I thought I would update everyone on where things stand with the crazy notion of letting everyone see election results online.
First, a month or so ago, I appealed the City's decision to deny me a password- the decision that gave us the magical 150 person limit for viewing electronic returns. (The appeal was with the Solicitor; next step was to Court.) In that appeal I also requested additional information, including how much the City charges for access to election results, how they decide who gets passwords for free, public notice they have put out to let people know that they can ask for a password to view results, and a list of who has these magical 150 passwords.
The City broke down my request into two streams: My new request for information from the Commissioners' Office, and my appeal of the initial decision.
The first response I got back was about the new pieces of information, and largely refused to answer my questions, including how much they actually charge. However, the one piece of information they did provide was the one piece I thought they would not: a list of who has these passwords. That is mostly what the Daily News focused on: the people who have access to voting returns, while the average citizen does not. And yes, it is pretty bizarre that they deny an average citizen access to results, while giving Fumo's Office ten of 150 passwords.
Then, late last week, on the same day the Daily News story came out, the Solicitor responded to and granted my appeal, and ruled that the Commissioners Office had to give me a password.
So, the bottom line is, I have a password and you don't. Suckers! Now, I am done with this whole annoying ordeal. But, in positive news for you all, I will rent access to the password for ten dollars a day, plus four chocolate chip cookies.
Anyway, I used the magical password to log in, to see what all the fuss was about. It took about two seconds to see what the problem was/is. Basically, those 150 passwords are for users to log into the actual voting system software. No one in the public needs that- we just need them to export the data so that the public can see it. I also asked YPP user ELP to take a look at it, knowing he is a computer guy. And, as I assumed he would, ELP quickly came up with a number of fixes. Additionally, in terms of whether this is all feasible for the City to do, he pointed me to this, from the website of the company the City uses, describing the benefits of their product:
- Easy to export results to other media or systems including the World Wide Web.
Um, right.
So, where do we go from here? Well, that is coming. The granting of the appeal was an important step, but in reality, just a small one. At the end of the day, we still don't yet have public access to the results. I will have more on how you can help very soon.
The awful truth comes out
So do you prefer with walnuts or without?
Seriously keep up the good work.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
It sounds like in my previous line up the answer was 2
It honestly sounds like they just don't understand what it means to export out the results and publish them. They just look at the results inside and don't get that you could possibly put the basic data up in a way that the public would see without messing with the whole system.
What is, perhaps, more disturbing, is that the commission is (from your description), giving access to administrative functions to party bosses and politicians. Obviously, there are many levels of administrative access so maybe they know enough to give outsiders access that can't actually change anything, but who knows?
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This Too Will Pass, for the guts in your cerebrum.
This is a SERIOUS breech...
My bread and butter is in systems engineering. Without going into way too much detail, the work product at my desk is installed at the Limerick nuclear power plant... among many other secure facilities.
A high school I/T nerd who only has webmastering skills could tell you that this is a SERIOUSLY bad way to run a vote reporting system. You NEVER give any sort of access to the system to those people who have a genuine desire, no matter how good these people may be, to modify the data.
Instead, you make live backups of the data to a reporting database and give people a website to look at the results....
which is what the City should have done when it purchased this piece of crap voting system.
There are over 200 I/T consulting organizations within reach of 100miles of Philadelphia who can fix this problem in weeks.
But then again, this is the same City who botched a super-expensive installation of Oracle Financials, which resulted in a payola-nepotism contract for a project manager lady at the Philadelphia Water Department... and STILL, no decent water billing system after millions of public taxpayer money spent.
*sigh*