Outsourcing Democracy
Summary
The citizens of New Orleans have been asked to choose the planners that will guide them through the process of developing a city wide plan for rebuilding. The method to record the response of the neighborhoods is an online poll. The online poll is open to fraud.
- Suffrage is determined by the possession of an email address.
- For many residents an email address is very difficult to obtain.
- For anyone with knowledge of email, infinite unique addresses can be generated instantly.
- An email address does not define a resident of New Orleans.
- Anyone can vote without any indication of residency in New Orleans, let alone a specific neighborhood or planning district within New Orleans.
- Anyone on the Internet can vote, even people living in other countries.
It is a childish implementation of a poll, easily gamed, impossible to verify.
This voting is being conducted under the contract of an architectural firm, Concordia, LLC. It presents and obvious conflict of interest.
Any neighborhood, dissatisfied with the results of a process that hinges upon this poll, can reasonably insist that the results of this poll be discarded.
Why This Poll Matters to New Orleans
We are still without a city wide plan eleven months after Katrina. We are the only county or parish effected by Katrina to be without a recovery plan. We will not be able to recieve federal funds until we have one. We have begun a new process that attempts to address the problems of the previous, stalled efforts by having a component of citizen participation.
Thousands of citizens are earnestly working participate in what they are told is a “democratic process”, yet their sincere input is being recorded using a web site “guest book” script. It is unconscionable that we are being let to believe that this is valid poll.
For more detail for readers who are not from the City of New Orleans, have a look at the article by Becky Houtman, Get Out the Vote, that describes why people are allowing themselves to be engaged in this process.
Request for Technical Input
I ask my technical readers to help my non-technical readers to understand that online voting is susceptible to every sort of fraud. There may be examples of online polling that can produce a meaningful result, but this is not such system. No reasonable technologist would suggest that the system in place at the UNOP could produce a meaningful poll.
Request for a Valid Poll
I ask that neighborhoods be allowed to conduct a poll using the decision making processes of the neighborhood groups. Where there is no neighborhood group in place, I ask ask that an experienced third party conduct the poll.
I’d greatly appreciate any insight into how to properly conduct civic participation.
Sign Guest Book, Win a Billion Dollars
The UNOP voting system is a fill in form with no verification of the voter. The results are entirely arbitrary. It is safe assume that people who are not New Orleanians are voting in this poll.
First, you only need an email address to vote. That is the only qualification for a voter. Which means that whomever is reading this article can go and choose a planning group for a neighborhood or planning district in New Orleans, regardless of the city, state, or country in which they reside. All you need is a valid email address. You also need to know enough about New Orleans to choose a neighborhood by name, and place it in the correct planning district. That is easily obtained from planning district maps.
For example, I live in the historic French Quarter, which is planning district 1.
Whomever is reading this may now go to the form, place their email address in the email address box, type French Quarter in the neighborhood box, and 1 in the district box. They can then choose some planners for neighborhoods or districts from a checklist. They will receive a confirmation email message, they click on the link and they have “cast a vote”.
Thus, my regular readers in Michigan, California, Australia, England, India and Germany now have all they need to vote for neighborhood or district planners in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Obscurity is not a means of preventing fraud. Any reasonably resourceful computer user will discover that they can vote from multiple email accounts. Any reasonably resourceful computer user will discover that they can vote regardless of their residence.
How to Conduct a Poll, A Learn As You Go Process
The polling process has changed from day to day, with a “just in time” philosophy toward voter education. At the first meeting of July 30th, 2006, we were given codes, mine being 1-167, that would be used to vote.
We have heard nothing of these codes since the first meeting.
There were many complaints that it was unfair to exclude people who have been actively involved in neighborhoods planning from voting, simply because the missed one meeting in 11 months. One must assume the codes were abandoned in response to that complaint.
Currently, there are neighborhood groups that are assisting displaced citizens by submitting votes for them. I doing so, it is obvious that many people do not have a valid email address.
Anticipating the Next Apologia
We will now be told that only votes submitted with a name and address will be counted, I’m sure. How will the name and address be verified? Who’s to say that even a valid name is was not simple found using the white pages?
We will be told that it is time consuming to create email accounts and vote multiple times. This is not true. It may be difficult to generate email addresses form Yahoo! or Gmail, but anyone who knows how to administer an email server can generate how ever many addresses they like.
Proper Voting
Here are questions that you, as a participant in this process should raise.
- When was this voting system developed?
- By whom was it developed?
- How many polls has this system conducted in its past?
- How does one verify that the voting system is accurately recording votes?
- How does one verify that the results have not been altered?
- How does the voting system ensure that the voter is eligible to participate in the poll?
- How does the voting system ensure that each participant in the poll can cast a single vote?
- How does someone contest the poll?
As a participant in the process I hereby raise these questions.
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At the meeting yesterday morning, Stephen Bingler tried to wrap up by saying that he asked Greg Rigamer, how many people it would take to perform a statisitcal survey. I put up my hand and Stephen back-pedaled. He started to explain my position for me. When called upon I asked if he was not trying to say that the selection process was a scientific survey. I was told no by two different members of the board.
What an interesting reaction.
How accurately was he able to explain your position? Because it requires some understanding to explain someone else’s position.
[...] So I’m left with the bitter feeling that this is just another UNOP photo-op - the citizenry raptly attentive to the big screen with their very own thoughts and feelings reflected back to them: how democratic (at one point the Founding Fathers were even invoked). And this time they’ve literally outsourced it. [...]
Because Becky linked to this old message, I’d like take a walk down memory lane. I recall how upsetting this was during the first round of the UNOP. Poeple were frantically repsonding to this particular call to pariciatition.
This marks the first time that Ryan Vis got involved. Ryan has written us a great post on Biometrics that will be posted tomorrow.