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Electronic Voting: Your Worst Nightmares are True
jfreon writes "On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold's FTP site they uncovered "an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California". Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm - during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: "So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""
This needs to make mainstream press, and DAMN QUICK.
"The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Yes. Your votes are being scammed to keep the neocon scum in power.
BOO! TERRO
How about some protections for democracy back home first? This is utterly unacceptable.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Does those voting data also tie person with vote? In other words can you "just" rig the election, or can you also keep a full database of people's voting habits?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Next time when they decide to use WS FTP someone should tell them to disable the WS_FTP.LOG files. *shakes head*
In typical slashdot fashion, we must protest this gross error in security the only way we know how - BOYCOTT!! If millions of geeks suddenly stop voting, the elected officials are going to HAVE to listen to us ... right?!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I think the safest thing we can do now is to wholly invest in this new technology and pretend the problems aren't there. If we change things around at all or abandon this technology, hackers and terrorists win. Think about that.
Is it too much to hope that our public officials will realize the potential for corruption, fix it (though any of the possible ideas which have been suggested on /.) and move on?
True, paper and pen ballots are vulnerable to tampering and etc, but at least you can recount the ORIGINAL ballots as the voters filled them out. Electronic ballots lack such a safeguard. Unless of course we print out a paper-copy of the ballots to keep in a lock-box just in case the voting procedures are called into question. But then why not just use paper ballots in the first place??
before we worry about the voters figuring out the ballot system, let's worry about how the voters are educated about the candidates in the first place. at least someone with the knowledge to hack the voting system in the first place is educated. their choice for our nations leaders would better suit the technology savvy of us anyway. what are we worried about? the ball is in our court.
peace,
-Grokent
The Commonweal Institute has compiled quite a bit of information (scroll down to the links) about the problems with electronic voting machines.
"So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""
Mod me down, because I am obviously too dumb to realize that just because the data from a machine makes it onto a server, does NOT mean that you can push data back.
You think, maybe, the voting machine pushes its data to a repository and defined intervals? Maybe? kinda?
teknopurge
As the next President of the USA, I promise to make fixing this problem one of my top priorities.
Are you kidding? If the vote is this easy to rig? Congratulations, CmdrTaco, you've been elected!
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
Look, you're ignoring the main problem. The problem isn't people being stupid and pressing the wrong name on the touch-screen (How would that happen, unless they had no coordination?), but in the actual counting of the votes. Counting the votes before the election is over gives a sign of how the election is going, and allows the people monitoring it to do whatever the wish with it, because they are not being monitored.
Great, now we'll have people cruising by with cantennas and VoteStumbler trying to get extra votes in for that black guy from Hackers
Not necessarily. Just because a resource can be read from doesn't mean it can be written to. With proper design...
Oh -- we're talking about Diebold? Nevermind...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
The mainstream press has been silenced after the Communist party won a landslide victory in the latest presidential election recount.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The general public and opponents of electronic voting will use this as "proof" that e-voting can never be stable and reliable. I fear that any blunders we have now may severely cripple public perception to the point that the masses won't WANT to e-vote, despite the ease and efficiancy such a system could provide. I also fear that we won't be able to EVER make an unhackable e-voting system - humans are falable creatures, and with something so obvious a target, there will always be attacks launched against it to expose the inevitable weaknesses, with resulting bad press.
...then again, maybe the public will get used to crackable e-votes. I mean, what, 95% of them run Windows unpatched, right?
Every technological setback may end up as another knife in e-voting's back.
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
The following names were found in the data...
Edgar Neubauer
Prudence Goodwyfe
Mr. and Mrs. Bananas
Humphrey Boa-Gart
Snowball I
As expected they all voted for Sideshow Bob
Maybe fewer people will be able to form their opinions on freely available information that way. That's what you neocon/conservatives would like, after all. Just like Britney Spears says:
Don't question the authority. That's the way to go.
BOO! TERRO
What is wrong with this picture? And if nothing is wrong why can't I edit the Slashdot home page?
Unless an electronic voting method can be proven (in the mathematical sense) to be accurate and secure, we probably are much safer from fraud using pencil and paper in a highly distributed voting scheme.
Perhaps a few precincts can be corrupted with paper voting, but the whole nation can be corrupted with electronic voting. What moron puts a wireless adapter on a voting machine, anyway?
