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Matt Stoller writes:
I'm going to go out on a limb and pronounce campaign finance reform a massive success, and then suggest that it should be repealed. On the success side, the new caps on donations forced creative use of the internet to break the Democratic Party's addiction to corporate money, tired direct mail lists, and the corrupt Clinton money machine. It did something similar on the right...
But something screwed up happened along the way - the mess of 501c(s), 527s, PACs, and campaign committees, along with Sinclair (and Stern, Soros, Chamber of Commerce, etc), and the internet, have made validating legal political speech impossible...
Campaign finance reform is one of those topics about which I believe whatever the person I last heard says. Matt is that person. Fortunately, he's someone I have a lot of respect for, so my current (= most recent) opinion is very likely to be correct.
OutragedModerates.org have posted the full text of the CIA report on the lack of WMDs, along with the forged uranium documents Bush cited in his 2003 MisState of the Union. You can get them via BitTorrent here.
Want to read something that's simultaneously entertaining and scary? Go visit Andrew Gumbel's article in the UK Independent about the upcoming nightmare about voting procedures in Florida. Oy veh, with a side order of chads.
David Isenberg circulated by email this morning a snip from Bev Harris at Black Box Voting:
The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole
Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
*snip*
The central tabulator is far more vulnerable than the touch screen terminals. Think about it: If you were going to tamper with an election, would you rather tamper with 4,500 individual voting machines, or with just one machine, the central tabulator which receives votes from all the machines? Of course, the central tabulator is the most desirable target.
Unfortunately, the site is down at the moment.
Two items at Computerworld.com.
First, here's Harris Miller, president of Technology Association of America (ITAA) on the attempts to stop e-voting until the machines are reliable:
It's not about voting machines. It's a religious war about open-source software vs. proprietary software..If you're a computer scientist and you think that open-source software is the solution to everything because you're a computer scientist and you can spot all flaws, then you hate electronic voting machines. But if you're a person who believes that proprietary software and open-source software can both be reliable, then you don't hate electronic voting machines.
Hmm. It's actually not about hating e-voting machines. It's about loving elections we can trust. For example, here's another article from the site today:
A former California political candidate who lost the March 2004 race for Riverside County Board of Supervisors by only 45 votes filed a lawsuit today against the county after she was denied access to the memory and audit logs of the electronic voting systems used during the election.
...The case arose after Soubirous petitioned the county registrar and machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems for access to the systems' audit logs, redundant memory, the results of logic and accuracy tests that were conducted on the systems, and the chain-of-custody records for the system components. Despite a California law that permits any voter to request and review "all relevant election materials" pertaining to a recount, Townsend refused to grant Soubirous access to the material, arguing it was not "relevant" to a recount.
How many challenges are we going to have in the November election if we entrust our democracy to machines without paper trails?
Brian Mooney writes a front-page story in the Boston Globe on the increasing demand that e-voting machines leave a voter-verifiable paper trail. In the course of providing Balanced & Professional Coverage, Brian writes:
''There are valid concerns on all sides," said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy group that tracks election reform efforts. ''Whether democracy is truly threatened by paperless voting machines, I'm not sure that's the case. Nor am I sure it's the case that these are 100 percent reliable. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle."
I wish the truth were in some middle ground, but in this case, we are going to have people who are psychologically and politically motivated to find fault with the system, so having technology that is not 100% trustworthy and verifiable is 100% guaranteed to erode our trust in the leaders who emerge from the process. Any unverifiable election that is at all close will be suspect. Any election that surprises us will be claimed to have been rigged. The frayed fabric of good will will rip. And we will lose the joy of upsets.
They Work For You lets you see everything your MP has said since 2001. You can also search by topic, with space to add your own comments. (Here are two examples from Perfect.co.uk, as well as The Guardian's coverage.) . Waaaay cool. We need this here in the Colonies.
Tomorrow I'm doing the lunchtime keynote for the FieldWorks Technology Politics Summit. I have half an hour. Here's an outline of what I think I'm going to say:
1. I want to address two questions in a roundabout way. A. Why is it that when Dean supporters met, we'd frequently talk about what we didn't like about Dean, even while remaining fully licensed Deaniacs? B. WRT the Dean slogan, we have the power to take our country back from whom exactly? Why did that slogan work?
