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E-voting Patches Skew Election?
Whammy666 writes "Wired magazine has an interesting story of how the much-maligned Diebold E-voting machines were allegedly secretely patched before Georgia state's 2002 gubernatorial election. The patches were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials. The election produced an upset which ended in a major upset that defied all polls. A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%. There are no paper audit trails with these systems so it's nearly impossible to check for fraud or malfunction after an actual election."
Why were they even allowed near the terminals. Patching 1,387 terminals would take a great deal of time. That is if they weren't left on and plugged into a network (I wonder what it's subnet is...) It uses Windows CE, exxccellent
And don't forget to "write me in" for me the next election. I have a feeling that I'll be the first write in canidate to win by a landslide
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Yes, Mr. Ashcroft. I did vote for you to be God. I'm sure any other result is a clear indication of terrorist intervention.
It looks like hanging chad is the least of our problems!!!
Even my cyncial mind is having trouble grasping the immense absurdity of the problem with these machines.
No matter what happens with the patching, it is absolutely imperative that voters receive a hardcopy of their voting decision to *verify* that the machine voted correctly AND to provide a way for a manual recount. Right now, this is not mandatory, and until it is, this kind of voting is not 100% trust-worthy.
Why do you support terrorists?
do not question your government, traitors!
your FP software was patched and subsequently fucked
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%.
As I recall, these voting machines are running Windows. Are we surprised? Perhaps these things should be running a dedicated embedded OS, or a trusted Linux, even OS X, but not Windows. Especially with all of the security concerns.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Its funny, how people actually believe that they can make these systems a viable alternative to the traditional punch card system. I am surprised that these systems were ever even allowed in the first place since there is no papertrail. And I hardly think this will be the last time that such unscheduled and unapproved patches are loaded onto the system. And thats not even touching upon the election results.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Sometimes, the best tool for the job does not involve technology.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
It is fascinating, though, that while the "secret" update to the machines has been exposed, we still can't figure out what "senior administration official" is disclosing the names of covert officials...
Yeah, I know, I'm (Offtopic, -1), but only because this story is (Redundant, -2).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I know they are afraid that if I know the exact order of the ballots casted, I can use that to collate back to who voted for whom.
But can't I just have a bucket inside the machine, a thermal printer that prints a 4x4" sheet of paper and when it comes out falls into the bucket and collect that instead?
There is then no way to figure anybody out and we still have a paper copy in case stuff like this happens, we can still do an old fashion "recount" if need be?
-joe
Who didn't see this coming?
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
This might only work here in California, but someone should start a proposition to require a paper trail. Then, they should hack the voting machines to make sure the proposition passes.
If the scheme succeeds, well then hey, we get a paper trail.
If it's discovered, then the need for a paper trail is vividly and publicly demonstrated.
All we need now are some sacrificial crackers...
Voters are fickle. Voting machines you "own" are forever.
By all accounts, the people of Georgia were quite ready for a change. Even where democrats kept seats, there were a lot of upsets.
Not saying nothing fishy happened, but I think Wired is overstating the case.
I say we should just go back to punch cards. If someone is too stupid to use one correctly their vote shouldn't count anyway.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
... it's in Wired. Not on, say, Fox News. (Although it would have been, no doubt, if it had been Democrats rather than Republicans doing all the screwy stuff.)
Even if every techie in the world knows how screwed up the voting machines are, it's not going to do any good until Joe Sixpack is hearing about it over dinner. I would be willing to bet that right now, the majority of voters don't give a damn what kind of voting machine they use, and of those who do, the majority assume that anything newer and sleeker and higher-tech is thereby more reliable. The number of people who have any understanding of the problem is growing, but it's still tiny.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it? Since right now it's mostly the Republicans who seem to be benefitting, seems to me every Democratic candidate should be yelling for a major investigation right now. That's certainly what I'd expect if the situation were reversed.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
RECOUNT? Actually, a recount isn't possible. They'd have to have another vote. If the error margin was really as high as they say it was, it calls the results of the election into question. Maybe this is a case where jumping to new technology right away is a bad thing.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
anything that has gubernatorial elections deserves to have stuff messed up just because of the name
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Which would you prefer, a computer picking a random candidate or a person picking a random candidate. At least a computer wouldn't vote based solely upon Democratic & Republican lines and wouldn't have a name recognition bias.
Yes I'm kidding.
I don't want to say that wired.com steals other people's stories. They certainly didn't steal my story this time
But I would like to point out that i wrote a piece about this sort of stuff a while back.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
As a matter of law do we as citizens have a direct voice in saying how our votes are counted ? May we insist our vote be counted in a different manner at the polling station ?
sounds like a bunch of fear mongering to me.
Mandate these machines be used in *every* election, as is!
Seriously, is *anyone* seriously looking at using these machines on a large scale? Are we geeks the only ones who hear/care about these problems? I keep expected the situation to "resolve itself," but that may not happen!
Elections in this, and many other countries, have a long history of fraud. The obtaining of power is so important to some people they will do whatever is necessary to get and maintain it. You can be certain that if there is a way to manipulate results without detection, the temptation will be too great. Countless examples riddle American election history, and yes, from both major parties.
But this is the worst of all. Closed-sourced, buggy, patched (with what? we don't know) after certification electronic voting machines represent power without accountability. Read that again: Power without accountability. That is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is patch things your way and, voila, you get some "odd" election results that contradict all the polls, but who cares? You're in power now, baby!
This is a huge story, and I'm glad to see Wired covering it. But this belongs on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and on every evening newscast. Why don't we see it there? Ask yourself who owns these voting machine companies. Now ask yourself who owns the mainstream media companies. Connect the dots.
I am a cild born in the digital age.
The first time I flew alone, I had a e-ticket
I have not known a world without onilne banking.
etc.
However, a voting system, the life blood of our democracy should not be at the whim of a single group or corporation. No this is not me being anti corporate, I just think that an election is too important to have its data exposed, or posibly exposed to tamporing on a medium like the internet. This system should have every precaution built in to ensure the people are heard. Obviously Diebold is being half-assed. I just hope that these machines arent used in 2004 for everyones sake.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
Let's see if I have this right.
A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines
The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail
The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel
untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections
Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing
----
This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Albert Einstein
Ideally, print out a record of the ballot with the votes attached. No need for the voter's name on the ballot. The voter wouldn't keep the ballot, it would be locked away as soon as it was printed, just like a real ballot (though the voter should be allowed to confirm that the hardcopy matches their vote) but only really counted for manual recount purposes.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
even the main code was not certified from a security standpoint.
harmonious design
Joe Schmoe presses big touch screen button for candidate A. Then Schmoe presses Big button Yes for ARE YOU SURE?. Vote is then incremented in some text file by 1. Text file is then taken and dumped to some master computer. Mathematical operation "addition" is used to tally votes.
How fucking hard is that?
after the succession of articles about diebold and their
responses to all of these issues, I have to say, they
need to get beat down hard
my vote is not something you fsck with.
How hard is it to write voting software. I could write PHP in 2 minutes that would run of a MySQL DB.
All is right in the world. Thanks to the supifying corruption of Grady Little, we (fans of any team other than the Red Sox) will kick back and enjoy the World Series, using headphones to block out the sobbing bawls of New Englanders...
el oh el
As an American I'd like to say that you deserve a full and complete anal probing from John Ashcroft and his storm troopers.
You really do.
Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."
You can't beat the Canadian ballot for simplicity and effectiveness. The voter uses a pen to mark a box next to the candidate's name on a simple, clearly laid out paper card. The voter then places the card in the ballot box. It's basically idiot-proof.
The ballots are fully counted, by humans, within hours of the polls closing. No hanging chads, no electronic errors or confusion. A paper trail exists, so recounts are simple. It's been this way for decades and there have never been any real issues with the system.
What's so hard about that?
Yeah, I was using Diebold First Post Deluxe, but it crashed on me without leaving an audit trail. They assure me it's fine now though, so I figure I'll just take them at their word on it.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that so you have something to fall back on when he wins again. Always easier to comfort yourself with some falsehood than face up to the fact that others in the US don't share your views.
And, keep in mind that the majority vote is not how the Presidential elections work. Don't like it... work to change it instead of harping on the "majority vote" issue. I find it strange that this was such a big deal in 2000 yet none of the Democratic pols have introduced a bill to change the national elections over to popular vote.
every programmer associated with that project should be brought on stage, tarred and feathered, and then shot in the genitals. i mean come on, how hard is it to make a dedicated machine that only has one function? to count! this takes all the ingenuity and processing power of pong. and techies wonder why non-techies think they are so horribly over-paid?
umm.. how hard could this POSSIBLY be..
i mean.. your just incrementing a set of numbers either in a table or in a file..
What is sooooo hard about that..
hell i can't program with crap, and i've written more complex software with PHP thats secure and works 100% of the time..
set a variable.. let that variable only be allowed to vote once.. then have the polling clerk insert a text string into another box to "reset" the voting variable so that another person can vote..
ME -- not suprised
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
- Audit by security researchers reveal serious vulnerabilities
- Diebold downloaded ongoing ballots (a federal crime) during California's last election (not the recall)
- The whole "Rob-Georgia" fiasco that Wired is writing about
- Diebold's executives are uniformly partisan political donors
- Diebold's CEO is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".
Note that #4 and #5, while annoying, would not actually be problems except for necessary paranoia about #1-3. Voting machines need to be absolutely above reproach, since they are the ultimate instruments of modern democracy.What else did USA Today have to say about the election?
Were you sleeping in civics class?
Everyone knows that the electoral system is solidly-based upon secure principles of operation. These principles were established long ago and are still operating in the electronic age. The specific details may vary, but the basic mechanics persists.
Positively and undeniably, election winners are exactly those people that have been best able to use money and power to fool the most people.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If you think that Democrats either don't or haven't committed election fraud, then you absolutely don't have it right. Think: Chicago Democrats. Think: LBJ's stuffed ballot boxes in Texas.
It's despicable no matter who does it, and the perpetrators - whether Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or whatever - should be thrown in prison.
If *that* is what you think, then as a matter of fact you do have it right ;-)
Arrr!
EVERYONE and I mean EVERYONE who consulted with Diebold recommend they add a simple thermal printer (ala gas station pumps) to allow the voter to walk out with a ballot confirmation that had a serial number and their votes. Some even recommended the ballot be paper, but created on the electronic machines. Confirmation on paper vis barcode AND the votes printed on the receipt (which would be then put in the ballot box to be scanned vis barcode later) Without this small bit of confirmation, the votes just go to the ether. No recount, no accountability, no accuracy.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
I can see it now: Kevin Mitnick wins the first 100% evoting election by landslide of 7 billion votes.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Hmm...I went back to the parent post and couldn't find one falsehood in it. Care to be specific?
On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?
"Vague, unsubstantiated accusations allegations by a man who was dismissed from his job and replaced? Hey, if it lets me smear Republicans, I'll run it!"
It seems to me that maybe what we want is a machine that records the voters vote in a computer-readable format. You touch a big button on the screen to vote, confirm your answer, and the computer prints out a card with a bar code or something that can be read by another counting computer. That way, you always have the physical, paper, evidence of the vote which can't be stolen by hackers or corrupted by computer crashes, etc, but you also don't have hanging chads and the like. Maybe this is the way it already works, I don't know, but it seems if you keep the whole thing digital you are asking for trouble...
You Americans deserve what you get. Fucking gay-o faggoty zealots. Maybe if someone knocks down some of your little buildings again you'll wake up. Probably not. You'll probably hand what little you have left over to the lunatic posing as an attorney general. Suck my cocks. Suck ALL my cocks.
-- The WIPO Avenger
just yesterday, i posted a comment that got rated "6, god-like insightfulness" and my karma was "flabbergastingly transexcellent"
but today it's just excellent and my 6 rated post is a 1
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ask for an absentee ballot and mail it in.
Need help finding the flow? http://www.myspace.com/naturalismandbalance
One one hand: Bush enjoys an ailing economy, a trillion dollar deficit, the quagmire in Iraq, no found weapons of mass destruction, disturbing leaks about CIA spies, still haven't found Osama bin Laden, still haven't found the anthrax killer, the Taliban is regrouping in Afghanistan, and he's looking to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare.
One the other hand, the CEO of Diebold is a major Bush supporter.
