Tech

Interesting column by Bob Cringely on the issue of electronic voting. The US government is moving toward more electronic voting machines to avoid a repeat of the Florida 2000 fun, presumably. The manufacturers of the machines seem intent on doing the minimum possible to fulfill requirements (if not less) while charging as much as possible. This is affecting both security and utility.

It seems to me that the reasons for electronic voting are to improve the GUI of a paper form (as with the butterfly ballots in Florida that appear to have confused many), to remove several areas of confusion in the counting of ballots (e.g. “hanging chads”), and to provide faster results (which is nice, but not a necessity). Add on to that the main requirements for any election, which I would suggest are transparency, accessibility, and verifiability.

So here’s my suggested solution:

Voter casts ballot on electronic device. Each election can be presented on one page (e.g. one page for Senator, one for dog catcher) so each page can be pretty simple.
Once I’ve made all the choices I wish to I get a simple print out that says in plain English (or any other language programmed in) “For Senator you voted for Jeff, for dog catcher you voted for Dave”.
If this printout doesn’t reflect what I wanted, I have the opportunity to correct my ballot on the device until I cast the votes I wanted to.
I take the printout to a large box, where it is held until the end of the day before being transported to a central location.
My electronic vote is held until the end of polling, when all votes are aggregated and sent to a central location.
If there is any dispute over the count there is a piece of paper that has my intended vote, confirmed by me, locked in a box. The paper becomes the final arbiter of the result.

So the interface is made more friendly, you get just your vote explained to you without distraction before it gets counted, and we have both a quick (and hopefully accurate) count together with a verifiable paper trail. Not foolproof, not flawless, but at least as good as current manual systems, and prefereable to the current e-voting situation.

One of the things that I get worked up about, at the moment at least, is copyright restrictions. A fantastically brief summary is that entertainment industry folks want to be able to control how we consume various copyrighted entertainments. This is an understandable thing – if everyone can use Napster-clones to copy music for free, the industry loses out. The problem is that in restricting use they are looking to a) prevent legitimate uses (such as making an mp3 copy of a CD to listen to solely on my PC), and b) potentially looking to extend this control beyond their justifiable defense, so that I can’t watch a TV program without having to watch the ads. Maybe they’ll have an automatic strap to keep me in my chair one day soon?

But I read a cartoon (of all things) that highlighted an obvious point to me. Using the example of music, an artist routinely gets a dollar for each CD sold, from which they have to pay various expenses and feed their family. So making the numbers easy, the artist gets 10 cents for each track on an album. Everything else is subsidiary. The money paid by the studio to promote the artist, ship CDs, etc. is all secondary to the artist creating a song and me paying to listen to it. That doesn’t mean that the promotion is a waste, or that I don’t appreciate being able to own a physical CD. It’s just not the key feature.

So far so good. What the cartoon highlighted is:
1. I could pay the artist 15 cents per track. I wouldn’t think twice about doing that – 15 cents is scarcely even small change any more. But I get my music, and the artist still gets more than if we were using the traditional approach. The people who lose out (the industry surrounding the artist) don’t like it, but as I’ve just said, they are secondary.
2. I would have no reason to share the music. Why would I want to use up my resources making the latest Metallica CD available on Napster? It costs me money (a small but real amount), deprives an artist I presumably like (not Metallica!) of revenue that he deserves, and all to save a stranger 15 cents.
3. I’ve always been concerned that downloading music deprives you of a nice physical item that you can keep for ever. If my hard drive crashes I lose all that music (and money). But I can burn the tracks onto a CD easily enough. So with just a little organization the most I’ll lose is a CD containing maybe $16 of songs (assuming the CD becomes corrupted over time). Let’s assume that I only actually want half of those songs now that 15 years have passed. So to replace all that music will cost me $8! This is the key insight from the cartoon for me.
4. The corollary of this is that I might actually download multiple copies of the same track! If I’m at a friends house and want him to listen to a new artist, for 15 cents and an hour’s internet access I can give it to him. If I want to listen at work the same thing applies. And all this at virtually no extra cost to the artist!

Voting Tech

Cartoon Copyright