Electoral-vote.com Under Heavy Load; Attack?

An anonymous reader writes "Electoral-vote.com (and mirrors electoral-vote2.com through electoral-vote8.com) seem to be very slow at the moment. Votemaster ( A. Tanenbaum) just posted 'All the servers appear to be under attack now, also DNS. I added another large multiprocessor but it doesn't seem to help much. I don't this is going to work. Sorry.' Massive attack or just a large flash crowd? Anybody up for some mirroring so votemaster can concentrate on the polls?" Reader fishwack writes with word that as of 3:46GMT (10:46 PM Eastern time in the U.S.) "the Federal Electoral Commission's Web site is down."

Comments

who cares!

[seanadams.com]

right now they're calling florida as "weak kerry" which is nowhere near the case if you look at the figures in so far. Why is this site important?

Re:Web site maybe being ddos'd

[FifthRaven]

Yeah, and that way we'll really make life hell. Now the real question is, "Is this malicious or simply the effect of general interest in the election?" I would hope for the latter, but the voting machines make me think of the former. If we decrease the public's ability to respond to the election, we can steal it more effectively.

Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[aardwolf204]

Its good that you provide us apache-crash-happy slashdotters with a link to Electoral-vote.com, come on troops get in there and get that server smoking!

More seriously, can anyone tell my why at this moment the reports are so uneven among the major networks:

NBC: 207 / 199
Yahoo: 237 / 199
Fox: 210 / 144
CBS: 246 / 207

Answer that, then continue to F5, F5, F5...

And do it in firefox, maybe the major news sites will notice in their logs.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[demachina]

Its interesting exit polls have historically been pretty accurate which is why networks have relied on them for so long, until the Republicans started winning elections and especially as electronic voting came on the scene. As you recall in 2000 VNS exit polling predicted Gore won and he didn't. In 2002 the VNS exit polls mysteriously failed in a massive way and the Republicans had a big win. It was disbanded and an all new AP system was used today.

Today apparently the exit polls were massively swinging to Kerry and it now appears he is losing the election. Curious that exit polls have gone completely south in just the last 4 years.

It leads to two possibilities.

1. The exit polls are really innacurate or maybe Democrat leaners were rigging them, of course rigging exit polls is kind of stupid since they don't count for anything other than maybe putting a little psychic pressure on late voters. Maybe they are just consistently bad but they are a pretty big sampling and its odd they would be as far off as they were apparently today. This is the message Fox and the Republicans were pounding on all night. The exit polls were all wrong and you need to fix them or get rid of them. Unfortunately at this point the exit poll are the only checks and balances we have on the truthfullness of the polls and especially electronic polling.

2. The exit polls were accurate and someone was rigging the vote. Needless to say with widespread use of electronic voting machines, without paper trail, if someone rigged them to skew the vote to the Republicans you would see what we've seen today and it would be hard to prove thats what happened. The exit polls say Kerry wins and the voting machines say Bush wins. Unfortunately with no paper trail we may never know.

If exit polls are wrong it should be setting off alarm bells that either they are wrong or the vote counts are wrong. You should not leap to the conclusion that it must be the exit polls as the media and Republican were tonight and probably will be from now on.

One interesting thing to do would be to lock up a all the electronic voting machines in precincts in Ohio and Florida (Broward and Miami-Dade in particular where there is huge Democratic vote to suppress). Look in particular for precincts where exit polls said one thing and the machines said something else. Be sure to set the date back to the day of the election, set them exactly like they were on election day, and start entering votes on them in a semi random way at about the same rate voters would on all or most of the machines, and see if after a full day of voting they report an accurate vote.

Another interesting exercise would be to correlate the map of precincts with electronic voting with precincts with bogus exit polls and see if there is a correlation.

I think much of the data on them can be found on electionline.org.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[slashdot.org]

One interesting thing to do would be to lock up a all the electronic voting machines in precincts in Ohio and Florida (Broward and Miami-Dade in particular where there is huge Democratic vote to suppress). Look in particular for precincts where exit polls said one thing and the machines said something else. Be sure to set the date back to the day of the election, set them exactly like they were on election day, and start entering votes on them in a semi random way at about the same rate voters would on all or most of the machines, and see if after a full day of voting they report an accurate vote.

