On Nov 7, 2006, upon arrival at the polling place with completed sample ballot in hand, unfamiliar voting machines were visible from the doorway. I asked the poll workers if paper ballots were available. They were! They asked me if I would like one. No, I decided, I wanted to experience the computerized system first hand.

Most elections I’ve participated in over the years have used the punch card machine, the one made infamous by the hanging chads of the presidential contest of 2000 between Bush and Gore. Since that time, our district of San Diego County has sometimes used a paper ballot and pen that was optically scanned as a last step before the voter left the polling location. This time, and for the first time, our district used DRE machines made by Diebold.

I don’t intend to vote using one again.

The process of entering one’s sample ballot selections into the machine was easy and straightforward enough, but auditing ones results was a study of frustration. While I didn’t think to measure the total time used to vote, I estimate it took at least four times longer than any other method I’ve used in the past, and most of this extra time is spent to insure the machine has recorded and will cast the vote as intended.

Double checking never seemed an issue with the punch card machines after the pin had been pressed into the correct hole, though evidently chads not fully punched are an issue. The other system, a paper ballot and pen, can be doubled checked when it’s initially filled out while the sample ballot is open to the contest page in question.

Here are some things I noticed as problems when using the Diebold DRE with a voter verified paper trail:

The initial vote screens seemed to match up with the pages of the sample ballot until about page six, where one contest from the sample ballot appeared on another page of the DRE device. This problem seemed somewhat minor, but it does seem somewhat confusing and perhaps slightly time consuming.

Once all votes had been cast, the computer built a summary page view. This was arranged into three columns. The voter must go back to page one of the sample ballot unless they have all the contest choices memorized. Another flaw is that all candidates’ full names were not always visible in the summary view, in some cases only their first names were presented. One must scroll downward to complete column one’s sequence, then one must scroll up to find the top of column two, followed by scroll downs to complete column two, then a scroll up to the top of column three, followed by scroll downs to complete the summary audit. The arrangement didn’t match the sample ballot at all, and it seems fewer scrolls could have easily been designed by sequencing the contest data in rows instead of columns.

One time I accidentally touched the summary screen while using my fingers to help track a particular line while my eyes darted between the screen and sample ballot. The machine decided to take me back to the initial vote casting screen that correlated to that contest, presumably so I could change it. I had to press the summary button again, and the machine’s screen said something to the effect of “building summary file”. Whoops.

I asked a poll worker if that meant I had to go back and double check the answers I’d already checked, and he said no (all the poll workers were different this year, and predominately of the younger, computer-literate generation) This advice I promptly judged as naive or computer illiterate at best, and likely coached at worst. The computer was clear, it had built a new summary file, so I needed to start back at the beginning of column one of the summary view and page back in my sample ballot again, unless I was willing to gamble that the computer hadn’t made any errors.

I can only imagine how much time voting might have taken had there been errors that needed correcting. The summary view was user unfriendly. There was something wrong with the scrolling, so after the device had completed the scroll, finding the next line to focus upon was an issue.

When the summary self-audit was completed, there was a paper printout that I could not touch but could see through a small glass window. This printout appeared to be thermal paper with dark print. I can’t tell you how stupid I think that decision was, if the paper was in fact thermal paper, given that the voter-verified printout is intended as a permanent record of each voter’s intent. There have been years when I’ve had receipts printed on thermal paper that I’ve had to discard from my end-of-year accounting because I could not read them, as time and or heat had rendered the print unreadable on darkened paper. All some election fraud perpetrator would need to do is leave the paper ballots in a warm enough location, such as a closed vehicle parked in the sun light on a warm day, or perhaps stored inside a non-climate controlled facility, and the thermal paper record’s usefulness is likely destroyed.

The printout was much shorter than the summary screen, two lines for each contest. Many of the lines were self-explanatory, unfortunately, the judicial section was not. Our election had about fifteen choices for judicial positions. On the paper printout, every line that titled twelve of those contests appeared precisely the same, they all read “Associate justice court of AP…”, that line was followed by another line indicating the yes or no vote: No candidate name appeared in any of this judicial sequence. The only way I was able to discern what candidate those lines correlated to was to count the lines and assume the ordering was the same as that presented in the sample ballot. Great, I need to assume something for a self-audit? To make matters worse, all fifteen contests did not appear at once under the limited glass size. The first presented readout needed to be accepted somewhere in the middle of the fifteen choices, afterward the next page printed and scrolled. The scroll itself caused issues with this counting to determine the contest, several of the bottom lines of the previous printout remained at the top of the glass screen. If I had not been watching very closely during the scroll itself, this would have caused me to get lost in the counted sequence that I correlated to the sample ballot ordering.

