The Public Apparently Isn't Interested In Sound Economics

from the this-is-unfortunate dept

So I hear there's some sort of election happening this week (have you heard anything about it?). Earlier this year, we wrote about an awesome effort by the folks at NPR's Planet Money to bring together a group of five different economists, from all over the political spectrum, and see if they could find points that all of them agreed upon. They came up with a list of six things that all of them agreed would be smart ideas for a President to implement -- and what was striking about all six was that not a single one of them was anywhere near politically tenable. Every one of them would be argued down immediately.

Part of the problem, honestly, was that nearly all of them required understanding a) a little bit of economics and b) being willing to understand nuanced situations and how different moves reverberate through the economy. Those, unfortunately, are rather difficult things -- and it was seen in our comments too. We had over 200 comments, and many of them showed exactly that problem. People made broad, sweeping generalizations based on the short one-sentence versions, without understanding the details or the nuances. Also, ridiculously, many people insisted that the plans were all a nefarious plot of one particular side of the political spectrum, totally ignoring the fact that the economists came from all sides. The idea that, for example, anyone might consider economists Dean Baker or Bob Frank "right wing" is so hilarious as to defy comment.

Since then, Planet Money continued the series with some really interesting followups. First they discussed some of the ideas that the economists couldn't agree on (free heroin!). Then it got fun. They brought in some political spin-meisters to take the policy planks that everyone admitted would never get very far coming out of a real politician's mouth and see if they could spin them positively. It's a really enjoyable/scary episode, in which complex economic ideas are reduced to crowd pleasing soundbites, mostly focused on misdirecting people from reality and, well, accentuating the positive.

Finally, last week, they decided to focus group the ideas and proved what we already knew: that the ideas, when explained to everyday Americans, were immediately and sometimes caustically shot down as being horrible, horrible ideas. They then tried to take some of the spin-meister versions, and present them as commercials... and got a little budge from a few people, but that was about it. In the end, it was clear that these ideas -- no matter how good they might be -- would immediately be shot down by the public, meaning that any candidate who proposed them wouldn't have much luck.

That's somewhat depressing, but a sign of the world we live in today. I'd argue that a big part of the problem is that nearly all of the proposals involve what appears to be short-term pain for long-term benefit -- and we live in such a short-term focused society. But as someone who tends to think that we really need much more understanding of economics and its impact among the general populace, this kind of thing only confirms how weak our economics education is today.

Filed Under: economics, election, politics

New Jersey To Let 'Displaced' Voters Use Electronic Voting... If They Give Up Secrecy & Return A Hardcopy

from the details,-details dept

Given the still ongoing recovery from Hurricane Sandy in the northeast, New Jersey has decided to deal with potential problems with Tuesday's election by declaring that "displaced" voters can qualify to submit ballots the same way overseas members of the armed services can -- via email or fax, followed up with a hardcopy. They're also allowing early voting, more provisional voting and absentee voting, but the ability to submit by email is generating plenty of attention. Some, like professor Richard Hasen, who is an "election law" expert, worries about the security of such a system, and whether or not ballots could get hacked or lost. Professor Andrew Appel, who has done work with e-voting systems in the past, worries about two things. First, the loss of the secret ballot when you vote this way:

We see already one problem: The loss of the secret ballot. At many times in the 20th century, NJ political machines put such intense pressure on voters that the secret ballot was an important protection. In 2012 it’s in the news that some corporations are pressuring their employees to vote in certain ways. The secret ballot is still critical to the functioning of democracy.

But, he's also worried about the unclear nature of the announcement (pdf), in which it is not emphasized that anyone who votes this way must also submit a hardcopy. He notes that the directive about allowing displaced voters to vote this way left out the line about submitting the hardcopy, and the law is not clear what happens to votes where the hardcopy is not sent as well. The fear then, is that these votes will wind up in court.

Then things really get murky: The statute doesn’t say what happens if the hardcopy is not received, except that the county superintendent of elections must investigate. It’s not difficult to imagine that these ballots will end up in court.

I urge the Lieutenant Governor to issue a revised order, clarifying that displaced voters must immediately follow up by mailing hardcopy identical to their e-mailed ballot–or risk having their votes thrown out.

