Category: politics

Computerized Elections in Israel

Background Information

The Israeli Ministry of Interior is planning to computerize the process of elections in Israel, using electronic voting machines. They are planning to start by running a pilot in ten settlements during the upcoming Nov. 27, 2007 council elections.
Sources:

This is a Bad Idea

The following reasons are given for the move to computerized elections:

  1. Reduction and even elimination of rigging votes and multiple voting.
  2. Election results availability few minutes after end of elections.
  3. Budgetary savings.
  4. Ability to vote from anywhere without special procedures.

Unfortunately, the first three reasons are either untrue or are insufficient justification for switching to computerized elections.

  1. The worldwide experience with election machines is that they are not secure, not well-designed, violate anonymity of votes, and facilitate rigging of votes even more than paper based ballots.
    Sources:

  2. Election results are not available if the voting machines develop technical problems, as they did in several elections in the world. A more fundamental point is that the integrity of the election process is worth the wait until the next morning. Confronted by the choice between rigged elections with speedy results and clean elections with results available only after 10 hours or so, every sane citizen would choose the second alternative without thinking twice.
  3. Any budgetary savings from using election machines are wiped by bad policies adopted by corrupt politicians, who got elected to office thanks to corrupt elections process. This is one place where one could be penny wise and Pound foolish (or one million wise and ten billion foolish).
  4. The fourth goal of computerized elections can be accomplished by alternative means – for example, by using computers only to verify that a voter did not already vote elsewhere. Paper ballots can still be used for the actual votes.

See also:

It is to be noted that the talkbacks to the news items about the Israeli Ministry of Interior plans demonstrate that Israelis are clueful about the dangers of electronic elections.

What Can be Done About This?

  • Find which voting machines will be used in the pilot and publicize audit results and cracking tips available from other countries where they were already used.
  • Refuse to vote in the voting machines during the pilot.
  • In the pilot, the results from the electronic voting machines will not have official use, so it may not be unlawful to actually crack into them. DISCLAIMER: IANAL. CONSULT WITH YOUR LAWYER BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SUGGESTION.

Nude Promotion of Peace

It is now fashionable to promote various worthy causes, like environmental preservation, by posing in the nude. Plans to make a nude photo of both sides in a conflict are under way for the fans of two Scottish football teams, who rioted at 1980 in an Old Firm Game at Hampden*.

So this is the right time to air the outlandish, unrealizable and crazy idea of taking a photo of a group of nude Israelis and Palestinians** – both men and women.

* Background information about the Rangers vs. Celtic conflict:

** Yes, I know about the Arab (including Palestinian) tendency to kill women, who violate “family honor” by “inappropriate sexual behavior”.

The fabricated danger to Al Aqsa Mosque

The 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada erupted in Arab cities and villages in both Israel and the occupied areas. The theme was that the Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – the third most sacred site to the Muslims.

Jews did not understand from where did this claim come. If any mosque were at risk due to conflicting religious demands, it would have been the Dome of the Rock, which stands at the location of the Temples of old times.

Bob Wallace’s How Propaganda Works is the best explanation to this phenomenon, which I read. The life of the Israeli Arabs has been relatively peaceful. Very few Israeli Arabs indulged in terrorism without first leaving Israel. Some sick leaders want to get them to fight the Jews, to make life in Israel more difficult than it is. To accomplish this goal, the Israeli Arabs need to be persuaded that the Jews are after something sacred to them.

To point out the inequality in standards of life, level of education in schools, electricity supply, disposal of sewage – is not enough – because those are problems which can be solved in few years once the will and pressure are there. Therefore, some grievance, which cannot be resolved because it was not based upon fact in the first place, had to be invented. Hence, the accusations that Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

See Preservation of Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim holy sites about sites important to the Muslim world, which are under Muslim control, and which are not preserved by the Muslims, to say the least.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Some of the stories are startling. For example:
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

The information is slanted against Israel – see:
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
On the other hand, the story of Palestinian terror acts, before the Wall’s construction was started, is not widely known outside of Israel and is not in the list.

