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Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request
aacool writes "Blackboxvoting.org has raised the largest Freedom of Information request in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips."
just when we thought the election was over... hopefully everything was computed properly...
Get your torrents...
I understand made use of electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold. Their CEO pledged to do whatever was in his power to swing the election towards George. Interesting... Plus the exit polls seemed to suggest a different winner.
So much for that....
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
It's done. Move on. Get over it.
Blackboxvoting.org is a non-profit supported by donations. Screw the FSF and the EFF. Give your money now to these guys and shine the light on the roaches.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?
Out of curiosity, can anyone expect to process and audit that data in a reasonable timeframe? Especially on a volunteer basis?
I'm all for electronic voting, with the promise of easy to use polls that allow for more immediate and accurate tracking of results, but hopefully this will shine the light onto the glaring need for greater audit measures and failsafes to be built into the software used to power these applications.
I'm glad someone's on this. The scariest thing about all these new voting technologies is the idea that if something were to go wrong, intentionally or otherwise, we wouldn't even find out about it.
A most... daring move, I have to say. The very perspective and magnitude of task such as doing independant audit of complete US presidential elections is... staggeringly humongous. I am afraid that the blackboxvoting.org does not posess facilities, technology and manpower to handle the avalanche of raw data that might hit them as the result of this request - obviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?
:). But I'm afraid it'll be a wasted effort.
In the aftermath, I am afraid that, if the audit indicates there are irregularities or foul play involved in the elections, reply might simply be 'It is counting error on your end, you don't have capacities for competently performing an audit of this size.' Besides, I just might think not enough of Americans will actually care.
Bottom line... I sure do hope the audit works out. I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged (being from a former communist eastern european state myself, I saw a number of those
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
The only people who would question the authenticity of the United States of America's election process via the "e-voting" method are those are support the ending of freedom and the resurgence of terror!
Why wouldn't you just trust the results you see in the media? Why must you map the tunnels that carry our infastructure only a terrorist would need that information!
Remember 10 out of 10 terrorists support John Kerry! If you are questioning the election results you must not support Bush and thus you must be a terrorist.
I'm only 52% kidding.
Every Slashdot reader knew going into this election that the Diebold machines were unaccountable, had no unalterable audit logs, no paper to subpoena, no WORM media to recount from. They are rewriteable and they are in the hands of the GOP. Now, suddenly, only two states have a vote count which is wildly divergent from the exit polling. Those states are Ohio and Florida. They were polled entirely by Diebold machines.
There is no accountability, no log, no going back. And it's OUR fault. We knew, and we didn't take action. We KNEW this would come.
It's not about who votes. It's about who counts them.
Although I am against Bush, I would prefer him winning the vote in a straight way, I can live with that. I can't live with the fact that he might have stolen the election for a second time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
they could find all the evidence they need of record tampering... of votes being miscast... of these machines being totally unfit for the democratic process....
and you would never see anything about it in the mainstream media....
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Yep. Get ready for the Diebold conspiracy wackos to crawl out of the woodwork, because Diebold's chairman said in his capacity as a Republican party backer that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Really, really poor taste? Yep. Probably a fucking stupid thing to say when you're CEO of a company that makes electronic voting machines? For the *state* about which you're making those comments, no less? Yep. But don't forget one thing: the exit polls exactly and perfectly describe the 2% Bush margin. That's one thing you'll never see the Diebold conspiracy blogs mention. They'll just fantasize about how a 13,000 person company secretly rigged the election, and that somehow, the mainstream media is "hiding" the story because it's in bed with Bush. Ahh, conspiracy theorists. Gotta love 'em.
Interestingly, they showed footage on NBC's TODAY show of some of the polling places using electronic equipment in Ohio; some polling places had waits of over 9 hours with the last people voting at shortly before 4AM local time. Voting officials offered the alternative of paper ballots to move people through more quickly. Ironically, students and other members of the line were yelling "Do not use the paper ballots! Wait to use the machines!" explaining later that they felt their votes wouldn't be counted if they voted on paper...
And no, the exit polls didn't indicate a different winner.
The audit of the unprecedented use of electronic voting would be a pretty good learning experience for us as a potential nation of future electronic voters.
However, I wonder what the potential political repercussions of an audit would be should the audit find inconsistencies or possible voter problems that skewed a state to the candidate that lost after the fact. Would Kerry renounce his concession?
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that for all the investigations that examined the "tricks" used to fudge the numbers (some of which we already know were repeated this time before the polls even opened yesterday) it still didn't mean the shrub was stripped of his presidency ... And it doesn't look like it secured a more honest democratic process four years later, either.
It is completely useless to have electronic voting logs/records if there is no paper trail to back it up. Without a paper trail, a completely fake vote tally would look just like the real thing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I was kinda surprised that I hadn't seen more about people questioning the voting systems, especially after exit polls seemed to reflect a different story than vote counts.
I guess we'll see what happens....
I'll be interested to see what the results are and if this gets any traction in the media
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
It seems fishy to me that the two states with computerized balloting and no paper trail, had Kerry winning in the exit polls, but the outcome was decidedly different. In fact these two states had the highest discrepancy in exit poll vs. final poll numbers.
I don't think it should be legal to concede. Screw checking out the voting machines, and have all the uncounted voters sue Kerry, Bush, and whomever else. By conceding the race and not counting those votes, it's effectively denying the right to vote for those individuals. This includes overseas (military and civilian), uncounted provisional votes, and absentee ballots. Every vote counts, so count every vote!
Hopefully everyone will comply with this order.
There are too many questions about electronic voting, and the legitimacy of the election in question. If these requests are not filled, it will really help to calm down the cries of voting fraud.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
...please provide [the items] in increments as soon as you have them.
(from TFA)
I guess it will take more than 4 years before they have gathered enough informations to come to any conclusions.
I don't read replies by ACs.
The thing that amazes me is how much all of this is going to cost. Lawyers will need to pour through the information request in each jurisdiction, someone technical will have to get the requested info out of the systems (if that's possible), and every nitpicky error in the logs will require some justification to demonstrate that it didn't affect the vote tallys. What on earth is the point? Do they honestly think that there is something unscrupulous going on? It can't be worse than trying to decide which hanging chads count and which don't...
I think that any place that used any sort of electronic voting should be made aware that they're going to be under a microscpoe because of it. Complying with lots of FOI requests needs to be an expensive part of the TCO for Diebold machines, and their ilk.
See what I've been reading.
Public Records Request - November 2, 2004
From: Black Box Voting
To: Elections division
Pursuant to public records law and the spirit of fair, trustworthy, transparent elections, we request the following documents.
We are requesting these as a nonprofit, noncommercial group acting in the capacity of a news and consumer interest organization, and ask that if possible, the fees be waived for this request. If this is not possible, please let us know which records will be provided and the cost. Please provide records in electronic form, by e-mail, if possible - crew@blackboxvoting.org.
We realize you are very, very busy with the elections canvass. To the extent possible, we do ask that you expedite this request, since we are conducting consumer audits and time is of the essence.
