Should we go back to paper ballots?

My latest article at Intellectual Takeout

Barbara Simons is a female computer scientist, which means she’s in a minority in the male-dominated computer field.

But she is also a part of a significant minority of tech minds who think that we ought to go back to paper ballots in order to ensure proper security.

Simons, a retired pioneer researcher at IBM is the subject of a feature article in The Atlantic magazine. According to the article, Simons’ has been a voice in the wilderness on the issue of the risks of electronic voting systems. But with concerns about Russian hacking of voting systems that have arisen since the 2016 election, that is now changing.

At the annual Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas, Simons participated in a staged attack on voting machines. “I lose sleep over this. I hope you will too,” she told the participants, mostly hackers.

Four voting machines had been secured for the event, three of them types still in use. One team of hackers used radio signals to eavesdrop on a machine as it recorded votes. Another found a master password online. Within hours of getting their hands on the machines, the hackers had discovered vulnerabilities in all four.

Reporters who before the 2016 election would have ignored her, crowded around her after the event.

“The problem with cybersecurity,” said Simons, “is that you have to protect against everything, but your opponent only has to find one vulnerability.”

In addition, ballots must be “anonymous and yet verifiable, secret and yet accountable,” says Eric Hodge of CyberScout, a security-services company that advises states and counties.

Paper, Simons said, is the best answer to this riddle. Marked clearly and correctly, it’s a portable and transparent record of voter intent, one that voters themselves can verify, at least while the ballot is still in their possession. It’s also a permanent record, unlike computer memory, which can always be overwritten. “There’s no malware that can attack paper,” Simons said. “We can solve this. We know how to do it.”

Sometimes the most primitive technology is the best.

To vote or not to vote--for Gingrich

Christian philosopher Francis Beckwith has a post today at the Catholic Thing in which he recounts one of our many evening conversations over coffee when we were in grad school. As he recounts it, in an attempt to convert him over to the conservative cause, I had recommended that he read Newt Gingrich's book Window of Opportunity: Blueprint for the Future.

This is the Francis Beckwith who rocked the theological world by converting to Catholicism while he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is now in the philosophy dept. at Baylor University.

I honestly don't remember having done this, but I'm going to trust him on it because the sands of time have worn away much of my memory of that time when Frank and I used to meet at JoJo's after class.

Unlike most people I recommend books to, Frank actually read the ones I recommended to him, which is one of the reasons that I now claim credit for all of his incredible successes in world of academic philosophy. Hey, it's a lot easier claim credit for Frank's successes than it is to have achieved them myself.

In any case, he recounts the impact the book had on his political thought. But the post has a surprise ending: he says he is not going to vote for Gingrich.

So I have decided to pay him the biggest compliment I know how to give: I am going to argue with him. Maybe, just maybe, I can call up the old magic and influence him again. I intend to post it on Monday, and to call it, "Why Francis Beckwith should vote for Newt Gingrich."

My goal is to one day be tottering around the Old Bloggers Rest Home (which I hope will be in the same complex as the Old Philosophers Home)  with a walker and to run into Frank, who, tottering around with a walker himself, will, as he recalls the old days, reminisce about the time I succeeded in convincing him to vote for Gingrich.

Stay tuned.

Newt Gingrich: The One

This is really terrible. I have just found out about another scandal involving Newt Gingrich: he has an ego. I found out about this by watching the analysis on television and places like the Huffington Post about the presidential election.

According to these reports, he thinks he's pretty big stuff. I have never heard of a politician having a big ego before. How could he possibly have gotten this far with this being noticed?

The next thing you know, they'll be calling him "The One" and acting like a political messiah and the media will fawn all over him and get so starry-eyed that they won't notice that he has an ego at all and just report good things about him on not report anything bad.

I don't know how we could have missed this.

WSJ on pork barrel Hal

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday on the drunken sailor the House Republicans just put in charge of the nation's fiscal sobriety. It seems that the appointment of "Pork Barrel Hal," who the House Republicans just put in charge of the House Appropriations Committee, isn't exactly, well, popular with the Tea Party crowd, who thought they put Republicans in power to, you know, change things.

Rogers is the Kentucky congressman who had the Daniel Boone Parkway renamed after ... himself. Why? Because of the service he has rendered his community by funneling taxpayer money into his district. Yeah, Daniel Boone discovered the place, but it was Rogers who paved it.

Mark Meckler, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, added, "You couldn't possibly choose to send a worse message to the people who just drove this election."

Over the past three years, Mr. Rogers has obtained 135 earmarks worth $246.4 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. He was the fourth-biggest earmarker among lawmakers last year.

... Mr. Rogers, in an interview with Ed Lane, publisher of a Kentucky business newsletter, responded to his critics in 2006. "Pork is the bad word for making good things happen," he said.

If there has ever been fiscal restraint in Mr. Roger's neighborhood, no one has ever noticed it before. Mr. Rogers has been saying "would you be mine" to countless federal programs and getting his way for years now, and now claims, in the wake of the election, that he is a Tea Party convert.

Why will Hal Roger's appoint as House Appropriations chair be "good for Kentucky"?

The fox the House Republicans have put in charge of the nation's financial hen house received plaudits today from fellow Kentucky congressman Ben Chandler. Chandler said that the appointment of 5th district congressman Hal Rogers by House Republican leaders to head the House Committee that doles out federal money, would be "good for Kentucky."

