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Voters News Service: What Went Wrong
ddtstudio writes "Baseline Magazine has a pretty good recounting of how even the national TV networks can have a computer network go wrong -- in this case the night of the last U.S. election. From the article: "VNS had been trying to rewrite and retool the system for years. This was just the most recent attempt and it failed miserably."
Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed."
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
The systems in question were mainframe computers running IBM's Operating System 390.
Not that i'm a linux fanatic, just wanted you to get your facts straight.
... and one page version of article.
...it was three elections ago. I hate it when people only count (and vote in) presidential elections, as though the other ones didn't matter!
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
George W. Bush is not a Junior. Al Gore is.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Quote from article: "Also, the networks would be unable to give the type of detailed explanations as to why voters voted the way they did this time around. For example, according to TV network analysts working the election, the networks wouldn't be able to tell viewers why particular demographic groups voted for specific candidates nor the issues that they considered most or least important when voting. "
:)
:)
So, what this means is that people were able to go late to the polls, and cast a vote free from the influence of network prognostication. They were able to cast a vote that they thought was right, free from the spectre of "throwing a vote" as the election had already been "called" by *INSERT NETWORK NAME HERE*. Boo Hoo to the networks. Wow...why the hell is this a bad thing???
Up until the 1960's, most US citizens were able to vote just fine, all by themselves, without the need for knowing why *INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC HERE* people voted for *INSERT CANDIDATE NAME HERE*. Why does it need to be different today? There's already enough blather on TV, if we could eliminate it from just one night every 4 years....oh man, that'd be sweet!
Of course, I won't know because I'll be watching something that is entertaining, rather than a farce, on my TiVo!!!
All members, including 19 newspapers, shared in the management of the company and oversaw its $33 million operating budget for the current four-year election cycle.
Could the failure of VNS be the fault of having far too many PHB's droning on about mission statements and TPS reports?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I think another thing that doomed VNS is the fact that it might be possible the way the system was programmed could have been biased towards one political party or another. Unfortunately, this could have bad effects on the election, as the 2000 Presidential election fiasco showed.
Well, no where in the article is it mentioned that there was a problem with IBM and Oracle. It just says that there were delays in transferring data. So I don't know why Oracle and IBM were named in the original post.
What's under yellowstone?
From article:
Now, it does not mention what OS they were running WebLogic on in the article, but it was definately not OS/390.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Just to mention, aside from the obvious advantage of our elections in Brazil over the US elections: the TV networks could manage to deliver almost instant voting data for the public, including statistics, pre-voting predictions and so on.
If the USA voters want a clean, fast and effective election, send the people responsible for it to Brazil, put your pride away and admit it works nicely.
Be more specific if you claim such! What kind of BEA system's server software? BEA TUXEDO, WEBLOGIC SERVER, what???
Java, Oracle, DB2, BEA - nope, those were symptoms of a deeper failure...
They used Linux.
The systems in question were mainframe computers running IBM's Operating System 390.
Not that i'm a linux fanatic, just wanted you to get your facts straight.
You sure it was Linux?
Or you assumed that a OS/390 must run Linux?
Besides, I'm not that pro-Linux in this, but if you go straight to the end you see the problem was not all that OS-centric.
I just want to state with the facts. Thanks for your time.
Who wants to start an open source project to replace this failed service. We'll use Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP and Apache. Any takers?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
OK Folks,
I'm one of the lead programmers of one of the members
We KNEW this was going to happen a LONG time before November. At the end of the article, they talk about "set a deadline 2 months ahead of the real deadline"
Guess what? They did!!! They were supposed to be ready for the NJ Primary, which was before the summer - they missed it, BIG TIME - That's when the alarm bells went into overdrive for me
I understand (This up in the levels above me) that the steering committee didn't realize that the technical committee was saying "We've got a BIG problem"
Another warning sign was when their test data generator that they sent us in the spring generated XML that didn't match their own XSDs - and that was with all the fields declared as cdata - the field names didn't match
The first test, which was supposed to be months ahead, came weeks ahead, and even the most basic message (just a heartbeat) didn't work. That's they day I knew it was doomed for sure. Our prime efforts switched to our backup data source at that time. THAT worked fine. I had a boring election night, watching VNS crash, and laughing
One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages--Java and the Extensible Markup Language-- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets.
That sounds great. People who have no idea how to accomplish the goal telling the people tasked with doing it, how it should be done. I can't believe it failed. They should have laid out what they wanted to acheive and left the rest up to the designers on how to meet those goals...
Also, some interesting older information on the VNS can be found a the Votescam website. Although they seem to have a few extreme views, along with some wild conspiracy theories..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Just what are you trying to mumble? BEA Weblogic Server is a Java application. Stupidass.
From the article:
Test heavy: Put it through at least 10 times as much activity as you really expectYeah, that sounds clever. Make sure to buy at least 10 times more hardware than you really need.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
It would be great if it were actually possible to read your novel. Unfortunately, the sites perpetual pop-overs, reminders to download the flash player, blah blah.. It's worse than a porn storm....
"Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed!"
Doesn't that sound like a line from a bad disaster movie?
DIE HARD IV: DIE HARDWARE.