We request the following records.
Item 1. All notes, emails, memos, and other communications pertaining to any and all problems experienced with the voting system, ballots, voter registration, or any component of your elections process, beginning October 12, through November 3, 2004.
Item 2. Copies of the results slips from all polling places for the Nov. 2, 2004 election. If you have more than one copy, we would like the copy that is signed by your poll workers and/or election judges.
Item 3: The internal audit log for each of your Unity, GEMS, WinEds, Hart Intercivic or other central tabulating machine. Because different manufacturers call this program by different names, for purposes of clarification we mean the programs that tally the composite of votes from all locations.
Item 4: If you are in the special category of having Diebold equipment, or the VTS or GEMS tabulator, we request the following additional audit logs:
a. The transmission logs for all votes, whether sent by modem or uploaded directly. You will find these logs in the GEMS menu under "Accuvote OS Server" and/or "Accuvote TS Server"
b. The "audit log" referred to in Item 3 for Diebold is found in the GEMS menu and is called "Audit Log"
c. All "Poster logs". These can be found in the GEMS menu under "poster" and also in the GEMS directory under Program Files, GEMS, Data, as a text file. Simply print this out and provide it.
d. Also in the Data file directory under Program Files, GEMS, Data, please provide any and all logs titled "CCLog," "PosterLog", and Pserver Log, and any logs found within the "Download," "Log," "Poster" or "Results" directories.
e. We are also requesting the Election Night Statement of Votes Cast, as of the time you stopped uploading polling place memory cards for Nov. 2, 2004 election.
Item 5: We are requesting every iteration of every interim results report, from the time the polls close until 5 p.m. November 3.
Item 6: If you are in the special category of counties who have modems attached, whether or not they were used and whether or not they were turned on, we are requesting the following:
a. internal logs showing transmission times from each voting machine used in a polling place
b. The Windows Event Viewer log. You will find this in administrative tools, Event Viewer, and within that, print a copy of each log beginning October 12, 2004 through Nov. 3, 2004.
Item 7: All e-mails, letters, notes, and other correspondence between any employee of your elections division and any other person, pertaining to your voting system, any anomalies or problems with any component of the voting system, any written communications with vendors for any component of your voting system, and any records pertaining to upgrades, improvements, performance enhancement or any other changes to your voting system, between Oct. 12, 2004 and Nov. 3, 2004.
Item 8: So that we may efficiently clarify any questions pertaining to your specific county, please provide letterhead for the most recent non-confidential correspondence between your office and your county counsel, or, in lieu of this, just e-mail us the contact information for y
The FOIA allows agencies to charge a reasonable "copying" fee for labor and material. $2-$3 per page is not out of the question my experience. Image the fee for printing or copying millions of ballots.
I wish them luck in their efforts to get this info. As another Slashdotter posted in the other election thread, it's amazing how no one in the media wants to talk about how the exit polls, which are normally quite accurate, showed Kerry strong in places where he eventually lost. I won't rehash all the Diebold issues, but in an election this close, some modest vote fraud, spread thinly enough, would be more than enough to sway the result.
I do wonder, though where they're gonna find the manpower to process all this data, if they do succeed. The recounts in a few Florida counties took days; this is a few orders of magnatude more work!
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
First, no, the exit polls do not suggest that. They perfectly mirror the results.
Secondly, Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, said that about only Ohio, because he lives and works in Ohio, and is a GOP backer.
Bad taste? Yes. "Interesting" that a CEO of a company is a Republican? Nope. Do I wish he would have had the scruples to stay out of politics since his company is making voting machines? Yep.
But please, take off your tinfoil hat. When he said he was committed to delivering Ohio to Bush, he meant that as a GOP campaigner, contributor, and backer. Not that he was going to secretly have a 13,000-employee company rig a presidential election.
Who are these people, requesting so much information?! They must be terrorists!
Do not anger the worm.
The election yesterday was my third experience with the new-improved voting machines. And for the third time, I walked out of the booth wondering if my vote would really be counted.
After tapping my choices with a stylus -not really that easy for a left-handed-choice-tapper on a right-handed machine, I had to re-do a lot of them- I pressed the vote button. And the screen flashed something like "vote recorded" and then it went blank.
There was nothing to drop in a ballot box, nothing to show me that the machine was really hooked to anything, and of course, nothing that anybody could re-count if there was a question of fraud.
The friendly octogenarian on duty assured my that the it was all run by computer and that we didn't need a paper trail, since they could recount the computer records if they needed to do a recount. And since it is impossible for hard drives to die and memory chips to fail...
Yeah, it probably worked this time but the empty feeling I had as I walked out of the polling station left me strangly envious of those days when I could look at my punch card to make sure that none of the chads were hanging.
I live in a country where 36.6 million people are registered as voters.
- sealed-urn ?
Every 5 years, we vote for our president and sometimes mayors / deputies as well.
It takes roughly 3 hours after the closing of the voting offices before we know the name of our president, without room for contestations over the regularity of the vote.
How come we can achieve that by using such a primitive method as ballot-paper-goes-into-ballot-enveloppe-goes-into
Don't be surprised when these requests are denied on the grounds that providing this information would compromise our ability to prevent vote fraud. (my head spins just typing that)
The radical right now control the White House, the Senate and the House. Some of the senators voted in last night make Barry Goldwater look like Ted Kennedy. This faction will not allow anyone to look behind the curtain.
Let the conspiracy theories begin...
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
4 MORE YEARS! Wait a minute, before you mark this troll or flamebait. I'm talking about 4 MORE YEARS OF SLASHDOT! Slashdot has been on the verge of death lately and probably couldn't survive a Kerry victory. With another 4 more years of Bush, Slashdot is virtually guaranteed an extra 2-5 stories per week that generate 1300+ comments and thus traffic and ad revenue. Look in the HOF, all the top stories are politically related. Thanks to Bush's victory, Slashdot will generate enough add revenue to continue. We should all be happy.
I just sent in my $100 donation. Put your money with your mouth is.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's interesting that this "get out the vote" campaign which was so championed by the lib media and Hollywood because they figured "everyone hates Bush so the more ignorant teenagers we convince to vote, the better" didn't quite pan out, now did it.
The democratic party got reamed yesterday. Positively reamed. The friggin' House minority leader got shafted for the first time in 50 years. The GOP holds a majority on both the House and Senate, and they won more governor races.
What these things do is suggest there is some kind of evil conspiracy to elect Bush at all costs and ignores the bigger picture. That'd be a mighty big conspiracy, if you ask me.
The horse is dead. Fuck it or walk away, but stop beating it.
Last night on PBS the pollsters were saying that their exit polls favored a Kerry victory, and they were disappointed by how wrong the polling was.
The exit polls favored Kerry by 1-3 percentage points but the "votes" favored Bush.
If the elections were rigged, those unexpected gaps between polls and votes are what you would expect in a well rigged election.
I don't know that the elections were rigged. How many of you have played Tropico (where you get to rig elections and so forth)?
