Slashdot Mirror
Flaw in Florida E-Voting Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like there are more problems with the new e-voting machines. How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?
By silencing anyone who talks about the flaws, of course! Do what I'm gonna do, bet money on bush being reelected. That way, if he is, at least it wasn't a total disaster.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost"
:D
Didn't they let some hackers lose on that Diebold machine and find 30k fake votes changed in a matter of minutes? Honestly, I don't think they're ready for this, if they ever will be. My grandfather can't even operate his DVD player.
In the gubernatorial election here in Cali (when Arnold got elected), they replaced the chad system with essentially the same design, but instead of punching holes, it left a really dark ink mark on the circle, which seems a lot safer to me. And this thing really flooded the ink, i touched it to my thumb just for fun and it left a pool in my fingertip. To me it really seems like a smart and simple alternative.
Though of course I expect some replies on the contrary
Vonal Declosion
I want to know why these people have such trouble building a voting machine and the occupying software? I'm sure I speak for many many /. readers when I say that we could nock up the client and server in about an hour to forkful all the specifications and then spend the next hour bug fixing and then in the third hour get a cup of hot coffee! Morons
Lets hope they aren't ready by the time of elections.
Instead lets hope Florida gets embarrassed into using something else.
How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
That's asking the wrong question! it's "How will the voters handle this?". Well, most will ignore it. They'll vote, and votes will be miscounted. Then someone will become president (exactly who doesn't matter). Then there'll be a small investigation into the voting failure, perhaps a story or two on slashdot, and then the country will keep on using them.
People just aren't interested in a system that works any more. If they have something to complain about and go "oh did you hear the voting in florida was rigged!" it gives them 10 minutes of conversation around the watercooler, then they go ahead with their lives.
Scuse the cynicism, but I suspect it's the most likely outcome
The worst flaw in those voting machines is that they always offer such a poor selection. I hope they get that fixed in time.
Given the fiasco of the 2000 US presidential elections, I'd guess that it's possible for the machines to be both buggy and better than the alternatives.
I think we should focus on getting something that works well. If we wait for it to be perfect, it's going to be an awfull long wait.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Get over it, Al Gore lost. :-)
And thank god! I remember the signs people had after the election that said "Sore Loserman" with a tear instead of the star (in the same motif as the Gore/Lieberman signs). I was never able to get one of those signs.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Is it a deja vu?
Does the Supreme Court decide again who is the next President of the US and not the voters?
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
I think that turning everything in the world electronic...is really bad news...it could easily be rigged...example: if($vote = "Bush"){ $BushVote = $BushVote + 2; }elseif($Vote = "Lieberman"){ $LievermanVote++; } return $DeathToWorld;
I've never seen someone use 'lose' instead of 'loose' before. Most people can't resist adding the second O. Nice to know someone else still remembers the word exists, even if they forgot what it means.
Considering that an electronic voting system is specifically designed to record and report voting activity, I'd say that a failure to do so consistently is more than a "minor technical hiccup" (as indicated by a spokeswoman for the secretary of state). An intermittent failure of a primary function is worse than an outright failure, as any programmer can tell you. Consider an intermittent failure of the brake system in your car....
In a strange way, I almost welcome all this attention focused on electronic voting systems. After all, the companies building them are pretty much doing what most other software companies do: Throw it all together as quickly as possible and let marketing and sales push it out the door. These are simply "average" software products coming under greater scrutiny. Maybe by pushing better quality here, we can force improved quality in other products (great leap of the imagination, I know).
I'm with grandparent poster, however they counted the missing votes, Bush lost.
What I want to know is why is it always Florida? The flight school in florida, the voter irregularities in florida, the same names and same places keep coming up again and again.
Oh, come on. The only thing that EVER kept voting even remotely fair was bi(or multi)-partisan supervision. This is implicit and understood by both major parties. There have been "shenadigans" for years by both parties.
The idea has always been that the cheating would generally just even out.
Machines are never going to insure accurate vote counting if the people reading off the numbers are corrupt.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Whenever a story on Diebold is run, the editors should put in a META tag on the web page to play the O'Jays' "For The Love Of Money". It would really drive the point home. Plus it's a wicked bass line.
Really, I am confused. (according to the article, that I actually read for once) The only way to fix this is to hook up a laptop supplied by Jeb Bush to the machine, to have it verify what is happening? Yeah, much better than a hanging chad. Thanks.
Don't blame me, I voted for the majority!
How can you count a "Missing" vote?
What scares me about all of this is that four years after the last election, it is still not common knowledge that Florida purged thousands of people from the electoral role illegally. This was admitted by Choicepoint in a special congressional hearing. Why Jeb Bush is still Governor in Florida I'll never know. (Notice that I'm saying nothing about the hanging chads business, that's a different kettle fish altogether).
What really amazes me though is that it's happening again and no-one is doing a thing! Why in god's name doesnt the media in your country do it's job? I'm absolutely amazed that you're allowing this to happen again.
"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost."
They said it couldnt happen..
"She's the fastest voting machine in the fleet"
But as the electronic voting system made her maiden election..
[Insert dramatic music]
"ACCESS DATABASE CORRUPTION - RIGHT A HEAD"
Disaster struck..
"Full reverse transactions on the data base! Switch to MySQL!"
"Its too late, we cant migrate in time!"
"But these machines.. they cant fail, they are un-breakable!"
[Music gets more dramatic]
"Captin! we have lost 12 states, this system had only enough redundancy for 14."
"What are you saying sir!?"
"Captin, im saying that if we loose 3 more megabytes of data.. then this election will be null"
[Music gets even more dramatic crescendo fff]
"Jack! Jack! there are only enough paper ballots for half the population of Texas!"
"You take one, your vote is more important! I was only going to throw it away on a 3rd candidate anyway"
Coming soon, from the directors of Florida 2000, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Diebold, Microsoft.
[Music reaches climax]
ELECTION: 2004
They said it couldnt happen.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Gambling on Voting (NY Times Op-Ed today)
I don't understand this run on machines anyway, don't paper ballots scale perfectly? Counting votes can be arbitrarily parallelized after all.
For the EU parliament. I went in, took a paper ballot, showed my voting card, recieved a small envelope, went behind the screen, used the pen there to check the box across my candidate on the ballot, put the ballot in the envelope, handed voting card and ballot in. Done.
How the fuck could e-voting make this any faster/simpler? After all, counting the votes is a highly parallelizable task, so the fact that you have 10x or even 100x as many voters shouldn't matter in the least.
All in all it took me ten minutes. No more, no less.