Voting is a fundamental exercise in any democratic system. I think being very cautious and conservative is justified, here. Chasing electronic voting for its own sake is simply foolish. It almost seems the push for electronic voting is due only to hungry contractors trying to make a dime for themselves. The 2000 Florida vote is merely a red herring in all this.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Even more interesting is that Diebold would MAKE MORE MONEY if they sold voting machines with add-on printers so you could deposit a paper record of your vote in a separate ballot box! However, Diebold - and the other voting machines companies that happen to be owned by Republicans - OPPOSE this!
Additional revenue from add-on sales like this - and the service contracts that would go with it - are immensely profitable.
So what is going on here?
Also, they insult and ridicule anyone who tries to point out that electronic voting machines that cannot be audited are a problem! Even the hundreds of computer scientists who have spoken out are told they don't know what they are talking about. What IS going on here?
What would be so difficult about adding a printer, and having the voter look over the printout and then deposit it into a separate ballot box? Why are they so dead-set against doing this, even when it would make them tons more money? Are these Republican-owned "businesses" after something besides money?
Don't just complain, act: There is a bill in Congress introduced by Rush Holt, D-NJ. It is called "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003". It is H.R. 2239. It currently has 29 cosponsors and needs more support. The Summary page is here. The press page is here. Congress is in session again now. Contact your Congressperson and demand they support this bill. It would require a voter-verifiable paper trail.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
This does not surprise me.
The only way people are going to get a wakeup call is if a group of people got a database of eligible voters from local precincts complete with whatever data is necessary to fake a ballot, go into said precincts, and make it look like some unknown Non-Democrat/Non-Republican party candidates (who wouldn't have won anyways) won the election.
Alternately, it would humor me if some "terrorist" organization used this hole to severely screw up the vote by mass-wiping voting terminals/databases.
BTW: How would someone catch this before it's too late? Most precinct staff are volunteers, and they definitely can't see who voted what...
It's worse than you think. Election Systems and Software, the company that builds, owns and largely runs many of the voting machines used in the US (and 80% of those used in Nebraska) was at one time headed and is still partially owned by Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from Nebraska - who, surprisingly, won unprecedented victories in his state against an incumbent Democrat governor, winning by the largest landslide ever and taking the majority among demographics that had never voted Republican in the past.Hagel had avoided reporting his ownership, and then the whole trail started to come out into the open. It also turns out that Election Systems and Software was heavily funded by the conservative Christian fundamentalist Ahmanson family.
// Voter Validity Checks if voterID is an int
// If it is, then dude, it must be valid!
voterIsValid = KindaVerifyVoterValidity(voterID);
// A switch would be better but the way I
// see it, there are only two candidates:
// the one I want to win and "who cares"
if(vote > 1 && voterIsValid == True){
vote_for_my_candidate++;
vote_for_whoever = GenerateRandomNoise();
}
I call shenanigans!!!
(go home and get your brooms!)
</Vonnegut-based sarcasm>
..next thing you'll know, we'll get an actor elected as president.
Those were the good ol' days, kid. Small government, wars that ended, and a Commander-in-Chief who kept his trousers on while working.
Come to think of it, the music was a lot better back then too, wasn't it?
The idea of EVM2003 is to create Free Software voting machine, and to implement machines that also produce voter-verifiable paper trails (i.e. visually readable printed ballots). We will do a number of security things right, where the commercial companies have done them wrong... they have aimed for "security through obscurity" or "just trust us." As well, part of our requirement is to have fully blind-accessible voting that maintains complete anonymity.
Anyway, I (David Mertz) have taken over as Developer Lead recently, and am trying to get the development of the demo rolling. Part of that effort is recruiting some more developers, and splitting the project into several only loosely connected parts. Feel free to contact me--the standard ballot system (in the demo version at least) is being done in wxPython; but conceivably we would choose other languages/technologies for bar-code reading, printing, blind-voting, etc. (my preference is to use Python though, for consistency and rapid development).
Buy Text Processing in Python
Point is paper is a PITA. However, it is substantially more difficult to compromise a physical ballet than electronic data.
A paper trail is comparatively expensive, but worth its enduring characteristics in recording a vote.
