German Elections Go Open Source 159
Get Behind the Mule writes "The Heise news ticker is reporting that the software used by the German government to handle the results of the Bundestag election (that's the national parliament) on September 22nd will be based on open source platforms. The system will be written in Java and deploy Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL, and is being developed by the Berlin software firm IVU (here's their press release), working with the Statisches Bundesamt (the federal statistics office). It's not clear from the announcements whether the source code of the application itself, and not just the servers it runs on, will be publically available. Nevertheless, one is reminded of the argument of Peruvian congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (seen recently in Slashdot) that open source software enables citizens of a democracy to see for themselves whether the work of government, such as elections, is conducted as it should be. All of the announcements are in German, so go fish. The software, as described in the announcements, will compute preliminary results (which are announced as soon as possible after the polls close), run plausibility checks, and determine the Bundestag membership as well as distribution of seats to the political parties. It will use web clients for entry of voting data, data import, presentation of results, and preparation of printed results. It will be based on a three-level architecture (apparently standard J2EE) and deploy Enterprise Java Beans."
Electionware (Score:2, Funny)
And even though it is written in Java, they'll still likely have their election results sooner than we had ours in 2000
Re:Electionware (Score:2)
They'll probably only have a window of a few seconds...
Poetic (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Poetic (Score:1)
Re:Poetic (Score:2)
Very good (Score:1)
Better than Babel? (Score:5, Informative)
I think it gives a more readable result, especially as it keeps the paragraph formatting.
http://translator.abacho.de/translate.phtml
Re:Better than Babel? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Pure logic (Score:1)
rhetoric, it just seems very logic to me that
you want the system that you use for democratic elections to be as transparent and open as possible.
Is Java safe? (Score:1)
Re:Is Java safe? (Score:1)
Open? Accountability? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's clear from common sense that if the code to the platform is open source, but not the system itself then there is no way the citizens can see for themselves how the work is being conducted.
Re:Open? Accountability? (Score:1)
it would be absolutely fantastic when any computer-literate citizen could check out whether the voting system determines the outcome of the elctions in a correct way. therefore, i hope that what you (rightfully) deduce using the common sense approach, does not reflect the real situation.
does any (german)
Re:Open? Accountability? (Score:1)
Anyway, to bring my point accross
1) The ballot counting in Germany is still done by hand (which is good, see US elections), so no software at all (opensource or whatever) is involved. You either trust the results, or you don't
2) You need the raw data to verify the system, again regardless of the software used. Now IF you
have the raw data, the you can verify the system, because the algorithem used is public domain. Regardless of open or closed source
So all this is is a little media hoopla, and possibly allows some students to re-use the code for some university elections. But it does - in no way - make elections any more or less accountable.
Alex
Re:Open? Accountability? (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing parts of the US have not caught on to is the concept of one ballot paper per election. IIRC some of the voting in the US involves multiple elections on the same physical ballot paper. Which greatly complicates the issue of recounts, there was talk about needing software to work out which ballots were needed for a recount. As opposed to something like "sort out the blue ones".
You need the raw data to verify the system, again regardless of the software used. Now IF you have the raw data, the you can verify the system, because the algorithem used is public domain. Regardless of open or closed source.
But if you don't have the source you can't formally verify that it follows the algorithm. You could end up with something which will give the same results the vast majority of the time.
Re:Open? Accountability? (Score:2)
No, ballot counting by hand is Bad. See US elections.
Re:Open? Accountability? (Score:2)
In which case it isn't really "open source" in the first place. Anyway elections, at least in democratic parts of the world, often go to great pains to minimise the number of people who have a direct interest in the results conducting the count and to ensure that the entire process is open to the scruitiny of any interested party.
The rest of the world would be looking at the original source, while the corrupt code is running on the server.
Any interested party can quite easily feed the data into their copy of the program. If you have a situation where every candidate and the press get result A and the "official" version comes up with result B then it will be rather obvious what is going on.
Distribution to other countries? (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, congratulations to the German Government. It's good to see the German people upholding the values of democracy, in ironic counterpoint to the USA :P
The obvious question is this: The German Government now has the software for handling elections; will they now offer that software to the governments of other countries for (free|low cost)?
Re:Distribution to other countries? (Score:1)
the most standartised characteristic should be that the one who got the most votes wins, and that wouldn't even be the case in a certain other democracy on the other side of the atlantic...