Obviously, you can still call up and order an absentee ballot, but most people order theirs over the web now. Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but in Palm Beach County most of the "get out the vote" campaigns in urban/impoverished/highly democrat areas encourage voters to apply for absentee ballots, hmm. PBC Elections Link That sure gives me more faith in the system, TdC
'How can you count a "Missing" vote?'
With a manual recount. There were 10750 votes that the tabulator machines said didn't have any vote registered on them, so they manually took a look. That was just Miami Dade alone.
Those 10750 votes weren't looked at manually in the election because of the time deadline.
Whatever rules they chose to apply, the votes still showed Bush lost.
What's so bad about putting an X next your candidate with a pencil and putting the paper in a box like we do in the UK? I'm all in favour of computers and everything but computerising this just seems unnecesaily complicated and expensive.
I guess it is too much to hope that the source code is publicly available, but really shouldn't it be?
lff
You know, what pissed me off more about the last elections more than anything else was the whole attention to shut down debate over the process. I mean, here we had a seriously close election whose results turned on exactly who won in Florida, and the entire push was to settle the matter as quickly as possible rather than as accurately as possible.
What was up with the entire "debate" over what kind of chad counted as a valid vote? If it was detached from 3 corners, it counted, but not if it was only detached from 2 corners, even if it was clearly the only candidate punched on the ticket?
More seriously, the decision was made by a Supreme Court containing individuals who - in any other court in the country would have had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest. (Some of the Justices were nominateed by G.W.B.'s father, for Pete's sake.) Why wasn't there more attention given to that failure of the process?
And, so, what I hate about the soundbite expression "Get over it, Al Gore lost" (although you did indicate that it was a joke - granted) was that it stopped debate and forced the result through.
How hard does it GET? Why can't they just CnP this code, install linux on the machines and just ... vote??
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include
int main(void) {
char* c = NULL;
FILE* votes;
size_t len = 0;
size_t readb = 0;
if((votes = fopen("votes_nov_2004", "a")) == NULL) {
perror("votes_nov_2004");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
puts("Enter your vote>");
while((readb=getline(&c, &len, stdin))>0) {
fputs(c, votes);
putc('\n', votes);
puts("Enter your vote>");
}
fclose(votes);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
So you'd rather trust a human with an agenda looking at each ballot and then deciding based on perceived dimples in each ballot what the person voting intended to elect? Personally, I'd rather trust the machine. If the user is too stupid to understand how to register his vote correctly and, as a result, the tabulator doesn't count the vote, then as far as I'm concerned the machine is right.
> They'll vote, and votes will be miscounted. Then someone will become president (exactly who doesn't matter).
I think that votes get miscounted when parties use malicious practice by disqualifying entire races from voting just because their last name is the same as someone with a criminal record. This is what Dubya did to get elected, plus he used a lot of other crazy tactics to sway the vote.
Voting machines could be a factor, but I think that the social engineering from parties needs to be quelled far before we worry about counts. Even recounts were suspended. So even an auditing system can't prevent social engineering by parties.
The law isn't doing anything to prevent elections from being stolen. Their hands are tied because of bribes, mostly.
You can have the perfect voting system but it doesn't count for anything if your country is lawless. A covenant without a sword is meaningless.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
You'd think that a country who prides itself on democracy and tries to spread it throughout the world would be able to figure out something as simple as voting. We've never had problems like this in Canada. This whole punch card/e-voting/dress up like you who want to vote for thing really just makes things more difficult. Much easier just putting an X in the box next to the candidate. Hard to screw up that one.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"So you'd rather trust a human with an agenda looking at each ballot and then "
'A' human? no, a group of closely monitored people, monitored by both parties with check recounts yes. If the rules say 3 corner chad is a vote but the machine can't register those votes then the machine is wrong.
Don't trust machines too much, the optical scanners in Florida were set to reject the ballot in predominantly Republican districts, (so the voter could try again). Meanwhile in Democrat districts the scanner was set to swallow the ballot and register a no vote. Which is why so many of the votes the machines couldn't read were democrat votes.
Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.
Vinnie says: Day sounds about perfect ta me.
Yoos gots problems wid dat, maybe we come over ta ur place and talk about it?
Answer: They won't. Until the world realizes that they need a truily open standard for electronic voting no "solution" will ever be ready to impliment.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Use keypunch encoders.
Voter goes into keypunch booth, looks at wall with each candidate assigned a number, voter types in numbers, extracts card, and (new part), sticks card into reader which displays their choices on a screen. (Doesn't like what she sees, goes back in line to punch out another card.) Voter hands in card.
You have anonymity, a paper trail, no concerns about hanging chads or mispunches, minimal maintenance, and almost no high tech specialist requirements. I wouldn't be shocked if most of this type of equipment is still manufactured and maintained.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Face it - the laws in place in Florida before the election would not have allowed Gore to win. So he tried to lawyer his way to the White House - with the help of the notoriously leftist Florida Supreme Court, which utterly ignored statutory law, case law, and the Constitution of the United States in an attempt to help Gore.
Now I am convinced there are bad moderators.
My post above was a comment about hoping Florida would use different voting machines.
The topic I was posting was AN ARTICLE ABOUT VOTING MACHINE PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA.
I was moderated down as being "off topic".
In other words, someone abused their temporary moderator's privelage to censor an opinion that they didn't like.......not an opinion that was off topic to the thread.
I didn't know that Judge Scalia had time to read slashdot!
I'm impressed
Even if many like machines, because they relieve us of the burden of doing manual work, the relatively few ones ;)
..would you trust banks/govts/corporations
that -actually know- how machines really work would rather work manually then let a machine decide the outcome
of an election. I certainly do and I'm no luddite, on the contrary I call myself a computer geek
The facts are simple and important: computers can count very quickly, but they can be instructed to MIS-count exactly
as fast. Computers can even be instructed to turn your YES into a NO and your NO into a YES. It requires only a click
to turn 10 million votes from one candidate to another, regardless of what some self-declared "security expert" say about
the security of well maintained and programmed computers.
Hand counting of paper votes cannot as easily be corrupted. While with just one click you can tell computers to do anything
but you can't corrupt a thousand people without having some of them understand that corruption in voting process is against
democracry ; some will refuse to be corrupted, others will go to media and denounce the corruption..maybe nothing happens
and the election is rigged...but some people still know and can still talk, and paper votes remain to be counted a dozen
times if necessary (with and expecially without the help of a counting machine)
It is also important to check that each and every voter is given his/her voting rights. One can't just trust computers
to tell if a voter still have his/her rights or have lost it. With a simple click one could trick a computer into reporting
that 10000 ex-inmates are still in prison, or that 100000 people are alive and should have voted, while in reality they're
DEAD so they shouldn't be counted as voters to begin with.
