Back in 2006, we wondered what was going to happen when the generation that grew up with social networking started running for office. Would their youthful indiscretions -- now shared with thousands of friends -- come back to haunt them? Or would people just chalk them up to typical youthful indiscretions? I'm not quite sure we know the answer yet, but the NY Times has an article suggesting that we're already seeing the impact, naming a few different campaigns where various images and videos of less-than-flattering activities became a campaign issue. But here's the thing which the NY Times conveniently ignores: it appears that while some tried to make something out of these photos and videos, it's difficult to find any indication that it had any impact at all. Some of the candidates in the article won, and some lost. Those that lost, it appears, were likely to lose anyway. If anything, perhaps the article should have made the point that the American voter is (oh my goodness!) smart enough not to care all that much about someone doing something silly that's caught in a photograph.

With the Republicans handily winning a whole bunch of House seats in the elections, apparently you can expect the amount of searching for internet porn to increase in the states that voted Republican. Sound ridiculous? Yes, but apparently it's science. On The Media points us to the news of a new study that looked at porn searches before and after elections and found that they tend to increase in states that support the "winning" party. Of course, I'd take these results with a pretty serious grain of salt, but the study's authors note that they're statistically significant. You can read the whole study (pdf) if you'd like. The abstract is:

The current study examined whether or not individuals who vicariously win a competition seek out pornography relatively more often than individuals who vicariously lose a competition. By examining a portion of Google keyword searches during the 2004, 2006 and 2008 US election cycles, the relative popularity of online pornography keywords searches was computed for each state and the District of Columbia the week before and the week after each election. Consistent with the Challenge Hypothesis, following all three election cycles, individuals located in states voting for the winning political party tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often than individuals residing in states voting for the losing political party.

The "Challenge Hypothesis," if you're unfamiliar with it, is the idea that competition itself increases testosterone in men, and winning a competition increases testosterone even more -- and this includes just witnessing the competition. So, other studies have apparently found increases in testosterone in men watching their favorite sports teams win. So this study looked at whether or not porn searches might act as a proxy for such increased testosterone.

lavi d points us to a report from Jim March, on the Tucson Free Unix Group email list, claiming that he witnessed potentially illegal activity in observing part of the Arizona mail-in vote scanning operation in Maricopa County. He summarizes the issue thusly:

Basically, we caught Maricopa County elections in a felony today - cross-wiring the central tabulator to a non-secure laptop owned by Sequoia Voting Systems, complete with cellular modem card in there and live. And I couldn't get a picture. Need a micro-cam of some sort to get the proof. See also my affidavit filed with our attorney today.

Remember: by law, the central tabulator system on what's supposed to be an isolated local network is completely unpatched - it's not allowed to be modified in any way since the day it shipped in 2006 or 2007. Even if the Sequoia tech didn't cross-connect the cellmodem to the Ethernet (and both appeared to be live), he could have easily "pwned" the "secure" systems with any number of ancient script-kiddy exploits.

He then includes the affidavit he filed. Basically, he spotted a Sequoia employee hooked into the central tabulator, via an ethernet cable from his own laptop, and he saw that the laptop had an EVDO card from Sprint -- and that, apparently, is a big no-no, as explained. When he asked to take a photograph of this, he was denied and was told that he was being disruptive. Now, there's no suggestion here that anything nefarious was going on, but that this central machine, which is supposed to be kept away from the internet, was exposed in a way that it should not have been. At the very least, this raises serious questions about the security of those machines.

In yet another sign that the entertainment industry's "winning" verdict in the trial of The Pirate Bay was anything but a victory, the surge in voters signed up to be a part of Sweden's Pirate Party was enough to elect two one representative of the party to the European Parliament, with 7.4% 7.1% of the vote (Updated as later results became public). And, of course, it's no surprise that this is a youth movement. Among voters under 30, 19% voted for The Pirate Party. Of course, you can guess how the entertainment industry will react -- shunning what they consider to be "immoral" "thieves" rather than recognizing what the party actually represents: those who believe in certain civil rights that are blocked and hindered by over-aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rules. I don't necessarily agree with the overall stance of "The Pirate Party" (and I hate the name), but it's hard to deny that it's actually making some inroads -- and that the entertainment industry isn't making much of an effort to understand why.

In the latest sad saga concerning e-voting mishaps, it appears that Finland's courts have agreed to certify a recent election, despite approximately 2% of the votes not being counted (found via Slashdot). Also, there were additional problems as it's been discovered that despite the requirement for an "anonymous election" the voting software stored identifying information, along with how each voter voted. Oops. Once again, we're left wondering why various governments keep trusting such questionable equipment?

For years and years Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) had always vehemently denied that its e-voting or optical vote scanning machines had any problems -- despite mounds and mounds of evidence of problems. We were shocked, this past summer, when the company finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.

Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.

Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?