It wouldn't be the first fraudulent US election (Lyndon Johnson rigged the vote in Texas).
You don't think the Kerry campaign, and all the shitloads of people working for it, realizes this?
A $300M operation that's been going on for the better part of two years, for whom 55 million people voted and believe that the future of the country is at stake?
They're just going to roll over and say "Oh well" for no reason?
I have news for you: there is not wholesale or widespread fraud in the election. And what fraud (on BOTH sides), inappropriate behavior, etc., is statistically irrelevant in this election. If Kerry believed there was a way to win, believe me, they'd be doing it.
I hate to break it to you, but the geek community isn't "on to" something big, and everyone else just doesn't realize it. Electronic voting has problems. Big problems. We need transparency. Blackboxvoting is fighting for it.
But no one stole, or was handed, this election. Bush won it, with the largest number of votes in history, with an absolute majority, and with additional seats in the House and Senate to boot.
Face it. Bush won. Keep working on making electronic voting open and transparent.
And you know what? When you do, Republican candidates can and will still win.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/FL/P/00/county.001.html#12086
IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
We absolutely need transparency in the election process so that the electorate will have faith in the election process. And we all need to raise the issue about these Diebold machines and any others that don't leave a paper trail as being unverifiable, un-recountable, and subject to manipulation. So I think what BlackBox is doing is fantastic.
BUT... If this inquiry is tied to partisan bickering and whining by deluded Kerry-supporters who loudly proclaim their belief that somehow this information will reveal some sort of conspiracy that will reverse the recent 100,000+ vote victory margin for Bush in Ohio, then it will actually be counter-productive. Tranparency in elections and election equipment will become a partisan issue pitting Democrats against Republicans instead of being a non-partisan call for transparency that the enter population should be willing to support.
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller
Speaking as a Kerry supporter...
#1, The election results were statistically similar to the exit polls in Ohio and Florida.
#2, only 20 out of 88 counties in Ohio (IIRC, I may be fudgy on the exact number) used Diebold machines, the rest were punch card ballots.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
It's too bad that Kerry has conceded the race, as it seems reasonable and worthwhile to check the accuracy of the electronic votes. However, the U.S. has a deep anti-intellectual bias and it's not surprising to me that the idea of simple factchecking of an important race seems intolerable.
The machine that tallied my vote (Satellite Beach, FL) wasn't from Diebold. A bunch of us in line were wondering why there were'nt even voting machines. Just a marker and a paper ballot being tallied by a scanner.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Voting Machine OS project? Talk about somewhere that Open Source COULD have a major impact. Plus, kick Diebold's a$$ to boot!
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
Damn straight. This wasn't a landslide, but it wasn't any small victory either. 3.5 million people more liked Bush than Kerry, and the electoral vote was actually closer than it should have been because of the extreme concentration of votes on both sides of the divide. If Bush's votes had been spread across the whole country more evenly, it would have been more like 375 rather than the 286 it looks to be now.
Ohio is the best shot to prove out fraud for the Dems. On the Republican side, Michigan, PA, and WI all have slight margins of victory - less than Ohio in at least 2 of those cases. We'll probably never know, and Bush really can't lose. I doubt any of the aforementioned Blue states will switch with a heavy investigation or recount, but it would be interesting to find out what the real story is there.
Kerry would be wise to walk away, and it looks like he has done just that. Not that he's going to get a chance to run again, but at least he will be able to keep his Senate seat, for what it's worth being in a 55-44-1 Senate.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not to sound like too much of a conspiracy freak, but I have to say that some of the numbers sound kinda flaky -- e.g. there was supposedly no change in turnout of young voters, but the news was *full* of anecdotal evidence of massive youth voter turnout... Also, the numbers from Florida just look a little... weird.
It's very, very good that these guys are doing this -- it's just too easy to imagine "election hacking" scenarios.
FYR: Some very good analysis of the problem, with resources, from Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0312.html#9
can anyone expect to process and audit that data in a reasonable timeframe?
Not to affect this election but perhaps they will come up with valid criticisms which will result in improvements that contribute to enhancing the reliability of future electronic elections and not just in the USA but world wide. With a bit of luck the NeoCons of this world will eventually have to learn to live with something as 'communist' and disgustingly 'liberal' but eminently democratic as open source voting software/hardware and fully audited elections.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I also find it surprising that Florida was so clearly for Bush given how tight it was last time. (Maybe retirees care more about terrorism and Iraq than I thought?)
Much of Ohio uses Diebold voting machines, which leave no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. :(
Question: If someone committed fraud, would it be better to make it a decisive victory in order to avoid scrutiny?
These guys should start with the big counties in states such as Florida and Ohio that seemed to turn out contrary to prediction.
As an european observer, I see elections in America these days with amazement :
1. voters can be deleted from the lists en masse, as the name of their party is written down. Therefore the secrecy isn't preserved.
2. use of electronic devices the quality and neutrality of which are very difficult to check. The easiness with which such devices can be made to give fake results is proverbial.
As for the current elections, noone knows whether some of these machines aren't biased.
Therefore the fairness of these machines is not insured.
3. Polls and partial results are given while people are still voting. The temptation to influence their choice at the crucial moment is enormous, as has been shown by Fox News, which was announcing 269 electors for Bush, in order to galvanize republican troops and indecise voters in swing states. The voters are influenced by partial results at the very moment they are voting.
Therefore the neutrality of the electoral process is not insured.
To sum up:
1. The secrecy of opinions isn't preserved.
2. The fairness of voting devices is not insured.
3. The neutrality of the electoral process is not insured.
The foundations of democracy are clearly shattered by such failures in an electoral system.
For the country which likes to claim to be the largest democracy in the world, it's a shame.
If America is the greatest country in the world, with it's freedoms and the right to vote, why can't they decide on a consistent form of voting? It seems to be, watching from the outside, there were so many different ways to vote, depending on where you were, whether it was electronic voting machines (and each of those were from different vendors)or paper ballots. In addition, the whole confusion and legal challenges to "provisional" and "absentee" ballots just muddied the waters even further. I also find it scary that something so important as voting can be done using hap-hazard machinery which is unauditable and unreliable. Hearing some of the stories coming from the different news agencies (CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.), it almost sounds like the voting system is a 3rd world style system.
What's needed is a voting system that's consistent across the country with checks and balances to ensure audit trails. I know that Americans take pride in the fact they vote for their government. Their system needs to be first class to ensure their vote doesn't become a circus. The American government need to ensure validity of the vote by ensuring voting is done in a consistent manner across the country, and if that is electronic voting, then they need to ensure the voting results are NOT subject to fraud or manipulation.
Please note this is not a "bashing America" rant, but the zaniness about electronic voting has to stop!
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Sorry to disappoint you.
What I find amazing is that the fuss is being made only after election day. Apparently, the people of the USA were perfectly at ease with votes being counted by unreliable machines - until the results of the elections came in. Now that the results are in, they are suddenly casting doubt on the validity of these results. If there was any doubt about the integrity of the election results, this should have been addressed before the first vote was cast.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Don't sweat it, sour grapes is simply a psychological coping mechanism and serves as an acceptable, safe outlet.
