I am up-voting you so hard right now. I really, really want it to be true.
But I doubt that anyone even remotely likely to connect those two dots will be allowed anywhere near the camera lenses of any company that broadcasts television.
The source code to one of Diebold Elections Systems (now dba Premier Elections Systems) voting machines was leaked in 2003, which summoned blackboxvoting.org into existence.
As far as I know, every voting machine system that has been examined since then has been found to have potential attack vectors large enough to fly an intercontinental airliner through. When the public records are examined, the audit trail is often nonexistent, destroyed, or falsified.
In the 12 years since then, the only meaningful result has been to end the practice of exit polling in the U.S. Yep, rather than explain the discrepancies between statistical sampling methods and the official results, we chose to stop sampling and trust the results.
So some academics apply statistical methods to the official results, to show convincing evidence that one major party or the other, or both, are blatantly cheating using specific voting machine systems.
You can hear those crickets chirping over the din of the absolute silence.
~But hey, let's all get worked up over homosexual marriage and Syrian refugees, mmkay? The 2016 national elections will be perfectly fair and honest, and not cracked and defrauded at the central tabulators at all. And since there's no cheating going on there, there certainly wouldn't be any at the primary level, with lower levels of scrutiny.~
Open source is democratic, but democracy certainly isn't open source.
Why did we end exit polling? Seems like an obvious counter-measure/check.
I don't trust for-profit media to conduct them. This is something that we all need to chip in to accomplish, if we care about democracy. If we can't trust election results, we really can't trust anything connected to government, and as the state continues to grow, that's very little.
Firstly, they were diverging from official results. There are two possible reasons. Reason one would be that the exit polls were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. Reason two would be that the official results were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. It could be both.
Since reason two would have been too uncomfortable to consider, reason one was chosen. And the exit polls dried up.
It is not even widely known that prior to ending the polling completely, the pollsters were already applying statistically-calculated adjustment factors before reporting the poll results on air, in order to force the polling numbers to predict the official results more accurately.
I don't even need to put my foil hat on to say that I trust a statistical prediction made by blindly sampling from a random pool of volunteer respondents over a secret-source black box that pretends to be counting votes, where there is significant incentive to cheat.
The great thing about exit polling is that anyone could do them, and publish the results along with their margin of error. And some people still do. They just don't get reported on television during elections night coverage any more.
The second reason is that news programs are now reporting official results, as they are tallied and reported by those black box computer systems. The computers can count electronic ballots quickly enough to report initial results shortly after voting booths close. Exit polls lost the advantage of speed. The television news programs like to be able to project the likely winners as soon as possible, and preferably before any competitors. By the time the hand-counted paper ballot areas finish reporting, the winners have already been known for hours, if not days.
Seems like this trust issue could be solved with a bit of cryptography. A search for "blockchain elections" turned up some interesting proposals. http://www.bitcongress.org/ seems like it's being served over 28k modem though.
But I doubt that anyone even remotely likely to connect those two dots will be allowed anywhere near the camera lenses of any company that broadcasts television.
The source code to one of Diebold Elections Systems (now dba Premier Elections Systems) voting machines was leaked in 2003, which summoned blackboxvoting.org into existence.
As far as I know, every voting machine system that has been examined since then has been found to have potential attack vectors large enough to fly an intercontinental airliner through. When the public records are examined, the audit trail is often nonexistent, destroyed, or falsified.
In the 12 years since then, the only meaningful result has been to end the practice of exit polling in the U.S. Yep, rather than explain the discrepancies between statistical sampling methods and the official results, we chose to stop sampling and trust the results.
So some academics apply statistical methods to the official results, to show convincing evidence that one major party or the other, or both, are blatantly cheating using specific voting machine systems.
You can hear those crickets chirping over the din of the absolute silence.
~But hey, let's all get worked up over homosexual marriage and Syrian refugees, mmkay? The 2016 national elections will be perfectly fair and honest, and not cracked and defrauded at the central tabulators at all. And since there's no cheating going on there, there certainly wouldn't be any at the primary level, with lower levels of scrutiny.~
Open source is democratic, but democracy certainly isn't open source.