French Voting Machines a "Catastrophe" 259
eldavojohn writes "The electronic voting machine has soured another election. Some French voters have reportedly turned away in disgust after facing up to two hours in lines to use the machines. Further, the article reports, 'Researchers at Paul Verlaine University in Metz said that trials on two of the three machines used in France showed that four people out of every seven aged over 65 could not get their votes recorded.' This article concentrates primarily on usability and efficiency, but surprisingly mentions little (aside from user trust issues) about the security embodied in the machines or whether it was satisfactory. I think all three aspects are important to anyone aiming to produce voting machines. The manufacturer of these particular machines is France Élection."
More Info (Score:5, Funny)
France Élection = NEDAP distributor in France (Score:5, Informative)
Those NEDAP computer are the same in use and contested in the Nederlands http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engli sh [wijvertrou...ersniet.nl]We Don't Trust Voting Computer.
Those are are the same computer aquired and never used due to public pressure by the Irish (see http://evoting.cs.may.ie/ [cs.may.ie]Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting).
Re:France Élection = NEDAP distributor in Fra (Score:2, Informative)
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Of course it's bad! (Score:3, Funny)
1. French (insert object name here) a Catastrophe!
2. French (insert object name here) a Fiasco!
3. French (insert object name here) a Miserable Failure!
4. French (insert object name here) Surrendered!
Why is it.... (Score:3, Funny)
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That said there have been major fights leading up to the election about the electronic voting machines with multiple law suits from some parties while other political parties are saying they are great and bringing out scientists
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[why is it] that what should be the a simple implementation in modern technology is an unmitigated train wreck?
Three reasons:
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I could think of two reasons why one might want to have computerized voting (or computer-assisted paper ballot filling):
1) You are incapable, physically, of using a pencil and paper. You may be blind and unable to read the ballot. You may be paralyzed or have a neurodegenerative disease that keeps you from gripping the pencil. In bot
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OK let's start with your three suggested advantages.
If the large ballots are good enough now, they're good enough for the future. Has anyone actually researched the number of people for whom this is an issue? I seriously doubt it's a significant enogugh factor to merit spending the money and taking chances with such a core process. (Where's the change control for democracy?!) There are plenty of other ways of dealing with the problem, i
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You just have every one dip their computer in purple ink after they vote.
So all the parties that polled badly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So all the parties that polled badly (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-823448,
It's not the parties who polled badly which complain, it's the electors. I am a Sarkosy elector (polled nice, thanks), and I can tell you I'm not happy with the queuing.
I'll just translate the last phrase from the article:
A 20 h 45, les derniers électeurs du bureau 5 font encore la queue derrière la grille. Les derniers ne verront pas le soleil se coucher.
At 8 45 PM [poll supposedly closed at 8], the last voters from poll place 5 are still queuing behind the closed doors. The last ones will not see the sun set.
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let's not forget the almost 100.000 people that weren't allowed to vote (although they should have been), of which more than 90% would have voted democrate.
or the fact that the machines that returned your ballot (so you could redo it) in case it wasn't entirely correctly punched or whatever, were mainly distributed to (richer white =) republican counties and the machines that simply ate defected ballots and not even gave a warning were sent mainly to (poor black/hispanic=) democratic counties...
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Re:So all the parties that polled badly (Score:4, Insightful)
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Of course, part of that was due to the clearly rigged nature of the voting machine shortages (Democratic neighborhoods in Ohio, etc.), rather than just the fact of (unconscionably) long waits.
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But this trend seem
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Tiens ça vote Sarko?(Score:1, Troll) by Nicolas MONNET (4727) Alter Relationship on Tuesday April 24, @09:08AM (#18851289)(http://slashdot.org/)
Tu aimes payer la taxe Microsoft?
Tu aimes les brevets logiciels?
Tu aimes George Bush?
Qu'est-ce que tu fais, exactement, sur Slashdot?
So people are voting for Sarko (ie Nicolas Sarkozy)
Do you like to pay the Microsoft tax ?
Do you like software patents ?
Do you like George Bush
What are you doing, exactly, on Slashdot ?
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Why bother with them at all? It's not as if the French electoral system is obviously broken in the first place. With "voting machines" tending to have a very poor history...
