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Maybe they just want to receive their emails and know that in the past, DNC servers and systems have been hacked. It's ingenious to say that their private system is automatically less secure than the government servers unless someone is an email security specialist and has knowledge of the two systems -- I'm sure someone on Slashdot will weigh in on this. ;-)

Perhaps with the record of Karl Rove and his operatives activities on Democratic servers -- I can definitely understand the Clinton's reticence to be on these same servers they've plagued. Doing the business of the state pre-supposes that all your communications are looked at by friendlies; not that everything you do is looked at in terms to set you up.

I can imagine a scenario where someone from the political opposition can read that you have a meeting with so and so, and can use that against you in some manner. As benign as changing the time of a meeting to making a fraudulent email and leaking it to the press.

Anything can happen if someone else with ill will controls the mail server.

Better to whether the small storm of criticism later, than be naive and pretend that political operatives won't do again what they've done to you in the past.
http://www.dispatch.com/conten...
Anyone remember Mike Connell? http://www.democracynow.org/20...
Former hackers were hired to create the original Diebold voting machines; http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
>> and Anonymous claimed they stopped the voting machines from being manipulated in the last election -- sounds like a quiet political cyber war is going on.

I'm sure to people not involved in politics, they think these are paranoid ramblings like Ross Perot claiming that the Bush crowd was pulling dirty tricks, tapping his conversations, and altering photos of his daughter; http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10...

Ross Perot is a man who used his own money and put is own neck on the line to retrieve kidnapped employees. Like him or not, he seems a bastion of integrity compared to the average politician.

Oh, and let's not forget that the RNC emails went missing;
http://freepress.org/article/a...
Rove's went missing;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04...
And Iron Mountain lost emails -- and since their whole business model is storing sensitive data is probably one of the few things they've EVER lost;
http://fcw.com/articles/2014/0...

I'm not saying this to excuse a politician from not being transparent -- but I'd think we need to address the fact that dirty tricks are going on, and we need to make sure there are no man-in-the-middle attacks and manipulations of data.

Lol. Apparently you don't know about the voting fraud of years past.

Read:
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4239

We didn't have accountability problems like this until electronic voting. I could spoonfeed you more, but I think its clear you need to do some research on your own.

Look, another Slashdotter that can't figure out how to use Google.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/politics/campaign/06ohio.html?_r=1

http://makethemaccountable.com/articles/Ohio_s_Odd_Numbers.htm

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud.html?q=2004votefraud.html

http://www.jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html

Or ARs technica

People in Ohio have been convicted for election fraud: http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2379.

What the kid was asking about was why Kerry caved on the election. He was citing evidence uncovered by Greg Palast that Florida was stolen in 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast. That was the book he was waving. People in Ohio have been convicted for election fraud: http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2379. Asking Kerry why he caved might be awkward for Kerry but it is an important question.

Paper ballots are also much more scalable than any kind of technological voting system.

Not enough voting machines for your precinct? Too bad. Wait in line for 8 hours.

This was used to great effect in the 2004 election to suppress minority/poor voters in certain states. http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/99 0

The green and libertarian parties requested and then paid for a recount in Ohio. There have been a couple of convictions so far stemming from this: http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/1 6536269.htm. Now, since the recount was done fraudulently, are not these parties owed a refund?

If the recount was fraudulent, what about the original vote? Why the attempted cover-up? This news http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20 07/2553 gives greater weight to the idea the election was stolen. If the greens and libertarians don't get a refund, at least I hope they'll get a little credit if this turns out to be proven. To me, democrats have put up weak candidates in the last two elections, Gore's Rose Garden speech basically shut out any competition after the impeachment but he wasn't ready to run. Kerry's reporting for duty speech set the tone for his campaign and Bush Lite was a brand that was already taken. Still, it may be some comfort to know that America chose not to elect Bush even with this poor alternative if, as now seems likely, the evidence comes out clearly that theft occured.

ePluribus Media reported this story back in Nov 2006 -- "Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again"

The NetCraft IP funny business was noted, and the election.sos.state.oh.us was updated and checked on from 2005 onwards, that is why you can look at NetCraft today on see a history of it. The list of domains hosted on SMARTech were also added to Robtex by querying a list of servers with a long list and adding to it over the years.