Re:Distribution to other countries? (Score:1)
OK, point taken. However, the business logic wouldn't be that hard in any case, elections being fairly simple affairs, unlike air traffic control :)
The point is that it's quite simple to swap out bits of the business logic that doesn't apply (especially if the code is open source). If the German Government can demonstrate that secure, reliable, comparitively inexpensive elections can be done on an open source platform, then other governments may be able to see beyond the Microsoft Solution(tm) and go their own way.
Re:Distribution to other countries? (Score:2)
Which is also not the case in Germany, due to an error in the election rules - see here (german) [wahlrecht.de]
I predict: overload. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:1)
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:2)
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:2)
no clue about mySQL "compliance" wrt sql though
Re:I predict: overload. (Score:1, Insightful)
Little things like these not working:
ON UPDATE CASCADE
CHECK EXISTS IN
FOREIGN KEY(blah)
mySQL accepts them without complaining, but doesn't actually do any of the relationship processing side of the SQL(unless they've fixed this in the last few months). It basically seems to just store stuff... which could probably be done better with some blank textfiles.
Whereas... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whereas... (Score:5, Interesting)
In contrast, the german government had a left-swing in the last general elections, and with the leftist green party came a bunch of people into the parliament that had actually heard of or even - gasp - used Linux. Microsoft only realized when the parliament was publicly discussing using Linux for all its computers, and retaliated with massive lobbying, winning at least a compromise.
So this is only the latest event in a number of battles for the european governments.
MySQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Judging from the amount of posts that Slashdot drops anyway. You need to accurately record every vote, you can't drop 1 in 100,000 even.
Maybe if they are using MySQL 4 with transactions and all the other stuff, then fine. But really, Postgresql is a better match. And preferable is a solution where you can sue someone if it all goes wrong...
Re:MySQL? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
It does occansionally suffer some performance drawbacks due to lack of subselects and row-level locking (Some of which is addressed in the 4.x series, but we're too chicken to upgrade). In this respect, yes, Postgres would be much better. But I can't imagine any seriously complicated queries being used in a simple election process.
Also, probably most importantly, MySQL has (IMO) a better security model than Postgres. That's not to say that MySQL's implementation is better than Postgres' (I doubt it is), but in theory it's great
My big question is why use JBoss and Tomcat? Is the former dependent on the latter? What kind of benefit is there in running both?
Re:MySQL? (Score:1)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
In 1989, I taught myself C writing an election counting application for the particularly complex system used at my university student union. It was only an exercise and so the count was performed in the traditional fashion, with the continual distribution and redistribution of votes until sufficient candidates had been eliminated to determine the council.
The computer made this process trivial and a count that took upwards of 12 hours by hand for a few thousand votes could be done in the application in seconds (no surprise there). But were I to have used an RDBMS then the number of updates would have been quite horrible and the indexing largely ineffective. Blecch.
Having said that Germany's preferential voting system is pretty trivial so I don't imagine that performance will be any issue regardles of implementation.
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Re:MySQL? (Score:1)
In that case, automating them is a good idea.
I didn't mean to suggest that automating them was a bad idea just that if one chooses an RDBMS as the vehicle then performance will be unnecessarily compromised.
Re:MySQL? (Score:3, Informative)
JBoss implements the whole J2EE platform (including Enterprise JavaBeans, Messaging, Connector Architecture, Management Extensions, etc etc). Tomcat only implements the web layer (servlet & JSPs). JBoss can embed Tomcat as its web tier implementation, although I think using Jetty [mortbay.org] would have been more reliable and better performing choice as a servlet/JSP container.
Re:MySQL? (Score:1)
Re:MySQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly the sort of anecdotal evidence that open source advocates need to avoid. The fact that it's reliable to that extent is completely irrelevant. Businesses (and in this case, governments) don't care if it goes down occasionally. Sure, they'd rather it didn't. But what they do care about is that if it does go down, they don't lose data integrity. It's far less costly to have 2 hours downtime than it is to have garbage data in your database (potentially without you knowing about it). MySQL doesn't have the ACID properties, that provide this level of assurance, and until it does, it won't really be suitable for this sort of use.
ACID (Score:2, Interesting)
That said: I wouldn't trust MySql for anything. What makes it's acceptance in the open source community even harder to understand for me is the lack of a true GPL. Postgress is very reliable and is GPL. I also wouldn't know how to survive without referential integrity constraints, outer joins, subselects and nested queries!
But for a project like this, I would certainly go for Sybase or Oracle, I love free/OS software, which is often better than commercial products, but when it comes to database, I am not convinced yet!