Harris told Democracy Now!: "We now know that the machines that they're making that count the votes are not secure from tampering. And add to that, we've got a situation where everything inside the machines is secret, we're not allowed the see how they count the votes. So this is not an acceptable situation."
I know! I checked out the souce code from the h4x0r3d FTP site. In fact, I even recognize the hardware it was written for! (Atari 800) It was written in atari basic. The offending code looks like this.
35 if gwb algore then goto 40
37 goto 45
40 gwb=gwb+(algore-gwb)
45 goto 10
You can tell by the line numbering that this was put in as an afterthought. Ya I bet those bastards didn't think anyone could still decipher archaic line numbers and goto statements of atari basic, BUT IM STILL HERE HAHAHA!
I don't understand what PROBLEM these electronic voting systems are intended to solve. Usability? Fraud prevention? Recountability? Non-centralized weakness? For ALL of those supposed problems, these electronic voting systems are WORSE than paper ballots.
The only advantage I see is that the electronic systems can count ballots faster, but we've never had problems with the speed of ballot counting. Ballot counting is easily parallelized across all voting precincts across the nation. In fact, that is a GOOD thing because the counting process is publicly overseen by representatives from all political parties and vote tampering is limited to a smaller set of votes.
cpeterso
If the guy ran a voting machine company, and the voting machine company made machines that can't be audited, and then we found on that company's website that they were illegally obtaining data DURING an election...
And if the company - even though it would MAKE MORE MONEY - refused to make an add-on printer so a ballot could be printed, examined by the voter, and put in a separate ballot box for counting to verify that the machine correctly reported the totals...
Well, I might not be convinced he was going to cheat, but I sure wouldn't want to trust an election to his machines.
Remember, with these machines there is NO WAY to know if the machine correctly reported the vote.
SOME of us here work with computers, so we know that sometimes the computers make mistakes. So wouldn't it be a good thing if we had a way to verify what a machine reported?
What if a machine just broke down? Do we hold the election over again, or do we throw out all the votes from that precinct?
Actually, this is one of the times I'd be LEAST likely to suspect election fraud. You seem to forget that any election more attention-getting than local school board is going to be continuously monitored by opinion polling.
If, as you suggest, the landslide was fraudulent, then the election results would have no relation to either the pre-election polls or the exit polling. This would attract an awful lot of attention in the media, and I believe that any fraud on the scale that you suggest would at least be openly accused.
The only place, in my mind, that election fraud would be useful beyond the threat of detection would be in extremely close races -- those that no one has any idea who will win. In those cases, than altering the votes by 1% would still be within the margin of error on even the exit polling, and so wouldn't be immediately suspicious.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Granted that people are stupid. You choose an excellent example. The bit about stupidity is at the end.
We have people suing over spilled coffee
To be precise, we have a person suing a restaurant because it sells a product that they intend for you to put in your mouth despite the fact that it is hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. They do this despite the fact that they KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE that their actions will cause people to be injured. Excusing the restaurant because "people should know coffee is hot" is tantamount to excusing the presence of dangerous amounts of arsenic in their fries, because "people should know that fried food is unhealthy." Note that in the case you refer to, the restaurant was NOT sued until they had repeatedly refused to assist the burned woman in paying her medical expenses.
So, what's stupid? The fact that large numbers of people BELIEVE the covert PR campaign conducted by the restaurant against the injured woman. They knowingly sold a dangerous product and lost in the lawsuit. However, they managed to generate a groundswell of support to protect themselves from future liability lawsuits.
This, of course, is symptomatic of the people's belief that corporate entities are their friends, when they are in fact their natural predators.
Speed in counting? Who needs it? It's not like the offcials take office the day after the election anyway -- hell, the President has to wait two and a half frickin' months. Why the rush to have an instantly-countable system?
Furthermore, in many other large-ish countries (such as France, the UK and Germany), voting is still done by making a big honkin' X on a circle next to the name of the guy you want. And no, it's not a bubble form that has to be filled in just right -- just make your damn X as sloppy as you please. No hanging chads, no network to hack, no problems reading it. And they still have the results in by the morning in time for the early papers.
So why have electronic voting again?
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
A corrupt presidential candidate who is poised to lose an election suddenly wins when his corrupt brother, who happens to be a governor of a very populous state, "loses" thousands of votes, tipping the election in favor of his brother. the entire world knows about it, yet the corrupt presidential candidate is allowed to take office.
