The Perfect Voting Machine

Ballots must be physical. The ballot should exist as a physical medium, allowing for recount by multiple independent parties.

Ballots must be machine-readable. The ballot must be marked in such a way that it can be counted by machine, for speed, efficiency, and repeatability.

Ballots must be human-readable. The ballot should be marked in such a way that an average human can read it, in case the counting machines are called into question or unavailable.

Ballots should be marked by machine. This prevents human error in ballot-marking in such a way that the ballot becomes invalid.

Ballots should be confirmed by the voter before final casting. Before the ballot is counted and stored, it must be read by the same machines that would count the votes in a recount. This ensures that the ballot is readable, and reduces the possibility of both mechanical and human error marking the ballot.

Each ballot should have the choices printed in a random order. It's been shown that earlier placement on the ballot conveys an advantage in winning the election. This means that whoever writes the laws defining ballot order can give themselves an electoral advantage, which is a clear conflict of interest. Each ballot should randomize the order of the candidates.

No machine, document, or person besides the voter should possess both the voter's identifying information and ballot contents. The ballot must not be marked with any potentially identifying information such as the user's name or a timestamp with precision finer than one hour. No person should see the marked ballot after it is marked besides the voter. Neither the printing nor reading machines should have any knowledge of the voter.

Ballots must be impossible to counterfeit. Exactly as many valid countable ballots should exist as votes are cast. Voters must be prevented from walking in with a pocket full of blank ballots; similarly, false ballots should be impossible to insert after the election ends. Practically, this means all ballots must be marked on-site with unique information that can be confirmed valid, but which is different on every ballot. As a first-guess suggestion, perform a one-way encryption on a timestamp. Then perform a two-way encryption on that, plus GPS coordinates, using an encryption key that is known only to a few high-level election officials. This ensures every valid ballot is unique, and allows each ballot to be tracked to the polling location it was marked, while maintaining timestamp (and thus voter) anonymity.

Ballots should only be issued to registered voters. It should be impossible to issue a ballot without also marking the name of a single registered voter off the roll. Similarly, it should be impossible to mark a name off a roll without issuing a ballot. Each registered voter should be issued a voting card before arriving at the polling location, containing cryptographically unique information to that voter. Only with the presence of that card will a ballot be issued.

Only one ballot should be issued to each voter. After a voter is issued a ballot, their name is marked on the roll. If that voter determines that their ballot was mismarked, they must turn it back in to receive a replacement. No replacement ballots can be issued without the original being returned.

The design and firmware of all machines involved must be open and inspectable. Maintaining voter trust in the system is paramount. Open-source and open-hardware systems ensure that no back doors or remote access is possible, and allow review for flaws by many thousands of coders and engineers.

It should be impossible to lose ballots. The to-the-minute vote count shall be constantly shared via network with the central election office. This creates a check against large numbers of ballots suddenly "disappearing" before being counted.

So here's the process.

1) I receive my voter card in the mail. The card is marked with a crypto-hash of my personal information, making it effectively impossible to fake.

2) I arrive at the polling location and present my card. My card is scanned, marking me from the roll as having voted. (Optionally, some biometric identification may be performed here, to prevent people from voting with others' voting cards.) A ballot is printed with spaces for all races in my district, plus a unique code identifying the ballot as legitimate and from this polling location.

3) I take that ballot to the marking machine. I insert my ballot, manipulate a touchscreen, and the machine marks my ballot for each race as I indicate

4) I take my marked ballot to the reading machine. I insert my ballot, and it tells me who it thinks I voted for. This machine also confirms that my ballot is properly marked with a valid crypto-stamp indicating a legitimate ballot.
4a) I confirm that my ballot is printed correctly, both visually and by machine. The machine keeps my ballot and counts my vote. I get a sticker and leave.
4b) I find an error in my ballot marking. I return to the poll worker, who inserts my ballot into the ballot-printing machine. The machine confirms that my ballot was valid, marks it with information which renders it invalid (including a human-readable timestamp), and issues a new one with new markings. Return to step 3.

What attacks are possible against this architecture? Obviously we have a problem with running out of ink. Perhaps we mark everything with high-power lasers?

Letter to the Editor: Amp Alternative

Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. But I’d like to propose one alternative which I think will be simpler and cheaper.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. So we’re spending (very roughly) a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption. If you want to get it off the ground fast, don’t put a fixed dollar value on it. Say “There’s a million dollars in the pot. Whoever carpools splits it.” It will take off instantly.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. But it’s worth consideration.

What's better than public transportation?