This was posted by some asshat who read the Free Press article The GOP's cyber election hit squad and is trying to take credit.

This is horrible to leave out the actual reporting on this and only link to the NetCraft "smoking gun". The mods here really, really suck.

This was first reported on by ePluribus Media back in Nov. 2006
Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again
And again summarized yesterday by Columbus Free Press
The GOP's cyber election hit squad

"The Free Press is reporting how the IT company that provides Rove's emails and RNC websites, also hosted Ohio's 2004 election results. The country results were sent to Ohio's Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, and those results were hosted on a SMARTech webserver in TN. Blackwell had the IT guys switch the DNS on election night in order to accomplish a man-in-the-middle exploit on election results."

• Freeman is biased -- maybe, but the heart of his argument is based on statistical analysis, rather than the usual political ranting.
• oh you're just a conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truth moment guys -- Nope. I think the 9/11 truth guys are crazy too. Their arguments are largely circumstantial when they don't violate physics. There's no comparison between that stuff and the case that Freeman and Bleifuss lay out.
• statistics can be made to say anything -- is that supposed to impress anyone at slashdot? Bogus statistical arguments are relatively easy to expose.
• but you don't have any real evidence, it's just statisitcs -- No, what we have is statistical evidence. Can you throw someone in jail with this? No. Is this good enough to justify investigating the problem? Hell yeah.
• maybe bush fans won't talk to pollsters -- Yes, that's the "The Reluctant Bush Respondant Theory". It sounds good, but doesn't hold up, it has multiple problems. Read the summary in the review.
• exit polls really aren't reliable -- there have been some odd quirks in exit polls -- and these are discussed in this book -- but overall they certainly are reliable. More importantly we have no other check on the election results at this point. Electronic voting makes undectable fraud possible. So now what?
• oh this is just sour grapes, the democrats do it too -- repeat after me: this is a non-partisan problem. If you care about the integrity of a democratic republic, you care about election integrity. If concerns like this are just shrugged off, then the America Republic is dead.
• what are you complaining about, the democrats won in 2006 -- with razor thin margins. There's an argument that the landslide would've been even bigger, save for election corruption. 2006 was hardly free of irregularities: we are not out of the woods yet.

Well this is a golden oldie... a book review that I wrote months ago. Thankfully (per my request) they deleted my election predictions that I closed the article with (I was only half-right, if you care).

This morning, the Senator from Maryland spent her entire seven minutes at the Judiciary Committee Hearing talking about the "Voting Rights Act" and recent election irregularities in Maryland.

And I see this is a subject she's talked about for some time now: Mikulski Says Voting Rights Act Needed Now More than Ever That's a press release from July 20, 2006.

The "Free Press" guys out in Ohio are of the opinion that the great Democratic landslide of 2006 would've been even larger without corrupt elections: Missing votes in Ohio call races into question, January 3, 2007

You realize that this argument has you in the position that you have to admit that the Democratic election official that approved the ballot was so incompetent that they couldn't spot an obvious rouse?

No, it doesn't. People are busy. They assume good faith by those who work for them.

Not to mention that the Republicans would have had to know in advance that Florida was going to come down to a couple of hundred votes, and dammit, Palm Beach would deliver them their election!

You assume the Republicans limited their corruption of the vote to just one precinct. This is very odd when you have the United States Supreme Court opinion mandating that vote counting under Florida law be stopped before it completed. You can't just pretend the Republicans were being corrupt in one place.

The Gestapo isn't going to stop them from voting or rig the election.

Now, military coups in established democracies are remarkably absent, probably because in a functioning democracy it's unnecessary.

I could not have said it better myself. However since the current administration seems to be openly ignoring the will of the people, it only stands to reason that the US is no longer a "functioning democracy".

