Hacking democracy

I just finished watching the documentary Hacking Democracy. The basic story is of one woman's efforts in founding blackboxvoting.org in order to uncover various ways that election results can be incorrectly (accidentally or purposefully) tabulated.

The documentary has some flaws - I think a lot of documentaries about "conspiracies" have an uphill battle because the point they are trying to prove can't be "proven". If they could legally prove some of the claims they make in a court of law, then this documentary wouldn't be necessary - the courts themselves would be exposing the fraud in our elections. Instead you are left with some hand-wavey arguments in certain areas of the film.

However, the underlying message of the documentary is very powerful - when you keep secrets, the potential for abuse of power becomes big. When there are no secrets, people might still try to abuse power, but they are easily caught.

The film focuses on how easy it is for computers to be reprogrammed to change election results. Although this has been proven to be true time and time again, I feel this is primarily a scare tactic and one used to make the story more dramatic. The real issue is that once you cast your vote in an election booth, there is no guarantee that your vote will be counted correctly. This doesn't matter whether it's computer tabulated or hand tabulated.

I suspect one of the reasons we keep our election votes secret is so that people cannot be attacked for how they vote. This is an important protection. However, this same secrecy makes it impossible to trace whether or not votes are counted correctly. Exposing the system to public scrutiny as much as possible is the right direction to move towards - public records of votes, people should be able to recount the votes at any time, examination of voting machines, etc.

On a related note, when I took a cryptography class in college the first lesson we learned is that if you develop a crytographic algorithm privately, most likely it will be quickly broken. If you develop an algorithm publicly, publish it to the community before you start using it, give people an attempt to break it, and only after it survives public scrutiny then you use it, you'll end up with something much more solid and trusted. It seems like our voting process needs to go through the same sort of scrutiny. Unfortunately, for privately owned businesses (such as the ones who develop election machines), this sort of model is often disregarded as it would expose their "industry secrets".

Maybe this documentary is wrong, maybe our election results are 100% correct. But if they are, then exposing the inner workings of our voting system shouldn't hurt anything, and it would at least put all our conspiracy theories to rest.

Breaking my video game streak...

I grew up playing the Atari 2600. I know that at one point I "bought" my Dad the game "Superman" for the Atari for Father's day - presumably because I wanted to play it.

In 1985, my parents bought me and my sister a Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with the light gun and the robot-thing.

At some point during the 16-bit game era, my sister and I ended up with a Genesis. It was several years into the era, we had not immediately jumped into the 16-bit era.

In 1996, I received a Nintendo64 for Christmas. I was pretty surprised. My roommate ended up with a PlayStation, so between us we had the best of both worlds.

Because I worked in the "industry", I was able to obtain a PlayStation 2 and a GameCube very close to their release dates in 2000 and 2001 (I think I had to wait a month or so after they were released).

But I don't own an Xbox360, a PlayStation3, or a Wii. I'm not sure that I ever will. If I do, it'll be after the prices drop. The Xbox360 and PlayStation3 are too expensive right now. Plus with one betting on HDDVD and the other on Blu-Ray, I'd rather wait and see what happens there. Many publishers are no longer doing exclusive titles for just one console, so with the exception of a few games, it really doesn't matter which one you buy. The Xbox360 online experience is very nice though, we'll see if Sony's measures up. The Wii is pretty interesting - I haven't played it yet but I'm very curious to see what they've done with their motion-sensing controller and how it ties into the games. It seems like it could be a great "social" gaming platform. The Wii's technical specs are really low, which lets them keep the price point low. Plus Nintendo's Intellectual Property is second to none, and people will buy Mario, Zelda, etc. no matter what type of game system it's on.

I still like video games. I think Guitar Hero is a lot of fun. And sitting down with some friends and playing the latest multiplayer game can be really fun too. I just don't invest as much time as I used to in playing games. And with many of the PlayStation3 or Xbox360 games, if you don't put enough time into the games, they just don't become fun enough. Every once in awhile there are games that you can play for either 5 minutes or 5 hours and still enjoy (SSX and Katamari Damarcy come to mind). Those are the games that I am more interested in lately.

To all the parents who have kids saying they won't speak to anyone ever again if they don't get a PlayStation3 this holiday... well, good luck with that.

5 weird things our cats do

• Big Boi digs through the trash looking for used dental floss, and when he finds it, he eats it.
  
• If only one of us is home in the evening, Logan waits at the top of the stairs until the other person comes home.
  
• When you scare Logan, his reaction is to turn his back to you and purr.
  
• Big Boi loves anything shiny or made of plastic, and will chase it and try to eat it.
  
• Logan makes weird clicking/chirping noises when he sees birds outside.
  

More election babble

Just some random thoughts about the upcoming vote on Tuesday:

• Apparently I am part of the three dirtiest words in politics: San Francisco values. The GOP has created an all out war in trying to convince people that if the democrats win, Nancy Pelosi will become speaker of the house and the country will fall apart under the "far left" ideals of San Francisco. I'm not sure whether I should be offended by this statement or proud of this statememt.
  
• Voting machines. I find it extremely funny that computer experts everywhere are telling counties NOT to use computers for voting machines (well, except the computer experts that work for voting machine companies). There's even an HBO documentary about the situation. There's been reports of voting machines tallying the wrong votes to bizarre reports of hacking voting machines to play chess. Some counties put locks on the connections to the voting machines to prevent tampering. But if you break the lock while you are in the booth, then the machine must be declared hacked and therefore all votes will be discounted, which is just as dangerous as changing the votes themselves. I understand why people want e-voting machines: it makes figuring out who won the election very easy. But why are people so resistant to the idea that an e-voting machine also spit out an old-fashioned voting card, that the user needs to double check? That way, we get the benefits of both worlds - the immediate vote count of an e-voting machine, with an old style paper ballot that can be manually checked and counted.
  
• I don't think California's proposition system is quite ideal. First off, in election off years (i.e. 2005), these propositions are put on the ballot knowing that voter turnout will be extremely minimal. That seems completely against the whole idea of why the proposition system exists. But in the big years, the proposition vote just becomes so confusing that I'm not sure people know what they are voting for. On the one hand, I really appreciate being able to participate in the law making process and define the area I live in. On the other hand, if these propositions are costing our state so much money, why not just leave it up to the law makers that we elect? Isn't that their job? Oh yah, I forgot, even though we elect these people we don't usually trust them to do the right thing. It just gets more and more confusing and more and more expensive with each new vote.
  
• I sometimes wonder what the future of the USA political landscape looks like. For example, I think splitting California into two states would make a lot of people a lot happier in all areas of the state - it's pretty clear that there are two very distinct political ideals going on. But I also wonder if the religious right will spin off from the Republican party, to form a major political party of their own? The Republican party can probably only last so long trying to appeal both to the religious right and the "central" voters. The religious right certainly has the population to form their own party. What would happen to our current two-party system if this ever took place?