Put it all together, and I smell a Bush victory in 2004!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Of course there are many people with different views . . . that still doesn't change the fact that the 2000 election was rigged, and as a direct result the country is in the shittiest shape in decades.
For anyone who's been following Georgia politics for a long time, Republican success in the 2002 election was no surprise. Naturally, I could write book about all the factors that finally came to a head. A short version: Georgia is, and has been, a fairly conservative state. The before Roy Barnes and Max Cleland, most democrats holding statewide office were your old-fashioned southern dems, not the kind of dems that your average slashdot reader thinks of. Just yesterday former (conservative democrat and senator) Zell Miller tore into the national democratic party for messing up the dems' chances in Georgia. That's your answer to the election, not some eeeevil voting machine conspiracy.
Always easier to comfort yourself with some falsehood
Assuming you weren't refering to your own post, you seem to be claiming that something the original poster said was factually incorrect. Could you please tell the rest of us what it is you caught that we didn't?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For what it's worth, I'm a registered Republican (as I gather are you), but the truth is worth far more to me than any party affiliation.
parent poster did not mention anything about "majority voting" on a national level (or even at all).
You are obfuscating.
The debacle of the 2000 election was NOT about the fact that Bush lost the nationwide popular vote, but about the complete uncertaintly of which candidate Florida voters actually chose to win their electoral votes. Voting should be accurate, and we as a nation, the most powerful in the world, shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that it is a solved problem. If anything, things may be worse now than in 2000.
In the first place was the 2000 presidential elections. It turns out that my beloved GA had more voting problems than FLA. It seems that the only reason FLA was in the spotlight was the fact they were last. In a panic the GA legislature decided to go to a more secure format... And we all know that computers are secure right?
Now the paper trail has shown its use again. and the machines dont print out transaction recipts for who, when, where, what. That makes the whole thing questionable no matter which side of the political wing you are on.
Sorry, but Roy Barnes lost. The people couldn't stand him. He was an arrogant *bleep* who was methodically ruining the state. Most people didn't vote for Purdue, they voted AGAINST Barnes.
Heck, even my wife's self-proclaimed bleeding-heart-liberal parents voted for Purdue just to get rid of "King Roy." The idea was that while Purdue may be a Republican, he couldn't be as bad than the incumbent.
Yes, the balloting machines may have been flawed, but before anyone proclaims it would have changed the outcome, get to know the weasel that lost. He would have lost (and lost big) no matter what the system used.
voters can stage an "absentee vote" protest to show their opposition to the electronic system.
I like that idea, but you will never get enough people to make it work...
I really think that the only way these things will ever get taken out of use is if someone makes a VERY obvious hack of a not so important office (to minimise damages...), something along the lines of 100% of the votes for county clerk going to the write in cannidate 'Billy Gates'
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Chicago Elections:
:-)
Vote Early, Vote Often!
www.christopherlewis.com
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And a corrupt Democrat in that situation would have done exactly the same thing. Neither side is better or worse than the other.
It is evidently up to us to keep those fools straight.
Demand code and process verification prior to the election. Run test after test, in public. Audit the test results. Lock the code and machines away, by a 3rd party, until actual use. Audit the results.
I'm sure these machine MUST have been completely responsible for a Republican winning the election in California. It had nothing to do with the dismal way it was run under the current Democrat leadership.
I DEMAND a do-over!
It was a 50-50 shot at Perdue winning the Governorship, the Senate race was never close.
Its tripe like that comment that makes mountains out of molehills.
If anything they are less prone to fraud as the dead cannot cast an eletronic ballot. That is a big change in Georgia where more than one township has had more votes than people before.
Face it, the people who cheat/steal elections using the old tech want to prevent their loss of power. They don't want something they don't have established means of cheating with.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How about the actual ballot machine, generate a paper trail that is deposited into a ballot box, for verification purposes.
Here is what I envision:
Jane Shmoe walks up to the machine, and makes her votes. The Ballot machine, electronically tallies the votes, and makes sure that Jane is not some ignorant slut (appologies to SNL), and doesn't over or under vote.
The last thing the machine does, is printout, punchout or otherwise creates a document that is deposited into the ballot box (with verification of each vote record).
After the polls close, each mechanical vote is compared with the electronic version by a seperate contractor. Any anomolies are noted, and recorded, and we have a documented failsafe backup.
I really don't trust electronic balloting. Too many things can go wrong, and one cannot call "Do Over" when the process is clearly flawed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Come on - if this was done in Burma or Chechnya, it would be all over the papers. Thank God at least Wired still has some guts.
What do you want to bet that Diebold wins the contract to do any upcoming Iraqi elections ?
You can't seriously expect the Democratic party or the Republican party to change the electoral system. Its winner-take-all arrangement guarantees lock-out of any third party. We can't have the people getting to vote for anyone else -- that would be -- what ? something evil -- terrorist, maybe.
Maybe their is some sort of unwritten rule, "You don't rat on my vote fraud, I won't rat on yours, may the biggest fraud win," sort of thing. Maybe machines were crashing because both sides tried to hack them at the same time.
This is part of a worrying trend. We don't hold elections to determine a winner. No one argues when you tell them they've won. We hold elections to determine the losers. More and more, the losers are refusing to admit they lost. Politics is looking more and more like a street brawl where anything goes, and We, The People, are the real losers.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Psst.. saying something is a "fact" without having any actual evidence (other than "The person I wanted to lose didn't... must've been rigged") means it's not a fact.
Ah, yes, just with a moderate amount of knowledge.
But what about liberals with liberal knowledge? Surely we must be worried about them.
The falsehood would be saying "if Bush wins the 2004 election it was due to x, y or z and most certainly wasn't because he won under the rules for winning an election."
Dude, maybe the poll are wrong. Come on, if you voted for some unpopular jackass, would you then come out of the machine and then tell the whole frigging state?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I've worked at three large banks before where the password for nearly every machine was "passw0rd" or "password!"... and now this. Where are the super villians who have the guts to go and take advantage of stuff like this? It's just a waste of a good election machine if the votes aren't being bought with gold coins by a dark moustachioed man with a Turkish accent of some kind.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Lest we forget, Bush inherited the debt. As far as the economy going downhill, I believe the dot-bombs which contributed most to its downfall happened in the late 90's. I don't remember Bush being president in the late 90's.
Saying "considering he lost the popular vote in 200" in teh subject seems to be about "majority voting on a national level" to me.
Have problems with reading comprehension much?
Then educate yourself on the facts.
I posted this last time this subject came up and it will probably be modded down as a conspiracy theory again but there is way too much smoke here for there not to be a fire.
Chances are since at least 9/11 and probably since 2000 the Republican's in concert with Machiavellians in the defense/intelligence establishment with their flunkies Diebold and Batelle have opted to rig American elections to insure Republican's take and hold power.
There's been one case after another where Republican's are gaining power in national, state and local elections under suspect circumstances. For example the recent win in California almost certainly was engineered by the white house and their friends at Enron when the engineered the California electricity crisis to destroy its economy and its encumbent Governor. The suspicious faliure of the VNS exit polls in 2002, which are engineered by Batelle, is another.
Just look at the quotes from the fundementalist christian extremist 3 star general who is now head of DOD's intelligence and special operations about how its "God's will" that George Bush is President with the implication democracy had nothing to do with it. Its standard special operations doctrine to "engineer" elections in other countries. They just figured out they could do the same thing in the U.S. because we are too stupid and lazy to stop them.
There are unfortunately some extremists in power now that think they have to defend America from Islam or any other convenient threat. Sacrificing Democracy is a small price to pay in their small minds. They'll be plenty happy to institute an increasingly repressive police state to keep them in power and everyone else in line and silent
You may love or hate Michael Moore but one thing to his credit he is one of the few with access to a TV camera that is pointing out we are already standing on the same slippery slope that lead to Nazi Germany.
To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, its not who casts the votes that matters, its who counts them.
@de_machina
I have some Occam's Razor cuts for you:
Does it fail the laugh test if you posit the 5 Republican Supremes going against the grain of decades of their own opinions upholding states' rights, to counter a state court's election decision favoring a Republican? Yes, indeedy. Shoe on other foot leads to other decision.
Does it fail the laugh test if you posit a Democrat running the Florida election and acting as state campaign chair, and ask whether you'd be content when every single decision favored the Democrat?
Real Razor time: what's the most obvious explanation for firing an inexpensive contractor and awarding a contract for purging voter rolls of ineligibles to the HIGH bidder? And repeatedly asking that the statistical methods for validation be less sound (generating more false positives)? What's the likely explanation for a 90% error rate, and the defiance of two court orders related to restitution of voter status?
I consider what Harris and Jeb Bush did to be treason against a democratic society.
But then again you need them to make your argument.
List all the elections won where they were clearly losing in the polls. Come on, do it. Just like the bald faced lie in this Wire article you point to no major poll (by link please) the backs your claim.
I live in Georgia, Barnes was out because the teachers wanted him out. North Georgia wanted him out - as he was trying to show an unpopular road project down the necks of many people. It was going to be close, and polls showed that. Why do you think Republicans made such a big last month push here? Cleland (D. Senator) was such a flop he didn't have a chance and polls showed that).
What burned the Georgia elections were the obvious attempts by the Democrats playing race politics and such here. The good-old boy network got shown for what it was.
Alabama was close for the same reasons. People are waking up, unfortunately just as they are the Democrats and Republicans start looking too much alike.
Back the article, its all innuendo. "I can't prove it, but I can make it sound plausible thereby making someone else prove me wrong" Sorry, that kind of logic belongs on a play ground.
(fwiw, I vote Libetarian, and no, GW doesn't get my vote in 04 either)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The idea makes perfect sense. Instead of a punch card ballot, you have a computer screen, click or push what you want. The system asks "This is what you said. Is this right?" A person says "yes" or "no, I want to change my votes", makes whatever changes, and it's done.
It's so simple, even a Florida voter couldn't get it wrong.
I hate it.
I'm sure there are those out there going "But John - you're a geek. It's computer based - what's wrong with that?"
Simple: verifiability.
The biggest problem with the Florida election, in theory, is that there wasn't a way to really verify what the votes were. The punch cards, which were fed through a machine, were suppose to give that. And, if the machine didn't work, somebody could just look at the punch card and say "well, there's a hole here - they must have wanted to vote for Person X".
The problem with the computer based voting machines is that the data is saved to a hard drive, then transmitted in some fashion (via floppy, CD-ROM, network transmission, whatever) to a central place - but there is no paper trail involved.
There is suppose to be a sheet of paper in some circumstances that gives a percentage of votes and the like, so if the actual votes don't match that we're suppose to feel good about it.
Not good enough, I have to say.
If the goal is to increase accuracy, then with every vote, the voter should get a sheet of paper they can look at, say "Yup - this is what I vote for", and drop it in the box. The results can still be stored and transmitted electronically - but in the event of a question on the results, those paper records can be taken out of the boxes and looked at by hand.
If the goal is to decrease the use of paper - well, then the current system of computer based voting machines is "good enough". It doesn't really offer any protection against hacking, against the voting machine company itself electronically changing the votes, the source is not Open to verify there aren't some other kinds of shenanigans going on - but if people are looking to reduce costs, then that's the price they pay.
Bev Harris says it best in the Wired article: "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."
People talk about the John F Kennedy assassination and conspiracies not because there really was a conspiracy (my opinion - it was a nut case in the warehouse with a rifle. Case closed) - but because the government did little to put everybody's fears to rests and left "holes in knowledge" open.
It's the reason why people still say "Bush stole the Florida election" (whether you believe that or not, and I really don't want to get into that) - because we still don't really know, since the counting was stopped by the Supreme Court (again, I don't want to get into the debate of "was that right or not").
So, for electronic voting systems.
Idea: Good.
Requirements: Source code must be open so all can review it.
Paper trail must follow each vote so the voter can review it and place in the ballot box.
Marilyn Monroe:
Idea: Hot
Requirements: Really should have learned how to swim.
Sorry for the last part. I just wanted to make sure you're paying attention.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
one possible way to secure voting, it to have things like duplicate checks. after each voting, the machine prints out receipt. this receipt will contain unique number and whom you voted for. this recceipt is not given back to voter, rather it is put in a paper bin. the voting machine should electronically store the unique number and the candidate for whom the vote is. after the electronic counting is done, manual audit of 1 or 2 percent of the vote should be done by comparing with the paper trail. any problem will then be known.