It does sound like officials in New Jersey now understand this and intend to be much clearer about it, but it is raising reasonable concerns.

Finally, well-known e-voting critic (and New Jersey resident) Ed Felten has actually taken a much more "it's not great, but given the situation, it's okay" type of position.

I am in no way a fan of online voting. Just last week I hosted an online symposium where experts talked about the many barriers to secure online voting. But under these circumstances I can understand why the State has taken the steps it has. The email+hardcopy approach will undermine ballot secrecy, and inevitably some voters will forfeit their votes by failing to submit the follow-on hardcopy ballot correctly. But at the same time, the state is allowing citizens who are facing a tough situation a greater chance to cast their votes. I would strongly oppose any long-term move toward online voting, but I can see the point of allowing limited email+hardcopy voting for displaced voters under these very unusual circumstances.

If the voting in New Jersey turns out weird tomorrow, the conspiracy theories are never going to stop...

Filed Under: e-voting, election, new jersey, privacy, secret ballot

German Pirate Party Wins Seats In Fourth Straight State Election

from the it's-becoming-a-movement dept

It now seems pretty clear that the German Pirate Party is a legitimate player in that country. A week after its third straight win in local state elections, the German Pirate Party appears to have won a similar percentage of votes in the country's largest region, North Rhine-Westphalia. The estimates are that it will end up with 18 seats on a little under 8% of the vote (Update: more final results are now showing 20 seats, so it's an even larger victory). In Berlin, Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein, the party was able to get similar votes as well, suggesting that this isn't a regional thing and has become a recognizable force -- especially among young people in Germany. The real question now is if it can use this to create some momentum going into the national elections next year.

Separately, it's worth pointing out that this result came about after it was noted a few days ago that the German Pirate Party's website was being censored in state schools, by a filter that claimed that the site was about "illegal drugs". It seems like pretty blatant censorship to block a political party's website -- even if it was "accidental" -- for daring to question the prevailing law enforcement regime around certain banned substances.

Filed Under: censorship, election, germany, pirate party

French Tweeters Get Around Ban On Tweeting Election Results Using WWII-Era Codes

from the gouda-cheese dept

Last week, we wrote about how French Twitter users were being warned not to use social media tools like Twitter to reveal local polling or election results before all the French voting booths closed in the Presidential election. We pointed out how silly this was, and it appears that folks in France used a simple mechanism to get around the rules: using WWII-era coding techniques to share information in the same manner that the French Resistance used:

As a result, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy became either Tokaji wine which, like his father, comes from Hungary, or Rolex because of his perceived "bling-bling" lifestyle.

His Socialist opponent Francois Hollande was either Gouda cheese (from Holland) or a soft, sweet "Flanby" caramel desert -- an old and unforgiving nickname for the portly frontrunner.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen was associated with the names of totalitarian regimes or rodents and Communist Party-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon was either a rotten tomato or something linked to the former Soviet Union.

From there, it sounds like people just had fun with it, figuring out all sorts of ways to obliquely refer to the different candidates and how well they were doing without directly referring to any of them. Once again, the internet views censorship as an obstacle, and routes around it, through a rather creative form of "encryption."

Filed Under: code, election, france, social media, world war two

French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'

from the not-likely dept

Update: Apparently the Guardian made a translation error, and the French 'bugger' is actually borrowed from the English 'bug' (as in computer bug) and just means 'crash'.

Last year, we wrote about a situation developing in Canada, where a strict reading of legacy election laws made it illegal for east-coast voters to discuss exit polls on Facebook or Twitter until polling stations across the country had officially closed. Now, the Guardian reports that a more or less identical situation has cropped up in France, where newspapers and regulators are warning citizens to keep mum about early results in the upcoming presidential election.

French law prohibits the media from publishing polls or exit surveys between midnight on the Friday before election day until all the voting stations have closed on Sunday – 8pm in cities and 6pm in towns.

This is strictly upheld. Because of time differences, French voters in overseas territories and departments, such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, will have gone to the polls the previous day; knowing early results in areas where the outcome is expected to be close could influence last-minute voters.

The French commission for opinion polls has ruled that Twitter and Facebook fall within the legal definition of media and are bound by the law.

