I could certainly support abandoning the party if people think they can pull it off however I’m more hopeful of a takeover and if the DLC wants to bail from the party so be it. I’d rather push the DLC democrats in to the republican party so the progressives can truly be allowed to lead.

Hopefully, Bush getting elected will help progressives not be complacent as they would have been had Kerry got elected.

You’re right, the voting machines we have no are a disaster. When I voted there was no way for me to tell that I voted for who and what I voted for. I don’t know if my vote was stored on the smart card I used or in the machine, but if it’s on the smart card I have no way to verify that it was written to the card properly and that the vote will be recorded before it’s used again. If it’s in the machine I have no idea if the machines votes were recorded at the end of the day (much like accidently pressing reset on a lever machine).

Our thought was a system that stored votes on an encrypted flash card in the machine and printed a ballot that is left in the ballot box. The ballot would have human readable results as well as bar code results. The system could store all the data so that barcodes at random could be scanned later by someone else to very the vote was counted. They system would store every vote so records could be audited however it could not tell you who voter 11375 voted for, so no one knows who voted for who.

They key components of the software would be that the source of the software would have to be made public, including the BIOS (I can imagine some attacks from the BIOS), and the hardware would only run software digitally signed by the hardware vendor so that election workers couldn’t replace the software with their own. All records would be stored on this kind of secured hardware. At the end of the day each polling location gets a set of numbers for each item in the election and reports them.

The voting system I used uses smart cards that can be used over and over again. I would use cheap plastic magstrip cards a-la hotel room keys. The manufacturer would provide the cards that are used once. A central facility for the county can inventory the cards before and after an election. The difference in the number of cards used should be the number of votes cast + error, which should be documented at the polling location. After the election a sample of ballots can be run through a hand scanner to verify the votes were cast and counted. The person doing this should be able to match the votes on the ballot with what’s on the screen. In the event of catastrophic failure these votes could be recounted.

Think of how much we could help baby seals if we just taxed all income over $100,000 at 90%!

This is a problem the democratic party is facing right now. There’s a split between the liberal democrats and the DLC, a group of moderate democrats. The DLC takes “centerist” or “moderate” positions in order to attract people who fall under the top of the bell curve. You don’t have to attract people with a wide range of political beliefs when you’re near the center. On the other hand the liberal democrats are wondering what happened to the really liberal ideas. We saw the problem this caused for the party in 2000 with the Nader vote.

Somewhere the party needs to find the balance between passive liberalism (for example saying there’s a problem with something) and far left active liberalism (doing anything to fix it). It seems most of America has become afraid of active liberalism run wild. There seems to be a feeling of “it’s okay for those people” (maybe without the negative vibe).

In any case, the point of all this is that America is afraid of a true liberal majority. They are afraid that that majority would take away everything they have worked for and to create only to give it away to someone else. It might not be a bad idea, but it’s a big part of what they are afraid of.

There’s all things the government can do to help the country, but where’s the cost benefit analysis on this one? Imagining it’s a legit claim they’d do better tracking down people selling warez. They’d do a lot better for me tracking down people selling explosives.