Oh wait...
We have people suing over spilled coffee,
I am completely fucking sick and tired over the way everyone trots this out as an example of how quick people are to sue, when all that person is doing is demonstrating their ignorance. Do you know the facts of the case? Do you know what happened, or are you going off of the fact that you heard someone sued because they spilled coffee on themselves.
The woman spilled a cup of McDonalds coffee on her groin. It didn't just hurt. It didn't just burn a bit.
She had to spend a significant amount of time in the hospital due to THIRD DEGREE BURNS, and required multiple skin grafts. They also found that McDonalds was serving their coffee significantly hotter than coffee is usually served. After all, it would have to be extremely hot to burn that badly. There was no reason to expect McDonalds coffee to be BURN THE SKIN RIGHT OFF YOUR BODY hot, but it was.
If you bought a beverage, spilled it on yourself, and as a result had to spend a week in the hospital, and had no prior knowledge that the beverage was that dangerous, would you think "silly me, I should have known this drink would hurt so bad even though I've never heard of this happening to anyone else", or would you think "how can they do something so dangerous without warning people?" I vote for the latter.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
This page on Diebold's website mentions that "Election results are securely stored utilizing world-class encryption techniques." As far as I can see, that's all they tell you about their encryption. Does that mean it has the same 128-bit encryption as, say, Mozilla? (Which, I suppose, is still pretty darn secure, but probably not "world class.") Is the "world class" bit is just marketing hype? Diebold doesn't say anything, which makes me a little nervous.
And what about their wireless security? You can store votes in a steel box protected by voracious bears, but if they (the votes, not the bears) aren't protected on the way to wherever it is that they count them up, it doesn't make much of a difference. (I'm assuming here that that is what the wireless networking is used for). Is Diebold using WEP, which can be broken in a couple of hours? Unless Diebold has adopted WPA early (which, given their track record on security, I kinda doubt), some schmuck could sit in his car outside the polling place and run a wireless packet sniffer on whatever traffic is being sent.
The way that Diebold seems to be hiding information on its machines' security is disturbing - you'd think that if they had solid software they'd talk a little about it to impress potential customers, rather than just making vague blanket statements. Given everything that's happened, though, that's apparently is not the case.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
Diebold's SEC filings show their Chairman / President / CEO to be Mr. Walden W. O'Dell, who has donated $2000 this summer to Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican from Ohio (Diebold's home state). Diebold Inc.'s soft money donations also go to Republicans.
This does not demonstrate to me much evidence that Diebold is "after something other than money", it looks like routine political activity to me. But, while my quick research has neither managed to refute nor confirm your conspiracy theory, I'll pass it along anyway for whoever might be curious.
this is really frightening, and must be stopped PRONTO. The computer may be useful for helping people to fill-out/print the ballot, and for rapid counting. But, as has been said a thousand times already, there must be a paper trail.
Better yet, I think the bureau of printing and engraving should make some fancy counterfeit-resistant ballots, each printed/embedded with a unique serial number in a place where everyone can keep an eye on the process.
After the election, any unused/mismarked ballots must be accounted for. The ballots should have a matching stub with the unique number and what they voted for that the they can take home with them and may at any time go to the county clerk's office to verify that their ballot is still recorded as having said what they thought they said.
If they have electronic voting, demand a ballot and don't go away until you get one. Make sure to make a scene and talk loudly about how you heard the machines were insecure on slashdot and how the situation in Nebraska is fishy and how you won't use the machines becuase they are rigged. If you can get a mob together to go and screw up the machines beforehand, that'd be better.
Seriously, I'v had my fill between corperations and the goverment. When I goto vote next election, if they have electronic machines made by any of these fishy companies with no paper trail, I'm getting a chainsaw and spraypainging "democracy" on the sides, throwing on a nasty nasty chain, hiding it in a trombone case, getting in a buisness suit so I look like a hurried musician, and when I get in the building, I'll start the puppy up in the bathroom or some consealed area, run out screaming "You want democracy, I'll give you democracy!!! Lets do this by paper!" and rip the machines to hell.