Where do they take the exit polls at? In Iowa, I think that they did the exit polling in Des Moines - the states "urban" Democratic area, but not in the rural areas. If this was done across the country, would it have been enough to show one candidate winning the exit polling while another candidate wins the vote?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Note that the link at the top of the main page for credit card donations only accepts US addresses. If you are like me from another country that belives this election will influence us all, you can find a PayPal link here that will allow international payments.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I was pretty excited to see that Virginia wasn't using Diebold machines in the voting booths. I was happy to see the WinVote machines. They looked slick, they worked fine and I had no complaints.
This morning I looked into the company and found out that it is run by 2 former Diebold executives.
I really don't like that too much.
I thought FOI applied only to getting data from Federal agencies. Why would states be compelled to fulfill FOIA requests?
We need a voter-verifiable paper receipt printed out by these machines that ensures manual recounts and spot-checks can occur without any hint of vote count fraud. The fact that there is any controversy in this area is indicative of just how sloppy we as a country have become in protecting our fundamental processes of government. We've put men on the moon, we have the expertise to put printers in voting machines.
Have you donated to the EFF lately?
My journal
From outside the United States "American democracy" is right up there with "jumbo shrimp" and "plastic glass".
Quite true, because I simply cannot afford getting that 40% of my salary back that I used to have before this asshole took power and did nothing while the economy slammed into an iceberg.
No I don't think the election was rigged, but I do think that people in this country are incredibly naive. The top two issues for Bush supported were "Morals" and "Iraq." In other words the GOP has convinced them that if Kerry won then we'd be eaten by wolves and sodomized by packs of roaming gays.
I'm shopping around for a new country to call home. This one has gone absolutely crazy.
Now, suddenly, only two states have a vote count which is wildly divergent from the exit polling. Those states are Ohio and Florida.
Actually, the results were quite in line with the exit polls. (Florida, Ohio)
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
There's a lot of people who are arguing that the election was 'stolen' by Diebold others who say that things are just fine...
The bottom line is -- until we look and until there's a paper trail we just don't know.
For all we know, Diebold could be sucking votes out of the system like a cancer sucking the life out of a body. Do we just turn our heads and not go to the doctor for a test? We do need to know what happened in an objective, non-partisan manner. Perhaps Bev Harris is the one to do that, maybe not, but it needs to be done.
Additionally, we need to fix the voting system. We need to form a true non-partisan grass roots effort to get accountability back into the system. I don't want people to ever question the results of an election. We need to have ballot initiatives lawsuits, whatever. I'm not an expert on how to force these changes on the voting system, but I'm willing to learn and it needs to be done.
Everyone please submit this as a news tip to CNN, here I want to see this make it into the mainstream media. The average person on the street needs to know about this!
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
Excuse me, the vote was not as I stated conducted completely on Diebold machines. But that's hardly the issue.
You don't need to control all the voting machines to swing 1% of the votes. You only need a few counties. A few counties and no audit logs. If history tells this election truthfully, it will be the election of "Nobody Knows Who Won".
By lying?
No, actually, I was up until 5AM ET.
And, uh, the networks didn't "revise" anything. The problem was that pre-election polling in states like Ohio made some people, like Zogby, pretty damned sure Ohio was a gimme for Kerry. But they were wrong. And the exit polling showed that.
Now let me get this straight: you're alleging that the major networks changed their exit polling figures, i.e., purposely falsified results, to make the exit poll numbers match the election outcome?
Wow. Do you use Reynolds or a generic brand for your hat?
I hate to tell you this, but I watched the AP returns on Ohio from the poll close to 100% precincts reporting, and the exit polls more or less mirrored the results the whole time.
But now people like Zogby are having to are having to eat their hats:
"We feel strongly that our pre-election polls were accurate on virtually every state. Our predictions on many of the key battleground states like Ohio and Florida were within the margin of error. I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn't materialize."
I did a couple of searches on my own, and found this (old) article: http://slate.msn.com/id/2086455/.
It's basically about Diebold machines being flaky pieces of crap, but most notably, there's this quote:
Anyhow, I find it amusing that a pro OpenSource article is on a Microsoft site (kind of like finding a supremely pro Microsoft article on Slashdot..
- - - -
KickingDragon
This is why bush won
http://homepage.mac.com/the_macman/voting_M.wmv
So before you flame or mod me, read my post.
How many of you have a clue as to how an election is run? How many of you have a clue as to the repeatability of recount results? How many of you have taken the time to call the elections office before an election and sign up as a pollworker? How many of you have gone to the courthouse and witnessed the *public* logic and accuracy tests of the ballot counters before and after the elections. Never heard of such a thing? Doesn't surprise me.
I worked in the elections business for 3 years, and not for Diebold. I was project leader designing a high speed central count machine. I designed the read heads and the digital logic. I've been to probably 10-12 elections across the country and Canada. What I've seen consistantly is dedicated, hardworking and impartial people running the elections. These people bust their butt to do a fast and accurate job election night, and they continue the effort until the election results are certified, usually a couple weeks later. The results are accurate and repeatable. Most states have laws requiring manditory recounts in elections that are close. The ballot counting process is considerably more accurate than the recount threshold.
What blackboxvoting.org is doing will undoubtably (based on my observations) just result in a gigantic waste of time and effort. I can only imagine that it's a grandstanding effort to raise their visibility. It will ulimately result in questions as to their credibility.
If you have questions about the election process, by all means call your elections office and talk to the people there, go to the public equipment tests and ask questions. You will find out for yourself that you are dealing with people that do a good job and produce accurate results.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
There are no Federal elections in the United States; all elections occur at the State level or below. Since the Federal Government doesn't run elections, they won't have any documentmation about them.
As a matter of fact, it's a historical accident that the People vote for President at all:
Perhaps it would be better for everyone if the State legislatures just nominated the Electors themselves instead of leaving it to the People.
Which elector is this? I live in Colorado, and check the newspapers' websites daily, and have not heard of anything like this here. In West Virginia, yes, but not in Colorado. Could you cite a source, please?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
(See my other post here)
So, are you, too, alleging that CNN falsified its exit polling numbers? Because that's what i get from your allegations.
Is it that hard to believe that polling might have indicated one thing in certain areas and another thing in others? The exit polling dipped and rose with the actual election returns, and there was always a ~+/-5% margin of error.
But the final, aggregated numbers more or less match the actual results. Are you saying that CNN has fudged these to match, i.e., lying about the numbers, meaning they are manufacturing artificial exit poll data? And if you are, what possible motivation would they have to do that?
If there was a big discrepancy, they'd (not to mention the $300 million Kerry campaign) want to be all the fuck over it...ESPECIALLY in the state that is deciding the election.
So I hate to break it to you, but Bush won, and there was nothing fishy to speak of going on.
(Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Bush.)
Uhh, no... learn how the electoral college works dude.
Subject of parent should read "The discrepancy was slight".