An open system, where everyone can see exactly what is going on, is extremely important in any venue where people are fighting for power. In politics and elections, everyone's trying to screw over the other person and grab as much power as possble. Electronic voting must not be a black box - it must be a clear, glass box where anyone who is interested can see exactly what is going on.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
The problem is not what they could do but rather that a group is doing it right here and now.
What people don't realize, is that punch cards are an EXCELLENT method of voting in terms of audit trail, security, counting, and detecting alteration. Punch cards get a bad rap because PEOPLE don't punch them correctly (i.e. punch twice, punch weak and make dimples, etc).
.... the punching machine never knows the difference, so you are getting a true audit of what it is punching. ... and the distrust.
Here is what WOULD work and with the best audit trail:
1) voter comes in, is verified as legit to voter, and is given punch card ballot.
2) goes to touch screen, inserts punch card ballot, makes selections
3) MACHINE punches card so weakling grannies don't just make dimples in it or insert it incorrectly, or punch twice in same race, etc..
4) OPTIONAL: User who wants to verify their votes takes punched card across room to a stand-alone reader, that display on a screen the votes on the punch card. Anything wrong and it's a spoiled ballot, and they get a replacement... and the punching machine can be doublechecked if desired.
5) Then they drop the card in the ballot box to be officially counted.
This is all IDENTICAL to the existing system of punch card balloting except for step 3.... and it is step 3 that eliminates 99% of the problems associated with punch card balloting.
The benefits:
- A paper trail is created with the punch cards.
- no names are on the paper trail so it is private
- challenge ballots can still be handled by putting challenged ballots in an envelope until the challenge is decided.
- can coexist with traditional punch card voting so it can be phased in.
- any machine can be autided at any time by putting in a ballot, making selections, and verifying them... then just shread that test ballot to prevent it from being counted (make test ballots bright orange too so they will be easily noticed if they get in the ballot box)
- it removes the tabulating function from the touchscreen terminals - which is the source of most errors
This is not rocket science people.
Have a cookie.
Because I thought someone would have just hacked the system to declare "Micky Mouse" or "Jack Vilenti" as the winner in any election. That's way more fun than just plain 'ol subversion of real results...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
do you think that FAUX News would cover it?
I don't think so.
They are too busy blaming the LibRuls for Rush's addiction anyway.
Hypocrites
t's despicable no matter who does it, and the perpetrators - whether Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or whatever - should be thrown in prison.
Speaking as a former Libertarian (and as someone who is still a small "l" libertarian -- that is, not a Libertarian Party member but ideologically libertarian), I think it would be pretty obvious if Libertarians stuffed the ballot:
"Clem, seems like them Liberal-tarians done got eight whole votes in this heah precinct!"
"Ya'll say eight votes, Cletus?? Damn straight, that there's obvious fraud. Ain't but one crazy linux hippie living in th' holler since we run off them boys livin' outa the VW Microbus!"
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Just how do you think controls the media in the U.S.? It's not the liberals.
It's assumed that Bush lost the popular vote. We'll never know fore sure because not all the absentee votes were counted. The margin of victory folks like you bandy about could have easily been erased had all the votes been counted in California.
Kinda funny how all you Dems were screaming bloody murder about votes not being counted in Flordia, yet millions of votes in Cali get tossed without a peep.
I've read many places that, "Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush."
All I gotta say is that Americans are f**ked in the next Presidential election. GW is in for another term. There goes the world.
If you live in a city where Diebold or any other electronic voting machine is used for an election, contact the election committee for your city, explain your concerns about the lack of a paper trail and closed source software, and then give them the link to the Wired article. Then CC your local newspaper and television stations. If half the Slashdotters do this in their own city, I bet you'll start seeing this topic in the mainstream media.
I'm still not sure about Diebold's intentions, but I think the situation with states turning to these electronic voting machines is more ignorance than malice. Most people just don't have a clue as to how computers work. As experts, it's our job to educate the computer-illiterate. Pushing for an auditable paper trail is a common sense solution that most people will understand.
So stop complaining on Slashdot (I get the irony) and contact your election boards and local media outlets. Make a real-world Slashdot effect.
X
This whole thing stinks. They are definitly trying to CTA (cover their asses).
No paper trail after the election? Who the hell designs these things. How do you do a recount or are the machines infallible? If 20-30% of them crash or have problems how good can the codebase be?
If the code wasnt certified then how can you be sure that the software wasnt rigged? The results bring that to mind.
Obviously no one consulted security professionals or thought that security would be a good thing. I would think that any such project would be opensource as anyone could verify the codebase.
Not being able to see the code or have it available for inspection is bad. Making it only inspectable by a select group or company is even worse (tampering/bribes/agendas).
Online voting still has a long way to go before I will trust it. I dont know how it could be used now with so many clear and present problems.
Shame on you!
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
Except we can't, and that's the whole point. It casts doubt on the entire election process. More doubt is cast based on the fact that a member of Party A produced the machines and then another member of Party A won the election even though it was expected that Party B would win.
That's the entire point - we don't know. It makes absolutely no difference what "Party A" and "Party B" are - which some other posters seem to have been attacking the above premise with. All we know is that a result has been produced that does not match the expected result. Further, we know that the makers of the measuring device favored the party that the measure device ultimately declared as the winner. This is suspicious.
So could the results be correct? Of course. Could the be wrong? Well, yes. And there's no way to tell. That is what the problem is. There needs to be a way to ensure that the machines did indeed produce the proper result, and right now, there isn't. Doubt has been cast, and there really is no way to resolve that without "maybes."
Maybe the vote was measured correctly. But maybe it instead skewed the vote - and until that possiblity can be reasonably discounted, a problem exists. (Regardless of which party is doing the cheating - it's still a problem, Party A or Party B.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
in fact, bush won more states by popular vote and had more national popular vote support than clinton.
so if you want to complain about the voting system, that's fine - but complaining down party lines is indicative of amateur trolling.
of course, your whole troll^H^H^H^H^H post is a bit of a conspiracy cliche, so that really shouldn't be surprising to anybody.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It does not matter weather any of the above is true or not, it matters ONLY that there is some question about the election process and how accurate it is and weather or not things 'unjust' are actually happening. If any of the above is true then the election process is flawed and we are in for trouble.
Electronic voting systems are known to be flawed by a certain percentage, yet more and more people want to push them forward. Will this make it easier for frawd? It is currently believed that there are 4 elected officials that would never have gotton elected had it not been for flaws in an electronic voting system. I'm not saying what party(s) they belong to or the state, but leaving this up to you to figure out how much you care about voting and what the politicans that are running this country are doing. REAZD slashdot as some of the things going on are scary -> FCC allowing tv stattion unlimited # of stations - this could lead to only 3 or 2 tv companies who could control EVERYTHING we see.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Don't you love America?
Don't you know that you are not supposed to question your appointed leaders?
Your duty is to vote for the winning repuke and then go out and consume.
No other dissenting view will be tolerated.
You can't have it print it out and just drop it automatically into a bucket ... otherwise hacked software can just change the printout as well as the electronic vote.
You have to print it out and have the machine hand it TO THE VOTER. Then the voter can verify that it's what she intended and drop the ballot into the backup ballot box.
Ev
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Yes, here in the Windy City[tm] we have a long history of fair and balanced (*cough* fraudulent) voting.
Why, our systems are so foolproof and easy to use that being dead is no reason to miss an important election!
Except that one side really is rigging elections and the other isn't. Kinda like wishing to kill someone vs hiring a hitman.
Can anyone tell me what the fuck is wrong with using scantron ballots?
This way not only do we get the benefits of real-time error correction, to avoid the hanging chad issue, but we also have a real paper trail to follow in case someone screams fraud.
It could be that the machines worked flawlessly. As a Georgia native, you just cant be sure that it wasn't the good-'ol-boy network stepping in to control state politics, as it does every few elections.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Tired of unsightly deficits? Vote Howard Dean [deanforamerica.com]!
Yes, let's all vote for Dean so our deficits will no longer just be unsightly, they'll be ungodly.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Here is another detailed article on this topic. In particular it discusses how Bev's website was not allowed to move after being blocked until after the recent california vote count.
Some have stated that Democrats would rig the voting machines, give the chance.
Others have asked for an enumeration of polls that were contradicted by election results, and of course cast doubt on the polls, themselves.
None of this matters a single bit. Three things matter:
1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
2: There appears to be no public audit process for code, patches, or patch installation for those voting machines.
3: (and this is the biggie) As a result of 1 and 2, I have very little faith in any results delivered by these voting machines.
NEWS LIKE THIS ERODES MY FAITH IN ELECTIONS IN THE USA. (further)
There is no way that this is anything but bad news.
Voting machines need security and transparency that can satisfy geeks nationwide, or at least let us know where we are, for those who simply can't be satisfied.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Yes, please do educate yourself.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Nah, we'll just enjoy socialist tax rates paired with no of the socialist benefits. No deficit that way - but no services anyway.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Sounds like this Rob Behler engineer is an incompetent whiner when it comes to diagnosing software bugs.
However, he's damn brave whistle blower. Go Rob!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
It may not be a rigged election here, but with no audit trail or ability to verify the results, there's no guarantee that the next one won't be. It doesn't even have to be rigged - depending on the margin of victory, it might not take many errors to perturb the outcome. Without an ability to check election results, the ability to rig an election exists, and eventually it will be used.
The people that run Diebold have a political bias. While they probably aren't allowing that to affect their judgment, as long as they are trying to implement a system with potential for both accidental misuse and full-blown voter fraud, their bias will be an issue. A clearer system for voting absolves the innocent and allows mistakes to be corrected.
Either incompetence or malice could alter election results where this system is used. People in power want to keep it, and the only way to prevent them from abusing their power to that end is to watch them. A system that doesn't allow one to do so is a system built for fraud. Any election in which that system is used will yield questionable results - even if the results aren't in error, no one will know whether they are correct or not. The (known) technical ability to either mess up or steal elections with this system can only decrease mistrust of it while decreasing the ability to do anything constructive with that mistrust. This is a bad combination for either political party.
P.S. the same problem that potentially could change outcomes (unverifiability) also means that there's no guarantee that dead people (or imaginary ones) won't vote. Without checks, all some programmer (cracker) has to do is summon them from the ether, and add the appropriate code.
The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 2239) has been introduced in the House of Reps that would require a paper audit trail.
.com was shut down by diebold.
More info: verified voting - fiar elections
and don't forget about blackboxvoting.org, another site for resources on this issue. It's currently down due to bogus spam complaints and the
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
Voters are fickle. Voting machines you "own" are forever.
Especially when there is no audit trail. You can do whatever the hell you want and there is no proof of your treachery. Hell the code could even wipe itself from the machine.
Are these things connected to the net? They must be as they have to send in their results. What do they use FTP, or wait somebody might have thought of that wasnt secure enough and used some proprietary encryption scheme that is "unbreakable".
Probably a Ceasar shift. But wait if we break the scheme we go to jail as it violates the DMCA and also will most likely get Bush and his cronies after you (ie: homeland security)
Isnt that what the Gestapo was in WW2?
I dont think that these voting machines were a well thought out idea, but maybe, just maybe that was the idea...
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
We were also covered last week in the New York Times and USA Today. For many more details about the Rob Georgia story from WiredNews, download the new Chapter 9 pdf for the Black Box Voting book -- as of this writing, BlackBoxVoting.com is once again taken down, again for a bogus spam harrassment report -- conveniently, within 12 hours of posting this new chapter -- so you'll have to go to a backup site to download the chapter. The BlackBoxVoting.org site is still down due to a Diebold DMCA action.
In Chapter 9, you'll see that Diebold also seems to have lost the bug reports from Georgia and that internal memos show that six or seven patches were done, not just one. This went all the way to the president of Diebold, who at one point yelled at Rob "We don't need YOU airing OUR dirty laundry!"
Nice folks, lovely voting system.
Bev Harris Author of Black Box Voting
Just cause we live down heah doan mean we
like killing small sheep!
Here is a secure solution.
