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I live in West Virginia and anything dealing with the state government has to start with an assumption that it is being done for corrupt reasons. Ask first how

I live in West Virginia and anything dealing with the state government has to start with an assumption that it is being done for corrupt reasons. Ask first how a contract or project financially benefits key state officials or their family. I can't emphasize enough how predatory and corrupt the government is here. Both leading Republican candidates for governor are under federal corruption investigations. There's a reason West Virginia is losing population and remains among the poorest states in the USA. Where West Virginia isn't corrupt, it is incompetent. The state can't even provide safe drinking water for its people, or even create a framework for official electronic signatures-- it has no business innovating in voting tech. West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology.

duxup 7y ago
I suspect the incompetence is by design to some extent. If you like small government, cripple it and then you've got an excuse to limit its reach and continue to cut.
- mobilefriendly 7y ago
  It isn't really small government culture-- both Republican candidates were very recently Democrats (the state has flipped parties). It is more a pervasive culture of natural resource extraction and disdain for the public's health and safety. Probably a function of the "resource curse". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
  - no_wizard 7y ago
    What I find interesting after reading the linked wikipedia article is that the USA as a whole is not suffering from the resource curse. I wonder, just tangentially, because: 1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand) 2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy 3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials. Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this. Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      > raw and manufactured We were immensly helped by the world wars wiping out so much capital abroad. Even before that, the civil war while costing much life only jump-started our industrial capacity as the fighting was never that far north. The resource curse is basically a mercantilist problem where the resources extracted are almost entirely exported, and little domestic industry outside of resource extraction.
    - jackcosgrove 7y ago
      The resource curse occurs when there are abundant natural resources and a group of people small enough to coordinate action controls those resources. In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant. Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier. In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative. Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way. The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.
- Lord_Baltimore 7y ago
  Politicians don't line their pockets by making government smaller.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
If it makes you feel any better, California is also failing to provide safe tap drinking water for everyone. In a few places, the wells are dry. In others the water is contaminated.
- jedberg 7y ago
  That's not anywhere close to the same thing. In California, the cause of that is climate change, not corruption. The sources for the rural communities are drying up. Secondly, the state is sending bottled water to the people who don't have clean drinking water. And third, the Governor just last week signed an appropriations bill that will provide millions for clean water projects out of the funds that were allocated for "green enhancement programs" because they recognize that this is the fault of climate change.
  - solotronics 7y ago
    Climate Change is a funny way to say farmers are using all the water to irrigate what is naturally an arid desert.
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    It's more than just global warming and I didn't say the cause was corruption (though I cannot rule that possibility out). I just said California did not provide clean tap water for everyone. Nevertheless, governmental failure of one kind or another is a huge and important reason for California's tap water problems. The fact that there is government provided bottled water in some places should not be looked upon as good management or a success story. It's a bandaid on a broken system and a statewide failure to manage and provide safe water resources and infrastructure. The the appropriations bill you mention does not make up for the years of failure to provide clean, contaminant free tap water on an equal basis to all communities statewide. And even if it succeeds across the state in every community, it will take years to actually fix all of the tap water problems. Five days ago, The NY Times reported As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — one out of every three — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-californians-taps-how-1000-water-systems-may-be-at-risk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-... The Guardian reports that some Central Valley communities have water contaminated by arsenic, It’s cruel to be living in a state that’s so powerful, so rich, but we can’t count on clean water...: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/california-central-valley-sinking-arsenic-water-farming-agriculture https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/californ... Maywood, a poor city in Los Angeles County, has had a multi-year contaminated tap water problem: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-contamination-in-maywood-california/ https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-cont...
matty22 7y ago
Also a West Virginian, my favorite is when our entire supreme court were impeached at the same time: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636761241/west-virginia-house-panel-votes-to-impeach-entire-supreme-court https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636761241/west-virginia-house...
- lallysingh 7y ago