Why ? (Score:1)
- it's very easy to install, setup, use and maintain. I got replication to work in 5 minutes the first time I tried. I wonder how long it takes with Oracle... Postgresql doesn't even know replication
- it's not ACID, yet it's very VERY reliable. It just keep going for months on without a restart provided the hardware underneath is big enough to handle the load. Even when it crashes your tables are always back up clean and nice. There's no need to run vacuum (Postgresql...) or rebuild indexes, it just work.
You get here the winning combo : something easy to use and that gets the work done. That's the same reason some people stick to their old Nikon camera or to an old truck.
Ummm... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not ACID, but very reliable? That's a bit of an anachronism. ACID isn't a library or a protocol to which you must be compatible -- it's a minimum guideline for reliability. ACID is a contract that says that if you put it in, you will be able to get it out again, unharmed, unchanged, and every time.
Atomicity: In a transaction involving two or more discrete pieces of information, either all of the pieces are committed or none are.
Consistency: A transaction either creates a new and valid state of data, or, if any failure occurs, returns all data to its state before the transaction was started.
Isolation: A transaction in process and not yet committed must remain isolated from any other transaction.
Durability: Committed data is saved by the system such that, even in the event of a failure and system restart, the data is available in its correct state.
----------
In short, by saying that "it's not ACID, yet it's VERY reliable" in reality means "it's not 100% percent reliable, but it's at least 85%."
If I delete a record that is a foreign key reference for other records, will MySQL guarantee that the record cannot be deleted or that every record that points to it is also deleted dependant upon admin preferences? PostgreSQL does.
MySQL has many more utilities to repair and maintain integrity of its databases than PostgreSQL. It's true. But then again, the authors of PostgreSQL have designed and engineered the datastore so that catastrophic data integrity failure cannot occur in the first place. Hardware failures (memory loses bits or hard drive fails to write correctly) can cause it, but even pulling the plug, while putting the most recent changes in jeopardy, will not destroy your committed data.
And before anyone comes forward with tales of PostgreSQL data integrity issues, please check that you are talking about v7.1 or later (available for more than a year).
Now then, on to issues of vacuum. I admit this can be a time sink. As you run updates and inserts on a PostgreSQL database, the indexes are not quite as efficient as they started (hence the need for vacuum) but it's not all bad as that. Most people would only have to run vacuum every night at 3am (or something like that) from a cron job. In short, PostgreSQL requires a minimum level of maintenance for optimum perfomance. Note that I did not say that it needs maintenance to keep your data safe -- only to maintain optimum performance. And nothing replaces good backups for any database.
And before you say, "But PostgreSQL's vacuum locks the table so you can't get work done," please note that 7.2 removes this constraint.
Will someone honestly try to say with a straight face that you would trust a MySQL database with gobs of data for an extended time without performing at least minor maintenance? If someone does, please tell me that they aren't running the German election database...
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
But then one has to wonder, how long to the germans plan to store the election data? Indefinitely? If so, wouldn't it be better to archive it?
(And that opens up a whole new can of worms. Say 10 years later a bug surfaced and they re-ran the archived data, showing a different victor--would legislation passed in that time become invalid due to a flawed election?)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Re: MySQL? (Score:2)
- Steve
Re:MySQL? (Score:1)
If you ever waited 15s for a webpage just to have a blank page or error message presented to you, you can be sure the backend of that site is MySQL.
On PHPBuilder there's an Article [phpbuilder.org] about the performance of the two with a real world application (actually, it's sourceforge). It's a little bit old now, but I guess it would look even better for PostreSQL now.
Imagine a concept like this being used in the US (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Imagine a concept like this being used in the U (Score:2)
Re:Imagine a concept like this being used in the U (Score:1)
Ignoring all the other possible affects on society etc, this would be totally sweet. Every computer scientist in the country working on a few Open Source programs. It wouldn't even be a "mythical man month" issue. It would all be about redundancy in error checking.
Of course, all the computer scientists in the world couldn't prevent the state governor from illegaly disenfranchising 100,000 voters a few months before the election.
Are you sure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice troll.
If you think about it, using OSS doesn't guarantee that nobody is cheating. Sure, you have the sources, but how do you know that the sources you have are the ones actually running on the machine? It's not like they're going to let anybody who wants to reinstall the whole thing.