Voter goes in to booth
Touches Screen to record Votes
The the recorded votes are padded with som extra data, zipped and encrypted with the Board of Elections's Public Key
Two reciepts are printed (with a 3d barcode perhaps) one for the Board and one For the voter
Voter is safe from a shakedown as long as the Private key is protected
Encrypted votes are sent to the tabulator at the board
Only the 'Master Computer' with the private key can manipulate the votes
The board has a paper record of each vote and can recount if needed
How hard is it
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
they fuss about minor sexual peccadillos and then steal elections and enough money to sink the ship of state. Hypocrite doesn't begin to say enough about their whole world view.
They stole the 2000 presidential election, biased judges passed on the theft, and now they're stealing the lower-level elections to insure that they never lose another election at any level. There won't be any paper ballots to recount, never again will there be any way to tell how many votes they stole, and the totals will be so far apart that recounts won't even be allowed.
Whose going to stop them? John Ashcroft?
It is to laugh...and cry...for liberty.
here is a much more detailed story from the independent 3 days ago.
Doesn't it seem strange that Diebold would have these problems, resulting in an election going to a republican when the CEO is a Bush supporter? A google search quickly found evidence of a link between Diebold and the Republicans. Sure some of the link were not real friendly towards Bush and might be easily discounted. But then I found news release! Clearly this needs investigation.
Except that one side really is rigging elections and the other isn't. Kinda like wishing to kill someone vs hiring a hitman.
And democrats (or persons wanting to getting a democrat elected) have never rigged an election? Please.
The only thing the repub's did worse in this instance, was doing it badly. So badly, that they got (are getting) caught.
close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and [...] tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%
Why do we keep hearing about these types of problems on voting systems? It's not frickin rocket science to put together a system to allow a single choice to be made from among multiple options, (ever hear of radio buttons?!). It's done all the time on web pages all over the world without these types of problems.
Even making it a networked application that allows configuration of the choices to be offered, sends results to a data warehouse, and even adding an application to count and report the results and you've still got a very basic system.
There's something fishy going on here. It's not because of technology that these problems are occurring - it's something else. Here's my opinion: it's easy to mask your activities with "technology problems" since the majority of the people don't know enough about the technology to cut through the story and see it for the crap that it is. And the activity being masked? Vote rigging, plain and simple.
As technologists, it's up to us to sound the alarm when we see this kind of thing happening. We're the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the use of technology. I know it sounds melodramatic, but a couple hundred years ago it was the people who knew how to use guns that protected everyone else. Now it's the people who know how to use technology.
I see no other explanation for the preponderence of errors in automated voting systems. Incompetence alone doesn't explain it. It's just too easy to put together a system like this, and too hard to screw it up so badly.
Facts are stubborn things.
The GAO or somebody, should develop the damn technology, with proper safeguards, and then contract out the manufacture of said machines. (Proper safeguards includes design for verification of the built machine, and a paper trail.)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
ha ha regenery publishing
last I checked every single lawsuit filed in the florida debacle were filed by BUSH because he knew without his buddies on the supreme court, who made a film-flam one use only ruling, he didn't have a chance.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
the quagmire in Iraq, no found weapons of mass destruction, disturbing leaks about CIA spies,
1) Quagmire? Shouldn't we wait for a year to pass bfore we rush out to use the word Quagmire? Oh and news flash, we won the war, we're rebuilding their cities.
2) Actually lots of WMDs have been found, you just don't want to count _those_ WMDs.
3) Leak? This story is the most idiotic POS the Left has tried so far. Notice how it whimpered away? It had no legs b/c it was shit. She wasn't EVEN a SPY, she was a mid level analyst.
This
I agree as a pretty hardcode Liberal Georgia voter that Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes was doomed from the get-go. My parent's were teachers, and I was more than willing to hold my nose and vote Republican just to get Barnes out. (We'll ignore whether Perdue's campaign promises about helping teachers have been upheld or not.)
However, as angry as the thought of potential election tampering makes me, I'm equally angry at the prospect that this kind of closed-door, behind the scenes changes were allowed to take place (regardless of whether it was maliciously intended to steal the election or just an honest bugfix). "Democracy dies behind closed doors." It get my blood boiling that this may have been done to cover the ass of Diebold's executives and keep the money rolling in. That's fraud by a company contracted to our state, plain and simple, regardless of whether or not it's also vote-tampering.
Fuck Diebold. I want their heads on a pike for pushing an insecure and unaccountable system on Georgia's voters and then violating election law to cover their own profits. I'm hoping that we can stoke up enough controversy over this to get the machines replaced with accountable ones. Whether that's through auditable paper-trails or more advanced cryptographic solutions (which I wouldn't trust Diebold's programmers to pull off) doesn't matter. We need voter assurance that their votes counted for what they wanted.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Independant.co.uk's coverage of the story
Bit Torrent of bug traq articles about diebold machines.
Bit Torrent of actual diebold voting machine software. (probably illegal)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I am a bit confused about how complexity is introduced into these systems. It seems that there are very well-defined inputs and outputs and that there is no reason they should not be rock solid.
Kiosks and terminals that perform fairly simple tasks like this have been around forever. Two examples are ATMs and some multiple guess touchscreen terminals I remember seeing as a kid in the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.
Someone mentioned earlier that the machines are running Windows. This seems like a bizarre decision to me. That adds a layer of massive complexity for a machine that's supposed to only do a very basic set of operations (take votes, record votes, disseminate votes to a file and hardcopy). This is extremely similar to what an ATM does, and you don't see banks installing Windows in those - even the new fancy ones that feed you stupid video advertisements while you wait for your transaction to process. A complex OS simply isn't the right tool for the job.
And I am just talking about crashing, above. Apparently these things are also inaccurate. That is a huge software problem. I can not fathom how a program doing such a simple thing (tally votes) can do it inaccurately. Yes, they might have to make sure transactions don't walk on each other, but this is certainly not rocket science.
I think I'll stop here before I go off on a tirade about this likely being a classic example of what happens when you don't use some kind of reasonable engineering methodology.
... people are stupid and don't think that Bush is responsible for any of those things.
Several years ago, I got my mom a T-Shirt to wear while voting... It read: "I'm from Chicago.... TWO BALLOTS PLEASE!"
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Why not host the site where the DMCA isn't enforceable?
.. )
(... and there's always Freenet, although a lot of your intended readers probably aren't going to install a Freenet client
it's in my head
I live in Vermont, where Dean was governor for quite a few years.
I don't agree with everything he did, and I don't agree with everything he's saying now. All things told, I don't know who I favor for President, at the moment.
But there is one fact which stands out:
Vermont is one of three states in the union that isn't wallowing in red ink.
As someone who has lived here through his entire tenure as governor, (and a few governors before him, too) it's not a case of a Republican legislature keeping spending in check over the governor's dead body. A significant portion of the time, Dean was keeping spending in check over the bodies of a Democratic legislature.
In any case, Dean was a key part of the fact that Vermont is solvent, today.
(To me, that may be the ONLY thing in his favor, maybe not, but IMHO that simple fact is beyond doubt.)
He spent some amount of time "casting aspersions on the wisdom of the legislature" when fighting spending battles. His language could be refreshing at times, even colorful, but I'm not sure how it would play on a national stage. (I seem to remember him using terms like "irresponsible" and perhaps even "idiotic", though I'm less certain about that last one.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Check out:
http://www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/
Read "Long-shot candidates do startlingly well in Tulare County"
small time candidates getting skewed results by voting methodology points to deliberate vote skimming. Amazing that a story like this with simple statistical evidence to back it up hasn't made the news anywhere...
The first being that I said that a last month push was made because the results were so close.
Zogby had different results in November, showing Cleland and Chamliss nearly neck to neck. The margin of error and undecideds easily account for the victory of Perdue.
Being a Georgia voter, and having friends at work whose spouses were teachers it was pretty much evident that it was very close.
People were not voting for a Republican Govenor, they were voting against Barnes. You would not understand the loathing people felt for him unless you lived here and saw it all the time.
Chambliss won out in the end simply because it was a major push. That and Cleland not getting any real support (mainly because he didn't earn it). Remember, Cleland didn't get in by landslide and his voting record was nearly directly opposite of his campaign. Combined with Zell Miller's record it makes you wonder what state Cleland came from. He tried the sympathy card late in the race, but that didn't get far as people saw it for what it was.
Finally, the Democrat party was reeling over some big name political issues in Georgia, and these combined with King Roys (Barnes) arrogance brought the whole Democratic establishment. See, Cynthia lost here as well... as did her father, and those events will play out for years.
Georgia didn't need a king.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Williams said they compare the system when it comes out of the Diebold warehouse to make sure it's the same software version that was certified by the ITAs. But he acknowledges that this does not include reading the source code.
Who needs to compare source code? After they certify the voting machines, just run a checksum on all relavant files. When the machines arrive for voting, run it again and compare the checksums.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Currently down: http://www.johntitor.com/ but it's promised they'll be back in a day or two. This is the motherlode, so check back until it's up.
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/ is up, but doesn't have the usenet postings he made the other site has.
After reading his timeline & predictions, note that the years mentioned are election years.
You need to host that site elsewhere. Maybe even HavenCo. BlackBoxVoting is far too important for the future of the United States. We can't have it going offline every week.
Doesn't having an unauditable election trail violate the Voting Rights Act? If there's no way to prove your vote is fairly counted, shouldn't the presumption be that it hasn't been?
Can there be a reasonable federal lawsuit requesting that, since the last Georgia election can't be objectively substantiated, and because the voting machines were also otherwise in violation of legal requirements for certification of their software, the election be voided and a fresh election held?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Prove it. Prove ANY of what you said above is true.
The election wasn't rigged. Laws were followed despite Democratic party attempts to ignore Florida law and timetables established by that law. Recounts by the media and other organizations have shown that Bush DID win Florida. They both got 48% of the popular vote, but Bush won 30 states to Gore's 21. If Gore had simply won his HOME STATE then the close race in Florida wouldn't have mattered. While many people misunderstand the electoral college, it is actually a more accurate representation of the desire of the nation then just counting those who actually voted nationwide. And it isn't the first time a president was elected without winning the popular vote. It's the fourth time. Just the first time you've been around to see it.
I don't know which I'd prefer... Keep a Republican president and have to listen to these idiots go on about the election, or just give them a damn Democratic president so they'll shut up.
Really, Gore suppors should heed his advice from his concessions speech: "I call on all Americans--I particularly urge all who stood with us--to unite behind our next president."
Here (scroll down) is some more information about the California recall election and some interesting numbers resulting from Diebold counts. Seems pretty damned fishy to me.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
"head in the sand"
Sounds like a head in the sand to me.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
To verify bought votes.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
I smell a Bush victory in 2004!
Yeah, but the smell of Bush's ass is not appealing at all. Not one bit. Geez, when will this political corruption end? I hope Congress can get a clue before WW3 wipes out half the planet.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Register as an absentee voter. So far as I know, they're not going to be sending you a Diebold system to mail back.
Obviously, there are flaws to this. ISTR that there was mention somewhere that absentee votes aren't really counted unless the vote is close (though, obviously, that can be an urban legend, anyone care to prove or refute?)
That's why W is the asterisk President. He's the selected President of the United States*.
haha, Earth to Rabid Republican. Shrub is currently running the largest Defecit in American History(TM).
So, the question is, how *are* you going to spend cash you are borrowing? Arms? TaxGrabs for the Rich? Star Wars? or Health Care? Education? and Social Security? The republicans are proving they are the greatest spenders in history!
Jesus, you'd think some of you conservatives would wake up to reality? are you stoned on HillybillyHeroin or something??
If half the Slashdotters do this in their own city, I bet you'll start seeing this topic in the mainstream media.
Yes. Nothing stirs up the mainstream media more than a couple hundred angry, misinformed, greasy, pasty white teenagers with a skewed social agenda.
Crawl back to your mother's basement, loser.
Foolish Democrats. Maybe they should have thought of this when they were screaming about punch cards? I guess the reason we aren't hearing from the DNC is that they plan to do the same thing they always do when an election they care about doesn't go their way: whine that it isn't _fair_, accuse everyone in sight of cheating, and demand recounts until their guy wins. Only this time we will have to hold the whole election over again, and again, and... Foolish Democrats.
Simply put the receipt printer behind glass: the voter can see that the machine printed her vote correctly, but then it goes into a sealed box.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Check this graph out when the little green men let you come back. If you're interested in looking at some actual facts, that is.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
I didn't mention his failures to hold anyone in the government (intel and administration) responsible for the intel lapses that led to 9/11/01. I didn't mention his failure to find:
a) Osama
b) Mullah Omar
c) Saddam
d) WMD
e) the anthrax mailers
f) the leaker of the CIA agent
I will now.