The Journal du Dimanche headlined an article about the situation: "Twitter fera-t-il bugger l'élection?" (Will Twitter bugger crash the election?)

As we noted last year with regard to Canada, such laws are holdovers from a time when the national media was controlled by a few key players. In the modern world, where everyone is the media, they are completely impractical. And indeed, as the Canadian election wrapped up, it became clear that citizens were completely ignoring the rule, even going so far as to set up a website dedicated to aggregating such tweets. In fact it seemed that the law actually drove more people to share early results online—and then the whole story sort of fizzled, when Elections Canada admitted that they only investigate and enforce the law in response to specific complaints.

As the Guardian notes, such a law is perhaps more significant in France, where the overseas territories mean the polling window spans two days. But, whatever arguments there may be for protecting the sanctity of elections, the law is still unenforceable. I suspect we'll see the same disregard in France as we did in Canada—and probably the same lack of repercussions, depending on the outcome of the vote. Someday, somewhere in the world, we may see a close election get contested on the grounds that such a law was broken—and that will spark a huge debate about the role of social media and the internet in election polling. But for now, it's unlikely that many people will heed the warnings and alter their behavior.

Filed Under: election, france, social media
Companies: facebook, twitter

Guy Sues Facebook For His Failure To Be Elected To Congress

from the proving-why-you-shouldn't-be-in-congress dept

Another day, another silly lawsuit. Michael Scott points us to this hilarious lawsuit from Majed Moughni, who tried to run for Congress last year in Michigan. He came in fourth in the primaries, but he's suing Facebook, claiming it's responsible for his loss. How so? Well, he claims that he was accumulating friends on Facebook in the lead up to the primaries, and then Facebook killed his account. Facebook notes that his account was halted because of activity that appeared to be doing things similar to spammers -- and that users who face this issue are alerted to it before their accounts are cut off. It seems likely that this lawsuit will get tossed out pretty damn quickly, as soon as Facebook points out that it has every right to deny service to folks based on a desire to protect users. Section 230 allows companies to filter as they see fit and not see any liability for those choices, and it seems that this case should be covered. Of course, for someone running for Congress, you would hope they actually understood the law on these issues, but I guess that's not really a requirement.

Filed Under: election, liability, majed moughni, section 230
Companies: facebook

Sorry, Net Neutrality Simply Was Not An Important Issue In This Year's Election

from the making-nothing-out-of-nothing dept

This one is just amusing. Scott Cleland, who works for the big broadband companies as a professional propagandist, and has a long history of making absolutely ridiculous claims in order to support their positions, apparently got a bit of traction from the non-thinking press, after he started pushing the message that all of the Democrats who signed a "pledge" to support network neutrality from the group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) lost in the recent election. So, suddenly, it sounds like a referendum on net neutrality with the people saying they're against it. Verizon was so excited about this that it even Tweeted about it and various folks in the press parroted the claim without really looking into the details. Even CNN wrote an article about it, suggesting this was the "final nail in the coffin for net neutrality."

While I doubt any net neutrality legislation is going to get passed anyway (and, that's a good thing, because after the telcos got done with it, it wouldn't be what you wanted anyway), to suggest in any way that this election was a referendum on net neutrality is pure folly. What the "press" left out is that the PCCC's net neutrality pledge was hardly the only such thing out there. Also, the PCCC pledges were not from existing Representatives, but those trying to get elected to Congress against incumbents -- and nearly every one came from historically Republican districts. In other words, nearly every one of those Democrats who "lost," were guaranteed to lose no matter what. On top of that, Broadband Reports took a look at a couple of other "net neutrality" pledges by folks actually in Congress, and noted that a bunch of Democratic Representatives who signed an anti-Net Neutrality pledge still lost their races, and of those who signed on to a pro-net neutrality list, not a single Democrat on that list lost their re-election bid. So, uh, it sorta suggests that a politician's stance on net neutrality had nothing to do with this election, and if you want to make up fake headlines that don't really mean anything, why would the press not mention any of the relevant facts, and simply parrot the fake story by a guy paid for propaganda?

