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No Secret Ballot for Military Personnel?
belmolis writes "According to this editorial in today's New York Times, US military personnel for whom regular absentee ballot procedures are inconvenient are being provided with a questionable alternative, the Electronic Transmission Service, run by a private contractor, Omega Technologies. According to the NYT, the secrecy of ballots could be breached when they are faxed or emailed from the field, when they are in the hands of Omega Technologies, or when they are in the hands of local officials. The NYT was unable to obtain any information on security procedures from the company or from the Pentagon. A manual describing the system can be downloaded here [pdf document]. Like Diebold, Omega is far from non-partisan. Omega President and CEO Patricia Williams has donated $6,600 in this election cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of its Business Advisory Council."
Ballots *could* be compromised at all sorts of places along the chain. The NYT article seems to be making political hay out of the fact that there happen to be some additional points along that chain for overseas military ballots.
Ballots could be compromised by the electioneers at your local library/fire station/place of baloting-- that was never the real check. The check on ballot tampering has always been:
- statistical anomalies to spot possible tampering
- ballot counting to verify/disprove tampering.
This may seem simpleton, but it's how things have been done for the length of the republic. I don't see how adding some more stages (with the same checks at each stage) would fundamentally alter that-- unless you're a newspaper trying to raise the spectre of a rigged election 2 months before voting starts...
davejenkins.com |
There are many, many situations of this nature. See Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government
All big companies donate large amounts of money to both political parties. It's too late to do any research on this particular one, but I would be surprised if they donated money to Republicans without donating to Democrats.
Geez, take your tinfoil hat off...
This begs the question why is voting anonymous anyway? Am i somehow under threat if i vote for kerry or bush or even the communist party candidate and gasp someone finds out :o ....it seems to me that if it was simply published then we could actaully see if the sytem is fucked....ie hanging chads and all that. I think our democracy is more threatened by the possibity of faulty even intentional voteing fraud created having an anonymous voting proceedure then some proceeved unknown risk of having each vote stamped with a name.
stendec@gmail.com
Those of us who take an interest in the state of the US watch in sorrow and some concern at the rate at which your cherished rights and freedoms are being stamped on by this administration. Bush only got in after some very suspicious vote counting. The Republicans aren't too bothered what it takes to keep him there.
First of all, it's kind of lame that the company would not give any information about its security procedures, while another source (it would seem) was readily available that details the whole thing.
Second, the Business Advisory Council is (in my opinion) a total crock of shit. I used to work for a company whose CEO won the Business Advisory Council's "Businessman of the Year" award. Let me tell you, the award is (in my opinion) pretty much given to people who donate large sums to the party. Oh did I mention that the company mentioned above is now under the control of a receiver, and is also under investigation by the IRS Criminal Investigvation Division? Oh, did I mention the grand jury preceedings? But I digress......
Remember, you cannot trust anyone, the whole damned system is corrupt, and all parts biased, one way or the other. (The "in my opinion" statements above are merely a CYA thing)
bash: rtfm: command not found
That wouldn't put a huge dent in the military, which tends to vote republican 80+ percent of the time (I saw a statistic at one time that showed military officers voted republican 8 to 1 over democrat... Here's an article about the Duke Study ).
I'd have to say from my own experience (former military officer talking here) that the percentage is probably higher than they think. I can count on one hand the number of real liberal democrats I encountered during all my years in the military.
Bush is respected by almost all the current and former US military personnel I know, in distinct contrast to Bill Clinton. When I was in the service, many officers and enlisted so despised Clinton that they refused to display any certificates, awards, decorations, citations, etc with his signature on them. Despite the prohibition on using "contemptuous words" against the commander-in-chief and elected officials, most guys were (privately) very frank about how they felt... The level of enmity was really remarkable.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I know several people in the military, who were absolutely enraged with the last election because their absentee ballots were'nt counted. See this for example. They were far more angry that their vote was usurped, then they were concerned about someone seeing their vote.
Let's try not to make too much of the fact that organizations outside the gov't having to do with voting (Diebold, Omega, et al) support conservatives moreso than liberals, politically.
This is largely because the right is much more pro-business and -capitalism than the left, who are typically seen to increasingly resent the wealth builders and creators with the more wealth they build and create.
If some organization seemed intent on taxing and regulating me out of business, I probably wouldn't support them much, either.
What party a business supports in a moot point, regardless. If someone is paranoid enough to have visions of conspiracy by right-supporting businesses, then the same untrustworthiness must therefore be assumed about all left-supporing organizations as well. While I don't understand paranoia all that well, maybe in the minds of those so afflicted, these two opposing conspiracies would cancel each other out...?
There's no substitute for thinking.
When you don't have choice, for example, in the way that vote is taken and passed, then that is something to worry about. Nobody forces you to buy the NYT or to watch Fox.