Yes, it does give you the posibility to check the code to make sure there are no bugs, but it also opens the posibility that anyone with physical access to the machine can install a version of the software which looks the same but has a back door. It used to be that only the original writers had that power, so now you have to trust a lot more people.
So, no, open source software isn't a magic bullet either.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:1)
Does that mean that if you write a virus for OSS you need to distribute the source code along with it too?
I can see it now, the virus writer got two years in jail for the virus and 10 years for violating the GPL...
Re:Are you sure? (Score:2)
Because "you" (being the candidate, the press or any other interested party) can feed the data into a copy of the program. This isn't a program to count ballots it's to assign seats using a proportional representation algorithm. In order to skew the actual count itself would need a massive conspiracy amongst the counters.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, not true. Tons of software have been backdoored without access to the source code. Just last year at Blackhat Europe, a very bright guy from Australia described in detail a method that could be used to backdoor a running process.
May not release source (Score:4, Insightful)
If they are using OpenSource components, such as the server enviroment application servers etc.
They dont need release the source. People ranting that they MUST release the source, etiher are lost in a fantasy.
If I write an application for counting chicken egg hatching probablity and It runs under Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL I needent release a single thing as long as I dont use any GPL suff in the code I am handling myself.
That said it would be nice if they do, who cares if they dont. A private software company is doing the development, they may or may not have some kind of agreement or future plans for the software being written.
I am getting pretty sick of all the OpenSource neophiles barking they must release the code blah blah blah. I think you are probably a large part of the reason MS calls the GPL viral, and people actually belive them. It isn friggin poison fruit. The other reason MS calls the GPL viral of course is projects like this get sold on building upon OpenSource applications, taking gold from a dragon has a tendency to piss it off a wee bit.
Re:May not release source (Score:2)
/Janne
Re:May not release source (Score:2)
I am unsure, if in fact the Govt is considered and orginaization, or if by the act of voting the public is being exposed to its derivative works, a little cloudy this morning.
Guess its all moot since it not like freshmeat exactly has 25 Govt election packages hangning around
Re:May not release source (Score:1)
In fact it is stronger than that. There is absolutely no reason why they need to release any damn thing at all, regardless of whether they use GPL stuff in the code.
The GPL requirement to make the source code available only means that these people would have to make the source code available to their customer . Hardly likely to be a problem, because the customer is likely to be the one making the decision to release in any case.
Andrew.
Re:May not release source (Score:1)
Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
Hopefully they mean on the votes. If you ran it on the candidate promises you'd have a 95% failure rate!
"Statisches" Bundesamt? (Score:3, Funny)
MySQL (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MySQL (Score:1)
Fewer Lines! (Score:3, Funny)
And left open security holes [newsfactor.com], and been vulnerable to virii [f-secure.com]. But, but, fewer lines of code!
Re:Fewer Lines! (Score:1)
We hold the world in our iron fist!
or perhaps,
We've got you by the balls now!
Fewer Lines, but all in one place (Score:2)
See:
O'Reilly article on the subject [onjava.com]
Oracle's benchmarks [oracle.com] (PDF)
In the second article, Oracle claims:
Gee, how could two identical benchmarks produce such different numbers? Sounds like a marketing war to me. I wouldn't take any of those numbers, Microsoft's or Oracles, without a grain -- or a pillar! -- of salt.
Re:Fewer Lines! (Score:1)
What really puzzles me, is what they're trying to accomplish with that site? Upset Java developers or try and turn them to the dark side? If it's the latter, I doubt that their FUD has an positive effect.
And in other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Not the only use of OSS in Germany (Score:1, Informative)
there is more going on in Germany regarding
OSS in government or public institutions
The german Bundestag (parliament) will put Linux
on its 150 servers. See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/
(this article is in german language).
Police in Lower Saxony ("Niedersachsen",
Germany's second largest state) plans to use
Linux on 11000 clients as of 2004.
See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/
(again german). There is also a press
announcement about this on the web page of Lower Saxony Police. See http://www.polizei.niedersachsen.de/aktuell/index
Unrelated, but maybe also interesting
Debeka, market leader in private health insurances in Germany already uses Linux
on 3000 clients. See SuSE's web page
http://www.suse.de/en/press/press_releases/arc
(in English)
I would be interested to learn what the situation in the US is with regards to OSS
in public institutions ?
Have a nice day (I guess, noone says this
anymore today ?)