Filed Under: election, hype, journalism, net neutrality, reporting, scott cleland

Twitter, Data Center Delay Upgrades Rather Than Cut Off Iranian Communications

from the the-power-of-twitter dept

I recognize that it's still fashionable to bash Twitter as being a useless toy for people with too much free time (despite many, many examples of how useful it is for those who use it properly). Yet, for anyone paying attention this past weekend, Twitter has emerged as an amazingly powerful communications tool as to what's happening in Iran, where there are massive protests, riots, rallies and attacks following the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iran Twazzup page has had a tremendous wealth of information from inside and outside Iran -- the sort of information that we wouldn't know about otherwise. It's an amazing view into the country that simply wasn't possible in the past. I remember in the runup to the war in Iraq, there were a few Iraqi bloggers you could follow to get a sense of what was going on in the country, but nothing like the massive ability of thousands of people to easily get the word out on what they're seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere. It's really quite impressive, and I'm hard pressed to see how anyone could look at what's coming out of Iran via Twitter, and then claiming that Twitter isn't a useful or different communication tool.

With all that going on, it's fascinating to see that Twitter and its data center partner, NTT, have actually chosen to delay some critical updates, knowing that cutting off communications from Iran just as so many people are relying on it would be a disaster. While this does highlight a separate problem -- about the fact that as Twitter becomes a critical communication channel for some, the fact that it is a "single point of failure" is worrisome. It's definitely something that will need to be addressed at some point.

Filed Under: communication, data center, election, iran
Companies: twitter

Honolulu Completes Internet/Telephone-Only Election

from the how-open-was-it? dept

A few folks have submitted various versions of the news that Honolulu has concluded a city election of council members using only internet or telephone voting. Similar systems have been tried elsewhere, but for the most part, there's been fear to use them more widely in the US, over worries about hacking. Of course, at a time when we still can't even get basic stand-alone e-voting machines to work properly, I think there's still plenty to be worried about before jumping ahead to internet voting. There is a note at the end of the article, saying that the company that provided the technology, called Everyone Counts, says that the code for the systems used in the election are available for auditing. However, a quick glance of the company's website doesn't seem to reveal any code. So unless I'm missing something (in which case, please let us know in the comments!), it sounds like the code isn't open, but only available for auditing by a limited group of folks... just like traditional (buggy, problematic) e-voting systems. Update: And already there are questions about the election. Despite part of the reason for internet voting being that it would get more people involved a tiny 6.3% of the electorate participated raising numerous questions about why... and if the technology miscounted. If people don't trust the technology, they're not going to trust the results either...

Filed Under: election, honolulu, internet, telephone
Companies: everyone counts

Did Slate Violate Copyright Law?

from the nobody-knows dept

Slate has a clever video comparing Hillary Clinton to Tracy Flick of the movie Election: This isn't a blog about politics, so I won't venture an opinion on whether this is fair to Sen. Clinton or not, but the video has sparked some interesting discussion about copyright law. First, Cynthia Brumfield points out that this is precisely the kind of video that Hollywood (specifically, NBC's Rick Cotton) would disallow under the fair use doctrine. Cotton argues that "the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works" shouldn't counted as fair use, but that there should be "something more" to qualify. This is quite vague, but it seems pretty likely that the above video, which is basically just 45 seconds of movie footage interspersed with footage of Sens. Clinton and Obama, wouldn't qualify under his test. But Chris Soghoian points out an even more obvious way that Slate may have broken the law: the most likely source of the video clips in question would likely be from a DVD. As Soghoian points out, the video is too crisp and clear to have come from a VHS tape. It's conceivable that it was taped from a cable TV broadcast, but I think he's right that the most obvious source would likely have been a DVD. If that's the case, then the video editor in question almost certainly broke the law, because DVD-ripping tools like Handbrake are illegal "circumvention devices" under the DMCA. Of course, it's not likely Election distributor Paramount will actually sue Slate, which is owned by the influential Washington Post Company. But I think it illustrates the extent to which the letter of the law is diverging from everyday practice. In a sane world, there would be no question that videos like this one would be legal. But in the world we actually live in, no one is sure what the law is, and people developing these kinds of creative works need to be constantly worrying about possible legal problems.

Filed Under: copyright law, dmca, election, fair use
Companies: slate, washington post