Is this judicial obfuscation deliberate? How can this possibly provide a paper trail of the voter’s intent if the name of the candidate isn’t printed on the paper trail?

The only good thing I can say is I did not experience any problems with the machine changing my vote, or making the voting for any of the candidates I intended to vote for hard to select, so far as I could tell, and as has been reported in the news at times.

In past years, once contest choices had been decided and the sample ballot marked, I remember spending no more than 2-5 minutes zipping through all the choices on the ballot at the polling place, though standing in line and waiting for a voting booth added to that time. I conservatively estimate that I spent at least 20 minutes actually voting on this DRE device. Since the process of voting on these machines takes about four times longer due to all the self-auditing and matching up of different presentational formats (that I truly felt needed to be checked), it’s no surprise that some voting districts that use these machines are reported as having long lines. The reported move by some other districts towards voting super centers in favor of the familiar neighborhood polling places will only exacerbate this problem. The mixing of formats in the summary view and separate printout view lead to a definite lack-of-clarity: another term for that could be obfuscation, certainly the failure to provide any of the candidates’ names on the judicial section of the paper trail is some type of obfuscation.

The process of filling out the ballot has been rendered much more difficult and complicated with this particular machine than it used to be with other ballot types.

Prior to this experience, I was open to the idea of electronic voting on a DRE machine so long as it had an unalterable paper record of the vote cast, this is seen in a willingness to try the system once our polling place offered it. Now that I’ve seen and experienced its implementation first hand, the thermal alterable paper that also fails to show my complete intent, the formatting confusion between the initial vote screens versus summary view versus the paper printout, even the polling place worker who claimed that I didn’t need to re-check when the machine built a new summary file, never again will I choose to vote with such a machine.

Of all the types of voting systems I’ve experienced, paper and pen seems the clearest, simplest, and fastest. Why make voting apparatus more complicated than it needs to be?

Randy Wooten, a mayoral candidate in Arkansas found out that his vote for himself wasn’t counted, official results showed him with a vote count of zero. Reports seem to indicate the voting machine was not from Diebold.

I have never once observed or experienced the actual counting of the votes. Counting the votes openly seems even more important than the type of voting system used, and how the votes are counted in machines using proprietary code owned by private corporations can never be known by the majority of citizens.

It seems to me that we need not only paper ballots and pens, but local hand counting by citizen volunteers at the polling locations and observable by concerned voters, with results posted immediately, publicly, and openly.

Until then we can kiss our democratic republic farewell. I was wrong to ever believe that computerized voting could be a good thing.

The punch card systems were counted by computers, except when they needed close examination. Paper ballots marked by pens and followed by optical scanning are essentially computers counting the vote, but once again the ballots might be counted by hand if there’s suspicion surrounding the results. DRE and their complicated system is perhaps the epitome of computerized vote aggregating, if equipped with one, their paper trail also can be recounted if necessary, but then there’s the little problem I noted above of the paper trail not always including all candidates’ names, and a potential temporal record issue if thermal paper was used. Lawyers seeking access to these paper records for purposes of recount have reportedly been experiencing cooperation difficulties.

For my entire life computers have been involved in counting votes. The computers apparently run proprietary, private code under the control of a few corporations, therefore it is not surprising that over the longer term such a ‘democracy’ has found itself living as a corporatist system.

“What’s going on here? Why, when we could be going to movies or plunking down in front of the TV to laugh with people, to be charmed and delighted by funny characters delivering clever lines, are we instead going to laugh at people who behave offensively, who act ridiculously, and who insult and demean others? Why, when we could be uplifted by stories of courage and indomitable human spirit, do we instead choose to see stories of unimaginable brutality, anguish, relentless horror and suffering, often without resolution or redemption? Why, rather than piquing our imaginations with what they don’t show, do today’s popular films use grisly hyper-realistic graphics and special effects that leave nothing to the imagination? We’re still coy about the depiction of sex in films, so why are we so blatant and vulgar in the depiction of extreme violence?”

I presume the attraction of violent entertainment is simply as a metaphor for our lives. The metaphor speaks to the non-physically violent raping that all of our minds have been subjected to year in and year out, from birth to death, by powerful corporatists intent on subjecting us to: their minds and their rule and their daily pick-pocketing; surely a kinder and gentler form of warfare.

While we may not have been violently murdered, the invisible butterfly wings we were all given at birth, and for some of us which were eloquently described in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, particularly the phrase about the un-alienability of each of our respective pursuits of Happiness, have been sliced away from many of us in a way similar to a violent murder, and arguably more cruelly than to simply have killed us quickly and to have been done with the matter.