Possible non-technical explanation for queues? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats the problem with elections... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sincerely,
Mayor Richard J. Daley
Re:Possible non-technical explanation for queues? (Score:5, Informative)
Our polling station still uses paper ballots, so the time it took depended on the turnout & not on any machines. As we let everyone vote who was in line at 8 PM, we had to wait until 10 PM to start counting. While waiting, I asked the president of the polling station what the average time was. His answer: 90 minutes on average.
A +2 hour wait was not exceptional.
The major time consumer when waiting is, as always, the verification of the voting rolls which is done by reading a long listing of registered voters. It can take them up to a minute to find your name when you forgot your voters registration card.
As there is no paper trail & the code is not open sourced I wouldn't want to use the machines they used in the areas around Paris where they used electronic voting machines. However, the wait had nothing to do with their use or non-use.
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Not anymore! While queuing on sunday to vote on one of those stupid machines, I noticed that people took from 15 to 45 seconds to vote on them. That compared to 1sec to drop an envelop in a box!
So it takes longer to vote for everyone, it is less safe, costs m
Inside Paris (11e arrdt), no queue (Score:2)
What took the longest was picking up each of the 16 ballots. Shitty recycled paper sheet stuck together -- except Sarko's, which kinda looked like someone stepped on it.
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This should make it quite clear if the machines led to any significant vote drop-out or not.
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All elections planning must assume 100% turnout - otherwise, you're planning for disenfranchisement. Typically, over 100% paper ballots will be allocated to polling stations, to allow for spoiled papers etc.
But, I've never, ever encountered an election where they only catered for some percentage above the previous election's t
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Far less of a problem to have too many ballot papers than too few. Paper/card is also recyclable/biodegradable/usable as fuel...
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Rob.
if it's hard to use (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, developers of security-related software often neglect usability, either making their systems insecure because people just disable or work around security, or making their systems unusable by many people.
Security? (Score:2)
No to voting machines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy works when free elections can be held and its results checked by any common citizen.
I don't know in the US, but in Europe, any participant in the elections has the right to a representative in all the pooling stations. Any common person can count the votes and confirm its results. When voting machines exist there's no real way for this kind of direct check.
First, because even if the code is open source, only programmers can check it. This is unfair to any other kind of citizen.
Second, popular participation. The mobilization of thousands of people in election days, counting the votes is a blessing and a grant of democracy. I've been a representative in several elections and I tell you, people enjoy being there helping and feel proud of it.
Democracy is the power of the people not the machines.
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It is unfair that only the mathematicians can check the counting.
It is unfair that only the literate can read the ballot.
Perhaps programming should be taught in public schools.
Oh wait.
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You just need someone with basic numaracy to check ballot counting. It's a matter of are there X bundles containing Y ballot papers marked in the same way . (Where Y is some constant.)
It is unfair that only the literate can read the ballot.
If people can recognise a logo, photograph, etc they don't need to be able to read in order to either vote or count ballot papers.
It is also perfectly possible to design a fairly dumb machine (the dumb
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Get with the program.
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Re:No to voting machines. (Score:4, Informative)
The old system was simple and foolproof when it came to counting etc. Take an envelope, one vote bulletin from each candidate, go in the voting booth, put the bulletin you want in the envelope, then you just held in above the slot while the guy pulls the lever and let it fall in.
The box was locked and made of transparent plastic.
Then to count the votes, they enlisted volunteers (people at your local voting facility often nagged you to come help after the poll, so it wasn't exclusive in any way shape or form) to count the votes.
Unlike the old american system with punch cards, counting the votes was easy and straightforward, and performed by humans.
Double checking the counts by recounting the piles of the various bulletins was also easy.
Given all that, I fail to see why they felt the need to move to electronic vote, which is much harder to get right, and can never get as transparent.
Anyone can understand how counting papers work and how the design of the old system was secure, whereas with an electronic system, you have to be a computer scientist with some knowledge of computer and network security to have a chance to know if it's secure.
And even then, you can't assess if the actual system is deployed in a secure way just by looking at the physical installation.