If the votes are so undeterministic, why can't someone demand a re-vote? Call no contest or something? IANAL, so I don't know what legal recourse there is, but I'd think there would be something people can do.
Right now, it seems people are saying "well I don't think this is quite right" yet they just shrug their shoulders and limp away? Absurd.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I don't think anyone ever thought that there was a problem with punch cards, either. I mean, you punch a card, how hard is that? The problem is when you've got an election where the difference is less than 0.5%. At that point, everyone goes totally nuts. Obviously it's easy to tell the difference between a ballot with an X, and a blank ballot. But what about a ballot with a little dash, or even a dot? Do you count that? What about if there are two boxes marked, but they are marked differently (maybe one looks like it's been scratched out)? What if the pen is out of ink, so you can see where the pen was pressed, but there's no actual ink mark? Those are the pen equivalents of pregnant or hanging chads. It won't be a problem in most elections, but when you have a frenzy like in Florida, with reps from both sides accusing the others of cheating, those distinctions are going to become huge controversies.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Wonder how long it will be before a special interest group files a lawsuit for equal treatment and back pay.
The Miller article also demonstrates a lack of credibility in other ways. It provides a pseudo-scientific analysis from an unnamed author, one who tries to sound like he's writing a scientific paper but who fails to get enough details right to do a creditable job of such. It makes an appeal to suggest that certain numbers are significant without disucssing the statistical tests he used (probably none) or a disucssion of confidence intervals is evidence enough of the writers inexperience with statistics. But most importantly, it falls down on the analysis of other parts of the election that could have caused the results listedand many of those are quite obvious to anyone familiar with California election procedure.
There are serious problems with both electronic and non-electronic voting systems, but faux-science and hysteria isn't going to solve anything.
I'm a nature photographer.
Do you REALLY believe these measily deficits are more important than addressing legitimate national security? With all your harping do you ignore than jobless rates are at an 8 month low and inflation is non-existant? You realize 911 was intented to *cripple* the US economy, right? And did you forget the .COM bust which began under Clinton? I can't believe folks whine about unemployment here when some European nations have double-digit and so did the US during the Great Depression. You asses wouldn't know true hardship if it bit your ass.
Oh yeah, and there's been no terrorist acts in the US since 2001 either. In the face of the unwilling to act UN, he led the ridding the Iraqi people of a butcher (unless you *deny* the mass graves and historical photos and accounts of his past abuse of WMDs)--that will give us, adding Afghanistan, *three* democracies in the Mid-East. NEWLY FREE PEOPLES.
The UN security council has unanimously supportered the post-Iraq plan this week. Yup, he's doing just an *awful*, horrible job. Mindless twat! Now go collect your socialist handout, wanker!
This parody of a Diebold ad explains the whole situation quite lucidly.
That is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is patch things your way and, voila, you get some "odd" election results that contradict all the polls
I know 'exit polls' should be more or less accurate depending on who's doing it, but I hear all sort of poll related things on the news everyday, much of which sound like total BS.
Not to sound like one of the paranoid tin foil hat people, but as someone who has NEVER been polled by anyone other than consumer products outfits, I have to ask:
WHO are these people that are actually polled, how are they selected?
How do we know that the polling outfits don't pick the people they poll to get a desired result?
Does the result mostly depend on whoever is funding it?
I've heard that they slant the questions they ask to get a desired result, WHY do polls have any credibility in our society?
B) She was not an analyst. She worked in a non-government cover position. She didn't have diplomatic immunity or any other form of official government cover. She was also working at actually finding/stopping the spread of WMD. Now that her employment has been leaked by the administration, everybody who had extensive contacts with this agent will be suspect. These are foreign nationals who helped the US in trying to stop the spread of WMD and we've hurt every one of them. Way to go!
C) We won the war, but we're quickly losing the peace. Rebuilding the cities while various factions continue to blow them up seems oblivious to the reality of the situation. While I recognize that it does good things for Halliburton and Cheney's stock options, it really isn't the best course of action. And as long as Rumsfeld continues to believe in the operational numbers he's declared are just enough, we won't be in a position to make things better no matter how much the ground troops would like to.
So that makes it right, then?
try using some FACTS
0 /00-127.htm
--------
Absentee ballot count completed in California
California Secretary of State Bill Jones announced this week that all absentee ballots have now been counted. Jones' news release in part addresses misleading reports circulating in the media recently that have resulted in many California voters' fearing that their absentee ballots might not be counted. Here at CVF we have also received numerous inquiries from voters about whether all absentee ballots are counted. To help set the record straight, Jones wrote in his release:
"There have been several erroneous reports on talk radio, the Internet and elsewhere that California does not count all absentee ballots or that absentee ballots are only counted in races where they would make a difference in the outcome.
"For the record, ALL ABSENTEE BALLOTS ARE COUNTED IN CALIFORNIA. All absentee ballots must be received by the county elections official by the time the polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. All absentee ballot envelopes must be signed by the voter and that signature must be verified by the county elections official against the signature of the registered voter that is on file in the county elections office.
"Following the November 7th election, more than 1.1 million absentee ballots needed to be verified and counted. The rare instances an absentee ballot would not be counted are specified in statute and include: no signature on the envelope; the ballot was received after the 8 p.m. Election Day deadline; or the signature on the envelope did not match the signature of the registered voter on file with the county elections official."
The entire release is available online at: http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/press_releases/200
--------
release not there anymore but get it from the wayback machine
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
But then I did mention them.
And there is a magical fairy that helps Republicans never have to try and understand or deal with damnable "facts" that interfere with their closely held beliefs. And you can be sure the parent AC has been thoroughly dusted.
Oh? How do you define WMDs? We've found a dual-use fermenter-trailer which doesn't have any of the equipment needed to weaponize what it could cook up (and no smoking-gun nasty bugs found). We've got a vial of toxin in a scientist's freezer...except there are two varieties of botulinium, and he had the less-lethal type that is used in medical procedures. Some rocket stuff, but that's conventional weaponry...SCUDs aren't exactly WMD. I really can't imagine why you think we found WMD.
And just exactly how is that a falsehood? It hasn't happened yet! There's no way to determine whether or not some future event will or will not happen, therefore you don't have enough evidence to declare these statements to be a falsehood. Speculative, yes, but not a falsehood.
The original poster was simply pointing out that the CEO of Diebold has made certain statements that should be cause for concern.
Something tells me you've spent a bit too much time in the No Spin Zone.
Maybe nuclear war is the only option at this point for change.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If "Dull" means Serious, Worthwhile Political Discourse devoid of exploitation by a cirus of anchors, pundits, makeupartists, cameraman, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, then Im glad our elections are "dull".
Anyone want to provide some links that call this election an "upset"? I mean, I'd like to look at them to see what kind of reasoning is used to call this an upset. The only type of upset that is valid in an election like this (in my humble, but correct opinion), is when the polls (multiple polls, notice, from multiple sources) show that one candidate is winning handily, and then the actual vote turns drastically in the other directions. These polls must have been conducted shortly before the election without any sort of "big press release" type event that would easily point to a changing of minds...
Here's a radical but not unreasonable idea: let's institute a mandatory federal death penalty for any serious involvement in election fraud.
At first glance this might seem nuts, since after all election fraud is a white-collar crime and it's not like they murdered anyone, but democracies are built and organized on a free and honest vote and it seems to me like any crime against the democratic system is easily the equal of a capital crime like high treason.
If the Diebold brass knew that they could go to the electric chair for stealing votes they might think twice about being so secretive; at the very least, they'd have a hard time convincing employees to keep quiet when their very lives were on the line.
And unlike Florida, these votes (which were counted) had no effect on the electoral college results of the ultimate election. The uncounted Florida votes and the SC interference with the state mandated process obviously DID.
sadly, i too have thought that.
Take the top 5 years of American history in which discretionary spending increased the most (as a percentage of the previous year's spending). Two of those years were during WWII. Three of them were under a GOP-dominated Congress within the last five years. So much for Republican's lowering spending!
Even supposedly "tax-and-spend" president Bill Clinton managed to only have a 3.5% increase in discretionary spending during his administration (with a 0.7% decrease in non-defense discretionary spending). Reagan was famous for increasing discretionary spending 7%, while GWB has increased discretionary spending 15.6% and has increased non-defense spending a whopping 20.8% in merely three years of office! This has led to a whopping $450 billion dollar budget deficit for this year alone.
From the fiscally-conservative Cato Institute: here and here
This is in spite of approving huge tax-cuts to the rich in spite of the fact that we already have some of the lowest taxes in the world. This has twice required massive accounting trickery and Congressional action to avoid having our nation default on its debt. Bush is driving us into the ground with his lunatic economics! All of the recovery under the Republican "Contract with America" and under the Clinton administration has been brushed aside by Bush reckless combination of tax cuts and spending increases. Remember back when Clinton said that we were looking at an end to the national debt after paying off $600 billion and with it at a mere $5.7 billion back in 2000 instead of the $6.8 trillion that it is now?
In the mean time, Howard Dean has managed to keep a balanced budget on his state for 10 years, through two recessions all while paying for the social programs that needed support. Maybe we should compare Bush's record as a governor? It's pretty obvious who's gonna be better as President if you're looking to see the deficit taken care of. Then again, if you weren't aware of Bush's spend-thrift ways to begin with, you probably won't bother to read the links and get informed.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I agree, trying to use a poll to cast doubt (or the opposite) on an election is ridiculous.
Calling someone a liar is equally ridiculous, and that's what I was disputing. The slashdotter I replied to asked for evidence of polls showing one candidate leading, claiming that there were no such polls, so I gave him links to the polls. He then claimed that I didn't read his message, so I had to reply again.
I suspect you want to reply to an earlier message in the thread. I actually agree that polls are moderately pointless, except as a means to an end (namely identifying key areas to campaign in and the like). I agree that they DO NOT predict elections well.
Ngo Dinh Diem won Saigon with 600k votes out of a total 450k registered voters in the US sponsored Vienamese election of 1954. Of course, we don't do that sort of thing anymore... we cap voterigging at 100% now.
The ______ Agenda
According to infoshop the company in the middle of this is sending out notices to squash the free speech on this issue.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
Sorry if I put any noses out of joint here, but...
.
In essence this is no different to third-world tin-pot dictators ensuring "re-election".
Frank Zappa said it best:
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."
Turn on the TV, open a newspaper, check it out. This phase transition is happening NOW, and its being covered "live".
The only thing that Frank got wrong (which no-one could have foreseen), was that its not the "expense of maintaining the illusion" that is why the curtains are being pulled back, it is because our elected leaders have discovered that the electorate is a lifeless corpse
First they insulted us, we showed no response.
Then they slapped us around a bit, and we showed no response.
Now that they've hogtied us and pulled our trousers down, they are busy pulling down their zip. And still we show no signs of life.
Someone else pointed out (in a different Slashdot story), that it's this kind of total disregard for the people being governed (the "masses") that caused the conditions where revolutionary sentiments are forged (eg US revolition, Russion revolution etc).
In the Greek revolution of 1821 (overthrowing the Ottoman rulers), the revolutionaries were called "kleftes" which means "robbers". These days they would be called terrorists.
Welcome to the New World Order.
I couldn't agree more. It's not just about the simplicity either. It's about the audit trail.
I'm not saying I know what the perfect auditing system is, but if it can't be clearly understood by 99% of the voting population, than it is no freaking good!
I can understand that a box with mark in it means good, a empty box means bad. I can't understand crap-ass Diebold voting systems with crap-ass windows CE on them with no audit trail whatsoever?!? WTF???
Unless someone comes up with an electronic voting system that has an auditing methodology understandable by your average american citizen (read impossible), then there shouldn't be an electronic voting system. Period.
I am not a luddite, but getting my order f*cked up by some crappy ordering kiosk at McDonalds is one thing. Getting some greedy-ass, power-grabbing ass elected because he's buddy buddy with the voting machine manufacturer is an entirely different order of bullshit.
we're quickly losing the peace
Keep on clicking your ruby heels while repeating this statement. That's the only way it'll come true.
As for the military absentee votes, the law said that they had to be individually postmarked (that was specifically there). Republicans like to conveniently forget the letter of the law when it serves their purposes.