Transparency is key to a functioning democracy. No, we don't always have it, but we absolutely should be striving for it, or you can almost guarantee corruption will take over. That's why we've been so focused on the problems with e-voting machines for so many years, and pushing for increased transparency. Now, some of the researchers who wrote a recent suppressed report, about potential security problems with the Sequoia e-voting machines used in New Jersey, followed the procedures in place to be allowed to view the process by which votes are counted. This is a perfectly legal request. The Elections Board is allowed to offer "Challenger Badges" to those who would like to observe the election process. You would think that some Princeton-associated folks, with knowledge of e-voting, would be exactly the type of people that an Elections Board would want to observe the election, in order to make sure that it was done properly, and to make citizens more comfortable that their votes would be counted.

But, of course, that's not what happened.

Andrew Appel and Grayson Barber had their request rejected as the Elections Board claimed it was "too important" an election to allow in any outside observers. You would think that if the election is so important, having some experts on hand to make sure the process is done in an acceptable manner would be more important. You can understand why they don't want too many people in the room, or don't want anyone who is clearly a partisan activist -- but these are e-voting experts. There's simply no reason not to have them in the room, and rejecting them raises many more questions about New Jersey's process for counting votes.

We report on so many stories where technology is used in bad or oppressive ways, that it's important to note when it's being used in positive ways as well. Technology, itself, is just a tool that can be used in both good and bad ways (not to mention neutral ways), but somehow the good ways don't always get as much attention. CNN has an article detailing how the rise of mobile phones throughout Africa is helping in making elections that are more fair. It's certainly not perfect yet, but the ability to communicate has allowed citizens to report abuses of the election process and get the word out when they see any kind of cheating happening.

Virginia Postrel points out a great story on the way YouTube is changing the dynamics of political debate. It points out that when Bill Clinton was first running for president in 1992, the media landscape had relatively few mechanisms for holding politicians accountable for misstatements. There was only room for so many stories on the nightly news, and so when politicians told white lies, reporters tended to move on before anybody could check the claims for accuracy. But now that anyone can create a blog post or a YouTube video, politicians' fibs and gaffes can take on a life of their own, whether it's Hillary Clinton's sniper fire, Barack Obama's "bitter" Pennsylvanians, or John McCain's "100 years in Iraq." The nightly news doesn't always cover these kinds of comments when they happen, but someone in the blogosphere almost always catches them and they then get endlessly reported, debunked, and hashed out online. And once a clip has generated a lot of heat among bloggers, it can often become a big enough story that mainstream media outlets pick it up again. While some of these attacks can be nit-picky or taken out of context, on the whole it's a definite improvement in the quality of democratic debate. With video cameras everywhere and bloggers ready to pounce on any misstatement, politicians have a stronger incentive to tell the truth, and not to talk out of both sides of their mouth.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that the presidential candidates are raising eye-popping sums of money in small increments via the Internet. In the first quarter of 2008, Barack Obama led the pack with $129 million in small donations, followed by Hillary Clinton at $65 million and John McCain at $37 million. Even John McCain's fundraising would have been considered a major accomplishment four years ago -- Howard Dean made headlines with $15 million in online donations in the third quarter of 2003, much of it from small donors. If the trend lasts -- and there are good reasons to think it will -- it will also have a democratizing effect on the political process. Presidential candidates will be more inclined to pay attention to the priorities of grassroots activists, and comparatively less worried about pleasing insiders capable of raising money in $2300 increments.

And of course, these developments are connected. The rise of blogs, YouTube, and other participatory media has gotten more people engaged and invested in the political debate, which in turn makes them more likely to open their wallets. Conversely, the fact that blog readers are often campaign contributors gives bloggers real leverage over candidates -- bloggers can punish candidates perceived as not playing fair by directing contributions to their opponents. All of which is producing a more engaged and accountable political process. Of course, things are far from perfect, but there are good reasons to think that 21st century politics will be better than politics was in the 20th century.

Tim Lee points us to e-voting security researcher Avi Rubin talking about how California Secretary of State Debra Bowen took part in a workshop on e-voting this week, right after the whole decertification/recertification of e-voting machines in California. Rubin notes that Bowen made some insightful comments about how the traditional voting machine certification process doesn't make any sense when it comes to software. Certifying an old mechanical voting machine was pretty straightforward, because you tested it out and if it did what you needed it to do, you expect it to pretty much do that every time. However, we all know that software doesn't quite work that way, and software is always being changed, patched and upgraded, especially as new vulnerabilities are found. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well with the old certification process. Of course, that leaves open the question of what do you do about it. It's unclear from the wording of the post whether the following statement is from Rubin or Bowen, but it's worth repeating either way:

"Software is designed to be upgraded, and patch management systems are the norm. A certification system that requires freezing a version in stone is doomed to failure because of the inherent nature of software. Since we cannot change the nature of software, the certification process for voting machines needs to be radically revamped. The dependence on software needs to be eliminated."

However, perhaps the best insight into this comes in the simple statement that Tim Lee used as the headline for his post on the subject, which was so good that we're reusing it here as well: You Can't Patch An Election.