2. These questions are obscured by the rapid consolidation of inappropriate lessons we've taken from the Dean campaign, including that the Net is only good for raising money and all that social networking stuff was for naive girly-men.
3. So, let's accept (for the nonce) the view that politics is naught but a specialized form of marketing in which the only successful market share is 50% + 1. So, what's happening with marketing? Marketing is war waged against customers, but we're in revolt. Marketers no longer have control over corporate information. Networked markets are smarter than the companies they're talking about. [Yes, this is overtly Cluetrain-y.]
4. At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing.
5. Taking blogging as an example. It looks individualistic, but it's really about conversation and links. To see how unusual it is, look at the Dean blog: We've never before had someone who speaks for the campaign but in his/her own voice. This isn't good marketing. It's anti-marketing: It succeeds insofar as it stays off message.
6. To see the importance of comments (i.e., the blog wasn't simply a new type of broadcasting), you have to understand the Net's architecture. It is not a broadcast or publishing architecture. It's end-to-end. It succeeded by removing the controlling center, and by keeping the center as empty as possible so that innovation would happpen at the edges. The Net is the opposite of marketing. It is profoundly democratic. And it explicitly provided the model for the Net portion of the Dean campaign. (Meanwhile, Washington and Hollywood seem hell-bent on destroying the Net by misunderstanding it.) [I'm sneaking in World of Ends stuff because there will be people in the room — including Tom Daschle — who I want to yell this at.]
7. No wonder we're so eager to go wrong about the role of the Net in the Dean campaign. Campaigns are about top-down control of message. Kerry said ten words off mike and there was a firestorm. But blogs are always off mike. (We forgive ourselves preemptively.)
8. Back to the two questions. We talked about why we disliked Dean because it affirmed that this campaign wasn't about top-down marketing. It was about us. We were encouraged to go off message — that is, to appropriate the message in our own way — because the campaign is about us, not only about Howard Dean. That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans. We're taking it back from the campaign marketers. We're taking it back from our own alienation. And that's a good thing.
Here's the next-to-final draft of a commentary that ran on NPR's All Things Considered on Monday. You can listen to it here.
I'm double worried about electronic voting machines. First there's the problem that lots of people have noted with the new machines. Instead of marking a box with a pen, you touch the screen to put an electronic mark in an electronic box. Very convenient and results are tabulated instantly, but suppose there's a bug in the computer, or suppose someone hacks into them. How would we even know that the software is miscounting the votes?
The most talked-about solution is to have the electronic voting machines also produce a paper copy of your vote so you can compare it with what you touched on screen. The paper copies would be kept secure so they can be counted manually to verify the electronic results...which makes sense to me.
But even if all the technical issues are resolved, I'm not going to like voting with the new digital machines. I'm voting because I want to make a difference. A little difference, exactly one person's worth. So I want my vote to make a mark in the world. I want to make a thick X in smelly magic marker ink where there wasn't one before. I want to feel a lever click into place. I want to punch some chads. That's what making your mind up feels like. Touching a computer screen is a little too literally doing my "bit."
Of course I don't want Florida to happen again. No one does. And I'm enough of a combination news and computer junkie to want election results within 4 seconds of the polls closing. But I'd be willing to give that up if it meant I could savor my role as a citizen longer.
You know, I not only want to make a mark on paper, I want to wait in line at the polls. The line should be long, and not only because that means lots of us are voting. The inconvenience reminds us that voting is worth waiting for. Besides, the line puts in front of me and behind me people who disagree with me. Yet right or wrong, we all get to stand in the same line. No matter how much we disagree about the future direction of our country, everyone in line agrees on this: People who cut in line stink! That's the basis of civil society.
And it should be drizzling on election day. And a little cold. Hands in pockets cold, not glove cold. We should be dusting the outside off our coats and stamping it off our feet as we enter the polling place because, although voting is an indoor activity, we should be reminded of the reality of the world outside, especially as voting goes digital.
So, yes, I bow before the inevitable. I'll probably be poking my finger at a touch screen and, I hope, checking the results against a paper print out. I may even glance sideways at the screen to see which names have the most accumulated fingerprints next to them. That's how badly I want to know the outcome. But I'm afraid I'm going to feel more like I'm recording information about my vote than actually voting. Casting a ballot is the fundamental, irrevocable act of democracy. I'm voting to have an effect. It'd be nice to be able to feel the effect.
Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's talks about TrueMajority.org in Businessweek.
Howard Rheingold talks about the Internet's effect on politics in an excellent Businessweek interview.
Britt Blaser and Ethan Zuckerman are talking about the Open Republic idea, AKA "Social SourceForge." Britt's draft mission statement:
Upgrade American governance by stimulating the creation and adoption of excellent campaign and governance software and Internet resources.
It's something we need.
Two companies creating software platforms for national political campaigns — Democracy in Action and PICnet — are leading a session on distributed campaigns. I guess it's important for activists to know about DeanSpace and the rest of the glorious regalia about which the panelists are talking, but I can't help thinking that the teaching maybe ought to be going in the other direction for once. (On the other hand, I'm about to give two or three talks on the same topic over the next few weeks. Pardon my hypocrisy.)
Audience member: The campaign failed because it didn't give those ivolved a way to reach those who were at the next level of marginal involvement.
Me: (in response to another audience member) It seems to me that the problem is an internal inconsistency that can't be easily resolved. Control is the enemy of scale, but campaigns are necessarily about control over message (both because campaigns see themselves as marketing organizations but also because campaigns stand for something).
Britt Blaser: We're looking at a big picture and saying it failed when in fact there were lots of little things that worked or could have worked if small changes had been made. Maybe, says Britt, campaigns ought to be totally transparent...nothing but an accounting function.
Dick Bell: (Kerry campaign blogger) You're actually running 50 campaigns. And the Dean campaign wasn't connected to the grassroots organizers. We need to figure out how to integrate the grassroots and the traditional political organizations, integrating the permission-free and the need for control.
The Dean presenter says that the Dean campaign was aiming at putting an application layer between the local DeanSpace groups and HQ so there could be meaningful communication up from the grassroots, aggregating the data in meaningful way.
Audience: That's what bloggers do. They digest positions and have a medium-level audience that can percolate up.
Katrin Verclas: I'm involved in very local campaigns and we use listserv. It works like a dream. If you go to down where the grassroots organizing is actually happening, we'll tell you what we need. And it's not the stuff you've designed for the national level.
Oxfam website guy: We feel the tension between control and allowing bottom-up involvement. We need to control our message, so when people come to us and say they want blogs and chats... [FWIW, Oxfam. is my family's favorite place to donate money.]
Audience: Don't forget to acknowledge that software freedom makes this possible.
Audience: How do we use this in our AIDS campaign?
Democracy in Action: The national organization can use it to create local sites instantly, with branding or not. The local organizations each have their own campaign site. There's two-way communication between the local and national. They support RSS feeds. The national campaign has control over the local sites.
Katrin: It's all about local leadership. You're talking about a push down. But the other piece of a distributed campaign is leadership from below. Some national organizations are beginning to get that, but the true leadership development is truly user driven. But the national side is more marketing driven. We need leadership development. It's one on one. It's human. You have to know where your leadership is and then you give them the tools.
Democracy in Action: We've tried to pay attention to that. The national campaign is an organizing structure but it's not meant to be pushing information down to local groujps so they can regurgitate it. It's two-way.
[I said, in the course of a comment here, that I love the presenter's sw, but I was confused. I actually don't know Democracy in Action's stuff. Probably excellent, but I didn't mean to give it a ringing endorsement. Oops.]
[And, yes, www.DemocracyInaction.org is an unfortunately ambiguous domain name.]
Ed Cone writes about what conclusions to draw from the fact that Maryland's use of electronic voting machines on Tuesday seemed to go well: "'Election officials will think that this validates the system, that now we can all see that it works just fine-but that's not the case,' says Michael Wertheimer, a systems-security consultant..."
My favorite bit:
A sampling of voters at Lutherville, Md., on Super Tuesday showed that the systems worked well on the surface. "The machine was easy to use," says Charlie Mitchell, 49. "The only thing I wondered about was what I had read about these machines - were the votes getting counted or not? I don't know."
Oh, I see. Let me paraphrase: "The system worked perfectly and I was very happy with it, except for the gnawing fear that it disenfranchised me of my most basic right as a citizen."
Electronic voting, without a voter-verifiable paper trail, inevitably introduces doubt into the system that should be the paradigm of lock box security.
(It is inevitable because the digital only has a symbolic relationship to the real, analog world. But that's a different story...the same story about why computers that model thought aren't themselves thinking. But I digress.)
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