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You need as much transparancy as possible. There are ways to use
What are the benefits of these machines? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the TCO of these things anyway? These machines are used maybe once a year. Will they still work in ten years down the line? Lots of motherboards don't due to failing CMOS batteries for example. It seems to me that given the rapid pace of changes in the field of computing and networking, it would be very difficult to maintain such a system over decades. Do voting machines use modems? What if everybody uses VoIP and cell phones in ten years?
They're not even faster! (Score:3, Insightful)
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One selling point is that the machines can be adapted for people with disabilities. The iVotronic, apparently the machine in question here, has a headphone jack so that a blind or vision-impaired voter can use the machine without getting assistance from a sighted person to cast his/her vote
In other words... (Score:4, Funny)
In other words, they threw up their hands and surrendered.
[Their place in line, of course.]
Quelle surprise!
Good ole way works fine thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
My cousin, in another part of the country, had to vote on a machine. He protested to the head of the polling station, who laughed it off (after all, what does he know about machines, he's just an average electrical engineer), cause, you see, it's been validated by the ministry of interior.
Who's the minister of interior? Oh, that's right, that fascist hugging, Microsoft cocksucking, software patent supporting son of a motherfucking female dog (my apologies to our canine friends). [grioo.com]
Paper ballots (Score:4, Funny)
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(sorry, you handed it to me and I had to take it)
France-élections is not the manufacturer (Score:3, Informative)
Anyways, I voted on such a machine, and saw how old people had trouble using it. It is also the first time I had to wait to vote (15 minutes instead of less than one), because their was only one machine and many people had to be told how to use it.
Two of the main parties called for their removal; I hope this is going to happen.
it's really very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
check marks on a piece of paper, that can then be scanned optically, is no more complicated than voting should ever get. it's not a prolem that needs to be solved more efficiently. the more important consideration when it comes to democracy is legitimacy, trust. and if you can't feel it taste it touch it, if it's a voting machine contraption, or an electronic doodad, trust goes down
and for good reason: all voting mechanisms are prone to tampering. even with paper ballots, boxes of them can get lost, they can be scanned improperly, etc. but the point is, the more complicated the process, the more attack vectors you present. KISS: keep it simple stupid. a valuable concept in programming, a valuable concept when considering the voting process
the problem with people, especially on slashdot, is technophilia: we are always trying, almost fetishistically, to mechanize processes, even if they don't need to be. in most cases, this fetishism is harmless. but when faith in democracy is on the line, our technophilia needs to take a hike
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It's even easier than that. You have paper ballots, each bearing a single name. You choose one, put it in the provided envelope and then drop it in the (transparent) ballot box. Counting is done manually, with ballots being opened by one person, read aloud by another and checked by a third. Two independent tallies are simultaneously made, each with one person counting and one monitoring.
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No, the prevailing view of electronic voting machines on Slashdot is that they are defective by design; that they are inherently insecure and the results cannot be checked and verified. I appreciate that you were trying
Any electronic voting procedure (Score:2, Insightful)
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There are a variety of systems that actually allow a recount (hanging chads anyone?). I agree that any system that doesn't allow later recounting the votes is unlikely to be a good idea.
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A voting machine is a black box. I do not mean a black box in the sense of those black boxes used in planes, trains etc. I mean a black box in the meaning of a dark black box where nobody can see what is in.
One of the most important things about a election is -- beside that it lets people decide about the their government and other things -- that the public can observe the election process.
When a person votes with a regular paper ballot,
Is it that difficult to build a voting machine ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably no election in the Western world can compare with the muscle power, booth capturing and other illegitimate means used in India. A number of people are illiterate and yet there have been no concerns raised about the machine's usability.
It has been used in difficult inhospitable terrain, using batteries where electricity is not available. Perhaps the mindset needs to change to accept this new mechanism of voting.
The problem is also a legal one (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want, you as an individual can stay in the voting room to be sure that the correct procedure is followed, and then can look at the counting and check if everything went normally.
To do so, the needed skill are literacy and some basi
Trust. (Score:2)
And you trust that the post office will transmit the whole package to its destination.
KIS (Score:2)
The problem with all this e-voting revolution we see now on First World Countries is the obscene amount of money they have at their disposal to develop such technology.