I don't believe there is a law that says concession is a finality. I imagine if we find otherwise, Kerry could easily step up and assert his presidency. He conceded for the same reason Al Gore did, out of concern for the well-being of a divided country; and not because he necessarily thought he had truly lost.
What?
They just received a response:
Dear BlackBoxVoting.org,
Your name sounds very ominous. Are you a terrorist organization? No matter, we will soon find out.
Your request for audit logs and other miscellaneous data has been rejected. We feel that providing this information to the public would allow terrorists a clear view inside our political process, which they might then use to influence future elections. We cannot allow that to happen, therefore, the logs will be kept under lock and key until a time far in the future when no one today will be alive to be held accountable for any mistakes.
In addition, we feel your questioning of the voting process undermines the public's faith in our democratic system and we wouldn't want any facts or numbers to confuse people and cause them to lose faith, would we? We also feel that no one should ever question the government, because anyone who does so is obviously out to destroy America and that's just wrong. Who does that?
The FBI, CIA, NSA, DOD, IRS, SEC, DHS, AFSPC, ANG, ATF, BOP, CBIAC, CDC, and OSHA will all be paying you a visit to "straighten things out."
Thank you for your time.
Your Government.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Because the United States is not one country, but is a federation of fifty countries. Each country (called a "state") is completely at liberty to choose whatever method of appointing Presidential Electors as they want. According to the US Constitution, the People don't even have a say-- the Legislature of each State gets to choose the method of appointing Electors.
I'm OK with that. If the software is certified for a particular set of Windows + patches, then on election night I want it running on that exact platform - not that system +/- a few minor "adjustments".
and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines.
One detail left out: did it answer calls from every phone number in existence, or just the ones on an approved list?
I don't mean to imply that everything was hunky-dorey, but the facts you mentioned (on their own) don't necessarily mean that the system was compromised.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You're assuming that exit polling is an unbiased process; it isn't.
People don't have to talk to exit pollers, they can tell them to get stuffed. I imagine Republican voters are more likely to do that (perceiving the media -- especially PBS -- as left-leaning and not worth wasting their breath on) than Democrats.
People can also lie to exit pollers, too, for similar reasons, or to avoid (perceived) peer pressure (a Republican voting in a predominantly Democrat precinct, say). There are reasons that the balloting process is private -- exit polls violate that privacy. Sure, some people don't care, but you're not going to get an accurate exit poll from those that do.
-- Alastair
they could find all the evidence they need of record tampering... of votes being miscast... of these machines being totally unfit for the democratic process....
I think the totals will prove correct enough to give Bush the presidency. Unfortunately there's no law against forcing voters in opposition precincts to wait in longer lines than everyone else. I heard on CNN that many in Ohio waited over 9 hours to vote. We can claim election fraud but the law provides no remedy if our claims prove correct. All that matters is votes cast. So you're right of course.
and you would never see anything about it in the mainstream media....
Yeah. They're pretty well forced to be either nonpartisan or agree with the government. Plus it's not economical to piss off half your viewers. Glad we have the independent media.
Watch them take 4 years to hand over all the requested information.
Anonymous coward (aptly named), YOU get a clue. Do you honestly think that either the Republocrats or the Demoblicans would hand back a victory over this issue?
Or do you think it's just whining after the fact?
Do you maybe think that the DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION is a LITTLE TOO LATE to be pulling this crap? JUST A THOUGHT.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
As a non-American, that is what boggles the mind.
With everything going on, the election is decided on "moral issues"? Me no understand...although, you gotta hand it to Bush's campaign people for realizing near the end that it was the only type of campaign they could win.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
During the election, someone should have set himself up in a public phone booth somewhere (in oreder to be untraceable later), hacked the Windows server (god knows it's easy enough), and hacked some of the votes to produce wild results such as Nader winning Florida and Ohio, so that fraud would have been obvious....
Or maybe that is in fact what happened, except that the hackers were sitting in Diebold's offices, with a hack to the servers on the one side and a line to karl Rove on the other. Would it really have been so difficult to "tweak" the results so that , for example, for every 1 Democratic vote, 0.05 votes, or even 0.005 votes were given to the Republicans, but only counted when it reached a whole number? Since this would produce the off chance that there would be more votes than registered voters, maybe it would have simply been easier to subtract 0.0005 Democratic votes for every Republican vote but only make it count once it reached a whole number.
Any beginning programmer could do this, and a good one could hide the code, say in the firmware or hardware of the Diebold voting machines.
... if all the people that voted electronically voted for the current minority candidate, would the results be different?
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that the answer is yes. Then you have a problem. Not only is the vote counting methodology used in the electronic systems fairly easy to subvert, but the methods to do so are a.) well published, and b.) done correctly, nearly impossible to detect. And that discounts other rigging methods (if (date == ELECTION_DAY) { tmp = MAX(bush.votes, kerry.votes); kerry.votes = MIN(bush.votes, kerry.votes); bush.votes = tmp; } or if (rand()/RAND_MAX 0.49) { kerry.votes++; } else { bush.votes++; } ).
So what are you going to do? Cleverly, manual recount is out of the question. Throw another $4 billion at getting it done right? I doubt that. Now is a great time for voter fraud because nobody has the stomach for "another Florida". I'm sure most would just as well assume not to look into it.
Even if there was fraud in the electronic systems and we discounted them entirely, a frightening number of people still voted for Bush. Considering his past performance you can only conclude that there's a fairly large portion of the voting populace that thought Bush was the best candidate and would likely welcome the fraud (based on their general acceptance of fraud and perjury perpetrated by the candidate during the execution of his job) if it helped him win.
Chalk one up for all those "terrorists" out there. They wanted Bush to win so badly. I'm sure they had no direct influence on the election, but they'll be pleased with the result all the same.
And here's to sticking it to the rest of the world, America! Allies? Friends? BAH! What do we need them for? Bush is already his own best friend! Really, who would Jesus bomb?
Where touch screens were used, people had to wait in line hours and hours. Many gave up.
The lack of a paper trail is completely wrong. WE all know how fallable hardware and software can be.
My voting experience for the last few elections has been based on 30 year old technology and works great.
Quincy uses paper ballots; you use a felt marker to connect a line on an arrow pointing towards your candidate.
The paper is legal size (larger than 8.5 x 11) so there's plenty of room. No butterfly ballot needed.
They ask for your name/address (but no id) before giving you the ballot. A second check, different people, before giving the ballot to the machine.
The machine reads the ballot (presumably) and displays a satisfying ballot count (I was number 138 at 8am yesterday).
No hanging chads. Simple, proven optical technology. Recounts just a matter of refeeding in the ballots.
I can't see how touch screens would be any faster, even in an ideal world. Imagine what it'll be like in a couple of years, after those touch screens have gotten bounced around a few times ... I hate touch screens on ATMs and banks have the money to keep them properly repaired.