Assuming George Bush is the evil power grubbing wannabe dictator your first paragraph would predict (if government attracts bad people then the top job of the most powerful government in the world should attract the worst of the worst, right?), why did he take the chance of being defeated in the last presidential election? What do you suppose would happen if he issued a presidential order that the next election was to be cancelled? I suspect the secret service would quietly take him into custody. If they didn't, the military would.

Many Americans now believe that he did not take any signifigant chances because the last two presidential elections have been rigged. (another example of a non funtioning democracy). As have many house and senate elections.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
* John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, (1962)

In other precincts, impossibly high voter turnout figures -- nearly all of them adding to Bush's official margin -- remain unexplained. In the heavily Republican southern county of Perry, Blackwell certified one precinct with 221 more votes than registered voters. Two precincts -- Reading S and W. Lexington G -- were let stand in the officially certified final vote count with voter turnouts of roughly 124% each.

By contrast, in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, amidst record turnouts, a predominantly African-American precinct, Cleveland 6C, was certified with just a 07.85 percent turnout. The official count was 45 votes for Kerry versus one for Bush, in a precinct where the day's overall voter turnout would have indicated eight or nine times as many voters.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20 04/1057

THIS LINK should have appeared in my original post

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20 04/1057

THIS LINK should have appeared in my original post

A broad outline of what happened to our state (and my county, Scioto County) because of Diebold machines is here. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20 05/1593

The article talks about memory cards and their problems, but there were about a dozen or more other problems with the setup, even disregarding the possibility of hacking.

Diebold has sold voting machines to Utah. Diebold is evil. They want to bully a poor innocent election clerk.

Funny as it sounds, that's exactly how it went here in my local county, and I was involved in the contracting process (A losing battle...word from "on high" was that you either choose Diebold or get no money from the state.) I pushed for another company because the Diebold submission was a load of technical crap.

And, best of all, nothing I've seen or read about since then (North Carolina, anyone?) has done anything to change my mind.

the probability that that perfectly random exit samples would be off by as much as they were in the three critical states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania is less than one to 152 million (1/152,209,887). The probability that non-random exit samples would be simultaneously in error in all three states at once is about one to 468 thousand (1/467,907), or in lay terms: impossible. [Ron Baiman The United States of Ukraine?: Exit Polls Leave Little Doubt that in a Free and Fair
Election John Kerry Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the Popular
Vote]

# Republican Secretary of State Blackwell reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is barring voters from casting provisional ballots within their county if they are registered to vote but there's been a mistake about where they are expected to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries, Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct. But this fall, voters had to leave if they were in the wrong precinct and find their way to the right one even though they had waited in line two to three hours. Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as governor, and has labored hard to install Diebold e-voting machines with no paper trail throughout Ohio. Blackwell is being widely compared to the infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones accused Blackwell of seeking "to disenfranchise the people of the state of Ohio." Tubbs Jones pointed out that the 2000 census had caused massive redistricting, particularly within inner city precincts, which would lead to many people ending up at the wrong voting site.

Ohio Democrats have filed a federal lawsuit this week over Blackwell's order to deny provisional ballots for people who show up at the wrong polling place. The secretary of state has instructed election officials to issue provisional ballots only to those who are in the correct polling location. Federal law gives voters the right to obtain a provisional ballot and have it counted if they mistakenly go to the wrong precinct.

That is a critical issue in light of a federal appeals court ruling Saturday that voters with provisional ballots -- backup ballots for voters whose names do not appear on the rolls -- must cast them in their own precinct for the votes to count.

I am glad you appreciated my previous post, LegendLength, but I do not agree with your comment below:

Note that if you argue it is because it is wrong on occasion, then surely that is enough to stop it being used in any serious argument.