Anonymous Coward
What were they using before? (Score:1)
OpenSource for german schools (Score:2, Informative)
my wife is a teacher of a german primary school and there she is a representative for new technologies. So I get all the info-material the school gets from our government for consulting issues
And, i'm impressed of the OpenSource-activities they do for german schools. For example they support the opensource school-server project [heise.de] of the (IMHO best) german computer magazine c't [heise.de] and have a detailed brochure about the use of open-source software.
darkcookie
Are these guys crazy?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, I know they are counted by hand but anyway!
Postgresql is unreliable and less-than-perfect ACID compliant but MySQL is a far bit worse, even with the hacked-in transactions!
Why not buy a really good solid DB solution with rock-hard ACID complicance, it's peanut money in a project like this anyway.
Re:Are these guys crazy?! (Score:1)
And how, pray tell, would that happen? (Score:1)
Re:And how, pray tell, would that happen? (Score:2)
Re:Are these guys crazy?! (Score:2)
Re:Are these guys crazy?! (Score:2, Informative)
We have used out PostgreSQL server running millions of rows without a problem for a year or so now,
under MySQL I have performance drop off with only about 5000 rows...
Great except for one thing.... (Score:3, Interesting)
People might think the German government is using a Linux variant, but given that all the tools mentioned in the release probably work under BSD variants I have a feeling that they're using a combination of OpenBSD/FreeBSD, an OS that is much-liked for its ability to handle large numbers of transactions and its very high level of security.
SuSE (Score:2)
Re:SuSE (Score:2)
If they wanted to show Linux could handle such a load I'm sure SuSE Linux would have been prominently mentioned. That's why I was a bit puzzled by no mention of what Open Source OS was used.
Re:Great except for one thing.... (Score:1)
Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL run on MS Windows Also. So they might been silently using OS Tools with a propriatory platform.
:-)
Open source? Like Florida? (Score:1)
OSS in Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
The German government could do worse. A proprietry package would probably do the job as well, especially considering that the actual counting is done by hand (although this does eliminate the possibility of machine error in the actual voting process and of someone cracking a voting line). The reasons behind this are probably economic: MySQL, Tomcat, JBoss on Linux with a web client cost a lot less to implement for all the counting stations than a proprietry solution and Germany has the positive effect of supporting it's own software industry (SuSE) rather than someone else's.
Did they go open source in the 1930's (Score:1)
Before you start thinking the US should try this.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The US Forefathers were smart - they intentionally left the specific details of how to collect the vote and tally the results to the states, and ultimately, the local county districts. They weren't concerned as much about regional cultural and financial differences as much as they were concerned about the integrity of the election process.
If I wanted to rig an election in the US, I would have to rig it ONE COUNTY AT A TIME, because each election office makes their own choice how to operate on the voting day in question.
With a centralized, standard voting system like Germany's open source plan, I would just have to know how to rig one system.
The Florida election worked exactly as it should have - the election was just really close. It sucks that we couldn't just call the election at 10PM and go to bed, but you know what? Your vote *does* matter.
Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi (Score:2)
Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi (Score:2, Offtopic)
In 1960 a worse problem than Florida in 2000 cropped up and it was left to the President of the Senate to choose which set of electors to use from Hawaii, a very close vote there. Richard Nixon chose the set that gave the election to John F. Kennedy, because it was the right thing to do.
Don't believe me? Look it up yourself on Google, I will not give you links that only support my side of the arguement.
the german election system... (Score:1)
let me try to explain:
you have two votes to make. the first one is for a candidate of your electoral district (one of about 330, i believe, half of the number of seats altogether), whoever gets the most (relative majority) wins a seat.
the second vote is for a party, and the other half of the seats is distibuted among the parties that either won 3 direct candidates (first vote) or have got at least 5% of the second votes (to keep the radicals out), so that their over all percentage of seats is their percentage of second votes.
actually, it is even more complicated, but this is the basic idea.
the parliament then elects the chancellor and the government, so it is far from direct. you elect a parliament, not a government.
Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi (Score:1)
Probably it wasn't so much a precaution as practical reasons; it's hard to implement a centralized voting system in a huge, sparsely populated country with messengers on horses the fastet means of communications. I
I never cease to be amazed about the superhuman intelligence Americans attribute to their forefathers. They were drafting the first democratic constitution in modern times. To assume that they got it right, and people 150 years later, with all their past experience and constitutional theory, got it wrong, seems a somewhat steep claim.
Somehow, the U.S. constitution reminds me
of a FORTRAN compiler: there are a lot of smart
ideas in it, it was the first of its kind, and it was a tremendous achievement at the
time. However, the theory underlying it was
in its infancy, and there were no practical
experiences of how to do it right. It's venerable,
and we all learned from it, but let's not assume it's perfect and better than C or the typical European parliamentary constitution, respectively, just because it's older.