I'm a big fan of public transportation. The ability to survive without owning a car would lead to a tremendous reduction in cost-of-living. Reduction in traffic is in everyone's best interest. And not having to drive every day would let me get a lot more reading done. (Or more realistically, sleep.)

But here in Nashville, the bus system is more or less a joke for much of the city. I live in the city limits, and I could get to work by bus, but I'd have to spend ninety minutes instead of twenty, I'd get there late, and I'd spend more money. The many thousands in the exurbs are pretty much hosed except for the Music City Star, and even then your options once you reach Nashville are limited.

The more I think about it, the more I think the emphasis on trains and buses may be misplaced. Mass transit as a concept has one inherent limitation: each rider wants to stop at only two places, and no others. The more riders there are wanting different stops, the less convenient it gets for everyone involved. But the fewer stops the bus (or train or whatever) makes, the fewer people the bus is convenient for. You want a very high person-to-stop ratio. This only works for high-density end-to-end traffic paths, like an express from a park-and-ride, a commuter train, or a small local circuit in a high-density area.

But what about those of us (and I'd guess we're the majority) who neither live nor work in high-density areas? By definition, we collectively have more stops to make. To keep a high person-to-stop ratio, you have to reduce the number of people per vehicle. Perhaps to, say, five.

I argue that mass carpooling could have more effect getting cars off the road than any imaginable public transportation system. Say we're comparing three options: 60-person buses, 5-person carpools, and the default single-occupant car. If there are six thousand people commuting from Clarksville (to pick a random number and exurb), that's six thousand cars, twelve hundred carpools, or one hundred buses. Obviously both carpools and buses are vast improvements to traffic. And if everyone would ride the busses, they win over carpools. But not everyone will bus, because of the lack of flexibility.

So the next question is, how many people are willing to bus? How many are willing to carpool? And at what point does realistic carpooling get more vehicles off the road than busing? I won't bore you with my algebraic prowess (maybe later), but in our case the answer works out to be pretty interesting: regardless of the number of people involved, if just 25% more people are willing to carpool than are willing to bus, mass carpooling gets more vehicles off the road. This even though a bus holds twelve times more people! Since a carpool is far more convenient than a bus, I'd expect far more than 25% greater ridership.

Now let's consider cost. If you've got 100 busses, that's at least $30,000,000 in capital expenditure. Probably more. Each bus costs around $100/hr to run. Even if you assume they only run four hours a day (two round trips), that's $40,000/day, or $10,000,000 a year in operating costs. Assuming each bus lasts ten years, that's $13,000,000/year to get 5,900 vehicles off the road. This seems like a lot, but consider that adding a lane of interstate between Nashville and Clarksville would cost something like $150,000,000 and take several years.

How about gasoline? A hundred mile round trip at 25 mpg costs $15 a day. That's $22 million a year in gasoline saved by getting those 5900 cars off the road! That's a number so big I almost want to cry.

Further, consider that traffic can add half an hour to your commute each way. One hour a day saved, times six thousand drivers, is 1.5 million man-hours per year. Figure an average wage of $12/hr, and $13,000,000/year starts to sound cheap.  If we come up with a solution that makes a significant reduction in traffic that only costs, say, a million dollars a year, we collectively are coming out way ahead.

So here's the idea: we should pay people to carpool. But not at a flat rate. Put a million dollars in a pot, and declare that that pot will be distributed evenly among everyone who carpools that year, weighted by how many days they do it. Imagine how people would respond to an incentive like that! If only five people carpool all year, boom, easy $200k each. Pay it out more often than once a year, too. Say every two weeks. Within a few months you should reach an equilibrium point where exactly the right number of people are carpooling for the money being offered. After that you can see just how good the system is and how much it's worth.

As an added bonus, you could let people without cars sign up for the system, and basically turn every driver in the city into a government-provided taxi for the carless. The driver gets paid by the number of passengers, so its a win for them. And the car-free individual gets better service than busses.

The problem is making the matches. If you could get our hypothetical six thousand people to put their schedules in a system, a relatively simple computer program could make matches between them and make a huge dent in traffic. There are already such systems, but there's relatively little data in them. Paying people to participate will fix that. And with smart phones becoming ubiquitous, hitching a ride without advance planning becomes easy.

Now, how does this apply to the Amp? To be clear, I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I think this alternative is better from almost every perspective. Let's run the numbers.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. Each rider represents at most one car off the road, but maybe not even that. Depends on whether they count the same person going both directions as one rider or two. So being generous, we’re spending at least a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you that the system has to be set up well from the start; I've seen far too many systems like this half-complete with clearly zero ease-of-use consideration. The problem isn't trivial. But it is solvable, and I think this is what we should be looking at as an alternative to ripping up West End for a few years.