  I have some family in WV (it's absolutely gorgeous) and the government is always fun conversation!
- Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
  And in this corner we have the national heavyweight champion, 8 time governor sent to prison CHI-TOWN!
sdinsn 7y ago
Note that West Virginia did not pay for anything. The project was paid for by a rich guy [1], Bradley Tusk. [1] https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain/ https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia...
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I will say that your state is beautiful though. Driving from Harper's Ferry to Charleston via the Monogahela National Forest remains one of my trips. My favorite memory was discovering a 13,000 square mile radio quiet zone with a gigantic, black hole hunting, radio telescope smack dab in the middle of it. After stopping to play tourist, I continued driving and stumbled upon a stranded 3 person group, a hetero couple and the wife's sister, the and that probably weighed 1500 pounds between the 3 of them (no judgements). Their minivan was out of commission, and there was no cellphone reception cuz quiet zone. I offered to help, but I could physically only fit one of them in my Ford Focus hatchback, which could normally fit up to 5 people (uncomfortably). Husband asked if I could get him to Durbin, about 30 minutes down the road, and I said yes. All 500 pounds of him squeezed into the front seat, which itself was an adventure because I am 6'5" and was a heftier 300 pounds myself, and he was spilling a bit into the driver's seat. I was basically squished between the car door and a human wall. I loved every minute of it. Husband was an awesome dude. We chatted about his career bas a coal miner (complete with a mild case of black lung disease and pending heart failure), life in a sleepy area, and all sorts of stuff. When we got to Durbin, he just asked me to let him own, where he planned to find a phone to call his preacher, who also happened to be the "local" tow truck driver. He walked/waddled off towards some buildings off the main road, and I continued my journey.
- infecto 7y ago
  Such a strange way to be a little condescending but also not.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>Ask first how a contract or project financially benefits key state officials or their family. Typical flyover state simpletons. If they were were thinking long term like the enlightened people in the urban coastal states they would direct the proceeds of their corruption at their party. After doing this for a couple decades they can have a de-facto one party state and doll out government jobs and contracts to a much wider cross section than just their friends and family further cementing their party's (i.e. their professional network) grip on power. (this is sarcasm, in case that isn't immediately obvious)
elwell 7y ago
> West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology. Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  I love your comment because I can't tell whether it's serious or an extremely well played HN parody.
- nwah1 7y ago
  > When asked about why a redacted audit or report from the auditors wasn’t released, Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney, who co-authored the white paper, gave multiple reasons. First, he pointed to a nondisclosure agreement with the auditors. Then, he stated that there was no way to share any more information about the audit without revealing proprietary information about the system. But one would expect a redacted report or even an abstract of the report for transparency’s sake, given the stakes of introducing a new system to our already rickety voting process. Depending on the secrecy of its system architecture is such a poor security mechanism that researchers have even coined a term for it: security by obscurity.
  - nwah1 7y ago
    A private blockchain hosted only by a trusted party has absolutely zero purpose, even in theory. This whole experiment is a scam.
    - i_am_nomad 7y ago
      This is the same principle behind Nebula Genomics, and it’s surprising more people aren’t calling bullshit on it.
      - trakout 7y ago
        In the context of nascent tech like this, most people just don't know the right questions to ask, unfortunately. Perhaps in the near future we will be treated to a layman's explanation of the prevalent (and corrupt) usage of federated blockchains, 'exposed' in a Netflix doc. :)
diveloper 7y ago
Dang, I just moved to WV for a software dev internship for the summer. Is it okay to drink the water in Charleston?
- dsr_ 7y ago
  Maybe? The annual water quality tests for chemical contamination look reasonable. But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    My first thought was "fix or six a year? wow!" and then you got to West Virginia. That's terrible.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  get a reverse osmosis system. Or buy RO filtered water from the local grocery store by the 3 or 5 gallon jug. Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.
- professorgerm 7y ago
  Yes. I assume they're referencing the chemical spill several years ago, and the water has tested clean consistently since. I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
nemacol 7y ago
WV resident here. (Northern Panhandle) Anyone interesting some history of coal country, a great book is "Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area" By Harry M. Caudill. Published 1962. https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Depressed/dp/1334682070 https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Dep... https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcomestocumb1963caud_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcom... While the focus of the book is eastern Kentucky, a lot of the content applies to WV and coal country in general. "At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American Conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region."
thebeefytaco 7y ago
I think those comments safely apply to any government project.