If I wanted to rig an election in the US, I would have to rig it ONE COUNTY AT A TIME
I fail to see the difference with German election
procedures. Votes have to be added in a treelike
fashion, and you have your choice of where to
intercept the process.
worst case: preliminary results are off (Score:3, Informative)
You might succeed, if you managed to subvert the central system, to have an incorrect result announced to the media on election day.
However this would soon be corrected, as the raw data for the permanent result will be published from the voting district level upwards.
The staff in the voting districts (which usually cover about 100-1000 registered voters) is made up of volunteers, mostly of nonpolitical city employees but also of party activists who volunteer to keep an eye on things. Occasionally, when appointed staff members have fallen sick, an early voter might get drafted. We are usually 8-10 persons and very, very unlikely to find anything in common to conspire for.
The counting of votes is open to the public (even if usually nobody, or the janitor of the school where the voting office is, looks in).
When we have counted, held a vote on any unclear ballot papers and the sums add up, we phone the results in to the city level. These results are further aggregated to the electoral district level and then, presumably, transmitted to Berlin in order to be processed by the software in question. Then we write up the protocol, package and seal the ballot papers into the voting box, and go home.
The local election commission (staffed by the town and by party representatives) later breaks the seal, reviews the unclear ballot papers (usually less then 1%), and perhaps also samples some votes for recounts. The result of the local election commission is the final one, and is aggregated into the federal final result. If I rightly recollect from the last federal elections, both the preliminary and the final results were published in our local paper on the voting district level. Of course we voting district volunteers would notice if results diverged from what we got on the evening of the election.
From the published voting-district level all calculations can be done with pen and paper, and will be by hopeful candidates who just did not get in.
The major safeguards of such a system are that the calculation of the final result can be checked by anyone on the outside. Of course, significantly, this only remains true if we stay with pen-and-paper ballots. The cost of that is that (at a rough guess) 1 % - 2 % of the voters have to serve in the voting offices
Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi (Score:2)
Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi (Score:2)
About the 'illegal stripping of 100,000 voters of the rights...', the supreme court halted the vote because it did not recount the entire state and thus treated voters in different counties differently. Ironically, that's the one scenario where Gore might have won. [washingtonpost.com]
So how come VoterMarch [votermarch.org] hasn't been updated in over a year? The site is owned by Maybe this is why... [posner.com]. (NOTE- it's from a different Posner than the one who runs VoterMarch.)
Oh, yeah, and by the way, see what *this* Brit has to say about about Palast's book. [newstatesman.co.uk]
Your sources are biased and have an adgenda. Nice try.
Not exactly (Score:1)
As far as I know the software is used to determine the preliminary results on that day, especially for the media. The official results will be determined as before, that is without any software.
Throughout this thread it seems that a lot of US based readers assume German elections work just as US elections, which is not the case. For the curious: Introduction to the German Federal Election System [iuscomp.org]
Alex
GNU Free voting project (Score:4, Informative)
We are a free software project creating Java electronic voting software released under the General Public License [gnu.org] (GPL). With this software we aim to:-
Provide a secure and private system
Create scalable and reliable software
Offer a non-commercial, non-partisan voting alternative
Use the GPL to create an open system that Internet users will trust
Release a system that can be used to support the growth of effective democracy anywhere in the world Additionally, in support of our wider development community, the project aims to:-
- Advocate the free software paradigm
- Evangelise the use of technology to strengthen democracy within a holistic understanding of the current malaise i.e. Internet voting alone isn't going to solve turnout problems
As an official GNU [gnu.org] package and one of two electronic voting projects of FreeDevelopers.net [freedevelopers.net] our Free Software evangalism aims our particularly important.Use EJB's ? noway. (Score:1)
Last i checked you can't run/deploy EJB's on open source java application servers. You gotta go to commercial ones.
I don't think they'd have a dire need for EJB's in such application though. And they can still remain J2EE-compliant.
Re:Use EJB's ? noway. (Score:1)
Translation (Score:2)
Therefore you are with us as more curiously, open and more competent Far philosopher exactly correctly.
Wha???
Re:Subject Here (Score:1, Offtopic)
graspee
Oh G-d mod this up!!! HAHAHAH!!! (Score:1)
Re:Correction (Score:1)
Or best of all really naughty?