Here is an example with CASH MONEY. Do you like your dollar bills ? Do you like to hold your money in your hands, knowing that your
money isn't going anywhere unless YOU decide to do something with it ? Indeed it's only a piece of paper, but a very
important one. Imagine a world in which paper or metal money doesn't exist anymore
to have all your money in their hands, stored as numbers in their computers ? What if a black-hat hacker attacks their computers ?
What if some corrupted individual working at a bank steals money from their computers, or simply -delete- your money from your
account because he doesn't like you ? Why do you think that banks are still using PAPER to keep their records ?
Fire can destroy paper money, you could lose it, anything could happen...so why do we keep money on paper with holograms
and other forms of expensive protection ? Because one could falsify money, one could destroy it accidentally..but you can't
destroy all the paper money with one click, you can't falsify all the money with one click, you can't take money away from
population hands with one click without kick-starting a bloody revolution.
Now back to vote : your vote is not money, but for some people it is more much more important then money. Why ? Because your
vote will direct trillions of dollars and a lot of power to some hands, because your vote will elect a politician, giving
him/her power to WAGE WAR in your name, to decide were tax money is going to be spent, to decide if a law needs to be changed
for better or worse.
Still want your vote and your voting rights to be counted or decided by a stupid computer ? I don't want humans to be taken
away from the voting process in the name of "progress" or in the name of "savings". It's stupid, it's dangerous.
One recurring theme I've noticed in recent years is that the idea of a "conflict of interest" seems to be only a quaint saying that is rarely if ever applied to real world situations.
Examples include Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State also serving as George W. Bush's Florida Campaign Co-Chair, a bunch of oil industry executives deciding to annex on of the largest oil producing nations in the world, Cheney and Scalia going on hunting trips while the Supreme Court decides cases involving Cheney, U.S. Senators owning voting machine manufacturers and countless other incestuous links that even first year law students in the former Soviet Union would clearly recognize as causing the appearance of impropriety.
I mean c'mon, if you're gonna fuck us, at least *try* to be subtle about it! Is that too much to ask?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Well Said! MOD PARENT UP
Just out of curiousity, what did you think of Ronald Reagan when he called out, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
I'd bet you thought Reagan was an "idiot", which is somewhat ironic because the millions of citizens of Poland, East Germany, Czech Rebublic, and others who lived under the domination of the Soviet Union - who lived a lot closer to the situation that you ever will - would probably consider you the "idiot", albeit one that is "useful" to some....
And the recount (which took many months, and was conducted by the Miami Herald, a less than friend of Repulicans, among others) found that Gore still lost Florida. Now get over it!
FYI, no one is allowed to try to implement positive identification of voters here in the US. It's termed "racist" and "discrminatory".
Guess which political party regularly uses those terms?
And guess which political party benefits from precincts where 98% of all registered "voters" vote, with 99% of those votes all going to that one party?
I think it's meant to work that way in Florida, atleast it will be in keeping with the oh so great paper system. The paper system is pretty flawed because you can only swing an election by 10 to 30 thousand votes before people notice, where as with electronic voting, it could be millions of votes but nobody would know.
Consider an intermittent failure of the brake system in your car....
Consider the tires of your SUV intermittently exploding and your SUV intermittently flipping over.
After all, the companies building them are pretty much doing what most other software companies do.
Not quite, other companies don't say things like "I hope our voting machines elect a republican". Also the CEOs of other companies don't suddenly get elected with a land slide vote after leaving their company to try a career in polotiks, but only in areas that use thier e-voting machines....
M0571y H@rml355.
Whats wrong with just attaching cheap receipt printers to every machine (they wanted to attach notebooks). Design the receipt to be visually obvious and machine readable, use paper thats atleast abit hard to forge, it could be for example just headed with a hologram sticker or water-mark or even just a unique id. Then when the voter presses ok, it prints, they are told to check it, the paper is wound up abit and the next voter comes in. Make recounts by this method mandatory for every election and the machines that read them are not made by the same company (or diebold). Advantage: You can use the existing machines, it doesnt matter how insecure they are, aslong as the paper is kept secure behind glass and then placed in a sealed box. Disadvantage: Im pretty sure the two results will disagree.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If every American can have an ATM card and the banks can track your finances related to it accuratly, there is no reason that electronic voting should not be a piece of cake.
Electronic voting machines are ready now, that is ready for the massive fraud they were designed for.
In the netherlands (europe) we've been voting electronicaly for more then 10 years now. No problems reported yet... And I always thought america was the country of the unlimited possibilitys :D
It's Florida! They ARE ready. All nodes point to names starting with B and ending with H, with US in between. And don't vote just once!
India just had its national elections and *one billion people* voted electronically. Why don't the Florida authorities ask the Indian Government for advice? We've heard few complaints from India so I assume it must have been a pretty successful system (can anybody comment on this?).
That's not as difficult as you may think:
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
It's like that old trick of dividing a cookie between two kids: One cuts it in half, the other chooses which half they want. Use the fact that both parties can be expected to try and cheat to force the situation to balance itself.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
There's so much material about conflict of interest in the Bush administration that it's difficult to make even a summary: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
Three movies and 34 recently published books should be news.
It intersting to see Election Systems and Software get some bad publicity. They are actually larger than Diebold in turns of evoting. Every one is familiar with the fact Diebold's CEO is a Bush campaign bigwig in Ohio and promised to deliver Ohio for Bush.
ES&S is also excessively close to the Republicans. An excerpt from Mother Jones on them:
"While Diebold has received the most attention, it actually isn't the biggest maker of computerized election machines. That honor goes to Omaha-based ES&S, and its Republican roots may be even stronger than Diebold's. "
"The firm, which is privately held, began as a company called Data Mark, which was founded in the early 1980s by Bob and Todd Urosevich. In 1984, brothers William and Robert Ahmanson bought a 68 percent stake in Data Mark, and changed the company's name to American Information Services (AIS). Then, in 1987, McCarthy & Co, an Omaha investment group, acquired a minority share in AIS."
"In 1992, investment banker Chuck Hagel, president of McCarthy & Co, became chairman of AIS. Hagel, who had been touted as a possible Senate candidate in 1993, was again on the list of likely GOP contenders heading into the 1996 contest. In January of 1995, while still chairman of ES&S, Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald that he would likely make a decision by mid-March of 1995. On March 15, according to a letter provided by Hagel's Senate staff, he resigned from the AIS board, noting that he intended to announce his candidacy. A few days later, he did just that. "
"A little less than eight months after stepping down as director of AIS, Hagel surprised national pundits and defied early polls by defeating Benjamin Nelson, the state's popular former governor. It was Hagel's first try for public office. Nebraska elections officials told The Hill that machines made by AIS probably tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in the 1996 vote, although Nelson never drew attention to the connection. Hagel won again in 2002, by a far healthier margin. That vote is still angrily disputed by Hagel's Democratic opponent, Charlie Matulka, who did try to make Hagel's ties to ES&S an issue in the race and who asked that state elections officials conduct a hand recount of the vote. That request was rebuffed, because Hagel's margin of victory was so large."
