Political Heads-Up!
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For the Americans in the audience. Copied verbatim from twistedchick because I'm supposed to be working.
One thing you absolutely must know: In committee, significant wording was changed in House Resolution 811, the Holt Bill that was supposed to open up voting and taken control of electronic voting machines away from the companies. It was supposed to make open source the coding that election machines use, so that elections would be transparent and it would be possible to tell when someone had screwed with the coding and was rigging the machine. Not any longer:
That was the original idea behind H.R. 811. The 2003 version of Holt’s bill was very clear. It stated:
No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software.
The bill, as introduced in 2006 was just as clear:
…source code, object code, executable representation, and ballot programming files [shall be made] available for inspection promptly upon request to any person.
The current version of Holt’s bill up for vote this week backs off of the public right to inspect voting machine software, open source code, in a big way and lets vendors keep secret the software and methods that determine your elections. Let me put it another way, you don’t get to see how the voting machines work that elect the officials who govern you - ever!
More info on the whole matter is here, including MoveOn's mistaken support for the bill -- which leads me to believe that someone at a high level is lying to MoveOn, because they are not generally liable to commit this sort of error.
The vote on this is set for tomorrow in the House. Please, go to thomas.loc.gov and search on HR 811 and read it, then contact your Congressperson. This bill should be supported only if it explicitly includes wording that opens the source code to the public. We need fair elections, transparent elections that cannot be rigged this time.
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For the Americans in the audience. Copied verbatim from twistedchick because I'm supposed to be working.
One thing you absolutely must know: In committee, significant wording was changed in House Resolution 811, the Holt Bill that was supposed to open up voting and taken control of electronic voting machines away from the companies. It was supposed to make open source the coding that election machines use, so that elections would be transparent and it would be possible to tell when someone had screwed with the coding and was rigging the machine. Not any longer:
That was the original idea behind H.R. 811. The 2003 version of Holt’s bill was very clear. It stated:
No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software.
The bill, as introduced in 2006 was just as clear:
…source code, object code, executable representation, and ballot programming files [shall be made] available for inspection promptly upon request to any person.
The current version of Holt’s bill up for vote this week backs off of the public right to inspect voting machine software, open source code, in a big way and lets vendors keep secret the software and methods that determine your elections. Let me put it another way, you don’t get to see how the voting machines work that elect the officials who govern you - ever!
More info on the whole matter is here, including MoveOn's mistaken support for the bill -- which leads me to believe that someone at a high level is lying to MoveOn, because they are not generally liable to commit this sort of error.
The vote on this is set for tomorrow in the House. Please, go to thomas.loc.gov and search on HR 811 and read it, then contact your Congressperson. This bill should be supported only if it explicitly includes wording that opens the source code to the public. We need fair elections, transparent elections that cannot be rigged this time.
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