face. We draw the states ordered by the margin of difference between the candidates, so the most heavily Democratic are on the left. The width of the bar indicates the number of electoral college votes, and the line across the middle is the half-way mark. Whichever candidate takes the state indicated by the middle line wins the election. Here's what the 2004 election looks like - it should be clear for example that if Ohio had gone the other way, then New Mexico and Iowa wouldn't have been enough to grant the Republicans victory. I've used the 2004 data to fill in DC's vote, since SurveyUSA didn't poll it.

ciphergoth

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday March 15, 2008 · 7:40 AM PDT

2008/03/15 · 07:40

SurveyUSA have been polling to see how Obama and Clinton might do against McCain if the election was today. Their polls predict that either would win in the electoral college, but Obama's win is by a higher margin.

The chart below plots their relative state-by-state performance according to the poll.

RSS

Don't call for "paper trails" when voting

What shall we do with the moderate Republican?

Chart for an imaginary election night

One picture shows what they need to win it

UK's Tories will show Republicans the future

National Review tries to defend Palin over rape kits - is this how the right will respond?

Expect a tight battle in November. These diagrams show why

CHART: how do Clinton and Obama do in the Electoral College?