As someone who finally bailed out of an extremely poorly run company (WebMD) burdened with dumb management, it's easy to see the echoes.
The list on the last page of the article is nearly perfect, with one small addition:
6) Listen to your employees!! You hired them because you thought they were good at what they do. Why would you ignore their input into the process now?
Nothing in this article is the "fault" of the technology (Oracle, Java, IBM, Linux, or anything) itself any more than it's the fault of a head of cabbage.
It's just poor management.
One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages--Java and the Extensible Markup Language-- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets.
Ah, yes. The programming language OS 390. Are there any O'Reilly books on that subject?
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
I think if the mass media were reasonably unbiased something akin to the Voter News Service might actually work fairly well.
The big problem is that most of the companies that contributed to VNS had a perceived political agenda that could "create" stories that could skew the election. This unfortunately caused the fiasco of the 2000 Presidential election in the USA; we are fortunate that VNS was kiboshed on 5 November 2002, which meant the networks couldn't "create" stories that could have affected the elections across the USA.
If you're asking about my skepticism about the mass media read Bernard Goldberg's book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Regnery Publishing, 2001, ISBN 0895261901). That book--which became a #1 best seller in the USA--is a contributing reason why many mass media outlets in the USA is suffering massive losses in TV viewers, radio listeners, and newspaper/periodical readers.
the TV networks confirmed what they had feared for months: They couldn't derive any meaningful exit-polling data from a system they had just spent between $10 million and $15 million to overhaul.
.
Projecting winners and losers in various races would take several hours longer than in the past.
(sarcasm)
Y'know, it is truly a sad day when you can no longer count on the media to tell you what might happen and instead have to settle for what did
(/sarcasm)
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
If the result of the election was an acurate reflection on the number of votes cast for a particular candidate? A flawed system reporting on a flawed system, maybe they've hit on something there.
problem was that they called Florida for Gore even though Bush was ahead in the actual vote count.
As a result, they cost Bush about 30,000 votes in the panhandle of Florida where the polls were not closed.
The VNS caused the Florida fiasco.
...a /. effect, too ?
Since from the article it seems too many people were trying to access the same pages at the same time....
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
I think if you look at your parent poster's use of blockquote (or whatever), you'll see that (s)he was saying the same thing -- someone else was making the Linux assertion, (s)he was questioning it.
I actually liked having a little suspense and watching the ACTUAL local returns rather than some "projected" guestimate that was in at 2:00PM. People actually voted up to the end here. If VNS died completely I'd be fine with it.
-- $G
Assuming you aren't grossly misinformed about Brazil's voting system (which you probably are), they have much bigger problems to deal with.
For example, what good is a technologically sound voting system when all the candidates are shit?
I guess if you don't mind your savings account being frozen by the president (de Mello), or a 35% currency devaluation (Cardoso), or a president without a high school diploma (da Silva), it's not so bad...
And I won't even start on the rampant corruption in Brazil. Slashdot's database wouldn't be able to hold so much information.
We'll put our pride away when Brazil puts away its complete joke of a government and stops forcing its masses to live in abject poverty.
You can lecture us on technology when Brazil stops doing asinine things like blowing up its own oil platforms.
Verdade?
Talisman
Wanna get pissed?
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
...but I would much prefer the government try to solve the problem.
The solution I've been trying to get people to think about is a 24 hour voting "day." All the booths would open at the same time and stay open for 24 hours. In addition, exit interviews could be taken, but not reported until the polls close.
That way the entire US would have the chance to vote at the same time and without external influence.
I feel sorry for those commmunities on the west coast, or in the Pacific, who do not have real elections because one party's presidential candidate is declared the loser. People may disagree with this, but I am sure that there are people who would have otherwise voted who end up staying at home because "What's the use."
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
for organizations that have "mission statements".
Do you notice they all include the cliche'd line:
"....enhance shareholder value..."
Hell, its stupid, nobody reads it, but they might at least be honest:
"...make money for the owners..."
People are so fricking stupid.
perhaps we should go back to using hand written ballots. The computerized voting that this administration is pushing will only lead to more vote fraud because the count will not be audited. In the 2002 elections in 5 different states Republican candidates won by the same score of 18181 (a prime number). Now, I am willing to give Diebold the benefit of the doubt and say this is a programming error but the fact that this isn't being discussed in the media is a problem. This voting machine code should be GPL'ed so we can all look at it and make sure it works. If they do go to computerized voting there needs to be an audit trail.
sanjayahuja - 02:39pm Mar 30, 2002 EST (#755 of 762)
It's exactly the sort of thing Microsoft tries to set up
AFAIK, MSFT is not too aggressive about pursuing patent violations. In as much polls, seem to be under discussion, MSFT owns the patent on web polls. See US patent below:
MSFT's web poll patent
They would be well within their rights in demanding that george pay them a royalty for the polls he ruins, or in the alternative shut him down. Teeheehee!
yuk. i mean yikes
this would be like demanding the right to query midas himself, over the 'purity' of the goaled, after it's been smelted, buy farcIEs?
have you taken lairy/robbIE's visual studio test drive yet? no meNTion of the kode blew virot, or the gpl, except that you can't use it, the gpl, that is.