"As might be expected, Hagel has been generously supported by his investment partners at McCarthy & Co. -- since he first ran, Hagel has received about $15,000 in campaign contributions from McCarthy & Co. executives. And Hagel still owns more than $1 million in stock in McCarthy & Co., which still owns a quarter of ES&S."
@de_machina
"...the notoriously leftist Florida Supreme Court..."
Translation for non-Americans: This means that they are slightly to the left of Rush Limbaugh, at least, by the definition in "left" and "right" in the rest of the world!
P.S.
And if you are not American, you might ask, "Who is Rush Limbaugh?". Just enter the name into Google and search. You will find that he claims that the War in Iraq is noble and just and no he isn't a drug addict like all of those crack-heads in the "inner city"! No, no, "trailer-park heroin" isn't anything at all like crack, is it?
And you can count on it, that somewhere on his home site he will have a good word for voting machines!
Wanna bet this gets modded flamebait/offtopic because it deviated from the "useful idiot" line of leftist /. pap?
Okay, trying again. The other link is slashdotted?
There's so much material about conflict of interest in the Bush administration that it's difficult to make even a summary: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
Three movies and 34 recently published books should be news.
The only thing that EVER kept voting even remotely fair was bi(or multi)-partisan supervision.
And there's the rub, isn't it? What's the bi-partisan supervision going to look like with one of these machines? Representatives of both parties stand there looking at the computer while the tech pushes the "count votes" button? Doesn't sound very useful to me.
Here's an observation: We know that in Florida Diebold machines gave Al Gore -15,000 votes. We know they screwed up in the California recall election, disenfranchising voters, and handing unusually high counts to minor candidates in counties far from their homes while the Lietenant Governor had substantially below his average. I'm not sure about the town where the vote totals were many times more than the actual population. We keep hearing about these machines screwing up. We have a company producing unverifiable machines -- and they know they are flawed but don't care -- and this company has close ties to the Republican party. Their machines have "oopsed" several times in favor of Republicans -- have they "oopsed" in favor of Democrats, or is this a one-way street of accidental errors?
Basically, my question is: What, exactly, is supposed to even this out?
The enemies of Democracy are
"Looks like there are more problems with the new e-voting machines. How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
Move along please, nothing to see here.
Alex
People bitch about MS being so evil (which they are) but Diebold doesn't care if they fuck up an election so long as they make a buck, which IMO is worse.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
It's hard to get over history, really. I see what you're saying though... it's important to make sure the history is told, because mainstream media isn't going to record it. History is recorded by the champions in battle, and elections have become as war, as elections are won to wage war, or bring peace.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
A lot of the research done by Greg Palast with the BBC video crew was compiled into a documentary called "Unprecedented", which you can download via BitTorrent. (I'm not sure if this counts as video piracy, but it would seem to be trumped by the need to protect the most vital part of democracy: the vote.)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
That's right, the global technical community. Slashdotters, open source advocates, programmmers abound.
Let's set actual security aside for a minute. And lets set hardware drivers aside for a minute.
How long would it take any child in a high school BASIC class to write a program which can print out selection menus and accept input variables that represent votes. How long to add accurate logging? 30 minutes? an Hour?
Claiming these problems are all accidental might fly with the technically ignorant. But I'd be willing to bet at least 80% of those reading slashdot at this moment could write a program that was more functional without doing anymore debugging than it takes to get it to compile, and do in under an hour. Toss back in the drivers and I'd bet at least 60-70% of us could do it in less than a week, from top to bottom.
I'd also bet with only that level of debugging we'd have it more secure than this is the first time around. And after a month of turning it loose on the open source community have it locked down so tight it would never actually be hack (of course we'd continue finding theoretical holes... there are always theoretically exploitable holes).
The entire effort of commercial voting vendors insults the intelligence of programming everywhere. Diebold yes, but the rest of them as well. For god sakes the php webserver announced last night as simple as it was, was 1000x more complex than the software these guys are claiming they can't get right!!!!
So my friends thats what we have, and we have to let the rest of the world know better. We at least have to try. Go pay a visit to your family, give them a call or what have you. Bring up this subject and explain how trivial and disgusting this is. It's starts there. Let all your friends know. Everyone in the world is supposedly linked by a small association chain, lets prove it.
Don't waste time writting email and letters to bought and paid for congressmen who don't read them and send back cookie cutter responses. Tell the PEOPLE. Get press if you can. Send in letters to editor of the local paper, start with the small ones until it's so public the big ones have to carry it. Forget the government, outrage the PEOPLE.
Now when 200+ million americans are pounding on their doors demanding open source voting software, THEN we'll see how long they throw up red tape.
It's not important that we "hand-count" ballots - anyone who has ever tried it knows that the margin of error for humans is huge. If people hand-count ballots, I can say with certainty that the numbers will be wrong. That's because humans are lazy and easy to fool, and they get confused when they have to do the exact same thing 20,000 times in an evening. I have worked with a handful of "democratic" societies and helped to count votes, and no two counts are EVER the same.
What IS important to this process is that the machine that does the counting is mechanical and transparent, and that a seperate, "user-friendly" machine actually prepairs the ballot for submission. Why can't we just have a computer that makes a punch card for the voter, who visually verifies that it is correct and then inserts it into a mechanical device to count the ballot? Jeez, it really isn't that difficult.
What kills me is this quote:
State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once -- an overvote -- and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race -- an undervote.
This is like Ford saying there is no need to put seatbelts in their cars, because their drivers are so good they don't get in car crashes.
Seriously, I can't help but sense a correlation between this story and the one on PDA's. So many people are so sure that if it's electronic, it must be e-better!!! when it's just more complicated.
I once worked for a man who wanted to automate a bunch of processes in his department. It sounded like a good gig, but when I took the job and actually got to know the people, I found there were no processes -- the manager had simply hired under-qualified people who were never able to get organized. He thought automation would let him bypass the entire need to...well...do his job. No matter how many times I tried to explain that you can't "automate" processes that don't even exist, he never got it, the project went nowhere, his department was eventually dismantled, and I got out of high-tech and into real estate.
My point is that I think there are many people who are honestly (if ignorantly) star-struck by new technology, and they end up creating a morass of incompetence, as well as openings for thieves like Diebold to stick their greedy hands into, all with the best of intentions.
The majority vote doesnt make a difference anyway.
