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?

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.