American Diplomacy

Bernard Kouchner, French foreign minister, says "The magic is over for the U.S."

Kent Spillner, American cultural ambassador, says "Bernard Kouchner can go fuck himself."

We Should All be Like Chuck Norris

Yes, we should.

Presidential Elections Are Not Utility Bills

From Friday's USA Today ("Get out your pencils: Paper ballots make a return," Friday, February 29, 2008):

I feel like we're going backward

H. Paul Schwitzgebel
Commenting on the fact he can pay bills online, but will have to vote on paper.

Apples, oranges; oranges, apples.

Financial transactions and voting are nothing alike! Consider the possible cases when you elect to pay a bill online:

Happy Path

1. You pay a bill online, and both the company you are paying and your financial institution successfully record the transaction, and accurately update your account balances. Everyone is happy, everything is right with the world, and you sing technology's praises in vivid technicolor in your dreams as you sleep soundly that night.

Sad Paths

1. You think you pay your bill online, but neither end of the transaction records any account activity. You notice this a few days later whilst checking your account balances and see no recent payments. Your bill is now past due, and so you call the company to explain that you thought you had already paid it, and hope they waive any late fees. Also, you still have to pay your bill (again).
2. You pay your bill online, but only your payment account is debited; the other account is not credited. Now you're really pissed, so you call up the company and curse their shoddy IT infrastructure, demand immediate satisfaction, and threaten them with all manner of legal nasties if such a thing ever happens again.
3. You pay your bill online, but only your account is credited; your payment account is not debited. Without any sense of guilt or responsibility, you justify your free lunch as "their problem," blaming their incompetent IT staff and wondering how they manage to stay in business. You probably also boast to your friends, family, and co-workers about how lucky you are.

The important point of each scenario is that paying bills online leaves two separate, independently verifiable audit trails which can be reconciled with each other in case of any discrepancy. (The same is also true of financial transactions conducted without the benefit of the interwebnets).

And that's why all the fuss about electronic voting systems, Mr. Schwitzgebel! Nobody thinks touch-screen voting machines are inherently evil or undemocratic. It's just that the early revisions of most electronic voting systems lacked adequate audit facilities, so it was impossible to reconcile any discrepancies.

Personally, I think the ideal voting system would consist of a large, touch-screen voting system securely connected to a printer. The touch-screen would support the latest and greatest accessibility designs for vision-impaired persons, multi-lingual ballots for non-native English speakers, on-screen navigation help to simplify the vote-casting process for everyone, and a final preview step which would allow citizens to preview their ballot before it is printed. The final ballot selections would then be rendered on a paper ballot courtesy of the printer, and this ballot could then be placed into an on-site optical scanner which would actually handle counting and tallying the election results, as well as safely storing the paper ballot for later verification.

But we're not there yet. And so, this step backwards, Mr. Schwitzgebel. Hopefully, one of few on the path towards easy, convenient, accessible, and verifiable voting.