I think this country needs voting reform even before it needs true campaign reform. No voting, short of a face-to-face visible show of hands, will ever be secure or perfect ... but paper ballots and simple technology is much more confidence inspiring than these touch screens. America should standardize on simple, effective, confidence inspiring methods.
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
Pollsters generally understand this. Nearly random sampling is difficult and uneconomical. The results you normally see are not exact ratios of people polled, but are a prediction based on the polls that attempts to remove bias. Poll X people in a representative sampling of precincts, take a guess about the people who refused to take your poll, and scale according to turnout predictions. The final result amounts to an educated guess backed partly by statistics.
It will be interesting to see if they still exist. Or for that matter if they ever existed. At no time, did I hear diebold state that they had a log file available on each machine that record the info.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not even so concerned with overturning a bush presidency (although I will admit that from my point of view that would be sweet)
Id just like to see america understand the nature of these machines... that they are not safe and reliable... that there are security holes and that there is no accountability in the long run.
thats all really...
they don't even have to find evidence of intentional fraud... hell they could even find that 100,000 kerry votes were invalid for all I care as long as it leads to an accountable voting system in the future.
but I don't hold out too much hope of that happening.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Take a look at Miami-Dade ... IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
... though Diebold made sure to design their equipment to be impossible to audit, a deliberate design decision in stark contrast to the ATMs they manufacture as their core business.
... again, as a deliberate design decision, in contrast with other banking equipment Diebold manufactures.
... abdicating fully their position as our democracies watchdog and a check and balance on the government.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your reason.
The Diebold touchscreens are a bit of a red herring. Yes, they are a concern and should be audited (and auditable)
The Diebold tabulators are the real concern. Like the touchscreen machines, they produce no paper trail and are difficult or impossible to audit
The tabulators are the big computers that collect millions of votes and tallies them up. They are used to count votes from touch screens, as well as from other precincts using everything from op-scan sheets to punch cards. A two digit back door code will let you change voting totals, with absolutely no evidence that you've done so.
In every other country, when exit polls differ significantly from the official results, it is generally considered a pretty strong indicator of voter fraud. In the United States, CNN simply changes their polling data to match the official result
I have no idea if the elections in Ohio and Florida were rigged, or if Bush won legitimately. I truly hope it is the latter. I don't expect the US to emerge from four more years with much intact in the way of its economy and influence in the world, much less with many of the social gains of the last quarter century still intact, but it would be far worse for America if Bush stole this election than if he won it legitimately.
The problem is, with machines that are designed to be impossible to audit, and with tabulators that have a software feature designed to facilitate fraud, we can't know.
Ever.
And that is terribly disturbing.
To any critically thinking mind, the legitimacy of this entire election is serious doubt, and would have been irrespective of who won. Using unauditable equipment in an election undermines the entire process at its most fundamental level, and does more to destabilize the political climate in America than a thousand bin Ladens could possibly ever achieve.
Diebold and others who produce similarly shoddy election equipment need to be put out of business, immediately and perminently.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I for one welcome our newly re-elected ape overlord
Same thing here. Find and fix the problems now, when the race has been conceded, and the result isn't in doubt, so that, when we need to be able to count on the system to count every vote, we can.
Like I said, the only place in Iowa that I heard that they were doing was Des Moines - and Des Moines is not representative of the whole state.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
> There were no electors on my ballot
The electors were listed by name on my ballot.
It is very clear that the vote is for the electors for a given presidential candidate, and NOT for a
president and vice president. In fact, the vice presidents were not even named on my ballot. Just the candidate and his electors.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It just accurately represents the fully aggregated results of ALL exit polling. No one will answer this question: What, exactly, are you alleging? People keep saying "revised" or "modified". Please answer this for me, so I understand you clearly: Are you suggesting that CNN and/or other organizations have falsified exit poll data or otherwise provided incorrect, artificiual, or manufactured exit poll numbers such that it "matches" the election results? Yes or no. If yes, what POSSIBLE motivation would CNN have to falsify exit polls, ESPECIALLY in the state on which the entire election hinged? Why would the Kerry campaign, a $300M, two year operation do absolutely nothing about it?
Forget the whining Democrats who apparently can't campaign themselves out of a wet paper bag. Forget that Diebold's CEO is apparently an idiot. The point is, This is not a partisan issue, friends, its called basic Democracy. If we as a country can't trust our elections, there will eventually be serious, destabilizng consequences. - Very bad for business.
Why can't people just accept that they lost and move on? No, they're going to waste tons of money and resources. Why don't you start trying to figure out how you can position Hillary to win in 2008?
Bev Harris and BlackboxVoting are certainly doing great work in exposing fraud and corruption among DRE voting machine makers (and other types, for that matter).
But the real solution to the problem, long term, past the current election, is to get electronic voting machines based on open source code, and that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. It just so happens that there's an organization for that purpose that could really use some assistance (financial and otherwise) right now: the Open Voting Consortium.
Just to be extra-sexy, our reference system uses Linux and Python :-).
BTW. Some readers will think: "What's wrong with plain old paper and pencil?" Actually, there's not so much wrong with that. I just used a pencil to vote in Massachusetts yesterday, and it worked great. Paper ballot. Zero line at the polls. Perfectly transparent. Great security (just look at that padlock on the ballot box).
But electronic machines do have a few good things, as long as their source code is open and the print out paper ballots after selections are made: Multi-lingual; blind accessible (using audio interface) and special interfaces for motor-impaired voters; large fonts for vision impaired voters; prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes.
Buy Text Processing in Python
. . . if they would be doing this if Kerry had won. If so, then what they're doing is a laudible effort to vet the federal election system, point out where it can be improved, and help restore people's confidence in it.
If not, then it's nothing more than a petty attempt to make as many people (the folks that have to gather all the data for these requests. Remember them?) as possible just as miserable as possible for nothing more than a meaningless act of political revenge.
I voted for Senator Kerry, and I suspect I know how someone like him would react to something like this, supposedly done in his name.
Regards;
"Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit."
So what? The networks are not an official part of the election process. They can say anything they want, it is not legally binding in any way. Until each state certifies it's results (over the next few weeks), there are NO official results.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Here's the thing -- for the first time, it's possible that a single, clever hacker slightly altered the returns across the state of Florida to convincingly shift the outcome by a percent or two. I agree with you that most likely it didn't happen -- but damn, there's just no way of knowing, is there? The statement "there is not wholesale or widespread fraud in the election" is one that not you, nor anyone else can support right now. The only way to do that is to sniff around, check all the logs and records and whatever, and see if anything interesting pops up.
A better way to phrase it would be, "we'll never know if there was wholesale or widespread fraud in the election, but since it looks like he won, and it's certainly credible that he did, why don't we just go with it?"
That sentiment makes a lot of sense -- but I'm still glad they're checking into it as best they can.
So... we all do seem to realise that this initiative lacks immediate means to process & analyse large volumes of data involved in this audit. My suggestion is...
:)
Search for Election Voting Fraud @ home !
...following in the footsteps of SETI@Home, this network will enable rapid analysis of voting records through distributed computing. So, who's gonna write the app?