Do I care about the prison time? The better question is, what jury on earth is going to convict me? >:) Especially if I proove that my motives were justifyable, there's something fishy going on and the goverment is bieng fishy, denied me a printout of my vote and ballot, and make it a point to tell the jury they don't have to convict me. Plus, I'll make national news for sure, a psycho running into a voting area with a chainsaw and ripping all of the boxes to shreds? You'd bet that it'd get all over the god box.
Sure, I'll take it up the ass a few years in jail and have a felony conviction to ensure that the voting system isn't rigged. Besides, I'm sure it'll look GREAT on a resume!
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Everybody knows the proper way to hack an election is legally through the Supreme Court, not with computers, duh.
People who want more and more power aren't in general Democrats (though times are changing). Democracy is about the dispersion of power and influence.
The $300 million dollar campaign of George Bush was about SOMETHING. They didn't make that cash by having $10 per plate barbecues. They got that money from coporate fat cats.
By the way, you don't get to be a super-corporate fat cat by being fair to your fellow employee and fellow citizen. You get to those positions by well placed daggers (proverbial) in the backs of your peers and the occasional supervisor (when you can manage it). You get to that place by selling as much as you can for as much as you can for the smallest cost (which means it's often shit). You get to that position by laying of workers, slashing benefits, importing foreign identured servants, busting unions and all around just being plain evil.
After a full day of wholesale theft, who do you turn to protect your bounty. Do you turn to Democrats who (used to) believe in a fair society by which you pay for public services according to your means. Those same democrats often provide low-cost or no-charge services that compete with your schemes to fleece every dime possible. Those damn democrats and progressives try very hard to keep large corporations from selling $1,000 toilet seats to the Pentagon.
Or do I give money to Republicans. Not honest ones (though there are few remaining). Rather, do they give money to the neo-cons who have now publicly stated their goal to merge large corporate America and government. Corporate governance (formerly called Facism). If I give them lots of money, they will slash those pesky environmental laws that stop us from dumping toxic waste in rivers. They will allow us to rape the landspace AND WORKERS. They will turn aside when we fleece Americans. They will overturn liability and tort laws by which consumers sue us for selling them faulty dangerous products.
Hmmm... if I'm a greedy evil rat bastard with a contempt for humanity, who do I choose to donate to. Well at $300 million to $30 million, I dare-say that the evil rat bastards have chosen the neo-cons.
Now the rat-bastards are finding ways to dispense with the even more troublesome DEMOCRACY. Voters will get pissed off. After all, once upon a time their was a robber barons paradise that but dangerous chemicals into the milk itself. Then their was a great depression and many of those who counted themselves among the elite few were cannabalized by their superiors. Sent out to the bread lines by the common rabble. But the common rabble could still vote. And they voted for an Roosevelt.
My gosh, didn't that Roosevelt's cousin also pass the first anti-trust legislation. Isn't that they war hero who led a rebellion against the elitist Republican party and subsequently crushed as a progressive. Didn't those victorious Republicans lead us to our paradise of an enslaved population. Damn what will this Roosevelt do????
Of course, Roosevelt brought about the new Deal. Eventually embraced by most (including the Grand Old Party) up and until Eisenhower. The last great Republican warned us upon departure of the Miliatary-Industrial complex and other such corporate mischief. Against he pursuit of war and strife for the benefit of a few fat cats. The same Business-Government environment that brought Adolf Hitler to power and the world to the brink of utter disaster.
Now we sit with a government being literally run by the corporat thiefs. They are governed by a president unelected by the people (like Adolf Hitler). He is determined to de-regulate EVERYTHING. To diminish the people great institution DEMOCRACY to a sham game. Adolf Hitler never stopped elections. And he never stopped winning.
Here and now the Neo-Cons (Facists) are trying to permanently rob America of democracy without robbing us of elections. They fix them through culling voting rolls of so-called "felons" and fix the voting machines to vote a Neo-Con every
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I am not under the impression that the Democrats are without blame, but I never heard that Dan Rostenkowski commited voter fraud.
The 17 counts he went to jail on were for mail fraud and paying people to do nothing.
Maybe there is a better example? Say in Chicago
Most of the websites and statistics regarding felon "disenfrachnisement" come from drug and prisoner advocacy groups, like the sentencing project... this makes their statistics suspect from the start. Many of these groups use these statistics to make voting for felons a "racist" issue. Also, some of them consider it "disenfranchisement" if a state does not automatically restore your civil rights after your sentence is served. Personally, I see no problem with making a felon fill out a form to get his voting rights back.