Can't remember where I heard this one but it can hold SOME water:
Democrats want all voting to be held in question from here on out because then they have a reason to contest all elections.
Anytime someone doesn't win who they wanted to win, they can cry foul.
Then again I'm not voting for Bush OR Kerry. People say I may be wasting my vote but voting my ideals is not a wasted vote to me.
Oh yeah, all the people asking why we can't go to a paper system of check boxes or x marks, read back to what happened in the last election. We have voters who can't even handle a simple punch card system. I can almost guarantee that someone will cry foul because a greyhair had a pen mark stray and marked two candidates.
One thing I can't understand is why in the hell we have to divine what the voter intended in the first place? Make it perfectly clear at voting time that any unclear votes gets tossed, no questions asked.
Then again that would imply some sort of personal responsibility. For something so important as the presidential election, people should be careful with their vote.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
"We know that in Florida Diebold machines gave Al Gore -15,000 votes."
...
...
" We know they screwed up in the California recall election,"
and finally
"We know there are Aliens out there".
All of them are of the same significance.
You are a political hack - go away
PS.
Interestingly, Swarc has the highest approval ratings of all Governors in decades
How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections? How has anyone ever expected they would be? It seems to me the best form would involve a lot of data recursion and backups, no central control point that could be hacked or abused, and leaning on paper ballotting as well until the system looks good. Oh, and heavy, heavy auditing of the programs and their results. Private companies trying to claim no disclusure over not just a but The matter of public concern...? Bah!
The people advocating voting machines are trying to solve a problem which doesn't exist. Technology for technology's sake.
Counting time isn't a problem. It would only be a problem if there was less than 1 day between the voting and installing the successful candidate as the representative.
The number of people involved isn't a problem, it's an advantage. They are volunteers and the more people involved, the lower the chance of electoral fraud. You can go watch the count yourself and verify to your own satisfaction that the votes people cast are the votes being counted.
The system is trivial. X marks the spot, it's pretty difficult to get that wrong. If you do manage to make a mistake, it says right there on the voting booth to tell the people manning the polling station and they'll get you another sheet.
The European elections used this cheap, simple, secure, verifiably effective system. 350+million Europeans voted, the UK on Thursday, most of the rest of Europe on Saturday. The vote count will start today at 6pm and will have results out by 9pm BST.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
{Dons asbestos underwear. It's only flamebait if you lack a sense of humour :P}
:)
Imagine Cuba developping voting machines using OSS. And then offering technological assistance to the US.
I know this sounds crazy, but as it is the US leadership obviously doesn't seem terribly interested in the idea of having decent voting machines. Maybe they need to be shamed by another country like Cuba into having real elections
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
In San Luis Obispo we had the massive scantron ballot, I liked it and it worked well. I did note however that the machine that read the ballot was a diebold machine. I also read in my local fish wrap that they plan to use the diebold counting machines in the november election, but are not going to use the touch screens in the near future.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Apparently the majority of voters are pretty stupid since most of them can't seem to follow instructions well enough to mark a ballot in such a way that it is clear what they intended to vote.
I say if the mark on the ballot is not per the specification and it is un-clear what was intended then it is a non-vote.
Enough of this hanging chad business! There were millions of people that were able to vote with not problems the last go around. The few that seemed to have trouble voting will have to learn better next time. If you don't mark things correctly and don't know enough to ask for help then your vote won't be counted.
The best solution is not some kind of electronic voiting system that if not already hacked will be in some subsequent election. But simple paper and markers. You put a mark next to who you want to vote for and you are done. Mark it wrong then ask for help and get a new ballot. If you are to stupid to do that then you don't belong in a voting booth and should be voted off the planet.
It must be that picking a candidate is far more difficult than selecting an accout, validating an identity, contacting a remote bank through multiple encrypted networks, and reliably dispensing currency of varied conditions. Oh, and ATMs have internal paper trails in case of discrepancies. And Diebold manufactures ATMs. Voting must be really hard to get right.
Perhaps the KISS principle should apply here.
1. Invalidate any vote that doesn't have the "chad" completely removed... Hanging, dimpled, "pregnant" chads aren't votes.
If you're too stupid to follow the instructions- should you really be voting?
Democracy requires responsibility. Leave the fancy electronics at home.
Oh wait, I's a closed source system, so it's not a software problem (can't see it, so no problem!)... :-/
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=259&row =2
'In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new computer voting machines--and three Republican candidates each won their respective offices, each with exactly 18,181 votes. "Isn't that the weirdest thing?" County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. "We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence."'
The flaws are intentional and exist so that the GOP can steal this election. This is a slow-motion coup we are seeing, and we must resist it in any way possible.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Could a partisan ne'er-do-well disrupt voting at, say, a democratic- or republican-rich voting location by wandering around the machines with a big honking magnet in a backpack? Just wondering. And where would I get such a magnet? :-)
How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?
Just not in the way you think. The more flaws exist on the voting machine, the easier it is to fix the result. What did the Diebold CEO say about delivering the election to Bush?
Until we grant Texans independence, they're just going to keep sending us Bush after Bush after Bush.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
shouldn't it be easy, I MEAN REALLLLLLLLY EASY, to make a program that counts votes accurately? It seems like an assignment in an introductory programming course. How hard can it be? This is what computers were made for...to count numbers. Anytime I hear of a flaw in something this simple it makes me think these flaws were intentionally put in there for ways to fix elections.
For a country that has always held itself to be the shining, guiding light of democracy, this next election is going to be one helluvan embarassment.
There are undoubtedly going to be significant voting scandals -- again -- and the USA will become the laughingstock of the world.
And the real shame of it is, it's not that the people of the USA are individually a bunch of buffoons. Given the choice, the individual citizens would love to have a voting system that actually works.
But the US government is determined to prove itself clueless and useless. How frustrating!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
you both get dirty, but he likes it. :-)
You're wasting your time trying to appeal to reason with this crowd. Their hatred for all things Bush has driven away any possibility of rational discourse. The best thing I like about Bush is that he drives them absolutely crazy.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
the chad system. In fact, it may just be easier for the Bush to pull another election, but with a whole lot less hassle for the US.
please, just call Brazil and ask for some 'urnas eletronicas' or e-voting machines . ours is the best... working fine since 1998
www.brasil.gov.br
They would rather destroy our democracy than lose an election.
VOTE, and vote for your Democrats: local, state and national.
The difference is simple in Canada ( Real american ) ( C ourageous A merican N oble A merican D efender of A merica ) its the people who elect the Prime minister ( leader of a democratic country ). The Etat-Unians ( there real name but they are too ashame of it ) have a different process where people think they are voting to elect the President ( they dont ) ( leader of the company running there country ) , when in fact they elect a "State" ( representative who in turns decide who is to be the next President ( he/she ( representative ) mostly voted the other way of the popualtion in the last elections ). Thats why GWB got elected even do 80% of the population voted for Gore.
To make it simple , so others understand it too, 240 milions votes ( last evaluation numbers of population in the US of A ) are "meaningless" in the US of A , its the States Representatives who get the final say and thats where GWB won the last time.
In a democracy its the people who elect there leaders , In the US of A its the States who elect the leader. Its NOT a democracy.
So, hopefully everyone who can see this will also VOTE AGAINST THEM, in addition to complaining.
Complaining, voicing our opinions, saying what needs to be said, all these things are necessary, but they are only step one.
Step two: VOTE.
And yet, there are people who say Bush won and all is fair and good in the grand old USA...god. I'm up here in Canada (married to a sweet Alabama girl who left the US to be with me), watching the disintegration of a beautiful concept via apathy and greed.
Here's the questions I want answers to, in regard to the last election:
- Were thousands of voters disenfranchised due to improper discounting of their right to vote (based on similar names to criminals)? It appears that we can say pretty definitely that the answer is yes.
- Were there voting improprieties that gave nonsensical answers for final vote tallies? I'd say the -16022 vote count against Gore is a pretty good sign that this is the case.
- Did the Supreme Court illegal (anti-constititionally) step in to make a decision in Florida? Again, the answer appears to be yes, based on the clarity of constitutional law.
Those three are enough for me to wonder why there aren't people screaming in the streets STILL! Can anyone give me a good counter to the above Q&As that has nothing to do with the individual personalities or leadership qualities of Bush or Gore?
We dumbasses south of the border are too worried about watching our jobs go overseas to think about how our democratic system is disintigrating right before our eyes...
;-)
Just mind your own business, you hoser.
The corrupting influence of Corporate America applies to you too: Watch out, babe!
In the manual recount of the ballots the machines couldn't count Gore didn't just win, he won by nearly 20000 votes.
h t/ palast.ram
The tabulators were 25 times more likely to reject a ballot in democrat districts than in republican ones.
Here's the BBC investigation on it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnig
Did you check Google News? There are many publications reporting the same thing. For example, the article Senator Objects To Secrecy Of Voter List tell part of the story.
Is your post a case of "I don't like the news, therefore I will make a vague attack on the source?"
They aren't lost, they just can't be counted. Way to split hairs, Ms. DeLara. You've got a big future in politics. Wait...that couldn't be why you're encouraging the use of these machines, could it? Oh my!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
My suggestion for the next ballot (simplified; the President is not directly voted on, of cause):
How to count the votes is later decided on by the Supreme Court. Instructed by the current President's advisor.This will probably be modded as flamebait, but with all of the talk about 2000 election, has anyone considered that maybe the problem is not with the Florida voting method? A hanging chad is a very difficult thing to make - these are not stone tablets folks, the stylus should puncture. I saw one report of someone who was loaned on of the types of voting machines used in Florida in order to see if he could make an ambigous ballot. He only found only one way, 2 or more ballots per attempt. This could shed some light on the demands for a hand recount...
"Writing a voting system that does this is stupendously trivial as far as the code goes. Which leaves me only baffled as to why there appear to be so many bugs with these voting machines to begin with."
You're getting close to the real problem here. Software development these days is different. Project managers want to reduce risk so they look for "COTS" (commercial off-the-shelf) products which can be integrated to meet the system requirements. Unfortunately Microsoft is one of the COTS vendors they everyone looks at. Pretty much all of these e-voting systems are based on Microsoft operating systems and database applications. Why anyone would use Microsoft software in such "mission critical" applications is beyond me, but people do.
I agree that some simple embedded code could be written and certified to meet all the requirements (including an encrypted "voter receipt") without much effort. Such a system would be much easier to certify.
Speaking of certification, how could any certification body approve of Microsoft operating systems and applications for such a system? The required reliability is just not there. The chance of data loss is just too high.
--
This space for rent.
I don't doubt that a Bush did meet with the bin Ladens on 9/10 or 9/11. I don't doubt that the family was flown out of the country while all other planes were grounded - in retrospect I think it was a horrible decision but it probably made a lot of sense at the time.
And now the left concludes that this means that George W. Bush was the evil mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11 - or that he knew about them and let them happen - or that the Republicans are putting LSD in our drinking water. All three are equally reasonable.
Continue to paint American politics as "With us or against us." It's a losing strategy for a party that only gains voters when the Republican party loses them. Like I said, the Democratic party is going to be in trouble for many years until somebody with leadership ability finds a way to actually -win- something, like a voter or the confidence of the people. I'm voting for Kerry only because I want Bush out. My best case scenario would be Bush as a 1 term prez, Kerry as a 1 term prez, and McCain from 2008 to 2016.
Brother Governor Jeb and his (alleged) lover, Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood will do whatever necessary to FIX it for the President...just like they did in 2000....
And...if it goes to the Supreme Court (again), Cheney's hunting buddy William "Billy boy" Rehnquist (who also happens to be the chief Justice) will fix it there (again, just like he did before).What the voters want doesn't matter to these Calvinists..remember, Bush is President because he's ENTITLED to be!
the optical scanners in Florida were set to reject the ballot in predominantly Republican districts, (so the voter could try again). Meanwhile in Democrat districts the scanner was set to swallow the ballot and register a no vote. Which is why so many of the votes the machines couldn't read were democrat votes.
Since Democrats set up all the machines, you have
to wonder how they screwed up so badly.
It looks like Florida is looking to take the "Laughingstock of the Nation" title back from California in the next election. Maybe Gary Coleman will win Florida's electoral college votes...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
are we suprised? no! most of those voting machines use M$ Acce$$ databases. and we all know how $hitty and insecure those pieces of shit are.
----
djzooky.com
I Like Cheese.
"Since Democrats set up all the machines, you have
to wonder how they screwed up so badly."
Not true, Katherine Harris's office was responsible for those settings. This is Katherine Harris who was both the Secretary of State responsible for overlooking the election while at the same time was Bush's Campaign coordinator.
Al Gore lost public sympathy when he tried to throw out the votes of the US military. Oops, they vote mostly Republican. Even Terry the Awful McAuliffe, the sock puppet that runs the Democrat Party, had enough at this point.
The recount mess. Ah yes, Al Gore wanted to pick and choose which counties held a recount. Florida law says you must recount all counties if you recount even one. By the time Gore actually read and consented to the law, there wasn't time to do the full recount, so none was done. All the Supreme Court said was you had to follow the law.
Every liberal newspaper oversaw the recount, they all said George Bush got the most votes by that slim margin.
Bzzzzzzzzzzt, you're wrong, but thanks for playing and paying taxes.
go suck a nigger's donkey horse cock
"States rights" is hick talk for "Persecuting blacks"
I can only ask what would Americans have said if this Florida election have happened in South America, Africa or Asia? Every body would have been claiming that there was Electoral Fraud.
Why are Americans different from the rest of the world?
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
"Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said."
and
"State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once -- an overvote -- and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race -- an undervote."
So now they're officially saying "we don't need no steenking recounts". Looks like they want to be able to help out GWB should things be close again.
But the machine is PERFECT!!!!@#!
Why test it? It's certainly better than your mother!@
Continue to paint American politics as "With us or against us." It's a losing strategy for a party that only gains voters when the Republican party loses them.
Okay, I'm a Republican, but while promoting his war, it was W who said (very closely), "You are with us, or you are with the terrorists." That tunnel-vision rhetoric didn't fly well with the rest of the world or a lot of people here at home. I'll agree that it's a losing strategy - for either party.
Here in California - it was the Democrats and the ACLU that bitched and moned and cried and threw a temper tantrum that we WEREN'T getting electronic voting systems - and went so far to say that the problem was that not having EVoting in the poorer areas would disenfranchise the minority voters because they have more errors when using paper punch cards than non-minorities (whites?) Don't ask me - it was their fucking racist concept, not mine.
so its really comical that all the lefties in here are bitching about this... most of the right-wing here in California was bitching about the cost and the innacuracies of the EVoting systems that were puched on us BY.... Kevin Shelley - the DEMOCRAT Secretary of state just a year ago.
Jumpin jeebus... there are people out there other than Christians, pro-lifers, and the Bush family that are trying to "steal" your vote.. and out here, on the west cost of the US - its the liberals and their shiesters for hire, the ACLU who are the lead PROponents of evoting.
so - if we've got a consipracy on our hands - you - please you fucking explain it to me how Florida can be one way, and California the other with respect to the supporters of EVoting...
oh - maybe its just that all the politicians are crooks and cheats? Nah.. that couldn't be it.
vote Libertarian - live life like you code your software - free, as in libre, free as in speech, free as in government under my heal, and not the other way around
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Of course it isn't that simple. You have to learn to use the correct iostream operators first.
With people all in a tizzy about elections and the flaws therein, it is time to realize that, in all probability, nobody (or at least VERY few) reading this site has EVER placed a vote that actually elected a president.
In the current electoral college system, all the voting that takes place on election day is simply another poll to let the real electors kow who the ignorant masses prefer. This influences their voting, sure, but there is absolutely nothing that says they have to cast their votes in the same way the public indicated.
This system has, of course, been in place for a long time. Way before Bush, Kerry and Nader (well, maybe not Nader, he seems to be the eternal election spoiler.)
If you think the choice was ever really yours, you're deluding yourself.
Nope. They purged people who had the same name as a felon and (IIRC) lived in the same zip code.
So if Bob Smith comitted a felony and lved near me, then I (Bob Smith the other) would not be allowed to vote. This method means that as the number of felons in a Zip Code goes up, so does the number of false disenfrancisements. Do you think this meant that more rich people or more poor people were incorrectly denied their right to vote? Do you think this meant that more black people or more white people were denied the right to vote?
With all the ancient people that live in this fine state. We'll get it together just in time to fudge it up again. :)
Lousy facepalm.
Nah. It's just Florida. Their electoral process is eternally cursed.
izm
I find it completely unacceptable that there is seemingly NO WAY to independently verify an election with these machines. Apparently, so much trust is placed in them, that a "recount isn't necessary" because the machines are flawless. Gimme a break! The elections officials also are unaware of the issue as well, trying to sidestep the issue at hand, that they put in a system that cannot be verified.
"The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said."
So in other words, every vote is not entered into a separate event log due to a bug. So say the system crashes midday, they are then unable to verify the votes cast, because the backup event log is not 100% accurate. I am guessing the log is for a manual recount, and it likely ensures that the system cannot be tampered with... Say it doesn't write 1 of every 5 Kerry votes, then it doesn't write any Nader votes. Then say the election comes out very close like it did in 2000, when they hit the recount button, Bush wins, and Nader got 0 votes.... odd.
"State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once -- an overvote -- and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race -- an undervote. "
No need for recounts? BAH!
One of the problems the voting machine was supposed to solve is: "Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, where thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked."
The system certainly prevents users from punching the wrong hole due to "butterfly ballots" and misleading instructions, however this doesn't seem to fix the problem where they couldn't count all the votes afterwards to be sure.
Lousy facepalm.
If Florida doesn't get their shit straight most ricky-tick, they're getting kicked out of the Union and occupied by armed Yankee militias. Texas, too.
I heard that more people voted for American Idol than the 2000 presidential elections, and it was all done over the phone! This just shouldn't be so difficult.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
well get people hitting the shoutcast talk section and listening to GNC or visiting infowars.com whatreallyhappened.com
Michael moore is way to nice to be able to push something die hards like alex jones pushes
they are crazy people but they make sence thouse people on infowars.com
Perhaps. I haven't seen the numbers myself, but it wouldn't suprise me. The majority of Californians are apparnetly idiots when it comes to anything involving celebrity status. Then again, so are most americans. Look at Reagan after all.
However the current popularity has nothing to do with the validity of the elections.
I don't remember any diebold screwups specifically in the recall election, but i remember hearing about them in other california elections, so again, it wouldn't suprise me.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That argument is bullshit. Hey, let's think about the California smog laws. After all, they're meant to keep cars in desperate need of repair off the road right? "Do you think this meant that more rich people or more poor people were" denied their cars? Ooh lots of black people are poor, I bet more black people fail smog checks than white people. Oh god, the numbers don't like up! It's racist, a right-wing conspiracy to keep the black man down.
Christ people like you piss me off. If you're so concerned about getting rid of racism, which undoubtably IS a serious problem in America, then stop retarded crap like this. You're in the same group as those people who tell us that 'everybody is the same, regardless of the color of our skin', yet we all should 'celebrate our diversity', aren't you? How the hell can you believe both of those at the same time?
The worst part about America is I don't know when to believe in corruption anymore. I hear so much shit coming out of the Democratic party's ass about how there is a giant orchestrated conspiracy and how everyone is everyone elses friend but oh no the Democrats are shining examples of moral, political, and ethical righteousness and they would NEVER do anything wrong. Same crap comes from the Republicans. It's gotten to the point where I don't really believe that Bush is in any of your crazy conspiracies, because you've completely inundated us in crackpot theories. Congratulations, you've made the problem worse. Not better.
Actually they found the results would have depended on how the recount was done. I forget the exact numbers, but he would have won by several of the methods by which the republicans wanted the votes recounted, and would have lost by several of the methods the democrats wanted the votes recounted. How's that for irony?
Of course none of that really reflects on the fact that Gore would have come out the clear winner if thousands of legal voters hand't been "mistakenly" striken from the list of eligble voters because the Republican Florida administration claimed they were felons.
And why should i "get over" the republicans lawyering their way out of the recount? My complaint isn't that they won per se (not that that makes me happy, but they've won lots of elections i wish they hadn't and i didn't acuse them of foul play in those) but the fact that they refused to follow the law and let the recount occur the way it was supposed to. Nixon wasn't any less of a criminal just because he probably would have won the election even without spying on the democrats.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This article is (as stated in title) about the lack of ability shown by companies who are making the voting machines. Conspiracy is up for wild illogical guesses, but the fact is, whoever is in charge of this is bungling it.
On the one hand, there's a e-vote machine that doesn't accomplish the goal that is set. On the other hand, the company fails even to evade conspiracy mongers by having the legal errors so obvious (intentional or not) that even the idiots like michael moore can pick them up, and as usual spin a totally illogical conclusion.
My own opionion is simple, all the companies involved in the election-integrity hyped machines are here to screw the government, and screw the taxpayers. The added controversy simply makes the job of these people totally unfit for the job seem harder, which insures that they will be back again as experts. Not just built-in obsolesence, these machines were made broke from the start.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
And, so, what I hate about the soundbite expression "Get over it, Al Gore lost" was that it stopped debate and forced the result through.
I think you fail to appreciate just how important it was to stop the "debate". Such debates, historically, have a very nasty way of ripping nations in two. In an extremely close election, like we had in 2000, you could spend years finding various inaccuracies and problems -- on both sides, because both sides play that game just as hard as they think they can get away with it.
Think about what might have happened:
Okay, I'll stop there, because I don't really think that scenario is likely. Mainly because people didn't (and don't) really care enought about either Bush or Gore to go to war for them.
HOWEVER, the point is that even if the scenario doesn't seem realistic, things like it have happened many, many times in history, and there's no way to know for CERTAIN that they wouldn't have happened in 2000. From a historical perspective, we probably ought to be holding our breath at every change of administration, waiting to see if power really will be turned over. Back in 1797, most of the world was shocked that George Washington announced, and then followed through on, his intention to step down as president. People don't often voluntarily give up such authority.
No, I think that in the case of a closely contested election the best possible action is to follow the law as closely as possible and as quickly as possible to select and swear in a new leader. That does create a risk of selecting the wrong on
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
" We know they screwed up in the California recall election,"
and finally
"We know there are Aliens out there".
All of them are of the same significance.
You are a political hack - go away ...
Wow, i wish i'd read the rest of the thread before my first repsonse to you. Here's an article from ABC news (link stolen from earlier in the discussion) which talks about the negative votes for Gore among other things. The negative total was given by an electronic voting machine from a company that was bought by Diebold shortly thereafter. So to say it was Diebold machines that provided the drasticly wrong results might be considered wrong, or at least misleading, but i think the idea is the same since Diebold seems to have become synonymous with electronic voting.
I remember the problems here in California when some precincts reported results of several times the number of registered voters. The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
You lose, go home troll.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
They won't, but as was mentioned here recently there were 1.5 Million suitable machines used recently by the world's largest democracy. I'm sure these machines won't be needed again in their Country of Origin for a few years. Problem is that these machines will tell the truth which is not necessarily what everybody in the US wants.
I do agree its suspecious, but what if the same 18181 people voted for all three?
That's right. All your base.
In Sweden, as in many other countries, votes are correctly counted within three or four hours of closing the poll stations. By hand. Recounted and verified within three days. Has never failed.
Amazing. How do they do it?
The trick is to have different ballots for competing parties: Pick the ballot that carries the name of the party you want to vote for, put it in the envelope. Also, if you have more than one election at the same time, have separate ballots for each (yellow, white and blue for national, regional and local elections as it happens).
Much more difficult to make a mistake than with half-punched holes in butterfly ballots like in Florida. (Oh, yeah, it probably helps that we have a national standard on what a ballot looks like, counties do not get to design their own)
(Since we have list elections, it is slightly more complicated than that, but to the first order, you can ignore the order on the list...)
I changed the beginning of the article considerably because of what you said. Thanks.
More seriously, the decision was made by a Supreme Court containing individuals who - in any other court in the country would have had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest. (Some of the Justices were nominateed by G.W.B.'s father, for Pete's sake.)
So the ENTIRE Supreme Court should have recused themselves since some were appointed by the Clinto/Gore team or other Democrat presidents right? I don't think there is an easy pat answer to this. Both parties acted like spoiled 3 year olds throwing a temper tantrum. Each wanted thier own way. The best way to solve it? For better or worse, it has to go to the highest court in the land.
The opinions expressed here are not mine, but those of these dang voices in my head.
The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
Yeah, I didn't have time to go looking for the news articles myself. The important part, to me, is not which election, but the fact that the Californian voting commission (again, no time to look for the correct name) found the systems to have disenfranchised voters, and that Diebold was forced to admit that this was true.
So thanks for digging up the link. I'm quite sick of being called a conspiracy theorist for talking about things that are in the freakin news. But if there's anything I've learned in the past four years, it's a healthy respect for the power of ignorance.
The enemies of Democracy are
is your head filled with human excrement, or dog excrement?
We were months away from using electronic voting (based on MS-Access!) - on what was reported to be an insufficiently tested system. Thankfully the system was pulled following a damning public review...
Of course in Ireland we have proportional representation - which makes the system a load more complicated. But also makes for great spectator sport - as candidates are eliminated and the next preference on their ballots are redistributed. electronic voting would have spoiled all that - and I am against it for that reason alone....
The only deadline that matters is when Congress meets in January to count the electors votes, and yes there is prescience for it (wtf Gore's lawyers didn't bring it up, I don't know). In the 1960 election, Hawaii's votes were disputed, and the results were certified until the end of December, I believe (Googling for Kennedy and Hawaii just turns up a bunch of pages on WWII). So Florida had more than enough time to do a full, statewide recount.
There was no audit trail, so they are reduced to trusting what the machine says. Sure it may be a coincidence, but you have no independant way of checking.
You do know there's a bit of a difference between being appointed by the same party and being appointed by the guys FATHER, right?
Trying to "debate" the standards for what does and does not constitute a valid vote after the votes are cast is nothing more than trying to game the system.
Part of the right to vote is the right to have your vote be counted. With the paper ballots, as the machines would fill up with chads, you couldn't make a clean punch through the page. Why should your vote not be counted when its obvious that you punched for candidate X, even though it couldn't go all the way through?
Neocon fucktard.