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Myriad of errors mar UK e-voting trials
Right on cue, the Electoral Commission has published findings from a number of UK e-voting trials, and just as expected, they went about as awry as they possibly could. Within the 24-page document resides a comedy of errors that would certainly put any other system on an eternal blacklist, but the blind faith in e-voting continues to allow events such as these to complicate democratic procedures. For starters, it was noted that the "use of electronic counting significantly increased the total cost of delivering these elections compared with a manual count," and furthermore, the scanning of ballot papers "took a lot longer than expected due to the need to scan certain batches more than once." Needless to say, the amount of mishaps involved are far too numerous to cover in this space, but hopefully the UK will take our interestingly administered warning to heart now that it has experienced similar turmoil. [Warning: PDF read link][Via The Inquirer, image courtesy of BBC]
Fresh study (still) finds Diebold e-voting machines hacker-friendly
The fact that some individuals still have any level of faith left in Diebold is quite baffling, but in case you were looking for just one more episode to dash your hopes of a hack-proof voting machine, open wide. As fate would have it, a fresh study in Florida has found that even optical scan voting systems "can be hacked into," which is causing quite a bit of concern considering that touchscreen alternatives aren't exactly an option in the Sunshine State. Reportedly, the document noted that "official memory cards in the optical scan machines could easily be exchanged with ones altering the vote count," and it was also stated that Diebold must "deal with the flaws" by August 17th. Yeah, we're sure it's all over that.[Thanks, Josh]
Mii Spotlight: A look ahead
We're taking a break this week from our usual Mii Spotlight format to discuss the future of Miis, including the forthcoming Mii-focused channel, and what we would like to see in the way of updates to the Mii creation process. We hope you don't mind ... and anyway, we're short on Miis! We can only guess you guys were far too busy immersing yourselves bodily in E3 videos and news to create any new little people this week.But no worries! Not only will we have new and interesting ways in which to wield our Miis in the near future, games like MySims seem to be running with the super-cute avatar idea, and soon we'll be able to expand our tiny armies of near-lookalikes to epic proportions. Miis even turn up in Wii Fit, though there it seems they must do battle with faceless VR mannequins who threaten to take over our exercise plans. Actually, Miis v. Mannequins could be an excellent game inside Wii Fit. Too bad we're mostly sure it isn't included. We do love our cartoon violence ... perhaps a little too much.
Caption This: Vote for winners! [Updated]
I hope everyone had a blast participating in this week's Caption This contest! However, as of Wednesday night at 11:59 PM EST the entry period officially closed, and I'd like to thank everyone who participated for making it a success! (And if you missed this week's contest, never fear, there will be another one starting on the Monday after next!) But now it's time to pick a winner -- the staff of WoW Insider has narrowed hundreds of entries down to ten finalists, and we want your opinion on which captions for the above screenshot are the best of the bunch. The winner will be walking away with a 60-day gamecard and second place will snag a More DoTs t-shirt from J!NX. So come on -- let us know which entry you liked best (polls will be open until 9am EST tomorrow), and on Monday we'll announce the winners!Update: The voting period is now closed -- we'll announce the winners soon!
Construction of chemical plant halted by 1M text messages
Voting might be something that we take for granted (unless it's the Engadget Awards, song requests, or American Idol) but everyone likes to take a stand for something and have their opinion heard. Residents from Xiamen, a city in the southeastern province of China, protested the building of a new chemical plant by sending over one million text messages to the city government. The chemical plant would produce paraxylene which is used in production of plastics, polyester and film. The Center for Disease Control states that the stuff could be dangerous in long term exposure, even causing death and or affecting the central nervous system. Needless to say, the council decided to halt construction after "careful deliberation." [Via textually.org]
So it begins: Florida bans touch-screen e-voting machines
If you didn't see this one coming, we'll just assume the glaring sun had you blinded, as the Sunshine State has apparently had quite enough of the e-voting woes within its borders. Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed into law a bill "requiring that all voting districts in the state replace most touchscreen electronic voting machines with optical scan machines." From day one, the state has been plagued with one mishap after another, and while some touch-screen systems will be maintained for "handicapped voters that require its features to vote unaided," the vast majority of the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines will be nixed in favor of a less hackable flavor. Flinging one last blow of frustration at the e-voting curse, Crist went so far as to suggest that ditching them would allow Floridians to "leave the polling place knowing that their vote had been counted and recorded and can be verified." Of course, we're sure the tax-paying citizens of the state are entirely more focused on the $27.8 million he approved to buy all new optical scan equipment.