Further, some of the states they cite as "permanently" disenfranchising felons DO have procedures in place to restore civil rights... Florida (where I live) is a good example. Florida is often cited as one of the 10 (some sources cite 14 states) that permanently keep felons from voting... NOT TRUE. Check out this press release from the ACLU
Some states give voting rights back automatically... some have a few hoops you must jump through. Either way, committing a felony costs you. Now, I'm not aware of a single state that does not have procedures in place for restoration of civil rights. If someone wants to correct me, please do so.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
In several races with electronic voting machines, there were noticeable differences between pre-election polls and the actual election results. In Georgia, both Roy Barnes and Max Cleland led their opponents until the actual election.
Other Dieboldalical results (from a source found via Google) are here.
Chuck Hagel's opponent wanted a hand-recount, but by the terms of the signed contract, it was illegal for government election workers to review the votes.
Short form: what you describe happened, and you didn't even notice. (Final tinfoil hat moment - did we mention that there was a file named "rob-georgia" containing patches not tested by the state on the Diebold FTP site?)
The NORC data did not "count" votes. This was the great con. All they did was note the condition of undercounted ballots:
For example:
"Voter puched the 'Al Gore' punch. Voter emphasized the vote by CIRCLING the punch. Voter further empasized their intention by writing AL GORE on the ballot.
Cannot count as Al Gore because we're not counting."
The Miami Herald did a similar study that actually COUNTED the ballots and found Al Gore the winner.
The true story of the election can be found at www.gregpalast.com. Yes, Greg Palast DOES have an axe to grind. He hates liars and hypocrites. The first two chapters of "The Best Democracy Money" is available their.
To summarize:
DBT Online/ChoicePoint was selected as a high-ball at $2.3 million dollars. The company who had previously did the job charged $5700.
They were supposed to record cross-checking against public databases and verification phone calls. They did none of this. They were instructed NOT TO.
ChoicePoint was instructed to search for similar names and reduced Jack to John etc... It was supposed to create the maximum number of matches provided the individuals.
The County offices were ORDERED to scrub everyone on the list without doing verification because ChoicePoint was SUPPOSED to have done that verification.
" The State of Florida was content with a partial match of four: names( the first four letters were good enough), ate of birth, gender and race. Not even the address or state mattered in the mad dash to maximize the number of citizens stripped of their civil rights."
- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p56
Of course you probably listen to Rush. AS if he hastened spent 6 hours a day grinding axes for the last 15 years.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
All things being equal (they aren't), Bush has done enough damage and the press is bold enough with him that he cannot win relection without: it being handed to him by a blunder of an idiot opponent, or if he steals it through fraud.
We are going into the economic winter of an inevitable Kondratieff Cycledelayed by massive deficit spending. Whatever party wins the next election will take the blame for this.
Based on the momentem of electronic voter machine replacment and the detailed widespread press coverage of the hanging/dimpled chad recount process, if the presidential election is in within 0-5% there will be great hubbub and sevral recounts.
Bush will become president again after recounts play out. The media will be forced to cover the advantages of open source vs proprietary software. It's to short a logical leap for the press not to take.
Durring the mayhem and finger pointing US companies that make software will become the biggest boogie men in the questionable election. Rigged or not, the mistrust of the govt will be enourmous. The stigma will linger and people will understand the software/IP alternitive en-masse for the first time.
When the market/housing/bonds/currency all crash, because the chinese unpeg the yuan from the dollar as late as possible (2007 3/4 as per the WTO) and the yuan springs back hard destablizing everything. (they will do this as sabotage or an economic nuke.) Republicans will take all the blame for the following depresion and the corruption that caused it. (Nothing sucks like a Hoover)
The Republican party will be dispanded, and perhaps a world war (over intelectual property) will occour. Laws on software will radically change for the better in 2012-2015 bringing the US inline with less recent but still new international IP law.
As crazy as it seems, the scarriest thing to me right now is a Democrat winning. Most of these things will still happen but the Democrats will take the blame. Democrats are way to weak to survive a disasterous presidency and will dispand.
Obviously whatever party is dispanded will be replaced, but the populist replacment will take time to accumulate power and the country will swing hard to the left or the right.
Somebody please laugh at me.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath