Until Logic Did Them Apart

Link: Until Logic Did Them Apart

In a liberal society, consenting adults are presumed to be able to do as they like, and it is incumbent upon opponents of any such freedom to demonstrate some wider harm. The National Organization for Marriage, on its website, instructs its activists to answer the who-gets-harmed query like so: “Who gets harmed? The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of husband and wife, that’s who.” Former GOP Senator Rick Santorum, arguing along similar lines, has said, “[I]f anybody can get married for any reason, then it loses its special place.”

Both these arguments rest upon simple tautologies. Expanding a right to a new group deprives the rest of us of our right to deny that right to others. If making a right less exclusive devalues it, then any extension of rights is an imposition upon those who were not previously excluded–i.e., women’s suffrage makes voting less special for men.

Outstanding piece by a senior editor of The New Republic on how conservatives’ opposition to marriage equality lacks a certain, how do you say, basis in reason.

Design for Deleveraging

Inspired by the ballot-redesign initiatives done by the folks at Design for Democracy, I spent a few minutes this week applying their principles to something that’s always bugged me: sleazy consumer lending practices. Back in my younger days, I let my credit card balance get out of hand (as I suspect a lot of people do in young adulthood). After I got married and my fabulous wife and I attacked our debt together, we realized that overspending was just one aspect of the problem. The other big part was just getting a handle on what was going on with each credit card — what you’re being charged, what kind of impact a minimum payment would make on your bill, and so forth. I’m an Excel whiz so I was able to put together a spreadsheet to deal with this, but it shouldn’t take a computer and a piece of software for the average consumer to figure out what their credit card is costing them each month.

There are basically three pieces of information you get when you receive your credit card bill:

  • What is my balance?
  • What do I need to pay this month to keep them from repossessing my sofa?
  • What is all this crap I charged up on this card, anyway?

Credit card companies do an OK job of giving you this information on the monthly statement, although the way they present it is inconsistent from one company to the next (which is a problem). But there are actually two more important pieces of information that most people would find pretty vital:

  • When will I pay off this ding-a-dang debt?
  • What is this ding-a-dang debt costing me?

To incorporate all this information, I came up with a wireframe design for a standard credit card statement. The specifications of this statement would become part of federal banking law (think of it as an aspect of the truth-in-lending statutes that have been on the books for years). The intention is to increase transparency in consumer lending and, indirectly, to encourage people to pay off their debts.

The wireframe looks like this:

The idea here is that the design of a credit card statement would be exactly the same across all credit card providers. The only variance would be in the upper-left corner: the provider would be allowed to put their logo and return address in that space, but nothing else. Every other design aspect of the statement would be described in a statute. No company would be able to issue credit cards without redesigning its statement to conform with this design, and we’d ban companies from putting all the other useless crap (cross-marketing, etc.) into the envelope along with statements — there shouldn’t be a frequent flier offer keeping you from actually looking at your balance each month. The contents of the envelope would contain nothing but the billing statement, and at the very top of the billing statement, in big bold text, would contain your exact balance, the amount the debt costs you each month, the minimum amount you need to pay, and a recommended payment amount.

The “recommended payment” amount is a new concept. It’s a simple figure that tells you how much you’d need to pay to get rid of your debt in 12 months based on your current balance and interest rate. It would also be nice if the concept of the “minimum payment” were legally changed so that it would never be smaller than the amount you’d need to pay to get rid of your debt in five years (just like a car loan). Right now lots of credit cards give customers minimum payments that would, in effect, take decades to pay off, and unless you’re handy with a spreadsheet, this might not be immediately obvious.

It would still be possible to run up absurd debts using credit cards, but hopefully this design and the new rules (particularly the “minimum minimum” and “recommended” payment amounts) would go along way toward avoiding “gotcha” debt traps, particularly for less sophisticated consumers.

In a world in which too much debt is threatening to cause society as we know it to collapse (and bankruptcy laws no longer enable consumers to discharge all their debt), this seems like a pretty modest proposal.

Time Zone Electoral Scenario

I was curious to see whether there’s a likely election scenario that has the networks calling the election for Obama before the polls close in the western time zones. It seems at least possible that this will be the case; it looks like Obama can surpass 270 electoral votes with just the states he’s favored to win in the eastern and central time zones. Florida is the big question mark in this scenario since it’s got 10% of the electoral votes that Obama needs and he’s only leading there by a few percentage points today.