Everybody Does Free Market Research for Nintendo Channel
Aeropause's Stephen Munn, reacting to a recent Everybody Votes Channel question about how people preferred to buy music, suspects that the Everybody Votes Channel may not be just about harmless fun.He believes that this question is aimed at gauging interest in a future music download channel, implying that the Everybody Votes Channel has always been an attempt to get marketing data from Wii users and pretend it's a game. We're going to have to add this plausible theory to our our own list of Everybody Votes conspiracy theories.What do you think? If this is true, are you outraged? Or does the intent of the service not matter as long as you're having a good time?
Miyamoto hasn't quite taken over this Time Magazine list
The list is the Time 100, which profiles 100 people that, in Time's opinion, are the most influential. And this year, our opinions will help shape Time's. And that's why we say Shigeru Miyamoto hasn't taken over the list yet. If there's anything gamers are good at, it's being vocal on the Internet. He's currently sitting at number 3 on the list with an average rating of 92, but we're sure that our collective clicking-on-things power will drive him to the top of the list. Sure, that's above every world leader and every scientist, but if they wanted carefully-researched decisions about relative world influence, they shouldn't have asked the Internet. They're lucky that we're even voting for real people.
iVotronic e-voting software issues to blame in Florida polemic?
Oddly enough, it seems that the Sunshine State attracts more than just tourists and nice weather, as Florida is now facing yet another round of e-voting woes long after elections have ended. While Diebold machines certainly administered their fair share of fits, now iVotronic's own systems are purportedly to blame for a controversial election in Sarasota County last November. Upon further review, officials noticed "symptoms consistent with a known software flaw" in the aforementioned machine, which countered the "county officials' claims that a bug played no role in the election results." Of course, this won't mark the first time that late-blooming documents shed light on a potential voting mishap, but it seems that both parties are standing their ground on this one. Apparently, the issues were spotted during the primary election, but since they appeared on a "smaller scale," they weren't adequately addressed. Currently, no individuals have been legally blamed for their deceptive handling of the probable mishap, but we'd seriously suggest that Florida thinks mighty hard before loosing these flawed machines on the public next time around.
Should politics look more like games?
You can almost hear the stereotypical, out-of-touch old-timer in your head: "What's the matter with kids today? They'll spend hours playing that darned Grand Theft Auto, but they won't take any time to take part in the political process." Well, maybe the problem isn't with the kids, but with the political process itself.That's the argument presented in a recent Slate review of Stephen Duncombe's Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. While open-ended games like GTA offer near-unlimited room to explore and learn, today's campaigns only seem interested in on dehumanizing efficiency and a lock-step, with-us-or-against-us style of support. The reviewer suggests we do away with political volunteers that are "relegated to the role of sign-toting spectator" and start promoting Duncombe's idea of "dreams the public can mold and shape themselves ... dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire."The review is short on specifics on how to do this, but we can think of a few ways to make political support more like a game. How about unlockable bonus candidates if you get enough people together for a rally? Or a create-a-candidate mode where your favorite politician goes through plastic surgery based on a straw poll of appealing features? The possibilities are endless.
SMS banned in Cambodia during election run-up
Cambodia's National Election Committee had mobile providers bump their SMS services offline over the weekend to impose a government sanctioned "Censorship and State Control tranquility period." This SMS blackout period was said to prevent voters from being spammed by the various parties during the election's final hours; no word on if this has happened in the past. This type of mobile banning has some history in Cambodia where 3G was axed for fear of it becoming a platform for the proliferation of adult content. Mobitel, Cambodia's largest provider did provide customers with a few hours notice, but with SMS costs so low compared to voice -- about 2 cents per message -- this service outage likely left many without an affordable means of communication. We aren't sure if this is too obvious, but shouldn't the various candidates just behave themselves and allow the entire population of the country get on with their business? Service was set to be restored shortly after the polls closed at 3 PM.