Now why, do you suspect, might Roger's appointment be "good for Kentucky"? It will only be "good for Kentucky" if Rogers really hasn't sworn off federal earmarks like he says he has.

If Rogers, the quintessential pork barrel politician, really is a convert to the anti-earmarks cause, then he WON'T be good for Kentucky because he WON'T be bringing home the bacon like he has for virtually his whole career.

The only way he will be "good for Kentucky" is if he's the same Hal Rogers he has always been which he's now not supposed to be.

If I'm a chicken in this hen house. I am not sleeping tonight.

How to tell whether the Republicans are serious about fiscal restraint

If you think that majority control by Republicans automatically means that we have entered the era of federal belt-tightening, then you'd better sit down for a moment. We've got some bad news for you.

The job of taking care of the nation's financial hen house is about to be given to ... the fox.

Very few people noticed this during the election, but, with the Democrats out of power in the U. S. House of Representatives, the congressman slated to take the helm of the House Appropriations Committee is none other than Kentucky's own Hal Rogers. Rogers, who represents the 5th district and is a longtime Republican member of the committee, has used his post to direct a pipeline of federal cash back to his district.

Rogers is the congressional poster boy for federal earmarks. He is to fiscal restraint what Godzilla was to Tokyo. Can we mix more metaphors in description of the complete and utter absurdity of putting Hal Rogers at the head of the House Appropriations Committee at a time of Tea Party ascendancy? Yes we can: putting Hal Rogers in charge of stopping earmarks is like putting Madonna in charge of abstinence education.

Let this be the first test of whether Congressional Republicans are serious about their campaign promises.

Evolving conservatism

Anthony Esolen on the election:

I fear that the battle, not always but all too often, is between a radical materialism and a softer materialism, a radical worship of Progress (to where, is never specified) and a softer worship of Progress. For instance, I saw the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on television with Geraldine Ferraro, the two of them commenting upon the difficulties of being a woman in national politics. One of them said, "There are still some Neanderthals out there who believe that it is impossible for a woman to have a family and raise her children properly while embarking on a political career. We hope that they will soon evolve beyond that position." Those italics are mine. Note the assumptions here. People in previous generations were bigots. What they actually believed about the relations between men and women, and their roles in private and public life, can be dismissed with a sneer. We, who divorce half of the time, when we bother to marry in the first place, we whose cities are sinkholes of sexual and familial chaos, we can safely ignore the so-called wisdom of past ages. We have evolved, don't you see. Just as, I suppose, our understanding of freedom has evolved beyond that of that fellow Jefferson -- that ascetic and patrician landowner, to use William F. Buckley's words, whom we can call upon to justify denuding the public square of all expressions of religion, but otherwise dismiss.

The person who made that comment, of course, was Governor Palin. I guess I shouldn't single women out for the collapse of our political thinking -- that we are not producing even an eloquent and somewhat addled populist like Bryan, or a stubborn constitutionalist such as Cleveland; and those fellows are rather dwarfed by the political intellects of the Adamses, or Jefferson and Madison, or Webster and Calhoun. Yet I wonder sometimes what a Palin or a Pelosi can be thinking. Are they entirely unaware of the great (and sometimes failed) statesmen of the American and British past? Are they not embarrassed by the vulgar cackling of the commentators on that show that is inevitably on the screen when I go to the doctor's or the dentist's, The View? Cackling which makes Rush Limbaugh appear like Demosthenes. Or are they aware in the slightest of the collapse of the American family, which in certain sectors of our population is evident in the disappearance of responsible men, the should-be fathers of their communities?

...Ah well. The fiscal conservatives have no idea that they lack a proper understanding of the human being and of the common good, and that they therefore play the secularist's game on the secularist's own turf. The social conservatives have either bought the idea that "government," for good or bad, means management by bureaucrats from afar, or have bought so much of the sexual revolution that their residual opposition to killing children remains utterly unmoored from any consistent vision of what a good human life or a virtuous and just human community looks like.

Read the rest here.

The Democratic double standard on Sarah Palin

Paul Begala is calling McCain's selection of Arizona Gov. Sarah Palin "reckless and irresponsible" because of her "lack of experience." But not only do liberal Democrats not consider experience important when it comes to their own nominee for president, but try to bring up the issue of experience and seniority when it comes to gender equity legislation and affirmative action and see what happens.

What Obama's new running mate thinks about him

Anti trivial trivialities in the presidential election

In yesterday's presidential debate, the Republican presidential candidates were asked for a show of hands to indicate whether they believed that global warming was a significant threat caused by man. Fred Thompson rebelled against the format and asked if he could give a minute long answer.

No way, said the moderator.

Thirty seconds?

Nope.

Thompson refused to play along, an act that is now being compared to Ronald Reagan refusing to give up the microphone in the 1980 New Hampshire debate. Some are speculating that this trivial little incident could light a fire for the campaign.

Now think about this suggestion--that one mildly entertaining little comment could change the course of the presidential race. Thompson was rebelling against the format of the debate because it trivialized the process, and now that trivial little act could spark a renewed public interest in the campaign?

Don't get me wrong. I'm for Thompson. We'll take it. But the political process gets more surreal by the day.

CNN Shenanigans

Did anyone notice that the only one of the Youtube questioners in Wednesday night's presidential debate who got the opportunity to speak at the debate itself was the gay gentleman? He was handed the mike and proceeded to expound his position to the nation.

Is CNN going to give the floor over to someone from the religious right during the next Democratic debate?