Not a terrible idea, but consider the following psuedo-code:

boolean election_day_ended = false;

function count_vote( candidate )
read_from_non_volatile_storage( &election_day_ended )
if( election_day_ended == false ) {
if( date_and_time > election_day ) {
election_day_ended = true
write_to_non_volatile_storage( &election_day_ended )
}
}

if( election_day_ended ) {
vote = candidate
}
else {
if( random_number_between( 1, 100 ) == 7 ) {
vote = kerry
}
else {
vote = candidate
}
}

This is not a rant _against_ your post at all, I think you have some very interesting points, and I just want to add that there is only one single way to do electronic voting and that's with a paper trail. I can't believe anyone would accept anything else. Even if the machines had Open Source software, *who* really is able to make sure that the correct executable is being used? You could maybe come up with some fancy encryption scheme, but you still have to assume that the polling machine is being delivered by non-trusted people, making this really very complex.

Why are things being made so complex? It's pretty simple, if you can randomly check the machines against their paper trail, all you have to do is count the pieces of paper, count what the stated vote is for and add it all up. They can print the vote in Arial 72pt bold so that there's never _ever_ any misunderstanding. If there's one single paper vote that's off by what the machine reports, well then that's a big fucking problem.

(12:45AM PDT it's pretty much certain that Bush is winning)
Just to get modded down as flamebait I will finish that off with some math I learned from Bill O'Reilly:

So considering the voting result, we are in one big fucking problem. So if I simply do the math, then (voting machine mismatch == big fucking problem, and bush == big fucking problem -> bush == voting machine mismatch)

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Please see PIPA's "Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" report.

Re:*sigh*

[mrchaotica]

The people who support Bush are choosing Safety over Freedom.
The poeple who support Bush are choosing religious Intolerance over Tolerance.

There are very few opinions in America that are downright wrong*, and these are them!

Being wrong isn't proof of low intelligence, but it is evidence of it.

*where "wrong" is defined as "completely against and opposite to the spirit and intent of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution (esp. the Bill of Rights)."

Re:*sigh*

[katharsis83]

No, people like Bush are exactly the type of America that the Founding Fathers expected and wanted. If you read between the lines of the original Constiution, it's clear that a white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class in control America is what they envisioned. The electoral college and the lack of original direct elections for the Senate are clear proof of this; they didn't want the "rabble" interfering in their Republic. Voting was something to be enjoyed by the upper class who have spare time and considerable estates. In their writings, they make direct references that voting was for "gentlemen," and they know better than the rest so they can make intelligent decisions for all - the core idea of a Republican society. The first president of the US was an avid slave owner, and the concept of "democracy" was viewed by Madison, Franklin, et al to be a terrible and dangerous idea that they should do all in their power to suppress. Everyone always envisioned the Founding Fathers as people of great equality - they weren't. George W. Bush and people like him are fulfilling the original American dream of inequality for all save the white Christian landowner. I hate this idea, but that's how the country started out. That's the reason America is the way it is today.

Bush is going to win -- now what?

[Anonymous Coward]

How depressing. At this time, Kerry would need to get 80% of the remaining Ohio votes just to not lose.

On the other hand, I considered that Bush losing was in effect letting Bush off easy. What he deserves is to be arrested for his criminal acts as president.

So the question now is how to remove him from office. Impeachment? Or is it possible for a criminal prosecution entity of the U.S. gov't to built a case against him? How can we make sure this happens?

Bush diverted our resources away from the war on terror so that Cheney could pay back his company for the hundreds of millions he made as CEO. That was an absolutely criminal act. The security of the U.S. has been threatened by Bush's imcompetence and U.S. servicemen and women have died to make Cheney's friends richer than already rich.

The analogy to chess would be trading you queen for a pawn. Saddam was nothing, he was beat down in the first gulf war, and kept down for 10 years. He was not a credible threat and not a clear a present danger.

I hope people will continue the fight to not let Bush's illegal and criminally irresponsible acts go unchecked.

Re:Web site maybe being ddos'd

[Fishead]

Malicious would be me hitting "Reload Current Page" constantly...

Best part is...