The SC, not the electoral college, chose the winner of the 2000 selection. That's why W is the asterisk President. Selected President of the United States*
Don't say that... That seems to be the way of the Democratic Party followers these days, whine and cry until someone gives you what you want. I'm sorry everyone can't have everything the way they want it all the time, but that's life.
Namely our secretary of State Cathy Cox and her office.
Democrats led the call for "touch screen voting" after their voters claimed having a problem with the usual voting machines down in FL.
Claims that Democrats are rigging elections to let Republicans win so they can be discredited or whatever is poor conspiracy theory mongering.
I know, I know. It's just tiring, isn't it?
But, as they say... if we give in to their whining and crying... THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON. :)
Now that this justification has been proven false, W comes up with "threat to the stability of the region". Note the absent modifier: Imminent.
So this was not a war of necessity. It was a war of choice. He was no more an imminent threat when we invaded then he had been for years. W decided to invade at that point (with no real international support) because he chose to. Not because he needed to. Not to protect Americans, or the world, or the region. Because he decided to.
H.W. should have taken out Saddam in '91. We would have had full international support. They were a clear invading threat to the region. They were the aggressors and the world was with us. He didn't.
W decided to take all of the international support post 9/11/01 and throw it in the toilet. He went in alone and is now begging the world to lend him a hand. The world sees him as the aggressor. He's losing the peace (though rewarding Halliburton with huge no-bid contracts). And he is breeding further instability in an already unstable region. Oh, and he continues to let Afghanistan slide into chaos, again.
And it is so very convenient to assume that 9/11 would have happened no matter who was in office. I'm sure you were the same way after the first bombing of the WTC towards Clinton. Right? Right?
And they have the nerve to brag about how they help 'protect' the Bill of Rights.
there's no place like ~
EXACTLY! How better to confirm that your vote really _did_ count. I've come to the same conclusion you did in thinking about this situation. If something looks funny - you can check it out, you can verify that everything is as it should be. Of course, the information needs to be online. Talk about a /. effect, the night of the election and the day after would be a hoot.
And while we're at it, let's go to instant runoff voting, and eliminate the public subsidies for private organizations - that is, party primaries.
How did 51 machines call home during the 2002 election in California?
The SC decided to ignore their rights and ensure that a large section of the state was disenfranchised. The fact that they decided to enfranchise a small section of votes that were clearly illegal while simultaneously disenfranchising a much larger group that were legal shows their contempt for the whole process. The SC's interpretation was that W won and that further counting would cast doubts on their decision that W won.
The real issue here is trust in elections, and the possible effect another election fiasco might have in this country.
Let's suppose that the next presidential election is as tightly contested as the previous one, and it comes down to recounts in certain key states. However, there is no paper trail, and there is no way actually recount the votes. In some districts, large numbers of people could not vote because voting machines were malfunctioning.
This is a recipe for chaos. At best, the winner isn't regarded as legitimate by a large section of the population, and his (unlikely to be a her in 2004) administratin is crippled. At worst, we have chaos.
Frankly, if I wanted to screw with the USA, I'd screw with the voting machines. You think that hasn't occurred to the terrorists?
I just don't get it, man! how bloody hard is it to make a check box, and a counter? when someone hits that checkbox you add one to the counter. X = X + 1 Is this actually so hard? i mean really? what the fFuck are these morons doing to this very very very simple concept? even encrypting and transmitting the data shouldn't be anything like difficult. it's a fFew numbers, fFor pete's sake!
can anyone explain the problems associated here?
In my country we have a successful e-voting system for years. And we are poor as hell.
U.S. is a joke
I thought it was the ACLU and California democrats that wanted the recall election put on hold until all the precincts had these nice 100% accurate electronic voting machines. Now you are telling me that the ACLU and democrats were just pawns of the W.?
Scary. This is worse then I thought.
Good thing the Appeals Court stood up to W and his cronies and reinstituted the recall date.
-BrentThe specifications for a electronic-voting machine should be open and publicised.
Vendors may design and build machines which must conform to the specification. Non-conforming machines fail testing and will not be used. Vendors may or may not choose to open the source code to their implementation.
In an election, no more than 49% of the machines may be from one vendor and/or share the same source code. How the machines are distributed is random.
After the election, the relative proportions of the votes from each vendor's machines must be similar - if any is particularly skewed, the implementation from that vendor's machine is then called into question for analysis.
These things should be open and public to reassure people that a fair and proper election has occurred.
Just my 2cents worth.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Affected Systems
Voting Machine 1.0
Description
A flaw in the previous version of voting machines allows user to actually vote for the person they choose.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
C) We won the war
I'm not sure the war ended yet, I thought it did, but then W said a few months later that he never said the war was over, just the end of major conflict. I don't keep a real close eye on the news, and I'm sure that the second ending of the war wouldn't make as bigger fuss in the media as the first one (which turned out to only be an end to major combat operations), but did W really declare the war over? Can anyone claim victory?
I propose a system that 1) has all the touch-screen/braile bells and whistles but also 2) immediately prints out a cardstock paper ballot that is easy for the voter to read. The voter then 3) runs the paper ballot back through the same voting booth to verify before "closing" their vote, and then 4) takes the ballot to the official lock-box at the polling booth that SCANS IT AGAIN, verifying the results with the booth. (the results are verified by a serial number put on the card but not linked to the actual voter.) No numbers (including who was voted for or totals) are available to the election judges or poll officials until the official tally at the county court house. The totals, however, must match up with what was reported encrypted, from each polling place, as the votes were taken.
This solution would use the best in technology advances without sacrificing vote security and voter confidentiality.
The system MUST be open sourced, with crypto signed binaries that MUST match patch levels as it centrally reports votes. Any tampering or patching would be traced as it happened.
This type of system would not be that difficult to develop on the OSS model and presented to the P.T.B. I'm a Republican, I'll sell the administration on it. We just need some Democrats to sell the news media on it (except for Fox news, of course).
A system like this, coupled with a simple law that forbids the publishing of totals (or even exit poll results) until ALL VOTES ARE IN, would go a long way to reducing voter fraud and prevent last minute media pushes from effecting the results.
The hardware would be a touch screen notebook type computer hard-linked to a scanner and solid-ink printer with ink-level sensors built in (an all-in-one design.) Utilizing OSS only on the hardware would keep a single company from the possibility of controlling the election as well as keeping the code public... just to keep it honest...
The benefits of such a system are huge. First, last minute changes would not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They would be added to the system on the fly, reducing printing costs to nothing. Second, the voter could SEE that his vote counts. A Paper ballot, even computer generated, has to be guarded. A switch, or even an unauthorized "box open" by a rouge poll judge would be detected. A missing polling box would be known immediately. Smart boxes with a "black box" and GPS tag would be in order here.
So, who's up for a software/hardware OSS design project before the next presidential elections???
I'm serious here, let's do this one! Contact me, let's get a project started and get some grant money to ram this one through.
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
Some highlights:
- source code comments revealed remarks such as "a gross hack" and "this doesn't really work"
- the software produced two different sets of results on two different passes
- the system password appears in plain text in the source code; that didn't really matter, however, because the system could be accessed without a password and its contents changed using Access
The list goes on. Thanks, but no thanks. Let's stick with paper ballots, pregnant chads and all.I voted by absentee ballot so I would have a paper ballot. I don't trust "electronic voting" no matter who builds or makes it.
I have seen some post indicating that the recall election here in Califorina was "stolen" perhaps because of these machines. With total Democratic control of the all State offices I don't buy into this idea. It just shows how out of touch the bay area and costal California is with the rest (majority) of the state when they makes such statements. This map shows that clearly. recall map by county This map show how many counties actually went for Schwarzenegger Votes on who will succeed Gray Davis he won in all but 7 counties. So much for saying he has no mandate
I have also read the some democrats in the bay area think they are "better" and "smarter" than the rest if Califorina and they don't matter. Discounting the equality of fellow citizens is offensive. Marginalizing those you disagree with is a huge turn off and your political ideas are suspect from then on. This is a boner move and will come back to haunt bay area and coastal democrats in the future. I suggest you STFU and concentrate on finding out why the rest of the state doesn't agree with you. This SacBee article dispells lots of myths I have heard and read (even on /.) about the nature of the recall Daniel Weintraub: Facts and fiction about the California recall election
Once again paper ballots are a must for free and fair elections. Any election can be stolen no matter what method is used but it seems that a paper ballot properly cast is much harder to tamper with.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
This whole fucking thread is off topic.
Excuse me but isn't the original post about security of voting machines and the 2002 GA election?
Wired got suckered on this one GA 2002 outcome is not in doubt much less rigged.
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/ 031008-ee380-100.asx
Just listen. The executive summary: for some reason computer science people are the *ONLY* people who have the ability to understand how to run a fair election.
computerized casino slot machines are held to tighter scrutiny than our computerized election machines.
Think about that.
Just like slot machines are audited, the election machines should have their 'roms' independantly checked by a watchdog agency before and after elections to detect fraud. If fraud is detected then invalidate the election and charge Diebold for a new one.
Long before the Bush/Gore fiasco Florida had borrowed some of these machines. It's amazing how forsightful they were. Dissapointingly, they had to come back because Edwin Edwards kept winning everything.
Cue music, Johny says, "There in the jailhouse now..."
Laugh.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The Computer is your friend
The Computer is your only friend
Trust The Computer.
Trust The Computer in all things.
Trust only The Computer,
And remember:
In all probability,
The computer wants you dead .
(Grumble, grumble, commie mutant bastards, grumble grumble)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If Diebold's black-box voting system is so atrociously bad (which it obviously is), why doesn't the Open Source community come up with an alternative? Are there such projects in the works currently? This would seem to be the ultimate act of community service.
Here's one that I found via Google: Electronic Voting Machine Project
Of course, the ultimate solution would be a drop-in replacement for Diebold's OS, so the already purchased machines could simply be upgraded... man, that would piss them off.
I'll bet if we had just an order of magnitude more elections officials than Canada has, thing would work just fine. The only hard part would be printing up enough forged cards to stuff enough boxes to make a difference.
A simple improvement to electronic voting systems would print out a similar card to be inspected by the voter and depostited in a box. This would yeild the desired paper trail without hindering the efficency of electronic vote counting. It must be realized, however, that the minimum staff required does not change, because every election can be challenged. Dibold would love to sell that many printers as a mod, I'm sure. Are you listening, Dibold?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
25% error in voting? That's pathetic!
It's not THAT hard to write a program that displays a list of 10 candidates and lets you select one and then records the number of votes they got. JEEZ!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
You sound like that kid who, after losing an argument, just cried, "this is just stupid anyway."
Just cover your ears and sing, or even better--turn on Fox News.
Yeah, everything is just fine.
Another serious problem is that it opens the door to making vote buying a lot easier. In theory, (although it has been greatly corrupted in some areas), the vote is private, making it hard for anyone to buy your vote and really have proof that you really gave them what they paid for. I believe this privacy is a factor that at least lessens the chance of vote buying. However, if a vote buyer can pay for a receipt with his name on it, it seems likely that vote buying will happen more often, directly aided by a printed voting receipt.
That's not to say I have answers. I would certainly like to have a system that makes voting easier and more accurate, but I don't see easy answers to solving issues of both voting privacy and avoiding facilitating vote buying while at the same time making voting system more accountable. Particularly not in a society that is not willing to impose the death penality when voting fraud is caught.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Still a lack of running water. Still no steady supply of electricity. Still no government. Still no free elections. Still no law and order.
Jesus Christ what do you want? it takes time!
This
Does anyone know how these things work, from a user's standpoint?
I mean, if the people at Diebold and the election officials had their heads on straight they ensure that each voter receives a paper receipt!
The receipt would have a unique vote verification ID # so that the user could go to a website or call their local government, enter their social and that ID # and ensure that their vote was tallied correctly.
And of course to dummy proof it further, it should also have just plain old English output of who they voted for...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
> 1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
No problem; just let each candidate's supporters provide a voting machine, and then the voters can choose whose machine they want to use to vote!
Vote with your vote, so to speak.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Who's deluding themselves?
How many people need to die before you get it through your thick, don't know shit from shinola, pisskopf?
Things ain't going well. In the short term, things may start looking better, but Bush has reaffirmed Al Qaeda and their tactics as deserved against an oppressive, crusading force.
Bush has assured that, Al Quaeda will live on and has provided them with deep caches of human weapons.