Since great masses of people are hosts to a few powerful parasites, and since killing the hosts typically kills the parasites, the parasites seek the opposite, extending our lives so they can continue in their ways. Like the metaphor of vampire, the parasite seeks to suck our blood without actually killing us — but altering us — so that they can receive sustenance from each of us everyday, and so they can live their powerful lives of darkness and power, an ability which is multiplied exponentially with more hosts.

When one thinks about the metaphor of violence with this pattern, one may realize that coyness surrounding sex in movies serves the same metaphor. Sex, as fundamentally a reproductive act when performed between heterosexuals, simply perpetuates the aforementioned parasite-host relationship from one generation to the next, so coyness regarding sex could be reflective of a communal sub-conscious desire to not reproduce, even when, at the individual level, one’s own body signals powerful reinforcements and one’s mind rationalizes that it is only through reproduction that survival is guaranteed. But that guarantee is really nothing more than a promise to the potential child-to-be that they, too, will be subjected to the same, or perhaps improved, parasitical methods that ultimately lead to a denial of Happiness, and therefore reproduction represents little more than a passing of parasite-host misery from one generation to the next.

I presume that a population that loves violent metaphors has experienced great psychological warfare wreaked against it. As metaphor, it is familiar.

Bibliography 1. http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/10/03.html#a1663

I remember the last several times I was called for jury duty: I spent most of the time sitting and waiting, reading a book, filling out questionnaire forms, thinking . . . and more waiting. One of my thoughts was how we’re told by the courthouse that it’s our duty as citizens to sit on juries, and how constitutionally important the citizen jury is to the freedom we have.

Rarely have I been allowed to actually sit as a juror in a trial.

Once, while waiting in the courthouse, I imagined how the courts might have been back in the early days of this country, and further thought that a jury summons back then probably meant you’d get to sit on a trial. Today, that is not so. Potential jurors are examined, questioned, prodded, and probed, by private attorneys and the courthouse. After this, one might be asked to sit as a juror; but more than likely one is, in my experience, dismissed. In many ways, the current juror selection system reminds me more of a classroom examination and summary judgement against the potential juror in the preponderance of times I’ve experienced it, than the citizen’s executing of a solemn duty to a fellow citizen & the community by actually sitting as a juror to hear a trial.

What happens to all the information the courthouse and the private attorneys have collected on citizens called to sit on juries, but who rarely do get to sit on an actual case? Is the potential juror’s data safe and secure? Is it recognized as the property of the source citizen? Or has that data been usurped for another’s use and eventual profit? Has it been placed in a database somewhere? Has that data been aggregated?

While I don’t have the answers to the above questions, I do remember being examined by attorneys several times after being summoned by the courthouse to show up for jury service. The people sitting at the attorney’s table would scribble on their legal pads after I gave my answers to the questions asked by another attorney. What is done with that data they recorded? Had I refused to answer their questions, what courthouse-sanctioned punishment could I have expected?

The larger point I intend is that instead of sitting on a jury, which is a U.S. citizen’s duty, today one is forced to divulge personal and private information to a system that may not protect that data adequately. How does the requirement of citizens to be examined before sitting on a trial impact each citizen’s and potential juror’s privacy?

Has a citizen’s solemn duty to an accused citizen been transformed into another lie The Rulers tell citizens to collect and exploit their personal information?

Perhaps juror selection should be entirely random. At least that way, a citizen’s time is not taxed by the state in an off-the-books transaction.

If the CEO of ChoicePoint, Derek Smith, espouses the theory that society is better off if “everyone can check the background of anyone else”, then he hasn’t achieved much else other than to enrich his own pocket at others’ expense. In the last reports I read, ChoicePoint was not opening up its database further, but rather, in response to the data-theft issues, restricting access to fewer organizations.

This action of ChoicePoint means his publicly stated vision is further from realization, not closer. Perhaps his vision of a freely transparent society is just another sales pitch he is using mostly to his own and ChoicePoint’s benefit.

Doesn’t Mr. Smith believe in the Fourth Amendment? Does he believe in capitalism? Does he believe in the property rights of others?

Perhaps Mr. Smith firstly believes in corporatism, then secondly believes only in capitalism when it’s his corporate property in need of rights. Perhaps that’s why he claims to believe regulation, not capitalism, is the fix for consumers whose data is sold as the property of ChoicePoint. This logic would be hilarious if it wasn’t so corporopathically twisted with respect to the Fourth Amendment rights of the people.

