2centsworth.info

I read an interesting column in the February 2007 issue of Dr. Dobb’s (a software development journal). The column is by Ed Nisley and he is discussing a report on the problems with electronic voting machines in Cuyahoga County, Ohio during the recent Federal election. The column is entitled Root the Vote: Wetware… It doesn’t seem to be on the Dr. Dobbs website (www.ddj.com) yet but it may show up next month.

I don’t think I have ever talked to someone who is professionally involved with computers or software who isn’t anything but appalled by the idea of purely electronic voting.

As Ed Nisley comments in the column, the current issue is how difficult it is to implement a new voting technology with a temporary once-a-year or once-every-couple-of-years organization largely staffed by volunteers. This years problems were due to poorly designed machines, poor organization, and a lack of training. The issue in the future will be deliberate, subtle, difficult-or-impossible to detect, vote tampering.

In my electoral district we use the “fill in the oval” paper ballots which are then scanned electronically. In my opinion, that is the way to go. Most people are able to figure out how to fill in the ovals, there is a permanent ballot that can be recounted. The thousands of paper ballots would be difficult to alter without its being noticed.

Given the tendency towards dirty tricks in US politics and the generally corrupt relationship between government officials and government contractors, I think purely electronic voting is a recipe for disaster for our democracy…. Just imagine the closed room conversations… “Not only can we guarantee a smoothly run election… For only a few million more we can make sure your guys win!”

If we end up with a significant fraction of the votes being counted in a purely electronic manner then we will also get deliberate biasing in the outcomes. And it will be, essentially, undetectable. You can at least argue about a “hanging chad.”

In fact, the first we will know that there is anything wrong is when some techie gets sufficiently disgusted (or decides he wasn’t paid enough) and we wake up to find we’ve just elected Mickey Mouse president.

Ed Nisley called attention to a recent New York Times article (U.S. Investigates Voting Machines’ Venezuela Ties – October 29, 2006) about the Venezuelan government buying a US company that makes electronic voting machines… That were purchased for use in Venezuela’s elections. Apparently this is being investigated by the Bush administration… One is being asked to believe that a Republican administration is suddenly interested in free and fair elections in South America?

If you want to find out more, check the following links:

Cuyahoga Election Review Panel – Final Report

Election Science Institute – DRE Analysis for May 2006 Primary

Avi Rubin’s blog

VerifiedVoting.org

Another illuminating New York Times article (December 30, 2006) entitled The Spine as Profit Center. The article raises questions about how many of the 500,000 spine operations performed each year actually benefit the patients, and whether the surgeons performing the procedures are influenced by financial conflicts of interest.

It turns out that not only are the surgeons well paid to perform the operations but that many of them are also investor/owners of the companies that provide the expensive hardware used in these operations… The article states that patients and their insurers are charged around $1,000 for a single screw… Which actually costs less than $100 to manufacture. Note that the surgeons decide where the hardware is purchased, not the hospital. In fact, the surgeon-owned companies frequently do not actually make the hardware at all. In many cases they simply buy a screw from industry supplier for $65 to $100 and mark it up to $1,000 before it is “sold” to the surgeon’s patient.

It should be emphasized that a typical back operation needs a lot more than one screw. In one example provided in the article a complete “set” of hardware for the procedure would cost the patient $7,800.

Another example of “soft corruption”… Pretty “hard”, of course, if it is your back that was “screwed” up in an unnecessary and expensive procedure.

I read a brief article… buried in the back of today’s Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 28, 2006) about our recently resigned Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton.

I am sure she’s done nothing illegal… After all she is a lawyer and a Washington political appointee… But reading the article did make me a bit queasy.

The reason for the article is that Royal Dutch Shell just announced that they had hired her as their general counsel, presumably for the sort of munificent salary that goes with that sort of job these days.

Now call me cynical but do you think that job offer was in any way related to her role as Secretary of the Interior?

Or the fact that during her tenure the Department of Interior, erh, omitted to bill the oil industry for royalties they owed the US taxpayer? To the tune of, some minor amount…. Oh yes, there it is… $10 billion (according to the General Accounting Office). And yes, Martha, Royal Dutch Shell was one of the biggest beneficiaries.

The general counsel job is, I gather, the Big Oil equivalent of stuffing a few twenties down her cleavage after the lap dance.

This is the sort of “soft corruption” I see as endemic in our government and business elite. Nobody handed Ms. Norton an attache case of hundred dollar bills, they may not have explicitly offered her a job… But she knew she would be “taken care of” after she left office.

UPDATE: In the New York Times (Dec. 30, 2006) Business section there is an article U.S. Official Overseeing Oil Program Faces Inquiry. This is all about, you guessed it, the Department of the Interior again. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the director of the multi-billion dollar oil trading program was being paid by oil companies hoping for contracts under the program. (So maybe the attache cases of cash aren’t so far fetched.)

The director of the program, Gregory W. Smith, and three subordinates are suspected of steering huge oil trading contracts to favored companies. As the article states… If the allegations prove correct, they would constitute a major new blot on the Interior Department’s much-criticized effort to properly collect royalties on vast amounts of oil and gas produced on US land or coastal waters. In other words, once again, the taxpayers are being ripped off and GW’s appointees and the oil industry are benefiting.

The NYT article then goes on to point out that the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service is now the target of multiple investigations by Congress and the Department’s own inspector general.

The above is a headline in today’s New York Times (14 May 2006)… I think you could also call it the last nail in John McCain’s political coffin.

I voted for McCain in the first primary because I thought he was a man of integrity. I was astonished and disgusted at the tactics used by the Bush campaign to defeat him for the Republican nomination.

But I have been revising my opinion of McCain downwards ever since. Given his intelligence and background he must have had serious reservations about Bush’s justification for the war in Iraq and he certainly was aware of how incompetently the war was being prosecuted. And one suspects he despises Bush personally but he still cozied-up to the Bush campaign in the second election.

Here is a guy who paid a terrible personal price during our nation’s last unnecessary, incompetently led war… Who knows that there are young soldiers and marines now paying a similarly terrible price for the self-serving, bordering on traitorous, incompetence of the current administration.

And yet here McCain is once again acting as stooge for Bush and his cronies. Kissing Falwell’s ring isn’t quite as bad… People won’t die as a result but it is similarly stomach-turning.

Feet of Clay doesn’t do it justice.

Another interesting New York Times article (Senate Approves 2-Year Extension of Bush’s Tax Cuts – May 11, 2006)

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 54 to 44 to approve $70 billion in tax cuts benefiting, no surprise here, the country’s wealthiest taxpayers.

To put it in perspective, here is an excerpt from the NY Times article:

The overwhelming share of the tax cuts the Senate voted to extend will flow to the wealthiest taxpayers. People earning $1 million a year would save about $42,700, and reap about 22 percent of the total tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group in Washington. People earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year would save about $47 and receive less than 1 percent of the benefits.

I think, just maybe, that the folks that voted for GW and the Republicans in Congress may finally be realizing that they’ve been taken to the cleaners. Unless you are among the tiny percentage of Americans who’s income is more than $1 million per year, you are getting royally screwed.

GW came into office with a budget surplus and we have had nothing but disasters of every kind ever since. We now have the largest budget deficits in history, GW’s self-inflicted war in Iraq is costing us $100’s of billions per year, more than 2,000 US soldiers and marines have died, Home Land Security is a laughing stock, Osama is still out there, and oh, by the way, GW and his Republican buddies in the House and Senate are going to leave office having made sure that they and their wealthy cronies won’t have to pay for it… The average US taxpayer will.