Footnote:

Suppose you have two forms of transit available to people. Cars, which hold 5 people, and busses, which hold 60. Suppose your goal is to get as many vehicles off the road as possible. For cars to get more people off the road than busses, more people have to be willing to use cars than are willing to use busses. How many more?

Define DB to be the number of people held by a bus, and DC to be the number of people held by a car. The ratio of people willing to carpool vs. number willing to bus must be at least (1-1/DB)/(1-1/DC)

If this criterion is met, more vehicles will be off the road by carpooling, even though each vehicle holds fewer people.

Attempted murder? Early retirement!

Knox County Sheriff's deputy Frank Phillips was fired last month after he was caught on camera choking a handcuffed and unresisting UT student until he passed out.

Let me say that again: the student was handcuffed, was not resisting, and this officer choked him unconscious.

It's just been announced that the Knox County DA will not file criminal charges against Phillips. This is a travesty. The message could not be clearer: a crime that would result in a normal person being tried for attempted murder, results in far less for a police officer. Every event like this helps break down the public trust in the police. We need that trust, or society will eventually fail.

Of course, given the history of police abuse in this country, I'm surprised Phillips even lost his job. Praise to Knox County sheriff Jones for doing the right thing. If he runs for anything anywhere near me, he has my vote. DA Randall Nichols, however, should never hold office again. Perhaps he'd like to explain himself?

Unfortunately, as I understand things no other entity in Tennessee has the authority to press charges against Phillips for his abysmal crime, possibly excepting the US attorney for East Tennessee. The state legislature should consider fixing that. A DA that's asleep at the wheel should not have the power to do that much damage to public trust.

Review: Dallas

This is a review of the new revival of Dallas, particularly as compared to the original show. I'm probably one of the few people of my generation to have seen every episode of Dallas. Seventeen seasons, three hundred and eighty episodes.

Obviously I find the show to have some appeal.

I'm not obsessive about it, by any means. Dallas is not the best thing ever. The plot developments are sometimes contrived, and sometimes it's just outright cheesy. But the old show did a pretty good job of holding my attention with its well-developed and well-acted characters. With moments like "Who Shot JR?" and the amazingly ballsy dream season, Dallas deserves its place in television history.

The occasional moment of eighties anachronism is pretty enjoyable, as well. The Ewings have car-phones as a sign of their incredible richness. One industrialist brags that when his computer chips are complete, each one will hold over ten thousand pieces of information. And, for a darker turn, Sue Ellen drinks like a fish her entire pregnancy and nobody says a word about the health of her baby.

This was clearly a show of its time.

The reason Dallas worked was because the characters had clear motivations, and the conflicts developed from their relationships. The Ewings are all family, they all love each other, but they all have different ideas about how to proceed. Same for the Barnes family, though of course it was much smaller. Almost every strange plot twist was either a response to real-world concerns (actors dying or leaving) or a means to give the characters something new to respond to.

The new Dallas ignores all that. When Pam left Bobby, he was months or years before he was ready to move on. But Christopher has gone through two serious relationships that ended badly in the last, what, less than a year of show-time? Plus finding out his mother died, which nobody has reacted to. Yet Christopher is ready to jump right in with yet another new girl. It would be okay if they were presenting it as the action of a hurt person who's reacting to terrible events in his life, but they're not. Heather is just someone for Christopher to bang for drummed-up conflict.

What does Christopher want, exactly? Family? Business success? I have no idea. How about John Ross? Emma? Pamela? Eleana? As far as I can tell, they all want money and revenge. There's nothing holding these people together, no bonds of family that force them into conflict. It would have been much simpler for John Ross to simply leave Southfork. I have no reason to think he cares about it as a place or a piece of his legacy, or about the people living there. JR cared. Why does John Ross?

Now, some characters aren't like that. Bobby and Sue Ellen, they're better, but that's because they were defined characters when the show started. JR was pretty well-done before he died, as well. Cliff, though, is a totally one-note character, which is a disservice to him. Cliff was often deeper than they're portraying him now.

And some of the plot points are just toally unbelievable.