From Omega careers page: Web Developer Job Description: Web developer will be responsible for the design, development and testing of cutting edge Internet based solutions. The employee will assist in needs analysis, and planning and development of implementation strategies. The development will also require evaluation of third party products/component technologies, on-site testing and installations, and testing and debugging of applications. Knowledge of C++ and Cold Fusion
Actually I've discussed the question with a few military people, and none planned to vote for Bush. Indeed, one Army officer pointed out to me that, given the "backdoor draft" going on, members of the Guard and Reserves "would be idiots" (his words) to vote for Bush. (Of course, I live in a pretty solid "blue" state.)
Right, I'm going to take the word of an Anonymous Coward on this. As if all the bombing and shooting was actually just an old Iraqi way of greating visitors.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm just a Brit - Watching from overseas, looking at the US through the eyes of the internet. Of course, this means I don't see it through the eyes of big-media, aside from prehaps the BBC once in a while, and if I remember - the channel 4 news occasionally.
So from where I am looking, I see peoples rights being taken away daily, contradictions in every-day aspects of American life, conflicts of interest and unacceptable terms lain down in everything from voting to laws. And I have to ask - why is nothing being done about it?
Really... I'm not trolling, or trying to 'diss' America. I used to love the idea of coming over to live in America, it was one of my childhood dreams - land of the free - these days, I'm far too concerned about the state of democracy over there. And yet I see almost nothing being done about it.
Over here, if we stood up on the news and said 'There is a clear conflict of interest, due to the link between the companys doing the voting machines, and the current prime minister' - I honestly believe something would be done about it, and very quickly. And for people to be arrested for simply protesting, on the scale/obsurdity that appears to be happening over there, would provoke outrage, and instant responses - along with extreme critisism, both from the media, and the opposition party.
So how to finish up this post? Good question - It's just as much a rant on 'why is america not doing something?' as 'why is this happening in the first place?', and voting is only a small part of what seems to be an institutional corruption. I can only hope that at some point in the future, a president will have the foresight to look forward and put in place, restrictions and clauses to further protect the American people. Your constitution is apparently no longer up to the job, and your democracy has been truely corrupted. (This is not a troll/flamebait post)
...but that's nothing to be embarrassed about, ignorance is curable.
The "McCarthy witch hunts" were NOT witch hunts (read the end). McCarthy's basic argument was "should we have people who are communists (many self admitted) in sensitive positions within our government?"
He was not only right, but underestimated the extent of soviet infiltration, as the release of the Venona Project transcripts now reveal (summary here).
Now go and read a book.
A sad trend in the US for the last couple of decades has been that of "those who know better, do nothing". Or more recently, "those who know better do nothing but bitch on the internet"
Obviously, voting is something that should be left in the hands of the people and not some corporation with who knows what agenda.
But where are the volunteers to step up and implement and open and robust voting system?
Of all the people here who bitch about "our rights being thrown away" - how many of them have even volunteered to work in a polling place, much less talked with their state's election board members?
The boards know that all these systems SUCK! But nobody has tried to give them a reasonable alternative.
Rather than bitch on the internet, why doesn't anyone here, with the expertise and obsessive desire for openness, do something about it?
Our rights are being thrown away because you're too lazy to get out of your chair and stop it. Join an activist organization. Lobby your congresspeople. Make a nuisance of yourself with them!
Moaning on the internet does nothing.
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Watching from Switzerland I was amazed to see the majority of the people in a country vote for one individual and that individual lose the election.
That's the way the US Constitution works -- it's happened 3 times since the US Civil War (1860s). The people don't select the president, the states elect the president through an obscure undemocratic process known as the "Electoral College."
The US is not a democracy, it's a republic. Worse, it's a republic written with a Constitution whose wealthy authors were openly scared of democracy. Those authors inserted many checks against the democratic will.
If you want to read up on this, the "Federalist Papers," a series of pro/con arguments written by the authors of the document in the 1780s during the debate over the then-proposed Constitution, clearly points this out.
IMHO what's more telling than the history of this is the fact that today, in the 21st Century -- and after what happened in the 2000 election -- there is no serious effort to eliminate the Electoral College. That is highly indicative of a broken system.
"Russian reporters at the Bush vs Clinton elections found themselves right at home. Two candidates answering no deep questions differing only on minor points. Exactly like the elections in the old ussr."
your argument actually supports capitalism. If our presidental elections are just a show between two nearly identical candidates just like the old USSR then why are we not all in the gulag??? The striking differance between the old USSR and the now USA is capitalism....now i will let you guess which one has the most freedomes, the greatest prosperity and the longest history of stability.
hey i got a book for you to read "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
I mean it is almost like an "invisable hand" is retaining our freedoms in the USA.
by the way "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum is a book you should read as well.
stendec@gmail.com