The only weapon of mass destruction found so far has been the immeasurable stupidity which Bush has shown since stealing the presidency, and which you zealots show in trying to protect the idiot.
Here is an article titled "Firm's attempt to down hyperlinks an attack on free speech, says EFF" which discusses how Diebold is using the DMCA to force ISP's to remove links to internal memos that were leaked regarding Diebold's crappy software and business practices. You can read the internal memos, for now, here.
LoRider
There has only been a handful of times where a candidate actually lost the electoral college vote after winning popular support.
1992 was not one of them.
Jesus, why don't you just go back to character assassination. That's the only thing you idiots do well, and it seems to be the only thing you have to say against Clinton.
The raw numbers are right there in the article, and methodology is discussed as well. While the article makes no claims about being anything other than a preliminary look at the data, it does raise very serious concerns and provides incentive (in the form of supporting numbers and the number of different cases where anomalous results appear to be correlated to voting mechanism) for a serious followup investigation. I don't think it's reasonable to brush this off as "counties had different presentation orders". Democracy is only as good as the mechanism for counting votes is honest, and Mark's blog entry raises an alarm that needs to be raised. There have to be plenty of /.'ers out there with the time and net access necessary to shed more light on these allegations.
Your failure to deal with the other points is noted.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
If the votes are so undeterministic, why can't someone demand a re-vote?
If the ubiquitous "They" can fix an election once, they can do it a second time etc.
What we need is accountability, a way to audit the election results.
How about a printout from the voting machine that is collected like the old fashioned ballots were. Make a printout that can be easily and quickly scanned by a machine as well as manually counted by a human being. And make it blantently obvious what the voter voted for, both so that the voter can confirm before s/he puts it in the box, and so that there is no debate durring a manual recount of whatthe voter voted for.
I see most politicians as being corrupt, both Democrats and Republicans. I don't want to see anyone fscking with the elections. Politicians are bad enough as it is.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
I used to wear my Don't Blame Me, I voted for Bill and Opus T-Shirt the day after every election day.
It's gotten kinda ratty, and I haven't worn it in a while. I ought to look for it again.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
As a Georgia voter, I'd rather have seen both a standard punch-card machine and an electronic voting machine in enlarged booths. A punch-card system would certify both the candidate aht the voting machine as viable winners if the results fall in their favor, and losers if the results do not. In my district we had a screwy election for governor and senator, with Republicans slated to lose in both cases making mysterious and timely gains that were *just* enough to allow both to win their respective elections. Questions about the voting were rampant immiedately following the elections among voters in both parties. A paper trail should not only be available in situations like this but mandatory to prevent potential fraud by anyone.
In both cases the victories are credited to the President's arrival and grass-roots stumping for the candidates involved. If it is found that the election was tampered with in any way than an immediate interim election should be held for all offices involved with punch-cards and paper trails available for a hand-count if necessary. I tend to vote by person instead of party and am quite happy with my Republican Representative, but fraud by any party is unacceptable. Until such time that a computer program is available with a stable platform and a secure databank for votes, this technology should be suspended indefinitely from implementation. At the very least they need a punch-card system in the next election to validate the results for quite some time to gather data and ensure that the machines themselves work properly.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
1) Quagmire? Shouldn't we wait for a year to pass bfore we rush out to use the word Quagmire? Oh and news flash, we won the war, we're rebuilding their cities.
A.) More American soldiers have been killed since Bush announced the end of the war than during the declared war.
B.) Defense analyst in the DOD were among the first to declare the situation a "quagmire". The Bush administration admitted that they had no exit plan. It wasn't until Powel and the State department was given free reign to negotiate with the UN without interference from Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Condoleeza Rice that he was able to get the UN to commit to pulling us out of this quagmire.
C.) Bush is stating that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost the U.S. $87 billion dollars during the next fiscal year. The vast majority of this money is being earmarked to go to Halliburton and Bechtel for services supplied to the troops and in contracts for managing the reconstruction. Both companies are owned primarily by Dick Cheney and other ex-CIA staffers and operatives, such as Frank Carlucci, as well as former Reagan/ Bush the first staffers (Cheney, Carlucci, and Rumsfeld). This may not be a quagmire for those who are in the right club, but it certainly is for the rest of us who will be left holding the bill.
2) Actually lots of WMDs have been found, you just don't want to count _those_ WMDs.
You must watch a lot of Fox
3) Leak? This story is the most idiotic POS the Left has tried so far. Notice how it whimpered away? It had no legs b/c it was shit. She wasn't EVEN a SPY, she was a mid level analyst.
She was a former operative (there all "former" operatives), which is why there is an investigation. It is not against the law to reveal the identities of CIA staffers, so that would not have been much of a news story. It is likely that she was outed by one of the former CIA people in the Bush administration, as they would have been the best positioned to know such details , and by law of averages, as there ore more senior whitehouse staffers that are former CIA (both staffers and operatives) than not. As it is likely that she was in agreement with her husbands claim that there was no eviodence that Iraq had approached Nigeria (or any other African country) in order to obtain uranium, there was a revenge or punishment motive for her not being loyal to the company. It is odd that Bush was so sure that the source of the leak would never be found when he repeatedly assures the American people that we will find Osama Bin Laden and Sadamm Husein. At least we do know where the the culprit is in the case of the "leak".
Read, L
Maybe you don't get how this thing called "debt" works.
There's this thing called "interest" that's charged to you when you borrow money. Even if you have a surplus of money, and are paying down your debts, if your debts are large enough, the interest can still be more than the payments made against them.
It's a scary thing to think that even before the Bush disaster, positive cash flow still wasn't enough to pay faster than accumulating interest.
But maybe you don't care about things like that. After all, it's all Clinton's fault anyway--right?
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
Your bank puts a lot of effort into making sure that their ATM machines don't have problems. This isn't because of government regulations, it's because they don't want to lose money! (Note that many of these ATMs are made by the same Diebold that is now making the unauditable voting machines. If your bank were in charge of voting, you can bet that Diebold would be making much better voting machines.)
Yet the government has essentially no standards for voting machines! How is it that we as a society care more about gambling and convenient access to cash than we do about voting?
The ACLU may have been right to challenge the equipment used in the recent California recall election, but their argument was completely bass-ackwards. They claimed that the four counties using punched card ballots were unfairly discriminating against minorities. Ironically, it is ONLY in those four counties that the voters (including minorities) can have even the slightest degree of certainty that their vote was in fact counted correctly as they cast it.
We need open-source designs for voting machine hardware and software. There should be at least one, and possibly several designs which are made publicly available for scrutiny, and fully public domain so that no royalties need be paid to use them. Then the counties can put out bid requests, and any manufacturer could produce them. However, the bidding requirements should include that the machine and software has to conform exactly to the published plans. Any deviations must be preapproved, and must be published and in the public domain.
Note that this means that both the software and hardware must be open-sourced.
And even then, it will still be necessary to have plenty of auditing to make sure the machines aren't tampered with. There should be internal printers for audit trails. And, like the gambling machines, it will be necessary to verify that the software integrity routinely.
The normal technique used to verify the software in electronic gambling machines has been to use ROM verifiers. The auditor actually removes the firmware chips from the machine, puts them into a verifier, and compares them against known-good images. (The software was subjected to intensive scrutiny when the machine was approved by the gaming commission, but in the case of open-source code for voting machines, it could get even more intense scrutiny.)
Newer machines, starting with the Odyssey machine from Silicon Gaming, store game code on a hard drive. The ROM code refuses to load code that isn't digitally signed. So they still use the ROM verifier, but now verifying the ROM proves that the software on disc is correct as well.
A voting machine shouldn't even need a hard drive, though. In fact, it's much better if it does not have one. Aside from the paper log, writing the data to a write-only medium would be preferred. The list of items to be voted on (candidates, ballot measures, etc.) could be supplied to the machine on a flash card, and the contents of the card could be digitally signed by the election officials.
The drives for the removable media should be in physically locked containers. Of course, the machine as a whole needs to be physically secured against tampering such that attempts to do so will be easily detected by the poll workers. Tamper detectors should also log messages to both the paper audit trail and the machine-readable log.
But you need California to win by a landslide.
Hmm, now a "Republican" named Schwarzenegger (who is actually slightly left of Diane Feinstein, but never mind that) will soon be appointing new members to Califorinia's election board, just in time for the 2004 election, where the E-voting machines will be used for the first time in the state.
Things to make you go "Hmmmmm....."
Edith Keeler Must Die
"Liberals" have actually shown an incomprehensible faith in electronic voting,
This is in part due to the "liberal ethic" of attributing the better of possible motives to an individual or group until it is demonstrated otherwise.
even Diebold machines.
This is taking one's "liberal ethic" a little too far.
As for the ACLU, thier embracing of electronic voting is a (perhaps misguided) attempt to have the same or equivalent voting equipment installed at all polling stations in a given district. The most common machine error that is found in voting machines is the non-registration of votes (votes not being counted as opposed to false votes being created by the machine). This allows for defective voting machinery to be selectively placed in neighborhoods based on thier voting tendancies in hopes that the increased incidence of undercounting errors will be enough to diminish the influence of the voters who use that polling station.
Read, L
Diebold -- sounds like they probably will.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
...that he loved Louisiana politics since he could still take part in them after his death.
The ACLU is definitely not working for our (citizens) best interests here. I suggest everyone pull their funding. That they backed the electronic voting machines shows they are way, WAY out of touch with reality.
The post is about the security of electronic voting and references the 2002 GA election. ..........Democrats.
As a Georgian I am very familiar with our states politics and no one in the State has challenged the validity of those election results.
GAs "touch screen voting" was implemented by Dem State officials at the urging of
What the Hell do George Bush and Valerie Pflame have to do with this?
Like the Cox sisters,Ted Turner,Katherine Graham .Pinch Sulzberger yup rich liberals...........
The page just loaded up for me. It took a moment, but it came up quickly once it started. Oddly, http://spews.org/ came up without any delay at all.
Not that SPEWS depends on a functioning website (it's just an information zone), but there may still be those out there who think that it died with Osirusoft (or that it *was* Osirusoft, which it was and is not).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I think that one has to be even more wary of this than purchasing voting machines from companies. Although it seems trendy to generally bash companies as amoral and working against the interests of society, I'd like to point out that a non-profit organization (especially one that makes voting machines) would probably not be policitally impartial, either. At least when buying machines from a company, the company has some known motivation for producing a fair machine: money. A non-profit has no such obvious motivation---the government and the voters must trust the intents of the non-profit organization, and their members, entirely. If the organization has political beliefs (which many do, even if not in their constitution), then members of the organization would be more likely to exact a "payment" for their services than paid employees. There's no such thing as a free lunch; in fact, the cheapest lunch is often the one that you pay for with your own money.
This is completely off topic and needs to be Modded as such...I'd do it but used my mod points already :(
It is evidently up to us to keep those fools straight.
Damn right on both counts. The problem is, voters on both sides need to care about fair and verifiable election results just as much. Judging from the slant of Rep-side responses in this thread, this is not going to be the case.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Crushed Dimbulb operates out of West P.B. of course the election was going to be thrown. Amazing how Cracksmoke repubs demand accountability. Ex-Nixon hack James Bankrupt us Baker flies in to oversee the elections? Dumbocratic leadership and Cracksmoke repubs are both incredible stupid when it comes to finding out how election machines work. They are upper management that has never written a line of code. Some code writer at Diebold knows what went down and when. With imminent bankruptcy upon the US after a dollar crash/derivatives crash/real estate crash/consumer-corporate debt depression do you think holding them accountable with paper ballots is going to keep Chinese, Japanese and Euro investors happy?
That's exactly what I am thinking, a major screwup like that to call attention to the issue of security. As it is, election manipulation of the common sort is so common that probably no-one thought much of it when the person beat the polls!! "Bought his way in, I guess. Oh Well" is probably what the average person thought. Then people become more annoyed at politicians and not at programmers where the fault lies. I guess being a programmer I should be happy, but as a citizen I sure am not.
.0008 seconds" we should add "but then again, your car would be stolen while you were working up the paperwork to buy it since you'd only need a piece of gum and an old tissue to take it."
Perhaps we need to start a new meme along the lines of the "If computers were cars"... instead of just saying "If computers were cars we would get a million miles per gallon and go 0-60 in
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It is easy to screw it up if you are from Florida. It has happened already. Blame Florida for the last presidential election fiasco.