And yet votes still got counted. Reporters were still able to cover the votes being tallyed.
Now why do they use this? And why is it government funded?
Voting in this country is a fraud. Voting machines of any kind can be rigged. They don't count the ballots at the polling place. How do I know that my ballot box is the same one that arrives at city hall.
When Jimmy Carter goes to some third world nation to help prevent a rigged election he makes them count the votes at the polling place. How come we don't do that here?
It is a fraud. I don't vote because of it. Our rights were stolen from years ago.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
VNS wasn't off in predicting Florida for Gore based on exit polling.
It certainly appears that most voters in FL *meant* to vote for Gore but goofy ballets (not unique to FL) and Democrats blowing the recount (there weren't enough votes for Gore in the recount of the few counties they asked for but there *were* if the whole state had been recounted.
That said, it's probably a good thing that VNS is gone. In this last election, it was less stressful and not as annoying watching the network coverage that night.
how about the 30,000 votes for Bush in the panhandle that were never cast because VNS liberals called state for ALGORE while polls were still open?? that was trickery at its worst
You listen to Rush Limbaugh too much. If I was a voter I wouldn't give a damn about what the media whores say on TV I would just go and vote.
I read somewhere that the famous "Dewey vs. Truman" predictions were skewed by the fact that telephones were something of a luxury at the time, so telephone polling resulted in more Republicans than Democrats responding to a survey. The theory is that Republicans were over-represented in the survey, thus leading to the "Dewey Wins" newspaper headlines.
If you tried a telephone survey today, you would discover that Republicans are likely to have money to spend on "Caller ID" and "Privacy manager". Now it's the Democrats who are over-represented in a telephone survey.
Even if you bag the telephones entirely and survey people outside the polls, the Republicans are perhaps more likely to decline a survey response because of the steady stream of marketing that is directed towards people with money.
Ya know, the news agencies *could* just wait and announce the *real* results after *all* of the votes are counted, instead of spending millions on guessing. I never believe their conjectures anyway; I always wait for the next day's paper to tell me what actually happened.
The article states that they dumped the S/390 hardware, probably in favour of some *nix servers. Its the same old story, company ditches the mainframe, company spends millions trying to get the replacement to work, company fails, company dies.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Bah! The voting system isn't rigged because doesn't NEED to be. The REAL "rigging" happens much, much earlier on. The two ruling parties have dug themselves in so firmly and put up so many barriers to outside challenge that any fiddling with ballots is essentially unnecessary. Sure, they point fingers at one another and accuse each other of "cheating", but the REAL cheat is that our choice is between the "Raise Taxes Party" and the "Go To War Party". Personally, that's why I don't bother to vote.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Punch cards work just fine, it's just that the voting officials were playing games with them.
They got greedy. If you only put 6 or 8 cards in the holder, they punch just fine. It's when you jam a dozen or twenty cards into the machine that they don't punch cleanly, you get hanging and dimpled chads because the puncher isn't strong enough to drive the stylus clean through.
Coupled with the fact the (Democratic) poll workers just happened to have a few extra sacks of ballots in their cars, and were caught with extra holders and stacks of blank cards, means AlGore didn't come within 100,000 votes in Florida.
Unfortunately, you would be better than 80% of the population who believe the media to be the right hand of God.
"Now, with 3% of districts reporting, we've given Florida to Al Gore. This just in, Al Gore has taken Florida."
"Damnit, Edna! Al Gore got Florida! Guess my vote won't matter now. What's for dinner?"
"VNS liberals?" Are you cray-see?
The Voter News Service did not call states for one candidate or the other. It is up to media organizations (i.e., news channels) to actually make calls like that. Incidentally, do you remember the first station to call Florida for Al Gore in 2000? It was a little outfit called the Fox News Channel. What's this complaining about "liberals", again?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Oracle + Java + BEA = burrrp!
Voting machines of any kind can be rigged.
As can vote counting machines.
They don't count the ballots at the polling place. How do I know that my ballot box is the same one that arrives at city hall.
The most obvious way is by having the taking of the box done in public.
Geez. And you wingnuts have the cheek to claim that the people in West Palm Beach were idiots. What's more idiotic, to misread a form and put your hole in the wrong place, or to not bother to vote?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You don't get it.
All they need is a name for a polling system, they don't need the system itself.
Regardless, the media will call the election early when appropriate for the Dems.
Florida was called for GORE before the polls were closed in CA. If you don't think that caused a significant amount of folks to just bypass the lines and go home, you are an idiot.
"If you want to know what a Republican is guilty of, listen to what he is accusing you of."
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
apparently they weren't connected with .NET enterprise software!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Another back story to this is that the chief news editor at FOX happens to be a cousin of bush. There were documented calls from the bush camp to their cousin right after florida was cast for Gore. Soon after, FOX gave bush the lead in the state. Hmmm.
Funny, I look at it like Big Media decided they didn't like the results that reality gave them... so they decided that their VPN system must be wrong when Bush was predicted to win, so it needed an upgrade.
This is utterly predictable. Long projects with a
single deliverable at the end are notorious for
not delivering on time.
Several things come to mind immediately from the Agile methodologies
playbook:
1. The customer should not set technical requirements.
2. A working (but not feature complete) version
of the product should be delivered no less
frequently than every three months.
3. The customer should set business requirements
with one voice. If that means that the various
customers have to vote on what's most important,
then so be it.
4. Features should be implemented in the order
that it's most important to the customer.
And we haven't even gotten into the software
engineering yet!
John Roth
Goldberg bases his allegations on opinion and hearsay.
Broadcast media in the U.S. skews so far to the right that you have NO chance of getting both sides of a story unless you go to a foreign source.
The computerized voting that this administration is pushing will only lead to more vote fraud because the count will not be audited. In the 2002 elections in 5 different states Republican candidates won by the same score of 18181 (a prime number). Now, I am willing to give Diebold the benefit of the doubt and say this is a programming error but the fact that this isn't being discussed in the media is a problem. This voting machine code should be GPL'ed so we can all look at it and make sure it works.
You can only verify if you can put the same data into your copy of the program. There are all sorts of issues surrounding being sure that the approved code and only that code is actually running on the machines.
If they do go to computerized voting there needs to be an audit trail.
How can you do this in such a way that makes an audit and/or recount possible?
I've seen this story, in one version or another, many times over the past decade or so - Some executive leader of a company or organization learns that the system their service is based on (which has probably been up and working nearly as long as they've been alive) is running on a mainframe, and they sniff their nose in horror and say, "Mainframe?!??!!! OS/390??? That dinosaur? We must get rid of this junk immediately!"
;) programmers to slam the new service into place in less time that it probably took to upgrade the OS on the old solution. That mold has never worked, and I think never will.
Then, they proceed to fix the service that's not broken by a)completely junking the proven, tested old system before a quality, fully-tested replacement solution is ready, and b)leaning hard on their (poor, overworked
I'm not a troll, so I won't dwell on how Java (and WebLogic) runs well on OS/390, and Linux runs on the mainframe just as well as on any other platform (and Java and WebLogic run there,of course, also); but those solution possibilities are there, needless to say.
Even if they were going to replatform the whole system, why in God's green earth did they junk the old system before the new system was in place? I mean, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that you don't completely scrap your #1 bread-and-butter application before its replacement is ready and in place. Even if the new system would be light-years better... some information is better than no information (from the point of view of the networks)!!
I agree with many of these previous posts... this is, among other things, a bad case of project managers and clueless executives getting caught with their pants down -- big time.
- Proofs of Sturgeon's Law Delivered Daily -
We all know what happened...
As a Western-state voter, I fully intend to lie to any exit pollers who ask me how I voted.
The networks seem to have this parallel election going on, so they can tell who won the election before the votes are counted.
Out in the West, they tell us who won before we even get to the polls.
Pox on that. There's only one real election. I abhor the parallel straw vote, and I look forward to any opportunities to thwart it.
Amazing how many lies you can fit into such a short message. Did you make those up yourself, or did you just lift them from the AM radio Rush-clone of your choice?
Clinton and Gore could both speak with command off the cuff on any aspect of their administration. Dubya has to use cue cards just to remember what his own policies are, and half the time can't even read them.
P.S. Grow a pair, log in.
What a weird coincidence. They all crashed. Maybe they should have used Access on Win 95 machines.
Or maybe somebody wanted them all to crash.
Well, for starters, it was absolutely imperative---in order to justify the illicit results of the SCOTUS decision and the supposedly "close" outcome in Florida that stopped being counted when the powers that be managed to come up with a number that put Bush .00005 ahead, by 537 votes---to suppress exit polling that indicated that people who entered the booths intended in greater numbers than could ever be divulged to have voted for Al Gore.
The very existence of VNS threatened the legitimacy of the newly installed administration.
Thus began the revolting parade of network executives in front of Congressional panels pronouncing mea culpas for having believed the exit polling and pointing out how unreliable it was. (What they didn't say was---it is unreliable in predicting sanctioned fraud, which is the goal of this administration.)
So, VNS was ordered to fix itself up, so it could account for things like massive removal of legitimate voters from the registration lists, a veritable flood of absentee balloting that is suspicious at best, and the machinations of highly mascaraed secys of state to suppress ballots that favored the opposition candidate even as she allowed late, unsigned, and otherwise illegitimate ballots to be counted for her boss's brother.
And so VNS hired the ultra secret firm Batelle, connected with CIA and other unknown endeavors, to come up with some software that could predict these little machinations and thus ensure victory to the victor in all cases. It was too tough a job (for how to predict triply-sent absentee ballots and people removed from voter rolls for crimes they might commit in the future?)...and voila....they decided they'd just have to give it all up.
What's the difference anyway? Election fraud was going to be written into the predictions anyway. No one can ever trust an election again.
...always leave out the mass destruction caused by the auto accidents which happened when 30,000 voters on their way to the polls simultaneously decided not to vote and pulled u-turns in the span of 5 seconds.
The truth: The networks called the Florida result before the polls closed in upstate Florida. This was a stupid mistake entirely unrelated to the bad calls made that night. It probably had a small impact on turnout that night (you have to assume it meant that lots of Bush voters totally believed the pollsters and made their decisions on voting on what the networks say; they might be stupid, but they're not that stupid). Whatever the impact, it was dwarfed by the corrupt and dishonest removal of black voters' names from the voter lists engineered by Jeb Bush and the Texas Department of Prisons.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Let's look at this.
The networks, forgetting that the Panhandle jutted into the Central timezone, called Florida for Gore fifteen minutes before the polls in the Panhandle closed. (They thought the polls had closed forty-five minutes before, and were desperately trying to make a call quickly.)
For the "30,000" figure to be correct, there had to be that many last-minute Bush voters, on their way to -- or standing in line at -- the polls while watching TV, saw the state called for Gore, and en masse turned around and went home (instead of voting).
Occam's Razor suggests that the "30,000 votes for Bush" theory was just Republican spin to cover their shameless actions in the Florida recount.
But you don't even mention the African-Americans whose voter registrations were wrongly deleted by Katherine Harris before the election, which is well documented.
--
In the Star Trek evil Mirror Universe, virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma is gangsta hiphop star DJ Yo Ma-Ma.
...Bush voters aren't as idiotic as Rush Limbaugh says they are? Who would know better?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
"How can you do this in such a way that makes an audit and/or recount possible? "
Create a paper trail. (Making everything electronic is actually very stupid.)
Or...
Create an independent organization that monitors the vote by interviewing voters as they leave the polls.
These are the common sense ways to verify counts.
Too bad the USA seems all to eager to abandon common sense.
Indeed the "old ways" still work. Canada's federal elections are run by an independent federal agency, not by the individual provinces. This allows for uniformity in the voting and counting process. The ballots are sheets of paper, with the candidates listed in alphabetical order by surname, and the party affiliation (if any) printed below each candidate's name. To the right of each name there is an open circle, where you can make any mark you wish (without mutilating the ballot) as long as it does not identify the voter. If you mismark your ballot, or stick your pencil through it, you can ask for another one from the returning officer, who has to mark the incorrect ballot uncountable (not spoiled; that's a separate category) and set it aside. Blind voters can mark their own ballots, because they get a template that shows them where the circles are on the paper. You have the right to submit an unmarked or spoiled ballot.
When the local poll closes, the deputy returning officer unseals the ballot box, pulls out the ballots one by one, and reads off the name of the candidate the ballot is for. Any scrutineer (candidate-appointed observer) can inspect and challenge any ballot. The ballot is then placed in a pile for that candidate, and challenged ballots are set aside for a judicial inspection and recount if necessary. The votes are tallied by all scrutineers and the poll clerk as they are read, and the counts verified by all observers. Then the sorted piles are counted to validate the tally. Spoiled ballots (unmarked, marked more than once, or identify the voter) get their own tally and pile. Each pile of ballots is placed in an envelope, one for each candidate, the envelopes are sealed, and the seals are signed. Then the envelopes are placed back in the ballot box, which is resealed (with signatures of all scrutineers if they so choose), and returned to the constituency's returning officer for a judicial recount, if required. Once the ballot box has been resealed, the poll's results are phoned in to the candidates' headquarters and the constituency's returning officer. The counting process takes about an hour for each poll. If the consolidated results show a sufficiently narrow margin between the higher-polling candidates, then a full judicial recount is automatic. All the ballot boxes from the constituency are unsealed, the envelopes opened, and the ballots reinspected and recounted by the returning officer and a judge. This, too, is open to scrutiny by the candidates or their agents. (The other candidates may be interested in the recount as well, because it may determine whether they get their nomination fee back for gaining more than 10% of the vote.)
The first public results are announced shortly after the polls close in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. However, under Canadian election law, these results cannot be reported where the polls are open. Thus television and radio coverage is limited to where the polls are closed, and Canadian-based Internet coverage does not begin until the polls close in British Columbia and Yukon. With staggered polling hours across the country, that's usually three hours after the polls close in Atlantic Canada, with enough extrapolation of reported results to declare a winner usually an hour before that, because of the 176 or so (of 301) seats that come from Ontario and Québec. The key is that the projections are made on real vote tallies, not exit polls and demographic profiles. If something is too close to call, the networks and newspapers won't call it. They will wait until they can make a statistically confident decision.
It doesn't make the political analysis any more informed or interesting, though. Usually the analysis boils down to one of "Canadians are grumpy," "Canadians are complacent," or "Ontario doesn't think the way the rest of the country does, but their weight carries the vote."I may not like the outcome of the process, but that's because I don't usually like the inputs to the process, not the process itself. The process is not completely foolproof, but it is open and verifiable if candidates choose to avail themselves of that openness.
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
They are not lies. They are all fact and are all public record. Besides, apeaking well "off the cuff" does not make you intelligent. Many brilliant men had trouble conveying their thoughts (ex. Einstein).
The "this" in question, the Voters News Service, is funded by news networks and newspapers, not the government. They use it so that they can provide as up to the minute information on voting results as possible, and so that they can provide in depth analysis of voter behavior.
I suggest volunteering to work at the polls, or to be a monitor of the polls. You're free to watch the entire process yourself. In hotly contested races, the various parties will send people down to monitor things themselves.
If you are absolutely convinced that the system is fraudulent, what are you doing about it? Might I suggest:
Your claim that our election system is rigged is extremely serious. If you seriously believe it, don't you owe it to yourself and your country to fight back?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
... it should be our voting machines. The new Diebold computerized voting system is a patented "black-box". Votes go in, tallies come out, and no one knows what goes on inside. Of all things that should be in the public domain and open for all to see, it should be the program thats used to calculate the votes which will determine the leaders of the "free world"
"But you don't even mention the African-Americans whose voter registrations were wrongly deleted by Katherine Harris before the election, which is well documented [salon.com]"
There were hearings on this and other charges, and nothing was found. Give it up. You lost the election because you are out of touch.
"Well-documented" by a link to Salon. There's no bias here, folks!
I would feel better with a link to an openly communist site.
Uh...Woops, Salon qualifies.
At least Salon has a soft porn section.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Abandoning common sense seems to be a priority for America these days. Electronic voting is DUMB and will only lead to more fraud.
Wow, I didn't know that stuff. Could you provide some links that would back up this amazing information?
Thanks!
Find the Harvard yearbook, Bush's pic is there.
Try to find Algore's pic at Vanderbilt or at law school for the 2nd and subsequent years. You can only find them for the frosh years.
Same with Clinton. He's in the yearbook as a first year student, but not the following year. Ask what course of study he finished at Oxford, you won't get an answer. Right now, the deanship at the Oxford New School is opened, and Clinton is nominated for it. Bet he doesn't get it! He's a flunk out and accused as a rapist.
Parent must have been written in that OS/390 language.
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
...a company which had GOP connections which was given taxpayer money to eliminate ineligible voters from the voting lists. They explored the possibility of getting lists of convicted felons from other states and crossing those names off the eligible voter lists in Florida. Most states balked at such a process because it was so hard to tell whether the voter was the convicted felon or just somebody with the same name. A small number of states (including Texas, with the biggest list) went along.
The company told Florida they didn't think the names should be eliminated without adequate safeguards to make sure eligible voters were not eliminated. Florida didn't want to spend the money to verify. So the names were eliminated. The affected voters didn't find out 'til Election Day.
(Note that the company demonstrated some Republicans are not as corrupt as the Bushes and their cronies.)
The 2000 election showed that Bush was out of touch with half the voters and Gore was out of touch with half the voters. Democrats were out of touch with Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court. That's why they lost.
Anyone who claims the 2000 election was some mandate for their ideas (on either side) deserves to have all their ideas treated with as much respect as the rest of this post deserves.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Reading further, I think that one can tell what went wrong with this project: rather than relying on proven technology, they wanted to make it all snazzy: voice recognition, Java, web application, XML &c. &c. &c. ad infinitum. Instead of sticking to what works, they went with what doesn't. It's like replacing a rock-solid program written in Lisp and running on a Unix system with something written in Visual Basic written on Windows. Don't have high hopes: it may run as well or better, but I'm not betting on it. The likely answer is that this system was over-designed and under-implemented. Too much fun, cutting edge technology and not enough old-fashioned engineering.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM--when I saw the writeup, I read the article. I have nothing to do with our OS/390 division or our DB2 division. I'm a Unix admin, that's all.
VNS itself is screwed up. It's a cartel of newspapers and news services so they can cover lots of elections. Sounds good, right? But they normally only cover the "real candidates" -- so that a two-party race between a and a green will be reported as " candidate running unopposed."
This combination leads to skewed, pro-establishment news reporting.
So I wouldn't be surprised at all if they had a specification problem (as reported by the message from the guy who worked on it). It's completely consistent with the charter of the organization.
Does Rush have a crew of slashdotters with mod points ready just for situations like this?
The "this" in question, the Voters News Service, is funded by news networks and newspapers, not the government. They use it so that they can provide as up to the minute information on voting results as possible, and so that they can provide in depth analysis of voter behavior.
/. ?
I was under the understanding the the VNS was started with government grants. I don't have the info in front of me and a google search is turning up dry so I'll withdraw it. I don't distrust the VNS system, I just thought it was amusing that it doesn't work.
As to your lists of things that I should do: I have been a voting offical. My life and my family's life was threaten when I tried to expose the fraud that occured where I used to live. While I can protest I can also be killed. I will not discuss when or where this occured. Besides that is not the point. Not every election is fixed. Indeed most are not. But the system as setup is designed to allow it to easily occur. I personaly have witnessed vote tampering of one election.
Your claim that our election system is rigged is extremely serious. If you seriously believe it, don't you owe it to yourself and your country to fight back?
Yes but I have a family I must protect as well and the system is too well entrenched. Do you not think that no vote fraud occured in Florida? On both sides. I think Bush stole the election. And I like Bush and would vote for him. But get real. As long as they try to use fancy technology and refuse to count ballots at the place of voting then we are going to have fraud.
I am trying to do something. Why do you think I post on
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Ah, I see. So, the Rhodes trust mistakenly sent him to Cambridge instead of Oxford, and Oxford mistakenly claims that he was a Rhodes scholar for the usual two-year term.