duxup 7y ago

I suspect the incompetence is by design to some extent. If you like small government, cripple it and then you've got an excuse to limit its reach and continue to cut.

mobilefriendly 7y ago
It isn't really small government culture-- both Republican candidates were very recently Democrats (the state has flipped parties). It is more a pervasive culture of natural resource extraction and disdain for the public's health and safety. Probably a function of the "resource curse". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
- no_wizard 7y ago
  What I find interesting after reading the linked wikipedia article is that the USA as a whole is not suffering from the resource curse. I wonder, just tangentially, because: 1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand) 2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy 3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials. Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this. Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    > raw and manufactured We were immensly helped by the world wars wiping out so much capital abroad. Even before that, the civil war while costing much life only jump-started our industrial capacity as the fighting was never that far north. The resource curse is basically a mercantilist problem where the resources extracted are almost entirely exported, and little domestic industry outside of resource extraction.
  - jackcosgrove 7y ago
    The resource curse occurs when there are abundant natural resources and a group of people small enough to coordinate action controls those resources. In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant. Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier. In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative. Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way. The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.
Lord_Baltimore 7y ago
Politicians don't line their pockets by making government smaller.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

If it makes you feel any better, California is also failing to provide safe tap drinking water for everyone. In a few places, the wells are dry. In others the water is contaminated.

jedberg 7y ago
That's not anywhere close to the same thing. In California, the cause of that is climate change, not corruption. The sources for the rural communities are drying up. Secondly, the state is sending bottled water to the people who don't have clean drinking water. And third, the Governor just last week signed an appropriations bill that will provide millions for clean water projects out of the funds that were allocated for "green enhancement programs" because they recognize that this is the fault of climate change.
- solotronics 7y ago
  Climate Change is a funny way to say farmers are using all the water to irrigate what is naturally an arid desert.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  It's more than just global warming and I didn't say the cause was corruption (though I cannot rule that possibility out). I just said California did not provide clean tap water for everyone. Nevertheless, governmental failure of one kind or another is a huge and important reason for California's tap water problems. The fact that there is government provided bottled water in some places should not be looked upon as good management or a success story. It's a bandaid on a broken system and a statewide failure to manage and provide safe water resources and infrastructure. The the appropriations bill you mention does not make up for the years of failure to provide clean, contaminant free tap water on an equal basis to all communities statewide. And even if it succeeds across the state in every community, it will take years to actually fix all of the tap water problems. Five days ago, The NY Times reported As many as 1,000 community water systems in California may be at high risk of failing to deliver potable water — one out of every three — according to a previously undisclosed estimate by senior officials at the California State Water Resources Control Board: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-californians-taps-how-1000-water-systems-may-be-at-risk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/the-crisis-lurking-in-... The Guardian reports that some Central Valley communities have water contaminated by arsenic, It’s cruel to be living in a state that’s so powerful, so rich, but we can’t count on clean water...: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/california-central-valley-sinking-arsenic-water-farming-agriculture https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/californ... Maywood, a poor city in Los Angeles County, has had a multi-year contaminated tap water problem: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-contamination-in-maywood-california/ https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/project/assessing-groundwater-cont...

matty22 7y ago

Also a West Virginian, my favorite is when our entire supreme court were impeached at the same time: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636761241/west-virginia-house-panel-votes-to-impeach-entire-supreme-court https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636761241/west-virginia-house...

lallysingh 7y ago
I have some family in WV (it's absolutely gorgeous) and the government is always fun conversation!
Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
And in this corner we have the national heavyweight champion, 8 time governor sent to prison CHI-TOWN!

sdinsn 7y ago

Note that West Virginia did not pay for anything. The project was paid for by a rich guy [1], Bradley Tusk. [1] https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain/ https://statescoop.com/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia...

