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Given this: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf, I am not sure you should really blame your neighbors... It's pretty clear that we did NOT vote Bush back into power. Diebold did...

We no longer have a government by the people and for the people (if indeed we ever did), we now have a corporate republic, where the only citizens that matter are corporations. The rest of us are unimportant at best and serfs at worst...

I trust the exit polls more than I trust the election results. Here's a link to a paper showing how unlikely it is that the polls were wrong. http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf I don't want Republicans, Democrats, or plutocrats hacking our elections. As a software engineer, I originally thought it would be pretty easy to create a safe voting machine. But following the KISS principle, I now believe that paper ballots or ballot printing machines are much safer. If an election can't be audited and verified with a recount, then why should anyone trust the results?

The unemployment rate is below 5%. It doesn't get much better without forced labor!

The method for calculating the "official" unemployment rate ignores large swaths of people. The numbers that the administration reports is the total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force. This leaves out all marginally attached workers, adds people employed part time only because of economic reasons (IE, they'd work full time if they could). "Marginally attached workers" are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. So, if you're not looking for a job because you're a Widget Assembly specialist, and the local Widget company closed the factory and put you out of a job, you're not counted in the "official" rate. You're also not counted if you're an aircraft engineer and you're working part time at a 7-11 because you can't find work as an aircraft engineer.

The stock market is at near record highs. It has never passed 13000. Right now the Dow is at 12,983.19. The stock market has never been better!

Furthermore, much of these profits aren't making their way down past the upper class. Wage growth is lagging behind inflation. Labor compensation is lower than it has been in 40 years. Since 2001, as a percentage of the GDP, labor compensation has decreased by 4%. Meanwhile, corporate profits are up by 4%. Yes, the Bush administration has been good for the rich.

Re oil prices:

And whose fault is that?

Anyway, drilling in Alaska wouldn't have any impact on the price of gas; not for another decade, at least.

How many Al Qaeda members did we kill yesterday?

Fact is, we are kicking major ass in Iraq and Afghanistan

Things are getting worse, not better, in Iraq, and Afganistan has even gotten worse in recent years. We wouldn't be in Iraq if it hadn't been for Bush's war mongering, and we could have a stabilized Afganistan if Bush hadn't gotten us over-committed. We're in a weak position militarily, because both N. Korea and Iran know we can't afford to invade either of them while we're mired in Iraq, and we don't get much support on the world stage because of Bush's unilateral posturing.

But, just because sucks as a president, it doesn't prove he's a crook who steals elections. That evidence is in the 2004 Ohio polling discrepancies and stories like this.

--- SER

Some people analyzed weaknesses in the bill and made recommendations for changes....
http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/ChangesNeede d2HR811.pdf

I think I first read about the details of the Indian system while doing some work in India. I was rather pleased by the simplicity of their system in comparison to what has been the direction in the US in recent years.

I wish I had access to the articles I read. The Wikipedia article here doesn't seem to describe as well how the votes are actually accumulated nationwide.

The first thing you need to realize here, however, is that the system the Indians are using do not necessarily adequately address the concerns that are addressed in the NIST whitepaper here or in the electionarchive.org paper referenced earlier.

The beauty of the Indian system is its simplicity. However, given such simplicity a paper trail isn't feasible. The Indian system is electronic in the most basic meaning. It is not at all computer based. It would be more appropriate to think of these as something more similar to the mechanical lever systems especially when it comes to issues such as recounts. What exactly are you recounting for either system? You're not recounting on the level of each vote. You're reaccumulating at the level of each box.

Fraud is still possible with the Indian system. But it is made much, much more difficult by a number of constraints. One of these is the maximum number of votes per box. It is rather small. But this is causing some problems in and of itself as described in the Wikipedia article since the smaller the number of votes per box, the less your vote is truly anonymous.

An even more interesting point of debate here is the fact that the Indian system was more or less designed to avoid paper ballots since fraud was so much easier with paper ballots. I like the idea of using a GUI to choose votes but then creating a paper ballot to use via optical scanning for counting. But this brings us right back to the issue of preventing paper ballot stuffing.

Actually this time just RTFA isn't enough. You need to read the whitepaper as well.

It appears that at least one federal agency has not turned to the dark side. The draft NIST white paper recommends a voter verifiable paper audit trail that is also the ballot of record, AND robust auditing. I was very pleased to read it. I hope the final document isn't watered down, and I hope this or something similar is implemented in time for the 2008 election.

The premise of the whitepaper is that no software dependent system for counting votes (like a touchscreen with no paper ballot) can be fully vetted, and that they should never be used without a software independent record for use in mandatory statistically robust audits.

In other election reform news... There is an organization that has been a key mover in the election reform movement called electionarchive.org. They did a lot of very interesting statistical analysis of the 2004 elections and found some startling results. They have made a very solid list of 15 legislative recommendations. They can be found here:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/EI-FederalLe gislationProposal.pdf

here is a list of the electionarchive.org recommendations
1.Manual Audits
2.Voter Service Reports
3.Auditable Voting Systems
4.Fund Manual Audits and Voter Service Reports
5.Teeth (enforcement)
6.Public Election Records
7.Election Monitoring Website
8.Submission of Reports
9.Public Disclosure of Voting System Software
10.Prohibit Certain Network Connections
11.Qualifications for Technical Guidelines Development Committee
12.Public Right to Observe
13.Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee
14.Repository for Voting System Disclosure
15.Prohibit Practices that Disenfranchise Voters

Voting Irregularities in Ohio which used ES&S and Diebold machines. see pp. 28 & 29[pdf]. The first link is irrelevant as proof, but interesting. The second link contains all of the exit poll discrepencies for each state. It was a report done by the exit polling company to investigate the discrepencies. I can't find any lists of where Diebold or ES&S machines are used, but you'll see in which states the largest discrepencies were found. It's a very interesting study, although they don't point fingers, only describe where the discrepencies may have come from.

There's other information regarding the votes besides this particular audit. You may consider U.C. Berkely a leftist institution, but their Quantitative Methods Research Team has quite a bit of credentials. U.I.Chicago, Notre Dame, Cortnell, U. Penn., U. of Wisconsin, Stanford, and Princeton might also be in a blue states, but they are also very highly respected. Other schools that have weighed in include Temple, U. of Utah and Southern Methodist U. Mathematical arguments like this may not sway dick and jane, but I would expect them to have more credence with the slashdot crowd:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Pol ls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf (PDF)

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national
poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%.
Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as
different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1
in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to
chance.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:
1. Statistical Sampling Error - or Chance
We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be
ruled out.
2. Inaccurate Exit Polls
This is the theory that Edison/Mitofsky put forth. They hypothesize that the reason the exit polls were so
biased towards Kerry was because Bush voters were more reluctant to respond to exit polls than Kerry
voters. Edison/Mitofsky did not come close to justifying this position, however, even though they have
access to the raw, unadjusted, precinct-specific data set. The data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their
report show how implausible this theory is.
3. Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of
Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election
results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted
cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu:7101/

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade,
respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch
voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in
Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of
81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm
Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should
have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 -
a difference of 19,300 votes.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the
significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting
cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of
electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for
President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this
appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once
in a thousand chances."


http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/us/FL2004/WandF lorida2004.pdf (PDF)

Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in just the
most critical st

Earth to Raisins: Conservatives don't talk to exit pollsters as often as liberals do.

Actually, participation in exit polls is higher in republican districts than democratic ones.

I think this does a pretty good job of explaining why exit polls resulted in such a poor estimate of election results.

That report has been discredited.