• Christopher supposedly grew up with Drew and Eleana Ramos. But if that's so, how does nobody know who Joaquin is? He was raised as their sibling!
• At the end of the most recent episode, Drew has apparently set fire to Southfork, despite heightened security.
• The entire family has left alcoholic Sue Ellen home alone in a house full of unlocked liquor. After having done the same thing, repeatedly, in the eighties.
• Many people want revenge on the entire Ewing family for something JR did. As if they aren't all individuals who have taken their own actions over time. Most of the bad blood was against JR (or Jock, if you go back far enough), and they're both dead. I could see Bobby or Sue Ellen having enemies of old, and John Ross is clearly a schemer in his own right. But nobody seems to be blaming them for their own actions. It's all about what JR did to Papa Ramos, which is a straight-up copy of what Jock supposedly did to Digger Barnes.
• And these plotters feel a need to repeat their plans and motivations to each other every episode, just so we viewers aren't left behind... "How is it going?" "Wonderful! Soon we will have our revenge against the Ewing family for stealing our father's property and driving him to his death!" "Oh, right, I'd forgotten why we were doing all this..."
• Drew is instantly totally over his guilt at killing two unborn babies, and now back on a revenge kick.
• All these people involved in shady dealings seem totally unaware that everything they do could be recorded at any time.

I'm afraid I'm almost done with Dallas. It's been fun seeing a few old friends, but I'm not making any new ones. That's what it was going to take to make this revival work.

Spying on Feinstein

Senator Feinstein just found out that the CIA has been spying on her, personally. She's outraged. Spying on us little people, that's just fine by her, she's all for it. But spying on her!? UNACCEPTABLE! Don't they understand that elected officials have different rules!? The CIA exists to protect Senators from people like us! (Reading editorial pages, that's some subversive activity, there...)

I mean, really, what was she expecting? That our spy agencies would suddenly start behaving ethically and recognizing some boundaries, when she's been encouraging them to do the exact opposite? She's a hypocrite, and a stupid one at that.

When an authoritarian moron like her (or, you know, pick your hypocrite) can get re-elected over and over, our election system is totally broken. We need a way to permanently break incumbent advantage, giving new candidates a way to overcome the entrenched, entitled political class. Preferably a way that isn't limited to millionaires and their friends, too. And it has to start from local and state governments; DC is never going to limit its own power.

So if you needed a reason to support approval voting, here's a new one: it would help defeat Senator Feinstein.

Oh, and my capcha for submitting this letter? 4nsa. Ha.

Google Fiber in Nashville

Nashville is now on the short list of potential Google Fiber expansion sites. Here's what that would mean: 

• Faster internet speeds for all, making every information-based company in Nashville more competitive
• Free internet connections for thousands of poor families, making job searching and education vastly easier, and relieving considerable burden from our libraries
• Better service offerings from AT&T and Comcast, as they're finally forced to compete and improve their dismal services.

I am not given to hyperbole, so please take it literally when I say that Google Fiber coming to Nashville would be one of the most cost-effective infrastructure improvements that could ever happen in this city. We need to do everything possible to make this happen.

Like all things, you're going to see some opposition. You can bet that that opposition will be supported by Comcast and AT&T. Even in Kansas City, where Google Fiber has changed everything for the better, some bought legislators are trying to keep Google Fiber from spreading to the rest of the state. They claim it's in the name of free markets, but how does preventing competition ever lead to free markets? Free markets are all about having as many competitors as possible!

If you see any such bills proposed here, look past the spin and recognize them for what they are: legalized monopoly for AT&T and Comcast, at the expense of all of us.

Quote-itis

Seriously, what is with this? Quotation marks indicate that something is not to be taken literally! They do not emphasize things! Signs I've seen lately, with my translations:

• "Look twice" for motorcycles (hahaha nope, just run them over)
• Flu shots given "daily" (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)
• "Select" Valentine's Day decor 50% off

That last one doesn't even make sense as emphasis! Who's typing these things? And "why"?

Guyana as a US state?

Guyana is a small country in the northern part of South America. It was a Dutch colony, then an English one. They became independent in 1966. Its 760,000 people speak English.

And some of them want to join the United States.

According to that group, half the population of Guyana has left in the last few decades. And half of those emigres came to the United States, and most of the remaining population is trying to get here! Relations between the countries are close.

It's an interesting concept.

TN consumer tax form fail

Anyone tried to fill out a Tennessee consumer use tax return lately? Probably not, since it’s entirely voluntary. That might explain why it’s so horribly designed.

First, it has to be done online; there’s no paper version. That’s OK, but only if you do online stuff right. Second, there’s no way to save your work; you type in a huge amount of information, lose your browser session and have to start over. Third, all the data has to be formatted to an absurd degree. Cents have to be in a separate field from dollars, entered as a two-digit amount. Years have to be two-two-four digits. Miss one, and it won't accept your form, but also won't point out your mistake! Fourth, you have to enter a separate line item for every purchase. If you want to add a number of purchases all at one time, too bad; you have to do that one by one.

Oh, and they don’t take Visa, of all things. Say what you want about whether this kind of tax should or should not exist. But speaking as an engineer, if you’re going to do something, it should be done well.