Unearthed memo details possible e-voting negligence
In case the Brits were still wondering if we Americans finally had our act together in regard to e-voting, this should add yet another nail in the coffin. Among the bevy of states that saw all sorts of turmoil when voters turned to electronic machines to cast their support was Florida, and while a recent motion doesn't speak of that specific incident, it does highlight a good bit of potential negligence. Apparently, a note was "uncovered" last September (but was withheld until just last week) which documented a "possible problem" with Election Systems & Software's iVotronic touchscreen machine, but wasn't used to scrutinize the finicky system before loosed to the voting public. The eventually malfunctioning software was linked to a "dispute over the 13th Congressional District race in November," which supposedly caused a high rate of "undervoting," and allowed Vern Buchanan to take the questionable gold by a mere 400 votes. Regardless, it's a little late for a recount, don't you think? [Warning: PDF read link][Via Wired]
Follow Up: Hillary-as-Big-Brother authored on a Mac
"Hi. I'm Phil. I did it. And I'm proud of it...I made the 'Vote Different' ad," said Philip de Vellis on this recent Huffington Post writeup. A "proud Democrat" and Obama supporter, deVellis authored the Hillary-as-Big-Brother ad on his personal Macintosh, uploaded it to YouTube and passed the link around to some blogs. de Vellis has now resigned from his job with Blue State Digital, a firm that has provided technology to several campaigns including Obama's. de Vellis does not specify which software he used, but iMovie and Final Cut are obvious candidates. He said he spent just one Sunday afternoon putting the ad together.
US government warns UK that e-voting is finicky
If there's anything we can appreciate, it's the irony of the United States trying to tell other nations how to run their e-voting setups, you know, considering that America can't even hire competent companies to run quality assurance tests on its own machines. Nevertheless, the US Government Audit Office (GAO) has warned in a recent document document entitled "All Levels of Government Are Needed to Address Electronic Voting System Challenges" that e-voting setups could cause some problems when it came to issues of integrity. Specifically, Randolph Hite, director of IT architecture and systems at the GAO, stated that "no voting technology, however well designed, can be a magic bullet that will solve all election problems," and even went so far as to suggest that e-voting technology "merits the combined and focused attention of federal, state, and local authorities responsible for election administration." Still, friendly advice typically sinks in better if the presenter tends to practice what they preach, so we'd suggest the Brits do everything they can to just, um, not do what we've done. [Warning: PDF read link][Via Inquirer]
Estonians first to cast national votes online
For a lucky group of Eastern European cyber-voters, e-voting no longer entails traveling to an official location to poke at a screen -- let's just hope they managed to shake off e-voting's penchant for fraud while they were at it. Nationwide voting in cyberspace has finally become a reality in, of all places, Estonia. Eeeh? Yep. Estonia's been keen on the idea of voting via the internet since 2001 and became the first country in the world to hold legit general elections when they implemented the remote e-voting process locally in 2005. As of this week, they own yet again with over 30,000 of 940,000 eligible Estonians casting virtual ballots in the world's first online parliamentary election. Online voters even have the option to re-vote with a paper ballot in the event that hurried or pressured decisions were made from their remote voting locations. This option is evidently proving to be an effective way to boost voter turnout, which was only 58 percent in 2003. Let's hope this "using the internet to encourage voting" trend catches on in some other countries (ahem) that also suffer from less-than-impressive election turnouts.
