MetaFilter posts tagged with voting and government

The House will now consider the Flags for Orphans bill

TheDonF — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:22:30 -0800

UK MPs trying to block publishing their expenses - they're voting on Thursday to overturn last year's High Court ruling. TheyWorkForYou is emailing members to let them know that the UK government buried the news of this vote amongst last week's Heathrow runway anouncement. They are trying to reverse the 16 May 2008 High Court decision that MPs' expenses must, under the Freedom Of Information Act, be made public. What can you do about this mixture of Jo Moore and Krusty? TheyWorkForYou is encouraging people to write to their local MP to ask them to vote against the bill, join the obligatory Facebook group or use their MySociety site to contact local media outlets.

HAVA has forced us to purchase systems that in my opinion are not appropriate for citizens to be voting on

amberglow — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 23:14:14 -0800

E-voting systems hacker sees ‘particularly bad’ security issues ...On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs.... More from the Washington Post here, where ... Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. ..."Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no. ... Verified Voting and Black Box Voting have much much more on all of this.

A Day of Wrest

boost ventilator — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 07:16:27 -0800

No Sunday shopping in Nova Scotia (apparently some were for and against).

A better way to vote?

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:57:46 -0800

Looks like a minority liberal government for Canada. The entire process will have been completed in a single day. The voters used pencils to mark X's on paper ballots, which were stuffed into ballot boxes then counted by hand. Despite the differences in population, is there a lesson here for our southern neighbours?

maud — Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:40:56 -0800

Florida Machine Records Votes for Wrong Candidate. OK, I know Matt Drudge isn't exactly a venerated news outlet, but he is in South Florida. And he's reporting that a West Palm Beach voter called in to a South Florida radio talk show to report that when he voted for McBride this morning the machine counted his vote for Bush. After he'd tried three times, the voter said, an observing poll worker finally acknowledged that the machine would have to be reprogrammed, since earlier voters had experienced the same problem. There is no official confirmation of this problem, but calls to the same radio show two years ago evidently foreshadowed the 2000 election debacle. I'll be keeping an eye on sites like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo as the day wears on. In the end, what should the electorate do (in addition to initiating lawsuits) if outcome-determining irregularities surface in yet another Florida election?

tranquileye — Mon, 27 Nov 2000 16:43:31 -0800

Doesn't this site violate Canada election laws? They claim they will be posting election results as the polls close. Under Canadian law, time zones that are still voting aren't allowed to know who is winning further east. First up: Newfoundland.