Do the exit polls jive with the election results?
That alone will point to any suspicious activitiy.
The most optomistic conculsion I've been able to draw from this and similar facts (note: not speculation, facts) about the corrupt state of US politics is that most people who pay attention to the news enough to notice things like this are also cynical enough to realize that there isn't enough difference between the major parties at this point to warrent getting as upset as they would if there was a "good team" and a "bad team."
Sucks, when that's the optimistic interpretation.
-- MarkusQ
Just because it's digital doesn't automatically mean it's a good thing. Give me back my paper ballots and paper trails and accountability for votes and I'll be a happy American. Personally I don't want Diebold to deliver 2004 for Bush.
>Yes, let's all vote for Dean so our deficits will no longer just be unsightly, they'll be ungodly.
You mean worse than the $560 billion deficit that we had for the federeal fiscal year that just eneded? Rememeber, we had a $87 billion surplus in 2000.
Let me guess, you were against a statewide recount in Florida when Bush was leading by less than 200 votes. The recounts done later showed that Gore won. However you are calling Gore's 540,000 margin of victory in the national popular vote too close to call.
Diebold: Guaranteed to give your state 25% more republican votes or your money back!!
Democrats my whine about not getting what they want, but Republicans just buy off the polticians, change the laws and take what they want.
Democrat curruption seems to be mostly small time, stash a few million in the bank type of curruption. Republicans are currupt on a massive scale. They steal billions of dollars and soothe you with talk of 'family values'
Don't ask questions...just look at the pretty flag...thats right...You're getting sleepy..sleepy...
It is getting attention in the mainstream press.
Only problem is it's in the wrong country.
US media doesn't seem interested in reporting on US election problems.
Read about what Greg Palast found about the 2000 election that the US media wouldn't report on here.
The Democrat won the popular vote.
The Democrat only needed to officially win one more state to win the popular vote.
More people went to the polls to vote for the Democrat than the Republican in Florida.
There was a long dispute about who won the Florida election, in which the US Supreme Court got involved.
The Republican ended up becoming President.
For some reason this seems familiar.
The Independent carried an excellent article on Diebold on Tuesday. Article here.
...share Clinton's concern with the deficit is to ignore enormous amounts of evidence. In particular, it ignores the undeniable fact that Clinton put Gore in charge of the hard part of reducing the deficit: finding large amounts of government waste.
The "current crop" of Democratic presidential candidates includes a general well known for improving military performance while cutting costs and a governor who balanced budgets under difficult circumstances. The rest of that crop (including one that has recently dropped out) ALL voted for a number of extremely effective deficit-reduction measures (including some which got NO Republican votes whatsoever).
As far as I can see, your use of the phrase "as far as I can see" translates as "while I am desperately trying to ignore all available evidence."
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
...is the fact that he has managed to accomplish all Valdrax has suggested while still planning to cut the size of the military.
Bush got elected in large part by promising members of the military he was going to "do something about" the fact that he didn't think the U.S. fighting forces were still able to fight two wars at the same time (which has been American strategic doctrine for a long time). When Donald Rumsfeld finally got around to announcing what they were going to do about it (in early September 2001), I was flabbergasted: They decided to change the doctrine so that we would no longer try to be ready to fight two wars.
When 9/11 came and went, I was convinced their plan to shrink the military would go out the window. They certainly had the public support for national security and homeland defense. Their political base is all for it. But they recently announced they were going ahead with their plans despite the fact that their current operations in Iraq are facing manpower shortfalls as early as next March or April.
I just don't get it. All the shortcoming mentioned in the parent post could have been predicted from Bush's campaign. But I don't think anyone expected them to do all that AND shortchange the military as well.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent whether the machines run operating systems by Microsoft, IBM, or Uncle Tom Cobley.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent that the software has security flaws.
These issues are distractions. There's a very good probability on the evidence that I can see that these issues just divert your attention from the probability that the systems are working as their makers intend - to deliver election results in favour of the party they, the makers, support.
I mean, let's face it, if you were going to set out to rig election in this electronic age, how would you do it? You'd take control of the vote collecting and counting process. That's what Diebold have effectively done. This is an issue at the very heart of democracy itself: quis custodiet ipsos voting machines?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
First Congress is of a republican majority in both houses. Second, these are not measily deficits in the least, hundreds of billions of dollars in the red is a situation that even the huge economy of the US can support for very long. Third, an 8 month low after years of losses doesn't suddenly make everything fine again. Forth, 9/11 was designed to instill fear and nothing more, the deaths of 3,000 at the WTC and the hundreds at the pentagon and in PA while tragic are insignificant to the health of the US economy. Fifth, so you're happy with just having slightly better employment than Europe? talk about low expectations. Sixth, There have been many terrorist acts since 2001, anthrax in the mail, sniper in the washington DC area. Seventh, since when has it been the US's job to go around removing butchers? yes Saddam was a butcher but that leaves many still in power most of whose crimes make Saddam's look minor in compairason, when are we going to clean those despotic butchers out? Also Afganistan is not in the middle east, its in central asia. Finally i'd just like to say your discounting of the facts while blindly spewing the party line makes me wonder if your loyalties don't actually lie with the United States but rather with the ideology of the republican party, anyone who puts the implementation of the ideology of their party above the welfare of their nation is nothing short of a trator.
EFF's Action center will help you send this info to your congress man. Cut the link to the article and past it to their form. You don't even need to pay them anything to use the service (free registration required). But if you fee strongly about this issue they could really use your donations.
Yes, it has been a failure, but, considering the underlying theory of killing to stop violence, that should be expected.
Your silly points weren't worth my time
This
Ms. Harris, please contact me at "blackbox@baymoon.com".
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Your silly points weren't worth my time
Rather than admit you are A) wrong and B) stupid, you just declare victory and walk away, Rush style. Way to go!
which wouldn't have been necessary if Regan and Bush didn't funnel so much money to their "good buddys"...
"Tax and spend" is better than just "spend"...
Yeah, so where was bush when people in Africa were being butchered (and still are)? Oh wait, they don't own a natural resource controlled by one of his private interests...
I don't understand how so many people can not see the situation we are falling into.
1. Our government controls the flow of a large amount of money by means of taxes and spending programs.
2. Corporations like money, so they want to do whatever possible to a) reduce taxes, and b) get contracts with some of those spending programs.
3. The best way to get a foot ahead of the competition is to make friends with people who are inside the government
4. These "friends" give special consideration to the companies that help them get elected or stay elected.
5. In return, these companies compensate their elected "friends" for their efforts and to encourage further consideration in the future.
6. The process continues for a long time, as the government slowly grows more and more corrupt.
7. Now the government (the only entity who can legally forcefully take money from you), is investing a majority of it's taxes into private companies.
8. In the end, the private companies practically own the government, and have become our feudal overlords.
Is this what we want?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Parent comment is by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.
Well at least you didn't go the germany 1939 route.
To the above all I can say is, "duh." Now, how do you suppose we get out of this rut? Or more importantly how can you go from digger of rut to driver of rut-mobile?
This
I thought it was the ACLU and California democrats that wanted the recall election put on hold until all the precincts had these nice 100% accurate electronic voting machines. Now you are telling me that the ACLU and democrats were just pawns of the W.?
I didn't see any mention of California... Pres. Bush and the RNC are pumping money left and right to update the voting systems throughout the country. As are the Democrats.
No ones wants the debacle we saw in Florida. Whoever you voted for in 2000, you have to admit that the entire "Hanging Chad" affair was completely avoidable.
And Brent, why do you constantly skew an argue in a completely unrealted direction? Stay on target and argue the FACTS. burgburgburg made no mention of California and his point was right on target.
Anyone can pick out a few facts and come to any conclusion they want. The full story is that the Democrats in CA wanted the recall election to happen after all precincts had electronic voting machines. Yet these voting machines are supposed to be error-prone, un-auditable, and Republican controlled.
I fully expect the CA ACLU to try to stop the primary in March. And the general election in November. Why shouldn't they? They'll always find some issue that they can use to impose their will on democracy. I don't think the recall election was unique.
-BrentIf all of the new voting machines are in place, what legal reason does the ACLU have for stopping the March Primary? Or the General Election?
/.
None.
And please realise that the ACLU cannot simply dream up a legal reason. You actually have to have an educated and well-thought out arguement before you step in front of a judge.
It's not like
You're just spouting more worthless rhetoric and attempting to discredit an organization that has done more to solidify the individual citizen's rights than just about any other organization.
You're biased rhetoric against the ACLU is about as valuable and on point as Jesse Jackson's rhetoric that the RNC is racist and works to keep black families poor.
Please, open your mind and realise that your paradigm is not the only one and certainly not the RIGHT one.
And please realise that the ACLU cannot simply dream up a legal reason. You actually have to have an educated and well-thought out arguement before you step in front of a judge.
It's not like
But isn't this story all about Electronic Voting Machines being unreliable, and unauditable, and being Republican controlled? Don't you think that the ACLU will sue to stop the primary election until the voting machines have been "audited", so that voters won't be "disenfranchised" by the "inaccurate" and "Republican-controlled" ballots? It wouldn't surprise me. Why should they not care about voters being disenfranchised by eletronic votes if they do care about paper ballots?
Or perhaps this whole story is just a joke, and there's really no issue with electronic voting machines to begin with. Of course, the ACLU realises this and knows that they can't get away with anything.
-BrentOr perhaps this whole story is just a joke, and there's really no issue with electronic voting machines to begin with. Of course, the ACLU realises this and knows that they can't get away with anything.
Or perhaps you failed to actually read the story. Otherwise you would have found that the story does not mention the ACLU or the RNC or President Bush.
Brent, are you assuming that voting activists is another name for the ACLU? Because, no where in the Wired story is the ACLU mentioned.
Personally, I think that this is a valid issue. If the software cannot guarentee a correct and accurate recording of person's vote, then should we not look to improve the program or at least demand that the manufacturer attempt to correct the problems?
And if a third party organization (like the ACLU) believed that the manufacturer did not adequetly correct existing issues, isn't it that organization's duty to raise awareness or stop falty machines from being instituted and used?
Side note: if you expect the Democrats or the RNC to not use issues to their political or financial advantage, then you're quite naive.
This is of course highly distressing and if proven true, then cause for great concern. Of course, the article does not mention if the Republicans or Democrats are responsible for this, because it looks like a private company (thinking about the profit margin) is solely responsible. So, I'm not really sure where you got the "Bush & RNC control voting machines" rhetoric.
My theory? You're just a pseudo-pundit that attacks what you don't want to understand.
Liberal and Conservative organizations that criticize, challenge, and demand compromise from the government are exactly why you have the freedom to celebrate and proclaim your close-minded, one-sided views. Ironic, don't ya think?
Hello!?!? Just because the story doesn't mention the ACLU or the RNC or President Bush doesn't mean that they don't can't about the issue. If you only accept a subset of facts about an issue, you can confine the facts to push your agenda.
The fact is that some people have issues with voting accuracy. The ACLU has issues with voting accuracy. This article talks about electronic voting issues, the ACLU filed a lawsuit dealing with paper voting issues. I fail to see why next March the ACLU wouldn't see the issues also with electronic voting that people are seeing now.
So, you are either saying that this story is bunk, and has no real facts, the ACLU is blind and can't see the issues with electronic voting, or the ACLU doesn't care whether the Republicans steal the election with electronic votes. I know which theory I'm going to believe.
-BrentYes. That's what I've been saying. I think that the ACLU will try to "stop falty machines from being instituted and used." There. I quoted your post. Does that make you feel better? :)
You are saying that I can't make that claim though in this thread because the original article doesn't speculate what the ACLU's response will be. Is that correct? Because in this reply you seem to concur with me. So why argue the same conclusion?
Side note: if you expect the Democrats or the RNC to not use issues to their political or financial advantage, then you're quite naive.Politically and financially, yes. But, I don't expect them to do anything ethically wrong. I don't have evidence of Republicans being involved in anything ethically wrong. I wish I could say the same thing about Democrats. But then, you know that I am obviously bias :)
So, I'm not really sure where you got the "Bush & RNC control voting machines" rhetoric.I didn't. It was burgburgburg who brought "Bush & RNC control voting machines" rhetoric. I was just responding to it.
-Brent