Too much money in this case has been translated into touch screens, fancy hi-tech networked machines that simply have no focus on usability. Take the Brazilian example in contrast, the first country to have a fully electronic election (2000): No money, no touch screen, no networked machine == No problems! 100.000.0
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Indian voting machine are also similar. No touch screens, no networking, nothing fancy. A very small micro-controller adds the votes. An extension cord to the Polling office to mark one person one vote, a 7 segment LCD to display the tally. At the end of the vote, each machine's tally is read, and overall total is done manually.
For reference
http://amit.chakradeo.net/2004/05/14/indias-electr onic-voting-machines-compared-to-diebold/ [chakradeo.net]
http://www.bel-india.com/Website/StaticAsp/prod_ni che4.ht [bel-india.com]
French dictionary (Score:5, Funny)
Here in France, a "Catastrophe" is something which is mildly irritating, like a crack in the pavement. So for example,
"Sacré bleu, c'est pas possible! Merde alors, c'est le fin de la civilisation! Il nous faut encore un révolution. Quelle catastrophe."
translates into UK English as
"Oh!"
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Tell me about it. I work for Thales in Australia. Words which are close enough to the English meaning get used enough to create all kinds of confusion. Normally is a good one. In English this refers to something which happens every morning, or every time I start my car, etc. In French it means something which should happen, regardless of if it did or not.
Voting? (Score:2, Funny)
"Not to worry, Mr. De Gaulle. The Germans will never come through the forest."
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The illustration was an ES&S iVotronic machine, designed in Omaha, NE, USA, with hardware and embedded software work farmed out to Lenexa (USA) and Taiwan. Assembled in the Philippines.
Are there vegetables in the streets yet? (Score:2)
Why use voting machines at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
As the original article and many others show, there are lots of disadvantages though.
But there is one big advantage to the traditional paper and pencil voting that nearly never is mentioned:
Everyone can immediately understand how it works. Everyone is directly and without additional knowledge able to understand the procedure, to control it or take part in its control, and to immediately understand any tinkering or irregularities that could happen. This is not at all the case with ANY electronic system. Nearly nobody of the voters will understand the ways how the system could fail, could be manipulated etc.
I think that the traditional system where many many helpers are needed to make elections work is an actual plus: all these people are witnesses of and active contributors to the democratic process, and they are actively supporting it (at least in my country, those "election helpers" are all working on a voluntary basis).
If you replace these people by a black box, you take away an important democractic element.
Again I ask: what for?
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You have never seen the results of people filling in paper ballots or surveys. Say you have a box next to the select along with instructions and pictures showing people how they should put an X in the box. While the majority of people will do it correctly you will get a significant number that have circled the box, but a check mark in/out of the box, underlined thier selection,etc. That does not even could the number of people who make multiple selectio
Keep it simple, stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
"Catastrophe?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bad UI (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Image:IVotronic_img_3
It looks like total crap, no wonder that people have difficulties by using it. Why in Bill's name did they start a new design for that kind of machines, ffs. we have had ATM's around for years, just stick to it, they work and people know how they work.
Re:bad UI (Score:5, Insightful)
First surprise : 30% of the people I talked to signed the petition, based on their worries about the trust one can have in the system. In these 30%, there are two categories : people with a technical background who already knew the fundamental issues and also old people, who, contrary to popular belief, weren't afraid at all of a new machine but really had a problem with trust.
I have seen a lot of this shocking belief : "If it was not secure, computer people would tell us so". So I did, but most people are ready to hand over control to a small portion of the population. I also had a discussion with an official from the mayor's office telling me that these machines were totally secure because they were not computers but totally electronic machines (which is either nonsense or plain lie)
Re:bad UI (Score:5, Informative)
Here, too, the manufacturer said it was not a computer. An investigative group said "give us one, we will convert it to a chess-playing computer". Impossible, said the manufacturer, but denied them a demo machine. Then, they borrowed one from a municipality, and converted into a chess-playing computer. This, of course, lowered some jaws.
Furthermore, they wrote new firmware for it that manipulated the election results, and showed various different techniques for making sure this was not easily detected.
The device widely used in the Netherlands has no precautions at all against manipulation of the firmware by unauthorized parties. The operating lock is a standard C&K lock for which almost all keys are the same. I remembered having such a lock in the junkbox and indeed, its key number is the same as on the voting machines.
But the flaw most easily exploited turned out to be around vote secrecy. The electronics are so badly shielded that someone with a radio receiver within a few tens of meters can detect what vote is being made.
After the usual initial denial, it has been taken up somewhat seriously by authorities. Operational procedures for guarding the firmware have been added (like sealing of the access lid to the electronics).
Furthermore, a certain range of one type of machine and the entire series of another brand were declared unfit for use, because the emission problem could not be controlled by the manufacturer.
http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engl
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To me, the whole deal about "secrecy" seemed more like a clever twist the Dutch government managed to pull off in order to divert from the more serious problem of fraud.
Basically we see three problems here:
1. Usability. There are no votes to manipulate not spy.
2. Security. Who cares if votes can be spied? Without security there's no useful thing you can do with that information. Threaten people who vote some way? If they voted your way, the lack of security would turn their votes into somethin
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To a certain extent that has always been a problem. Creating an anonymous voting system that can handle every disability from blindness, deafness, dsylexia, just plain unable to read, down to outright stupidity* without help from somebody else is very diff
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We have been for several years now. However it's rather difficult to get the mainstream media to pay attention, because if voter turnout is low, it follows that interest in the election is low. And most news outlets consider technology stuff to be fairly uninteresting anyway.
So interest in "how secure is the computerised voting system?" (and therefore "how worthwhile is it dedicating some time in a mainstre
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What makes you think paper ballots are more secure than computers? It's not computers that steal your votes, it's people. And the same people can steal or miscount them when using the paper version.
I worked in a vote counting team when there was a voting on whether Poland should join EU and have seen people who wanted to count vote as invalid just because someone wrote "EU SUCKS" on the ballot paper even though there was a mark in the next to "No" field and there was no mark next to "Yes" field. The direc
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A lot of people asked me that when I proposed them to sign my petition. They told me that fraud was very old and couldn't be prevented entirely. I agree. In fact most of the frauds possible with a paper ballot are still possible with electronic machines. But now, there is another possibility to fraud : you onl
No Wonder They're Confused! (Score:2, Funny)
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They say that language plays a role in complexity. Having worked with the French for the last 10 years, I can certainly attest to that. The French language is very complex, and so are French UI designs.
The voting machine should have had 4 big buttons, one for each party. And that's it.
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Is that a joke? The illustration shows a touch-screen iVotronic displaying the welcome message (in French). The UI hasn't even appeared yet, so what are you commenting on? The aesthetics of the packaging?
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Seriously! I mean it is like they put the instructions in some foreign language or something
Cordially Yours,
American
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This indeed is a quite simple UI that does not cause problems here. What worries people is that there is a strict sequencing of voters: you present your ID, the clerk notes down your deta
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lol, so, you just go around making Beowulf cluster jokes about anything you can? Man, you're the craziest frenchman I've ever seen, I know it, I'm french too ;-).
And the USA don't suck as much as France, are you crazy? (based on my previous comment about your mental health I guess we can consider it a rhetorical question)
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Refusing to join an armed conflict is not the same as predicting its future problems.
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US: "Ey, you can't do that!"
US: *starts a war and benefits from it, just to fuck around*
</fling poo>
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And the refusal to use force directly lead Iraq to end his newfound co-operative attitude when he thought the UN would come after him finally. The entire "Iraq war" could have been avoided if France didn't stand up for Iraq and issue a Veto statement to any use of force mandate from the UN. Saddam was working to fulfill his obligations after the US
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Your right, from now on, lets do what Halliburton thinks is best, they arent french
230V vs 110V (Score:2)
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Yeah. And criminals shouldn't be allowed to make decisions either, after all they aren't part of society, even 20 years after they've been released. They forfeit the right, and clearly have nothing intelligent to contribute anyways.
And for that matter, people who don't pay more than 5,000 per year in income tax shouldn't have a vote either; the people paying for government should be the ones who decide how
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How about a simple IQ requirement? Tests certified by elected officials who are subject only to the authority of the supreme court so that other branches of government can't force their hand? I wouldn't support a minimum age to vote, a bright teenager has an equal capacity to
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Easy enough, full mental capacity at a minimum. I would support a minimum IQ for voters as well.
'Also, do you realize that most of the people ruling your country are elder people?'
Yes. Thank you for pointing out this fact that solidly supports my position.