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Computer Problems Already Affecting Florida Voters
TAGmclaren writes "The Sun-Sentinel is reporting on computer glitches already affecting the election in - you guessed it - Florida. Of the 14 early voting sites that opened in Broward County on Monday morning, 9 were reporting problems. In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed. More generally, SFgate.com is keeping track of all voting issues across the country - including lawsuits and other ballot problems." Update: 10/19 03:38 GMT by T : Thanks to reader Dale J. Russell for pointing out that "there is no Orlando County. The city of Orlando, Florida resides in Orange County."
Was that I was watching the local news (Washington, DC) and they were discussing electronic voting machines and some of the concerns surrounding them. Then, the reporter ends his report basically blowing the concerns off and saying it was just people were afraid of computers raising a fuss. What? It seems to me that the more people know about computers and know about the systems, the more concerned they are. It's not people afraid of computers and to be dismissed like that simply blows my mind.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Not a significant problem? Did you read the article? They don't have paper lists at the polling sites according to the article, and as a result they had to call in the name of each voter into the main election office. It was a huge slowdown, according to the article.
The NYTimes (free reg, blah blah blah) also has an article on the recent problems in FL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/politics/campaig n/18CND-VOTE.html
The Times also ran has an article about how closely scrutinized voting will be by both sides, particularly in the swing states: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/politics/campaig n/18monitor.html
Interesting to see how nearly everyone seems to be showing their partisan colors. It almost seems that people don't want a fair election so much as they want a *legal* election that their side wins.
Here's to hoping good things can emerge when a bunch of greedy agents interact...
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/18/diebo ld_among_sites_still_running_windows_nt4.html
According to this article, diebold is still running windows nt 4 internally. This is scary because because microsoft is scheduled to stop releasing all hotfixes for nt 4 on december 31st of this year. What does it say about the security of our election if the driving company behind the election machines has no clear upgrade path for their internal software? Does it imply that products they release may be released on unsupported, buggy platforms?
When the USA was formed, it was created by the coalescing of thirteen separate countries. The founding fathers were far more concerned about he equality and rights of these separate states than they were about the equality and rights of the individual citizens. That concern survives to this day. Senate power is allocated equally to the various states. This means a citizen is a small state such as Rhode Island has more voting power than a citizen in a large state like California. You could assign senators by state population the way the house works, but then the senate would keep expanding. Perhaps it would be better to give each senator as many votes in the senate as there are voters in his state.
The founding fathers were also concerned that every region had a say in the running of the country. This means that a citizen living in a sparsely populated part of the country such as Utah has more voting power in the House Of Representatives than a citizen in a densely populated state like New Jersey.
The founding fathers did not believe in democracy as we know it today. They did not trust the "mob" to govern. They wanted a republic where well-educated elected representatives made all the decisions. The masses should never be permitted to directly make any decision. There were no national newspapers, no TV, and no Internet. The average citizen did not even know the names of the candidates. So the founding fathers set up an indirect system called the electoral college to elect the president. A group of impartial, non-party-affiliated, educated men, who were familiar with the presidential candidates, made the selection. In the constitution, the electors are not even required to vote for the candidate they are pledged to. 27 states have laws to bind them, but these laws may be unconstitutional. The penalty is typically a $100 fine, and being kicked out of the party. The constitution even made provision for a state legislature to select these electors in any way it saw fit. Legally the state legislature need not even hold an election to choose the college of electors. This harks back to the days when the states were nervously considering the possibility of union, and wanted to retain every possible power to themselves. The state legislatures originally directly chose the electors for president, without holding an election.
Further, in most states there is a winner-take-all-the-electors rule, which leads occasionally to the strange anomaly that the president chosen is the one with the fewest popular votes.
Modern Americans may consider these founding fathers' notions in violation of the democratic principles of "all men are born equal" and "one man; one vote". However, as Jimmy Carter pointed out, these rules are almost impossible to change because they are burned into the constitution. They require 38 states to agree before they can be changed. Small states and sparsely populated regions are not about to give up their privileged positions, even if they recognise that privilege is unfair.