Easy mistakes to make.
As a Western-state voter, I fully intend to lie to any exit pollers who ask me how I voted.
There are already several groups systematically lying to pollsters - especially exit pollsters, but also telephone pollsters, etc.
One of the points is to foul up the "parallel election" you mentioned, in the hope that they'll either stop it or be discredited and ignored.
But others are making various political points - again trying to get the pollsters to make wildly inaccurate predictions and lose credibility with the public (some of whome try to conform with the crowd and/or "vote for the winner") and/or with politicians (who, once elected become isolated from their constituents and tend to believe the media and the polls).
Meanwhile: When listening to poll results, take careful notice of WHICH polling outfit is doing the work. Some polls (including most that hit the airwaves) are commissioned by people who want to create an image and use it to swing popular opinion and/or legislators, rather than to actually measure public opinion. And some poll operations cater to this market to make money.
My impression:
Zogby: Actually tries to predict elections, and does perhaps the best job of it.
Field: Their results seem to completely mirror the Democratic Party line and are often wildly at odds with the actual results once an election is held.
Gallup: Depends on the poll and the season. Better than Field come election time (though not as good as Zogby) but still seems to whore on other issues between elections.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And if it does happen and we lose millions in one day instead of thousands, count on this: Bush and Ashcroft will look like pussycats compared to the regime that will follow.
And the brethren went away edified.
It's been a long day at work. You're tired. You want to go home and have dinner. The NEWS is telling you that the candidate you would vote for has already lost. Not an "opinion poll", but a projection of the result. Why would you bother going to vote if you thought the result was already known?
What's more idiotic, to misread a form and put your hole in the wrong place, or to not bother to vote?
To ignore the instructions completely and whine about your vote not being counted correctly.
I'm sorry, I can't really see any defense here for those who didn't vote. I don't believe anyone really stayed at home because they thought Gore had won, voting is a once every four years thing, and even if you really thought the candidate you wanted to win had lost, you'd vote for him anyway - just in case, and so you can say you did so.
Reading the instructions? Frankly, a ballot that requires seperate instructions should never be put in front of the voters. If you're implying that's what happened, I'd reconsider your view of the West Palm Beach fiasco.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sabotage.
Take into consideration the mindboggling number of financial transactions that occurs everyday just with credit cards--and all the accuracy and security concerns involved.
There are many other huge and complicated problems that are confronted and solved.
But the VNS can't handle the large, but rather straightforward mathmatical task (of addition) set before them, so they throw up their hands in frustration, and they GIVE UP????
This was planned. The VNS was marked for extermination. There are powers in the USA that don't want the VNS, or anything, like it to exist!
Voter News Service: What Went Wrong?
By Larry Barrett
In November 2000, a "perfect storm" of vote-counting miscues and polling problems led the major TV networks repeatedly to change their minds as to whether Al Gore or George Bush was the next president. In November 2002, a second storm whipped through the networks' election broadcasts.
Unfinished and mismanaged efforts to update the computer systems used by Voter News Service forced executives at the consortium's owners--ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press--to abandon the use of exit polling data before it even got all collected. Indeed, by mid-January the failures led to the disbanding of VNS itself. On Jan. 13, the six organizations said only that they were "collectively reviewing a number of strong options'' to avoid another fiasco in the future.
Back up to Election Day, Nov. 5. The balance of power in Congress was up for grabs. Yet by 10 a.m., the TV networks confirmed what they had feared for months: They couldn't derive any meaningful exit-polling data from a system they had just spent between $10 million and $15 million to overhaul.
Disasters were almost comical. Many of the more than 30,000 temporary workers collecting exit-poll information were disconnected from VNS' new voice-recognition system before they could finish inputting data over the phone. Some poll workers were unable to access the system at all. Live operators weren't always a help, as the phone system periodically crashed under the crush of callers dialing in.
Using computers was not much of an alternative. News organizations and other VNS subscribers were repeatedly instructed to log off their machines, so the new servers running BEA Systems' WebLogic application server could be rebooted.
When users finally were able to access the system, they quickly discovered they were being presented with incomplete and inaccurate information. For instance, early exit-polling data indicated that Erskine Bowles was leading Elizabeth Dole in the North Carolina senatorial race. As the day progressed and more exit-poll data was added, that margin grew.
However, when the actual votes were tallied, Dole won the election by almost 200,000 votes, a convincing victory.
"Everyone could smell this coming months in advance," says Joseph Lenski, co-founder of Edison Media Research, a Somerville, N.J., firm that provided supplemental polling data for CNN. "VNS had been trying to rewrite and retool the system for years. This was just the most recent attempt and it failed miserably."
Among the causes of the second "perfect storm," culled from participants, were:
Delays in delivering and testing the new voice recognition software used to capture polling data from around the country
Complications in consolidating IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, which housed election and demographic data from every state and precinct for 30 years, and transferring the information to a new Oracle 8i database.
Insufficient testing of the new Java-based WebLogic application server that replaced mainframe computers running IBM's Operating System 390.
.