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
And if you argue that one should only enforce your beliefs on oneself, you're forgetting that the Bible has a line saying that allowing your fellow man to proceed to damnation by doing nothing or saying nothing condemns you as well. To me, speaking one's mind in a rational and non-accusational manner is sufficient, but there are those who believe that one must act by enforcing laws on morality, even on issues which do not effect them directly.
You may claim that the base assumptions are irrational. However, I don't think there's a way to prove it either way.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged
And why do you hope this? Is it that you don't like the results? Or do you believe that the election was rigged and want it to be proven? And by the way. The Audit can still be a success if it proves the election wasn't rigged, if there was no fraud. So don't autmatically claim that the audit has failed if they didn't find and fraud. Cause there probably isn't any.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
*shrug* How different is that from the current state of affairs? All that a church wedding does is get you wedded in the eyes of the Church. Heck, a few systems don't even require a wedding to be married. Even the Catholic system only requires the two people getting married and one witness. The actual secular Church involvement is largely bookkeeping, recording the marriage and ensuring that it's legit (no bigamy, close blood relationship, shotgun wedding...). You can be wedded in the name of whatever church you choose, and as many times as you choose, but until you get your marriage certificate signed by city hall, you're not married in the eyes of the State. I'm cool with that. The religious ceremony involves spiritual bindings and the legal ceremony involves legal bindings. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Give unto God what is God's.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Well, from the poster in his book. The poster portrays Bush and Kerry as a boxing match. A banner reads, "Every citizen guaranteed a vote.*" The footnote reads "* Vote not guaranteed to count."
except you just take votes, only a handful out of every thousand. Kinda like in Office Space (or Superman 3). obviously, too much one way would be suspicious.
Is this being paranoid? maybe, but Diebold doesn't exactly inspire trust. they could stop all complaints by opening up their machines for independent review & allowing a paper trail (without which their can be no real recounts).
Nice going. There have been about a dozen posts from Republicans who want to kill any investigation of the machines by claiming that only "Democrat wackos" will "crawl out of the woodwork". I was relieved to see that the Democrats were in fact pretty reasonable, with only one stupid comment (claiming that any error would require the whole election to be re-run).
Unless you are also a Republican trying to sabotage this investigation with a fake post, you have damaged your own cause.
Face it. Kerry lost, despite my and your vote for him. He lost by a large enough margin that there is no plausable way that any error by the Diebold machines in Ohio could have changed his loss (it would require those precients to be magically 70/30 for Kerry while all others in Ohio appear to be 51/49 for Bush).
The first thing for everybody to do it admit NOW that challenging these machines is NOT challenging the election and drown out all the rabid Republicans who are trying as we speak to stop any attempts to get rid of these illegal machines by making claims that the challenge is from sore-loser Democrats and should be ignored.
Diebold and friends have in all likelihood stolen the most important election of our lifetime. We never know for certain, because the real results of the election may have deleted forever, with a few presses of a backspace key.
Others have already said the obvious: the exit polls don't match up to the Diebold tabulations. The record number of new voters all casting ballots for an embattled incumbent seems incredibly unlikely. In my mind, this portents a new era in American politics: the most cunning cheater always wins. And with the Republicans gaining more and more ground thanks to Diebold and other dirty tricks, they'll be the ones in the best position to cheat.
We can be certain that the Republican's new electronic apparatus will entrench itself further and grow in sophistication--unless it is stopped right now. Diebold will be emboldened by this victory, and the people Diebold put in power won't lift a finger to stop it. In few short years, even the Supreme Court will probably be stacked with men who essentially owe their jobs to Diebold.
The media is filled with cowards will we now shift to the right in response to the wind. If the Diebold story doesn't make huge headlines now, then it never will.
What difference does it make it you can get record number of people to the polls if an evil nazi-nerd can push a button and erase all those votes?
Reform of the election process should become everyone's #1 issue. Protests of epic proportions are needed, because as of right now, all the suffrage gained since the dawn of the Union is in peril.
Right now, no one aside from Diebold has the right to vote. Not even the white landowners.
www.georgewbush.com
www.georgebush.com
Are == no longer == accesible from outside of the United States.
Another very happy news are looming out
just few hours after the election.
According to Reuters U.S. strategic military petroleum reserves are being filled causing mayor drain in normal oil flow (and driving price of oil sky high) inspite the fact that every driller is sucking crude like crazy, Reuters is predicting that "commander in chief" will be pretty agressive in the middle east soon.
It is refresing to see some realistic responses from at least some Republicans and Democrats.
I voted for Kerry. HE LOST! And I know it.
I serioulsly distrust these machines because I have rudimentary knowledge of how computers work and are designed and programmed. Not because I think Kerry could have won, or that I want the election challenged, or because I am a terrorist bent on starting a civil war, or because I am a "bitter sore loser".
Unfortunately too many people are trying to squash any investigation of these machines by saying it is "sore loser Democrats who don't know when to give up" doing it. And it does not help that there are a some Democrats who are acting exactly this way. Reading some of the responses to this article, I count at least 25 (browing at +2) where Republicans are basically saying "this is sore-losers and conspiracy theorists" and 8 actual rabid Democrats saying "it was a conspiracy and the election should be challenged". Counter this with about maybe 1 Democrat agreeing with me (not counting responses) and your post which is the first Republican one that questions the machines. This is not good, the loud and illogical extremists on both sides are going to kill any support for real investigation of these machines, which incidentally can be fixed just as easily by a Democrat to deliver a Democrat victory as by a Republican. Maybe even easier, if Slashdot is any indication the people with the necessary knowledge to work for these companies and sneak in code seems to slant pretty far left!
I am hoping that there can be bi-partisan support of people who all agree "Kerry lost the election but that does not mean these machines work". Any idea how to get sensible claims out above all the noise?
Seems to me we could fairly easily do a pretty good job of verifying the vote. Here's how we'd handle a single vote for a single community of voters (whether a precinct or the whole country):
Here are some consequences:
There are a few problems with this; for one thing I don't know if whether a given person has voted is supposed to be public information; for another it would be hard to look for illegal voters. But I think this is a big improvement over the black box we have now!
Your question is an extremely valid one. The issue is that according to our Constitution, the voting process is governed not by the federal government, but by the states. And the states often farm out decisions on equipment and small decisions to counties and towns. The only way to have a unified voting system with one set of equipment, rules and staff would be to amend the Constitution to give the federal government control over the election process.
This is an amendment that I would support, but changing the Constitution is a difficult process and I wouldn't hold my breath on it coming through any day soon.
But yeah, basically, it happens the way it does because it's illegal for it to happen any other way.
--
RumorsDaily
Giving the voter proof of who they voted for defeats the purpose of secret ballots: you can coerce somebody to vote in a certain way and to present you with the proof that they did. It generally is public information whether or not a person voted in a given election. They check you off in a great big book, and if you're a politician and haven't voted, they hassle you for it.
Lying to pollsters would seem especially likely if one of the candidates has publicly declared that if you're not with him, you're with the terrorists. It's even more likely if that candidate's people have a record of hauling people off to camps for years without access to lawyers or trials.