Jimmy Carter said the most we can hope for is an abandonment of the winner-take-all-rule, because that change does not require a constitutional amendment, and because it can be done a state at a time. If states apportioned presidential electors in proportion to votes, most of the probability the anomaly of the winner in the electoral college getting the fewest popular votes would disappear.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
Americans love democracy so much...they really should try it some time.
It puzzles me how somebody who won the vote of less than 25% of the population can claim to be democratically elected.
Better yet - can claim a mandate as the leader of the "democratic free world". Hey, if the US president wants to be the leader of the democratic free world, let's open the election up to the rest of the free world...using a sensible electoral process.
BTW - now that Iraq has been "liberated", shouldn't they also be allowed to participate in the election of the "leader of the democratic free world"?
If the US presidential candidates don't want to open the ballots to the rest of the world, they should stop claiming to be our representative, and start ceding some power to a globally representative organisation
California's absentee is pretty similar, we draw a line across to connect an arrow, so it is complete
hopefully no mistakes there unless you decide to doodle all over your ballot
I already voted last week, woo hoo!
They are still having problems here in New Zealand with the local elections, results should have been out last week but the 'software' that was going to count the votes didn't work... I think they should have just done this: select winner from votes order by number_of_votes I'm sure they will have problems in the US elections, it's only a couple of weeks away and I have read far too much about the problems, mind you of Jeb has his way half of his state won't be able to vote ;)
info on the NZ problems...
"Ten days after the local body elections, the make-up of seven city and district councils and 18 of 23 district health boards is still unknown, with both companies involved in the fiasco - Christchurch election services company Electionz.com and NZ Post subsidiary Datamail - unwilling to predict when final results will be out.
Though officials had said the problem, traced to Datamail software, would be resolved at the weekend, checks by the Audit Office and audit company KPMG are still being carried out......"
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3068912a11,00. html
Suppose there is massive fraud involving electronic voting machines, either through rewriting votes, having machines in democratic (or republican) areas just not work...
Then what?
The Supreme Court seems to have made it's feelings clear last time around... what's the smart plan?
I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.
I guess if the chaos repeats, perhaps we'll have one ready for the next election?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Why anyone sane would use e-voting in the first place is just beyond me. I just cannot understand why people are so obsessed with e-everything. Could anyone please tell me what is wrong with pen and paper? I have been asking this question since this stupid idea of e-voting was first introduced and I have got absolutely no serious answers. This is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Look up "Voting Machines" and by that I mean the groups that rigged the elections for about 50 years. Ever seen "Mr. Smith goes to Washington"? That is what I am talking about. Illinois is famous for their machines. Chicago, IL is where the phrase "Vote Early, Vote Often" came from. And before anyone says something, Illinois has voted Democrat for many years, and the Mayor of Chicago (Daley Jr) and his father (Sr) are Democrats.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
While working today, I had two different clients, both with remote offices in Florida loose their VPN connections from the East coast to Florida. For about 4 hours this morning all my IPSEC tunnels in or out of that state stopped responding, coincidence? Anyone else have a problem?
After the election is done, counted, recounted, and the lawsuits are settled, let's take all these Diebold machines and send them over to Iraq.
They've got some elections to do at the end of January, and certainly a generous donation of several thousand voting machines would help them along. No, they're not perfect, but they might be good enough. (does NT4 do Arabic?)
When they're done with their election they can keep them or bury them in the desert as they see fit. No return-address labels required.
We'll have a fresh start and four years to get something reasonable in place.
If there's a silver lining in this it's that the current machines will not be viable os/software wise in 4 years and the hardware will probably be kaput by that point as well.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My new
Simple Answers...
...and if a student were to benefit from a snow day at school because he didn't study for his exams... Tell me he's not some mad genius with a weather control device in his room!
What political party benefits the most from a disputed election process?
Which party is involved in the most pre-election fraud?
I'd have to say the Baath Party.
Which candidate would Mary Poppins vote?