As you may well know, the error function is Gaussian, the PDF extends out to infinity both positive and negative. I reject the argument that we need to "mathematically" prove that fraud has occurred, we only need to prove it to satisfy legal standards; "beyond a reasonable doubt". For example, the differences between exit polls and "recorded votes" in 2004 were extraordinary, and in all of the key "battleground" states the swings were towards George W. Bush. Dr Stephen F. Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania calculated that the odds of just three of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against their respective exit polls were 250 million to 1. (See, for example, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/2004votefraud.ht ml

The swings in the 2005 Ohio referendum are even more extraordinary (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2 005/1559, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/the-st aggeringly-impossib_b_10589.html) Again, these swings were in the "preferred" Republican direction

Awareness of these atrocities is growing around the fringes of "permissible political discourse" in this country. My fervent hope is that it will not be long until the issue explodes into the public consciousness and the criminals are exposed. In a court of law, where we will see which standard of proof satisfies justice

The actual sequence of events seems relatively accurate, however I think the more important fact here is that studies after the fact showed that a full statewide recount would've been decided in Gore's favor (there was an issue about the overvotes that never got counted, all the disputes dealt with undervotes ). So what it looks like really happened is that the Gore team made tactical errors in cherry-picking their recount requests (there was some reason for it that I forget at the moment, I think having something to do with filing requirements).

Now, this is all an unpleasant trip down memory lane that none of us wants to really revisit, but I walk away with the clear impression, between the butterfly ballots, the staged Dade County riot (remember that one? ) disenfranchised non-felon felons, etc, etc that the majority of people in Florida went to the polls in 2000 intending to vote for Gore. I believe this was sustained by subsequent studies. I suppose the relevance in the context of the current slashdot article is that there's lots of ways to steal an election, as with many other things, technology just makes it more efficient (e.g. the career of L.B.J)

This could of course be a longer post, I don't think anyone's got the appetite for that. There's a fair amount of evidence, BTW, that e-voting threw Ohio to Bush in '04 for example, here

Personally the day the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000 was the day I stopped believing that I live in a democracy. I know this might strike some as tinfoil hat country, I think I'm a reasonable guy and there's a fair amount of evidence to support this conclusion.

Sure, that'll keep Halliburton from dealing with the Saddam Hussein regime through offshore subsidiaries.

I bet it'll keep us all from buying cheap goods manufactured in China, too. Get the word out. Once the weight of public shame gets out there, we'll all stop buying the stuff.

Granted, those examples aren't quite to this point: Toys R Us isn't actively selling products for the quasi-enslavement of China's factory laborers, it's contributing to those working conditions at one (slight) remove. In the case of Halliburton, though, the company was working to find loopholes in the oil for food program. Under Cheney. At least borderline illegal, and the shame didn't seem to hold them back...

An image makeover, since he's considered by some to be the Darth Vader of environmental politics?

The issue of election integrity is bigger than the Kerry Bush race. For the first time in the history of this democracy, we are trusting electronic tabulating machines to count votes in a presidential race. Machines which reknown computer scientists and cryptologists have proven to be insecure and untrustworthy.

In addition to being insecure and untrustworthy these machines left no "paper trail", no way of verifying the machine's count in a recount. When you have no paper trail, the only tool to investigate the integrity of a machine count is that of statistics, as Berkeley researchers were forced to rely upon when they concluded that voting irregularities lead them to believe 260,000 votes were invalidly awarded to Bush. In fact when 4,258 votes were awarded by a Diebold machine to Bush in Franklin County, Ohio we only knew that result had to be wrong because only 638 voters had casted ballots. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated event as Diebold has stirred a string of such voting irregularities. According to Bob Fitrakis:

Due to computer flaws and vote shifting, there were numerous reports across Ohio of extremely troublesome electronic errors during the voting process and in the counting. In Youngstown, there were more than two-dozen Election Day reports of machines that switched or shifted on-screen displays of a vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush. In Cleveland, there were three precincts in which minor third-party candidates received 86, 92 and 98 percent of the vote respectively, an outcome completely out of synch with the rest of the state (a similar thing occurred during the contested election in Florida, 2000). This class of error points to more than machine malfunction, suggesting instead that votes are being electronically shifted from one candidate to another in the voting and counting stage.