Wii's "Everybody Votes" channel hacked to allow unlimited suggestions
It looks like the dozens of e-voting terminals across the globe aren't the only voting machines getting hax0red these days, as the sweet, innocent "Everybody Votes" channel has now been exploited too. Nintendo's Valentine's Day gift to the world was met with much applause, but we knew those tricksters behind the scenes would be hard at work trying to find a workaround to the dreaded "one suggestion (or vote) per day" limitation. Along the same vein as fooling poorly coded shareware into thinking your "30 day trial" never runs out, all you have to do is set the Wii's internal clock a day forward, and from there on out, you're able to cast as many votes as you wish without being hampered. Of course, we don't really expect the Big N to just kick around this weekend and not fix this, but then again, we don't exactly foresee any of the polls found here to face recounts of any magnitude either.[Via Joystiq]
US chooses two hopefuls to review for future e-voting tests
Just days after the US government decided to bar Ciber from testing anymore e-voting terminals due to its perpetual negligence, it now seems that a pair of Colorado-based outfits are next in line to take over those duties. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently recommended that iBeta Quality Assurance and SysTest Labs "be granted final clearance to test the systems" after a "comprehensive technical evaluation of the laboratories' processes based on the international standard ISO/IEC 17025, which covers general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories." Now it seems the final hammer resides in the hands of the US Election Assistance Commission, which is "a federal agency that has sole authority to grant full accreditation to the labs." SysTest Labs isn't new to this e-voting QA game, as the firm was already granted "interim" accreditation and is now awaiting the official seal to keep up the (presumably) good work. Notably, the EAC stated that they would be focusing their efforts now on "non-technical issues such as conflict of interest policies, organizational structure, and record-keeping protocols," but we're not so confident all the hardware checks are as robust as they should be just yet. Nevertheless, we shouldn't count on hearing anything final for quite some time, as this apparently lengthy "review process" somehow takes between 9 and 18 months to complete, so in the meantime we'll just see how many more Americans ditch the whole "voting" idea due to issues like voting in triplicate, getting distracted by board games, or simply obliterating their machine in frustration. [Warning: PDF read link][Via Slashdot]
US bars Ciber from testing e-voting terminals due to negligence
Call us crazy, but we had a sneaking suspicion all along that all these e-voting woes were due to a lack in quality control testing somewhere along the approval line, and now it seems the US government has found its scapegoat. Ciber, Inc., the Colorado-based company responsible for testing a majority of the nation's electronic voting terminals, "has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its QC procedures, and moreover, could not document that it was conducting all the required tests." Aside from wondering where the oh-so-critical auditors were during this entire debacle (read: federal scrutiny of the testing began just recently), this brings into question the legitimacy of the votes that were actually placed and counted through the potentially faulty machines, but alas, what's done is (presumably) done. Eager to keep that expectedly gigantic government contract money pouring in, Ciber seems to be on top of the issues at hand, and a spokesperson for the outfit even stated that "the company believed that it had addressed all the problems, and that it expected to receive its initial federal accreditation later this month." We just hope that undercover chess functionality somehow goes unnoticed.[Via Slashdot]
Indian political party trades TVs for votes; free HDTV campaign in 2008?
Although bribery isn't exactly smiled upon here in the States, we've got a hunch that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam political party in India is on to something. In news likely to cause turmoil (or not) among culturally-planted Americans, the DMK promised a bevy of new electronics to folks who cast their vote for them, and apparently, it worked. After falling from power in 2001, the party has stormed back into prominence by offering poor citizens niceties (such as stoves and TVs) which most could never afford on their own. By wording the goodies as "social welfare" benefits, the sets they hand out supposedly aid the voters in receiving news critical to their life, health, and work, which in turn benefits society the DMK as a whole. While America hasn't had the best luck so far with all these e-voting implementations, and considering a good few don't even cast a passing glance at anything political, we'd bet a "Free HDTV" campaign would result in surefire admission into the Oval Office.[Via Fark]
Smartmatic bails from e-voting biz after media heat
Smartmatic, of Sequoia Voting Systems infamy, is taking its ball and going home, after becoming fed up with the intense public scrutiny its voting systems have received. "Given the current climate of the United States marketplace with so much public debate over foreign ownership of firms in an area that is viewed as critical U.S. infrastructure -- election technology -- we feel it is in both companies' best interests to move forward as separate entities with separate ownership," said Antonio Mugica, president of Smartmatic. Of course, we really would've just been happy with a voting system that didn't, say, have the ability to register multiple votes per voter, but we suppose that's too much to ask. A big stink has been raised in regards to Smartmatic's Venezuelan ownership and some supposed ties to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and it appears Smartmatic isn't up for the fight. Smartmatic had previously agreed to an investigation by the US Treasury Department, but now that they're putting Sequoia on the auction block, they've withdrawn from the review process. Any takers?[Via Techdirt]