I wrote more of my thoughts about this in the comments of a prior posting about ChoicePoint. In summary, the information in ChoicePoint’s database should be recognized as ‘the property’ of each citizen it represents. When ChoicePoint sells data about anyone, that citizen should get a royalty. This would be equitable capitalism instead of corporatism.

The rationale that government regulation is the answer to the past and continuing corporate theft of citizens’ Fourth Amendment property and calling it ChoicePoint’s own, speaks loudly to the corporate welfare state that years of graft have brought us.

That the corporate seizure of people’s data is apparently legal, indicts corporatism as a defining element of the corporate welfare scam. Perhaps we need a new word to refer to some of the corporations and executives of the world: corporopathic. They unreasonably seize from all the people, pay themselves outrageous bounty; in response the corporate media has the audacity to claim that others have stolen from them!
That’s the essential framing of the issue now in creation for Choicepoint.

“I have to say, I love getting real trackbacks. I like it when people take what I’ve said and expand on it. I hate getting semi-trackbacks, where a poster sort-of refers to what I’ve said, doesn’t link to me, and throws in a trackback. I hate, hate, hate, spam trackbacks.”

Every weblogger with trackbacks turned on is currently burdened with trackback spam, but this is the first I’ve read of “semi-trackbacks” being a construct of malcontent; in fact it’s the first I’ve read of semi-trackbacks at all, perhaps I’m ignorant on the issue.

It appears the use of trackbacks is to build on others’ existing conversations at close to the same time as adding content to one’s own weblog. This is trackback’s advantage over comments, where content is placed in only a single place. It’s important that “at close to the same time” is understood as not precisely simultaneous. Further, a trackback request can be placed at the time of publishing one’s own writings, or it can be added later to existing postings. This latter type appears to be one of Adam’s objections, where the content may not be strictly personalized.

Is the only appropriate use of trackbacks to request them at the time of one’s own original writing? Should we attach stigma to trackbacking of older articles in a newer conversation?

There are at least two ways of approaching trackback’s use: these two uses contrast with each other in the time a trackback request is made relative to when the weblogger publishes their own content. The distinction here is the time a bloggers article is written versus the time that a blogger requests a trackback placement. In one usage, a weblogger reads someone’s article, then decides to write their thoughts about it on their blog. Before publishing their thoughts, the author prepares the requested trackback link; this trackback is sent upon first publication of the blogger’s article.

1. I’ve read your thoughts, now let me build upon them with mine.

Another use is when the time of the requested trackback works in the opposite sequence. Someone writes a post, delineating their thoughts on some topic of importance, then publishes the post. Later, either through looking around the blogosphere for related content, or having accidentally stumbled upon it, the weblogger decides to send a trackback request, which adds their already existing and related thoughts to the newly discovered conversation. Is this something to be avoided? As long as the topic is related to the trackbacked article, it presents to readers another viewpoint and it grows the related interconnections in the blogosphere.

2. I’ve already written down my thoughts, now I see they are related to yours.

Number two is somewhat like neighbors waving hello to each other, kindred spirits seeking each other out, or like minded individuals meeting together. Why would this type of trackback be a source of malcontent?

Is one method of trackback usage superior to the other? In academics, I’m told, it is usual to build upon the work of another. This is well and fine if the other’s work is presented to the academic first. But what if it isn’t? What if the academic comes to a conclusion or inspiration independent of exposure to already existing work? Does it invalidate their work, or instead lend credence to it?

Should one trackback use be preferred over the other? If the objection to a trackback is solely that there is no reciprocal link, then simply trackback to it yourself. The reciprocal link is thereby created in the dance of conversation.

I think trackbacks are one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of weblogs. They allow readers to find related information, they allow emergent conversations to have a multiplicity of voices, and they allow an author to retain transportability of their portion of the conversation. No human blogger can be aware of all other related content in the sphere, therefore allowing trackbacks at all times is preferred. The essence of the Internet is its decentralization. As articles are discovered by each blogger, new interrelationships can be created through trackbacks. This doesn’t mean you have to retype a personalized version of already existing content.

In answer to Adam’s question, “Is that sufficient to make trackback spam worthwhile?” I would have to answer that there may be multiple layers of reasoning behind trackback spam. On a surface level, it may be non-paid advertising, on a deeper level it may be an inflation of page rank, and there may be still deeper layers, layers of which outsiders can only guess.

Looking at some effects of trackback spam, I note that a large number of bloggers turn off their trackbacks. This alone has a marginalizing effect on the conversation. In imagining what deeper layers might exist in the reasoning of spammers, can demonstrated effects be ignored?