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

I will say that your state is beautiful though. Driving from Harper's Ferry to Charleston via the Monogahela National Forest remains one of my trips. My favorite memory was discovering a 13,000 square mile radio quiet zone with a gigantic, black hole hunting, radio telescope smack dab in the middle of it. After stopping to play tourist, I continued driving and stumbled upon a stranded 3 person group, a hetero couple and the wife's sister, the and that probably weighed 1500 pounds between the 3 of them (no judgements). Their minivan was out of commission, and there was no cellphone reception cuz quiet zone. I offered to help, but I could physically only fit one of them in my Ford Focus hatchback, which could normally fit up to 5 people (uncomfortably). Husband asked if I could get him to Durbin, about 30 minutes down the road, and I said yes. All 500 pounds of him squeezed into the front seat, which itself was an adventure because I am 6'5" and was a heftier 300 pounds myself, and he was spilling a bit into the driver's seat. I was basically squished between the car door and a human wall. I loved every minute of it. Husband was an awesome dude. We chatted about his career bas a coal miner (complete with a mild case of black lung disease and pending heart failure), life in a sleepy area, and all sorts of stuff. When we got to Durbin, he just asked me to let him own, where he planned to find a phone to call his preacher, who also happened to be the "local" tow truck driver. He walked/waddled off towards some buildings off the main road, and I continued my journey.

infecto 7y ago
Such a strange way to be a little condescending but also not.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

>Ask first how a contract or project financially benefits key state officials or their family. Typical flyover state simpletons. If they were were thinking long term like the enlightened people in the urban coastal states they would direct the proceeds of their corruption at their party. After doing this for a couple decades they can have a de-facto one party state and doll out government jobs and contracts to a much wider cross section than just their friends and family further cementing their party's (i.e. their professional network) grip on power. (this is sarcasm, in case that isn't immediately obvious)

elwell 7y ago

> West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology. Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.

skrebbel 7y ago
I love your comment because I can't tell whether it's serious or an extremely well played HN parody.
nwah1 7y ago
> When asked about why a redacted audit or report from the auditors wasn’t released, Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney, who co-authored the white paper, gave multiple reasons. First, he pointed to a nondisclosure agreement with the auditors. Then, he stated that there was no way to share any more information about the audit without revealing proprietary information about the system. But one would expect a redacted report or even an abstract of the report for transparency’s sake, given the stakes of introducing a new system to our already rickety voting process. Depending on the secrecy of its system architecture is such a poor security mechanism that researchers have even coined a term for it: security by obscurity.
- nwah1 7y ago
  A private blockchain hosted only by a trusted party has absolutely zero purpose, even in theory. This whole experiment is a scam.
  - i_am_nomad 7y ago
    This is the same principle behind Nebula Genomics, and it’s surprising more people aren’t calling bullshit on it.
    - trakout 7y ago
      In the context of nascent tech like this, most people just don't know the right questions to ask, unfortunately. Perhaps in the near future we will be treated to a layman's explanation of the prevalent (and corrupt) usage of federated blockchains, 'exposed' in a Netflix doc. :)

diveloper 7y ago

Dang, I just moved to WV for a software dev internship for the summer. Is it okay to drink the water in Charleston?

dsr_ 7y ago
Maybe? The annual water quality tests for chemical contamination look reasonable. But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  My first thought was "fix or six a year? wow!" and then you got to West Virginia. That's terrible.
bloopernova 7y ago
get a reverse osmosis system. Or buy RO filtered water from the local grocery store by the 3 or 5 gallon jug. Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.
professorgerm 7y ago
Yes. I assume they're referencing the chemical spill several years ago, and the water has tested clean consistently since. I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

nemacol 7y ago

WV resident here. (Northern Panhandle) Anyone interesting some history of coal country, a great book is "Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area" By Harry M. Caudill. Published 1962. https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Depressed/dp/1334682070 https://www.amazon.com/Night-Comes-Cumberlands-Biography-Dep... https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcomestocumb1963caud_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/nightcomestocumb1963caud/nightcom... While the focus of the book is eastern Kentucky, a lot of the content applies to WV and coal country in general. "At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American Conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region."

thebeefytaco 7y ago

I think those comments safely apply to any government project.