Created using CQ Politics scenario builder

It this scenario plays out, it will be bad news for conservative supporters of a certain California ballot initiative, since an early call for Obama in the east may keep conservative voters away from the polls in the final hours of voting in the west.

Update: Electoral-vote.com notes that polls in Virginia (real, as well as fake) close at 7PM EST (which would be 4pm on the west coast). Although that state is favoring Obama by seven points, they’re looking at that race as the canary in the coalmine for McCain (as in, if he loses there, Obama’s basically got the election in the bag).

Count All the Votes, and Audit Them

From today’s NY Times comes a disturbing story about rumors circulating among African-Americans in Florida that if they vote early, their votes won’t count.

I have a couple of attorney friends who are flying to Ohio to serve as poll-watchers; apparently both parties are deploying thousands of lawyers to battleground states next week, just in case. Yesterday I sent one of my poll-watcher friends a Donuts and Bacon ’08 t-shirt as a way of thanking her on behalf of Americans everywhere.

We think of ourselves as the “leaders of the free world”, but our system of voting is an embarrassment when compared to elections in other parts of the world. We spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives to impose our style of government around the world, so it’s nearly criminal that our own system of elections didn’t get fixed, particularly after the 2000 debacle. The fact that most elections are mostly run by small-town drones in each county across the country means that failure is practically built into the system. Ideally we’d have national standards for elections with a certification process that includes proven best practices (like a uniform ballot design, a ban on closed/unauditable voting systems, etc.). Most importantly, accountability must be built into the system: if a county fails to run a certified election, the results would be thrown out and election repeated at the county’s expense. If the county fails twice, that county’s government would be decertified — everyone would be thrown out of office and the election is run again by the state. (The throwing everyone out of office part may sound extreme, but we do this kind of thing with incompetent school boards all the time.)

This is fundamentally a political problem, but as a nerd I look at this as an information technology problem, and I know a lot of other nerds feel similarly. There have been lots of stories since the 2000 election talking about the inherent security flaws in closed touchscreen voting systems, how companies that make them like Diebold are run by Republican party heavy-hitters, etc. But just saying “no” to what’s going on today is not enough; it’s too easy. We need to come up with our own ideas for making clean elections happen.

It would be nice to have a way to audit votes. That way, no matter how screwed-up the voting procedure becomes, we have a way of figuring out that the vote that goes into the ballot box actually gets counted for who or what the person was voting for.

The main barrier to fixing this problem are the people and institutions who have an interest in preventing people from voting. I’m talking mainly about the GOP, which shamefully opposed sensible initiatives like motor voter in the 1980s and who may attempt to disqualify voters who have been thrown out of their homes due to foreclosure. (News flash: you don’t have to have a residence to vote.)

Imagine that you could call an 800 number or visit a web site on the morning after the election to verify that your vote was counted the way you cast it. Next-day verification wouldn’t totally eliminate the mystery of how (or whether) votes are counted (because it’s possible that the verification system could be compromised as well), but it would go a long way toward increasing voters’ confidence in the system. But the ballot obstructionists probably wouldn’t accept this; they’d make some lame arugument like “people will sell their verifications,” never mind that this kind of thing never happens in the real world. So we need to come up with practices to ensure the integrity of the vote that are immune to these (largely bogus) challenges.

There are at least two ways that I can think of to do ballot verifications that would make it difficult or impossible for people to engage in election malfeasance — ballot hashing and statistical sample audits.

With a ballot hash, every vote you cast would be assigned a random number value. After you’re done voting, you can add up all the numbers to come up with a single value (called a check sum) that represents all your votes. The next day you could call an 800 number or go to a web site to verify your check sum, verifying that the vote you cast was actually counted the way you intended. If the check sum didn’t match, you could challenge it or re-vote. This is the important part — if there’s no way for you to go to city hall and say “stop the tabulation machines, something’s crooked here” this exercise would be pointless. Most importantly, nobody would be able to correlate your check sum to any particular initiative or candidate (and the check sum would be calculated manually by you anyway) so it would be impossible to sell.