Walt Brown
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
The system doesn't work, so just deal? That's just great. Why even bother having elections?
How about this system:
We'll set up a "psychic" (nominated by each state congress) in the capital of each state. On Nov 2 the psychic will read the brainwaves of the people of the state. He or she will then decide who the winner of that state is based on "vibes". And that's who gets the electoral votes (of course we'll keep the Electoral College).
Does that system seem more or less error-prone than the current one? Or are they about the same to you?
Just because it can't be perfect doesn't mean it shouldn't be better.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Do you know about the recent estimates that 27,000 votes will be lost by highly predictable computer errors in mostly black precincts?
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make install -not war
Get used to the term "interim president" being used in reference to the leader of the USA. Don't laugh - it's been done elsewhere before.
Bush set a US precedent in 2000, and now no mere voters or courts of law will stand between him and "the will of the people". Just at his finest hour, when triumph is so close...!
We've just seen "the will of the people" in Australia, who voted based on fear of change... which I find odd, since the current government is the one that got us into this mess in the first place.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
You might get your mind blown back the other way after watching the 13 minutes of John Stewart (_The Daily Show_) on Crossfire. He calls "Conservative" Tucker Carlson a dick without increasing his sneer, while Carlson's token "Liberal" opposite just bobbles his head while included in the same condemnation. These mediadroids are thinking only about working within the conventional wisdom from their corporate producers, not even whether an intelligent, real person is denouncing their lies and deranged harm to America, right in their faces, on camera. They are purely formal apparatchiks; the content is irrelevant to their buzzword sniffers. Viewers of any intelligence at all can only be appalled.
--
make install -not war
So I log onto Yahoo! news and see the headline Few Glitches Reported in Early Florida Voting. Then I come to Slashdot and see Computer Problems Already Affecting Florida Voters.
Is it just me, or do all the Slashdot voting headlines sound overly pessimistic? Who says spin isn't alive and well?
However, there's a further point, in that a candidate can win the election with less than 23% of voters voting for him, if all electors vote according to the plurality of votes in their state and there are only two candidates. As the number of candidates goes to infinity, naturally the required proportion goes to zero, but it does it faster than you'd expect. In an election with three candidates, a candidate can be elected when as many as 85.2% of the voters cast votes for someone else.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20041018/BREAKINGNEWS/%20%2041018011
the Political Inquirer
Old news...
#1 The data link was down. Just for your knowledge these e-voting machines are not connected to the internet, therefore cannot be hacked.
#2. SFgate.com is a liberal site which will tell you that the black vote is being suppressed by the republicans even though the democrats were and are still racists (remember THE DEMOCRATES were the former fucking slave owners) and continue to pursue "affirmative action" for the "inferior" black Americans.
#3 This will be modded down because political facts scare the liberal mods (when I'm not fucking moderating!)
#4 Vote libertarian and don't believe this liberal/socialist horseshit!
I think the main problem in Australia is that the ALP has been totally ****ing useless in the 3 years I've lived here. I was here the last time mini-Adolf got voted in and Labor happily let him reduce the agenda for the election to "foreign people are bad" notwithstanding the fact that all but about 60000 Australians have no Australian ancestry going back more than 250 years...
This time around people just seemed to ignore the fact that the 2001 Australian election was "stolen" in that Mini-Adolf lied is a$$ off about babies overboard. Since then we've had "core promises" and "non-core promises" - why the hell didn't Latham ask Mini-Adolf to say which of his promises THIS time around were "non-core promises" to remind people what a lying rodent he is?
Now he's back in and within 7 days the chancellor is warming us up to another bunch of broken promises.
That's the problem with compulsory voting - all of the really stupid people who don't really get this politics stuff HAVE to vote. Maybe we should have a large notice on the ballot paper saying "you do not win a prize if you get the winner correct" That might help...
Rant over - I feel better now
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Forcing people to vote doesn't work as people forced to vote do not pay attention the the issues and just randomly check somebody.