Holocaust Denial Jamboree in Tehran, Iran – few footnotes

  • I saw nowhere any mention of the fact that when the Neturei Karta accuse the Zionists of causing the Holocaust, they imply that the Holocaust did happen.
  • The story about Iranian attitudes during the Holocaust is not given wide publicity either. Those were different times altogether.
  • Nor are the stories of the “Tehran Children” being publicized. They were Jewish children, who were sent to Tehran to be rescued from the Nazis. They lived there during the World War II and eventually immigrating to Israel.

Addendum from December 15, 2006:
It seems that Yasser Arafat financed the Neturei Karta and bought their support.

Absolute vs. Relative Poverty Line

Economists and politicians routinely argue in favor of basing social assistance programs upon relative poverty lines. Such programs have the effect of favoring equalization of income in a country, rather than emphasizing the idea of a safety net for that country’s residents.

Paul Graham has an interesting paragraph in his Mind the Gap article:
If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

In light of this observation, it can be seen that each day, several people from 3rd world countries vote by their feet in favor of absolute poverty lines. They do so by immigrating to more affluent countries. They do so even if they are illegal immigrants. They do so even if they end up being in one of the lowest socioeconomic classes in the affluent country of their choice. They do so because they believe that they and their families would be better off being illegal immigrants in an affluent country rather than be legal and sometimes relatively prosperous in their country of origin.

The most interesting observation for me is that economists and politicians discuss feelings of resentment and discrimination among people who find themselves below relative poverty lines, while ignoring that those people probably value more adequate schooling and medical care for their children, which are better for the poor in affluent countries than for the middle class in 3rd world countries.

One more observation is that humans can be divided into immigrant types and non-immigrant types. The above discussion applies to immigrant types i.e. people who are willing to take a risk, immigrate to an unknown country, try to survive there without the familiar faces and patterns of life – with hope of doing better. Non-immigrant types value more stability and security, and are willing to forego opportunities in favor of this. It is possible that non-immigrants (who are usually the majority in countries without significant percentage of immigrants among their residents) are the ones who favor relative poverty lines.

Memorial Event to Commemorate 11th anniversary of Itzhak Rabin's Assassination

Tonight, I was physically present in the memorial event held to commemorate 11th anniversary of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination. The event was held in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv.

I was physically present, but not really present there.

I did not see the Sign Language interpreter, nor was a podium for her to stand on was to be seen. I have the interpreter’s cellular phone number, so I SMSed her. After about half an hour, I walked away and indulged in some dead tree shopping (15th issue of “Dreams at Aspamia”). Later I got her reply (she cannot answer SMS messages in middle of interpreting).

Turns out that she was to be shown only on the big screens which show what is happening on the podium. And even then – only when there are speeches rather than songs and music (even though she is expert also in rendering music in Sign Language). This explanation was accompanied by two short words about the IQ level of the event’s organizers.

Most of the people present in the rally was Leftists, of the “Peace Now” variety. I came there because war for accessibility is my 1st priority, and trumps other political considerations. However, once I was present and saw their slogans, I poignantly recalled how the Palestinians forced the Israelis to elect Bibi Netanyahu (from the camp which opposed Rabin’s peace policies) rather than Shimon Peres (who encouraged Rabin to adopt the peace policies which provoked his assassin) in the elections held after Rabin’s assassination. The Palestinians accomplished this by putting bombs in few busses and exploding them, killing passengers – including Arabs who happened to ride on the busses with Jews.

Links to previous Web pages about Rabin and accessibility:

Proposed Substitute to the Planned Controversial Gay-Lesbian Parade in Jerusalem

The religion-driven homophobes are threatening with widespread violence if the parade takes place as planned.

There are several voices calling on the Gay-Lesbian community to cancel the parade because of the violence threats. I suggest that instead of, or in addition to, the parade, an attempt be made to collect and publicize statistics about lives, which were ruined due to homophobia – demonstrating that such a parade is still essential:

  • How many youths, in the age of army service, commit suicide each year because they found that they have unacceptable sexual orientation?
  • How many teenagers are thrown out of their homes each year into the streets because they are homosexual and their parents are homophobes?

When the newspapers will routinely write about homosexuals, who were thrown out of their homes by their homophobe parents or committed suicide, the way they (the newspapers) write today about beaten women and women, who were murdered by their husbands, provocative parades might be unnecessary.