All reported errors favored Bush over Kerry.

Which leads us to question the integrity of the election especially when the exit polls were so clearly in favor of Kerry.

The CEO of Diebold has made no attempt to hide his support for Bush. Ironically, he has publically stated that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". Later he stated it was a mistake to have said that, he meant it as an American, not as the CEO of a corporation that was contracted to count votes in Ohio. The CEO however isn't the only one to be painted with a big brush of suspicious, as at least five convicted felons secured management positions in his company. One of which served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."

In my response I have analyzed the integrity of the Ohio election through the prisim of electronic voting, others have made other arguments regarding why they think an investigation is warranted as I can assure you the problems with Diebold is not limited to Ohio nor is electronic voting the only "irregularity" in Ohio [1] [2]

The issue of election integrity is bigger than the Kerry Bush race. For the first time in the history of this democracy, we are trusting electronic tabulating machines to count votes in a presidential race. Machines which reknown computer scientists and cryptologists have proven to be insecure and untrustworthy.

In addition to being insecure and untrustworthy these machines left no "paper trail", no way of verifying the machine's count in a recount. When you have no paper trail, the only tool to investigate the integrity of a machine count is that of statistics, as Berkeley researchers were forced to rely upon when they concluded that voting irregularities lead them to believe 260,000 votes were invalidly awarded to Bush. In fact when 4,258 votes were awarded by a Diebold machine to Bush in Franklin County, Ohio we only knew that result had to be wrong because only 638 voters had casted ballots. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated event as Diebold has stirred a string of such voting irregularities. According to Bob Fitrakis:

Due to computer flaws and vote shifting, there were numerous reports across Ohio of extremely troublesome electronic errors during the voting process and in the counting. In Youngstown, there were more than two-dozen Election Day reports of machines that switched or shifted on-screen displays of a vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush. In Cleveland, there were three precincts in which minor third-party candidates received 86, 92 and 98 percent of the vote respectively, an outcome completely out of synch with the rest of the state (a similar thing occurred during the contested election in Florida, 2000). This class of error points to more than machine malfunction, suggesting instead that votes are being electronically shifted from one candidate to another in the voting and counting stage.

All reported errors favored Bush over Kerry.

Which leads us to question the integrity of the election especially when the exit polls were so clearly in favor of Kerry.

The CEO of Diebold has made no attempt to hide his support for Bush. Ironically, he has publically stated that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". Later he stated it was a mistake to have said that, he meant it as an American, not as the CEO of a corporation that was contracted to count votes in Ohio. The CEO however isn't the only one to be painted with a big brush of suspicious, as at least five convicted felons secured management positions in his company. One of which served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."

In my response I have analyzed the integrity of the Ohio election through the prisim of electronic voting, others have made other arguments regarding why they think an investigation is warranted as I can assure you the problems with Diebold is not limited to Ohio nor is electronic voting the only "irregularity" in Ohio [1] [2]

You get what you vote for.

Stop blaming voters for their government's actions. The last two elections proved that you do not get what you vote for.

You get what you vote for.

Stop blaming voters for their government's actions. The last two elections proved that you do not get what you vote for.

At best this(the presidential race) was just a friendly competition.

Friendly, yes, but it's not over until they wheel Renquist out of chemo to cast the deciding vote.

Looks like we've got more than 150,000 valid equal rights claims in Ohio, based on the evidence that voting queue length correlates to historical precinct support. I wonder whether any nonlocal Democrat lawyer wants to be destracted by Washington. However, based on the clear evidence emerging from Florida, I would not advise any Democrat with the ability to pay for a recount to give up anywhere.

I did learn here that commercial hemp operations could be devastating to marijuana production. I learned here that marijuana pollen does have forensic value to law enforcement. I learned here that in Spain, "the hemp pollen count is broadcast on the nightly TV news" as some people are allergic.

Hopefully, I will have learned from your most encouraging comment to contribute to Slashdot in a botanically-friendly fashion.