As somebody who lives in a country (Australia) with compulsory voting, I can tell you that that is not true. Compulsory voting actually has the effect of making a greater number of people pay attention to politics. Only a small minority seem to vote randomly.
Compulsory voting does create a different political climate to what you would be used to in the US. There is no need to "get out the vote", and no need to appeal to your "base". Elections become very tightly focussed on the small segment of swinging voters, and the partisans on either side are completely taken for granted.
We also have instant runoff voting here, so we can vote for "third" parties safe in the knowledge that our vote will not be wasted. The US electoral system seems very backward and rudimentary from our perspective.
Why is Hillary Clinton becoming the first female U.S president a problem?
This is an honest question from a foreigner.
But didn't Kerry later say he would have voted for the war knowing what he knows now... that there were no WMDs?
To tell the truth, I don't believe what any politician says. The debates are beauty contests and ads are twisted spew. You can take anything out of context and turn any statistic in your favor. You're better off looking at the voting record and deciding what you approve of more. I no longer believe the Media and never believed Moore and Limbaugh.
What is truly frieghtening is that some people actually believe what you are sarcastically saying. Especially here in Florida.
The world wonders why America is not going nuts over Kerry and why Bush is so popular. Its because a third of the deep south is baptist and 90% are hard core Bush fanatics thinking they are serving the lord by being republican.
I give credit to the campaign strategiests for Reagan. They started teh movement and the religious folk fell for it and created a hard core radical wing of the republican party as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
But you know what?
%70 of Americans according to some polls think Bush is more decisive as a result. Especially this is true among independants who are leaning towards Bush. They do not like Bush but feel Kerry has no stand and flip flops left and right and is too unpredictable to be president.
Propaganda works.
If you let yourself be defined in debating you will lose. Kerry let Bush define him last spring as a flip flopper and now the label is permanently stuck with him.
Its a sad day when a military hero is descredited by someone who went AWOL due to negative campaign tactits.
http://saveie6.com/
Well, I was going to moderate on this discussion, but oh well...
Anyway, I'm a Baptist. And not only do I not think that Bush is annointed by God, but I'm voting for Kerry. I believe that the government has no business regulating morality, really, so I'm voting for the person who I think will do better for the things I think the government should be regulating.
Just because someone is religious doesn't make them have a head full of mush.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
9-11 is way too big a subject for a casual post. Just run in google, 9-11, government prior knowledge. You will find plenty to keep you busy for a long time.
As to the crime, maybe because before him it couldn't have gotten much worse? A lot of crime has been dropping around the country from demographics, crime age young males are falling in number, and those with the tendencies have been gradually kept off the streets with two and three strikes and it's life laws. But, I do remember reading he ordered the cops to "crack down" on street crime. Apparently they did.
I honestly don't know, but he's not what I think of as a constitutionalist. He's anti gun,(NYC is the height of anti gun ness and he and his various cop orgs never changed that) ignored illegal immigration, pro war on some drugs, and so on. I think he cleaned up lower level street crime while high level crimes go unchecked, a party/system boy, and a statist deluxe.
I guess it just depends on your priorities. I'd rather have less security and more freedom. I don't weant a cop on every corner, I want all people to have the ability to be armed on their person, so crime can have a littler instant karma attached to it. Sort that stuff out in a year or so.... His methodology -impression only- is closer to --hmm-like they run singapore in a way, at least that's the impression I get.
The other part still stands though, as a local guy for the folks there he is OK I guess, but to run the whole country and be so totally urban, and niche urban like NYC, is not a wise choice for the nation. I reject party superiority when it comes to the nation as a whole, and I don't think he's knowledgable enough even theoretically to really understand what it's like to be a NON-NYCorker, so he couldn't make good decisions *generally speaking*. For a totally random example, I don't see him understanding at all something like what the ESA has done to the rural areas some places. A garbage strike and dealing with some unuion bosses, yes, having to deal with guys from John deere country or smalltown USA, nope, I don't think he would "get it", no frame of reference.
Thinking back,he reminds me of some of the gents in the coterie around Nixon actually,more than anything else.