"It was a joke," one political analyst at a major television network told Baseline. "It became obvious to everyone that this wasn't going to work. There wasn't enough testing. There was not enough collaboration between the networks and the IT people. And, worse, there was nothing we could do about it. You can't postpone an election."
Network executives quickly concluded they would not use the bulk of the data they were able to collect, particularly the exit-polling information. Projecting winners and losers in various races would take several hours longer than in the past.
Also, the networks would be unable to give the type of detailed explanations as to why voters voted the way they did this time around. For example, according to TV network analysts working the election, the networks wouldn't be able to tell viewers why particular demographic groups voted for specific candidates nor the issues that they considered most or least important when voting.
Game Over for VNS
This second debacle meant the end of VNS, as the news organizations said they would look at new ways of tabulating national and state results. Insiders close to VNS say the media organizations will likely rely more on their own individual exit polling and that of the Associated Press exit polling data in future elections. Battelle Memorial Institute, the Columbus, Ohio-based technology firm charged with overhauling the VNS system, was terminated.
"There's no way the networks are going to do anything that's connected to Battelle going forward," says one network analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That ship has sailed."
Battelle Memorial Institute representatives declined to comment. Even before it got the boot, the organization appeared to distance itself from VNS. Its corporate Web site made no mention of its work or association with VNS.
The networks now face the prospect of returning to the days of conducting nationwide polls separately--at cost of roughly $10 to $12 million per four-year election cycle--rather than shelling out between $5 million $7 million per cycle by sharing operations.
The idea behind forming VNS was to pool funds. That way, news organizations could pare costs and still get a much larger and, theoretically, more accurate sample from voters on Election Day. All members, including 19 newspapers, shared in the management of the company and oversaw its $33 million operating budget for the current four-year election cycle.
Warren Mitofsky, a media consultant who developed an exit-polling analysis system for CBS in 1967 and worked for VNS in the early 90s, says the project was doomed from the beginning.
"You simply can't have six different competing news agencies jointly managing a technology project of this scope," he says. "That's why I left VNS. Everyone is trying to decide what should be done and how. If you don't have a final decision maker who takes the responsibility for a project like this, you end up with what we saw in November."
And it is that structure that proved stormy, not just the technology.
"The truth is that had there been better collaboration between the people who collected and passed along the data to those who were analyzing the data and publicly projecting the results, this all could have been avoided," says Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor who worked at VNS for more than 10 years. After the 2000 fiasco, though, "VNS decided it was time to make a real effort to fix the system.''
The first step was to change the VNS board of directors. Before the 2000 meltdown, the board was composed of representatives from the election units of each network. After the 2000 fiasco, a vice president from each network was on the board.
That new board took bids from computing companies to completely rewrite the VNS system. One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages--Java and the Extensible Markup Language-- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets.
The idea: Data could then easily be provided instantaneously to subscribers over the Internet.
Database Debacles
As part of the effort, voting databases developed over a span of more than 30 years were to be consolidated into one. That's where the rubber never met the road.
"There were a lot of IT issues here that I'm not sure Battelle was qualified to handle," Lenski says. "They routinely missed deadlines for delivering the different components for testing."
The databases which housed the election results and local demographics for more than 4,600 precincts were running on both IBM's DB2 and a version of Oracle 7. They were to be consolidated into Oracle 8i database software.
"This caused all kinds of problems," one source close to VNS says. "You're not only talking about a clash in culture and expertise but you're also talking about trying to create places for data to fit that just aren't there."
For example, participants say the new system wasn't able to compare previous election results. If a network analyst wanted to know how independent voters in a particularly county were voting compared to the 1996 or 2000 election, the system couldn't deliver the data quickly, if at all.
"The fields just didn't match up," one network analyst says.
Also, traditionally Democratic precincts scattered throughout the country were, according to the flawed exit polling figures, showing unprecedented strength for Republican candidates. And vice versa.
An estimation model, which was developed by longtime VNS staffers, was implemented by Battelle in time for the election. But it wasn't sufficiently tested.
"We had absolutely no confidence in the numbers we were getting from the estimation model," says one CNN analyst.
CNN, sensing doom, partnered with Edison Media Research as an alternative to the VNS data. Its "RealVote" system gathered exit-polling data from 10 states to beef up CNN's analysis as the raw vote totals trickled in. ABC, NBC and Fox News all either sent reporters out to some of the precincts or conducted telephone polls throughout the day to bolster their broadcasts.
The dissolution of VNS leaves the networks with less than 51 weeks to develop an alternative before the Iowa caucuses--the start of the 2004 presidential campaign.
Launching on a Deadline
Copyright (c) 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Someone with mod points, please mod this reply up!
In the Florida election, Ralph Nader's Green Party vote had a major impact on the end results.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
An open source voting solution makes it possible to tell if anybody's cheating on the process. Do you seriously think anybody wants to buy *that* ? And an open-source polling solution isn't going to know that the non-open-source voting solution is being cheated...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Old MacLinus had a stack/l-i-n-u-x/and on this stack he had a trace/l-i-n-u-x
with an Oops-Oops here and an Oops-Oops there
here an Oops, there an Oops, everywhere an Oops-Oops.
-- tjimenez@site.gmu.edu, linux.dev.kernel
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