Doing a hash would be optional, but if one half of one percent of voters in each precinct did it, it would go a long way toward ensuring the integrity of the system.

A statistical sample audit could also be a good way of verifying whether votes were counted properly. Statistical sampling is how pre-election public opinion polls work today. In a statistical sample audit, a fraction of voters (maybe one-half of one percent) would be designated audit voters. Their ballots wouldn’t look any different than normal ballots so they wouldn’t be treated any differently — until after the votes were counted, when they’d be permitted to go to city hall and manually examine their ballots to ensure they were counted. This would be done in the presence of an official (a ballot worker or maybe a judge), and the auditor wouldn’t be allowed to take their ballot with them to ensure that this didn’t become a vector for vote-selling. If enough ballots weren’t there or the votes didn’t match up, the whole election would be thrown out and redone. This would be a big logistical challenge, maybe not as elegant as the ballot hash, but certainly not insurmountable (particularly in a world in which we see fit to blow away other countries’ governments in the name of democracy).

One logistical “problem” with these ideas is that it would take more than one day to declare a winner of an election. This is a bogus argument, though: nowhere is it written in stone that election day has to last a single day, and rushing the process of voting certainly doesn’t provide a better outcome, as we learned in 2000. At any rate, with the increase in early voting across the country, the traditional notion of election day has already extended to weeks. (We actually voted two weeks ago at City Hall.) Our current tradition of voting on Tuesdays is a dumb holdover from the 19th century when people had to travel in ox-carts to the county seat to cast their vote; as part of an electoral certification process, we should make every state accommodate early and absentee voting as the preferred method of voting and open polls over a two-day period (ideally a Friday/Saturday, so that the 25% of people who said they didn’t vote in 2006 because of work conflicts could do so).

Yo Voté by nathangibbs on Flickr

"Yo Voté" by nathangibbs on Flickr

Finally, there is an extremely simple way to ensure that each voter only votes once, and it’s been going on in developing nations around the world for decades. When you vote, you stick your thumb on a stamp pad that stains your thumb purple for a couple of days. That way there’s no question as to whether you’ve voted or not, so you couldn’t vote twice. This would destroy a lot of bogus aruguments pertaining to voter reform, the moronic ACORN fright wig, and much of the nonsense associated with foreclosed homeowners being disenfranchised.

Update: Wired’s Threat Level blog has a story about a small California county that did a ballot audit using optical scanners. Lo and behold, they were able to find a discrepancy of 197 votes between what the machine counted and the correct count, due to a software error.

No on California Proposition 8

The scumbags who want to decide who you can’t and can’t marry in California have descended pretty low: they’re using slick TV ads to scare you and make you believe that what they’re doing is “for the children”. In fact, they’re just trying to impose their narrow morality onto the California constitution. It’s a desperate tactic (and it’s worth mentioning that the measure is currently in danger of succeeding).

However you feel about gay marriage, this is a horrible precedent. If these dorks succeed, there’s no telling what part of the Bible they’ll choose to write into law next.

Of course, Prop. 8 has nothing to do with kids or what they’re taught in schools. This TV spot says it more eloquently than I could:

You would think that liberals and conservatives alike could agree that the state has no business regulating marriage between two consenting adults. Californians: Vote NO on Prop. 8.

Vote Now!

I almost never vote on the day of the election since I’m out of town or busy or whatnot. My wife and I went to City Hall in San Francisco to vote early today, since I’ll be out of the country on election day.

San Franciscans can vote at City Hall from now through election day. They’re open for voting from 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday and from 10am to 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’re not yet registered to vote, you can actually register and vote on the same day, but the deadline for that is Monday October 20 (tomorrow).

McCain Is Now On Rachael Ray’s Show Making Veal Piccatta

Here’s an absolutely brilliant dismantling of McCain by David Letterman over McCain’s politically-motivated “drop everything” attitude toward the financial crisis. It’s nine minutes, but it’s hilarious and right on the money.

I am beginning to think that this will be looked at as a pivotal and historic moment for McCain akin to Muskie’s Canuck Letter. I just heard that if McCain doesn’t show up for the debate on Friday that Obama will turn it into a town hall meeting and just take questions for an hour. Good for him.