[koolB]

Polls for kerry, hate america, more polls for kerry, F9/11, more pools for kerry, wrold thinks we dumb.

Result: Bush wins.

PS. Fok U World.

Re:Best part is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I expected Bush to get at least 53% of the popular vote and maybe as much as 55%, I'm surprised it was actually this close.

I'm relieved, too. A few of you out there may remember the Carter presidency. Jimmy Carter is, I'm sure, a nice guy. His heart's in the right place. He's not dumb in an IQ sense of the word (he was chosen by Hyman Rickover as a reactor officer). But he was a terrible president, the worst one of my lifetime (I was born during the Kennedy administration, to give perspective).

John Kerry would have been as bad as that, maybe worse. He's not quite as incompetent as a leader (maybe close, though), but he more than makes up for it on other fronts. Fellow Americans, count your blessing that John Kerry has lost this election.

And as for those Europeans who favor appeasement of terrorism, I can't say much except "Didn't you learn anything the last time this happened? We did. We won't let it happen again."

Re:*sigh*

[mrchaotica]

Actually, I've pointed exactly this out to the people who want to get rid of the Electoral College, with a slight modification. It is my interpretation that they wanted intelligent, informed, and moral people to be making decisions -- I agree with you on this. However, I believe the criteria of "white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class" was merely the most convenient way to find such people. Since then, circumstances have changed, and it is now accepted that anyone could be intelligent, informed, and moral regardless of race, religion, or class (Amendments 15, 1, and 24 respectively). So, it seems reasonable to me to dismiss the the actions of the Founding Fathers that were appropriate to the time, but no longer relevant. Instead, we should focus on their words and ideals, which have stood the test of time much more successfully.

I assert that Republicanism (the system of government, not the political party) wasn't designed to protect the "haves" from the "have-nots;" it was designed to protect the "cares and knows" from the "care-nots and know-nots." Unfortunately, it seems to have failed today, since so many people have succumbed to Bush's fearmongering (fears of terrorism, fears of religious and moral diversity). They have forgotten that freedom is the basic principle of our country, and are instead are trying to inflict their morals on the rest of us (who, I should point out, are no less moral -- we might just have slightly different ones).

This is not Republicanism! It is Democracy, it is the "rabble," and it is mob rule.

We were a mirror...

[cachedout]

Well, we were a mirror on www.electoral-vote7.com until we were pulled from DNS earlier this evening. We handled the load without a problem, even while hostrocket.com got crushed. Our services were voluntary and we neither asked for or received any compensation for our mirror. We served about 10 million hits today on the website today and peaked at about 2.5 mil/hour earlier in the day.

I don't know why we and the other non-hostrocket.com mirrors were pulled from the DNS round-robin, but I do know that the decsion to remove us and the other non-hostrocket sites from the DNS round-robin for www.electoral-vote.com was made without consulting us (which is fine, it just seemed a bit odd.) After we were pulled, hostrocket.com basically tipped over and the site went down hard.

Re:*sigh*

[BenEnglishAtHome]

...the Founding Fathers expected and wanted...a white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class in control... The first president of the US was an avid slave owner...

The first president of the US wasn't a Christian. He, like some other FFs, was a Deist. He thought there was a higher power. He went to church because that was the accepted way of expressing one's spirituality in those days. But he left before Communion, always, because that would have been a symbolic acceptance of the whole set of Christian beliefs, something he simply didn't accept.

Can you imagine a Presidential candidate today getting up and leaving church before communion and being quoted in the press as saying "Well, I believe in a higher power and all, but this whole 'body of Christ' thing is more than I can swallow.* I think those Christians are nice people and I'll share their meetings, but I'm not really one of them"? He'd be pilloried. He couldn't get elected dog catcher.

(*) - That's humor, for those of you who didn't recognize it.

Do you really mean to imply that Shrub is a spiritual descendant of Washington? That both of them share similar goals and visions for this country? Washington had the strength of his convictions and enough humanity to admit that he didn't know all the answers and, certainly, enough good sense not to intimate that his actions were the result of God whispering in his ear.

I find your assertion that Bush is "fulfilling the original American dream" offensive on a dozen levels. He wouldn't know "the original American dream" if it bit him in the ass.