I wasn't accosted by any exit pollster, but if I had been, I'd have been quite tempted to say that I'd voted for the non-terrorist candidate. After all, I don't really know who the supposed pollster is reporting to, or whether they might recognize me.
I'd think that any sensible person might be nervous about admitting to a stranger to being "with the terrorists", as our president would describe us.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And want the aluminum hats off? The post you cite is from Diebold, so just how trustworthy is it? An independent source would be more appropriate. Also, the fact that the Diebold CEO is pro-Bush is troublesome at least. There is no objective reason to suspect him of anything worse than bad judgement in public statments, but ... for the tin foil hat crowd, it couldn't look much worse now, could it.
Your argument for open source code is good, but the custodian idea is problematic. How would you insure non-partisanship in the custodian?
In the mean time we appear to be stuck with the sock puppet for another four years.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I'm thinking of starting an open source project that does just this. Thinking of going the cheap route and doing it in linux. Unfortunatly I don't really know linux, so I have to put the system together with Visual Basic and VC++ and ask some open sourcers to port it.
Anyway, I see it printing out two copies of the ballot. One copy is kept by the voter, the other is given to the pollworker. The ballot is also xfered to an electronic 'ballot box' (aka local server)
When the polling place closes, the signed and PGPed electronic votes are sent to the master tabulator and the paper ballots are stored under lock and key.
In the event the electronic results are challanged, the paper ballots can be used.
In the event the paper ballots go missing, voters can be contacted usually by mail to send in a photocopy of their ballot.
All paper ballots will have a text version of the votes as well as a Code 39 barcode version with the text printed underneith.
The polling place will have a dedicated barcode scanner that can be used to make sure the barcode matches the text.
Keep in mind though that the code 39 font I will made for this system will include the symbol's letter undernieth the symbol. This is built into the font, not the program.
Any comment's suggestions?
This is totally doable in Visual Basic, but I have security concerns with windows.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
I find it amazing that a state like Mississippi which voted to ban gay marriage by huge majority still had a comparably close race for president. So it must be something else.
It's not inconsistent at all.
There are a number of issues that might be important to a voter. Potential voters are not a unified mass with identical opinions, or a collection of a small number of such masses of clones. Instead, each individual has a distinct opinion, and a distinct importance weighting, on each issue.
Once people have come out to vote, they will vote their opinion, not just on the issue that decided their presidential choice, but on every issue on which they have a preference, regardless of how strong the preference or how much importance they hang on the issue.
For a (possibly small) fraction of the voters the gay marriage thing is a very important issue. For some it would make the election important enough to go vote even if they otherwise would have skipped it. For others (probably far more) it would swing their vote to a candidate they would have opposed if the issue had not been in play and they'd decided on the next most important issue.
But there are a lot of people for whom their presidential choice was made on other issues - War, Economy, Taxes, Health Care, Education, Anti-terrorism, anti-anti-terrorism-side-effects, etc. - who also have an opinion on gay marriage. A lot of such people might have voted for Kerry for president but against gay marriage.
There aren't two sides to an issue. At the US federal level there are hundreds of millions to each of many issues. There may be a LOT of clustering. But to assume the voters are identical clones of a handfull of stereotypes is to make the same mistake as the Media make when they say, for instance, that ALL Boomers are drug-swilling hedonists and ALL gen-Xers are Punks in business suits, that ALL blacks are gangsters, and so on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I liked the polls where i live, great big poster sized interface that has a bunch of buttons with lights, they blow up the election poll to poster sized put plastic over it and put it over the inteface such that the options line up with the buttons, you push the candidates name an arrow lights up next to it, you want to change your vote press his name again, arrow disappears and you push your new choice. Worked great and was fast and easy to use.
He did that in a 2003 fundraising letter in his capacity as private citizen, not as the head of Diebold. He also realized his mistake, and banned Diebold election employees (including himself) from all political activities except voting.
How stupid would he have to be to try to rig the election, when everyone in the world is watching, when getting caught means jail time and the loss of his reputation and the loss of the Presidency for his party for at least four years and probably more? He'd have to be stupid and insane.
That's one reason why the exit polls were not supposed to be published. They aren't statistically valid, since people in one time period may tend to vote all one way. For instance, I understand that women tend to vote early in the day, while men tend to do vote later. Urban areas are easier to exit poll, and that may have been who was reported.
The process was designed to be difficult to verify, so WHY should it be trusted?
It should be trusted because thousands of grandmothers are watching it. It should be trusted because it's all we've got. We must be diligent and make sure it doesn't get corrupted, but there's no need to assume it's a sham without any evidence.
sigs, as if you care.
That could give a whole new shade of meaning to "War Dialing".
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So why does some hat either steal or pay some miscreants some cash to steal a diebold voting machine? Then one could perform at their leisure a true audit.
That's a good name--ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
I think the networks had an interest in making the election look closer than it was (and by extension Zorgby, too) Perhaps more people stayed up, like you did, to watch the results precisely because of the reported closeness of the race. As far as tinfoil hats- just because one paranoid, it doesn't mean somebody isn't out to get you- The deception may be more subtle, and from a different source, but I wouldn't let the press off scott-free
Would they be able to see how I voted if they got their hands on this information?
I get receipts from the gas pump, the ATM, and self serve checkouts. Why in the world can't an electronic voting machine produce 2 pieces of paper: one for me and one as a record for audit purposes? If nothing else, it seems Diebold is missing a revenue opportunity here. Make this an add on deluxe feature or something. There's a huge install base of these machines right now. If they don't do it someone else will.
We need to determine whether or not vote-rigging or ballot-stuffing has occurred, and obtain conditions for future elections so that election-rigging is not possible in the future.
I suspect that the only way to make that determination will be to obtain the design information (source code, memos, diagrams, schematic drawings, etc.) for the election machinery, and open them to expert examination. I suspect we could easily find a few hundred PhD's who would be willing to examine the designs. So what is needed is to get the machinery and the design information into a forum where it can be examined.
I'm not sure how that can be done. Perhaps, a suit could be filed alledging election-rigging. Then, the discovery process could be used to obtain the evidence.
I'm thinking of starting an open source project that does just this. Thinking of going the cheap route and doing it in linux. Unfortunatly I don't really know linux, so I have to put the system together with Visual Basic and VC++ and ask some open sourcers to port it.
You want to write a good and secure program, but don't want to spend time learning how to make it work on a correct OS ??
That's strange. There's nothing difficult with Linux, if you want to make that kind of program you should at least ready to spend that time.
wtf.n0x.org
Electronic voting fraud is more than possible, it's inevitable. Did it occur in this election? Unless a group with a lot of skill can get unlimited access to each sort of machine and acquire the source code used in the machines for this election (not the old Diebold source that was leaked), we will probably never know.
As for fraud, it wouldn't have to be a conspiracy at all. A conspiracy means a group of more than one. Yet in a case like this, a single coder with access to the voting machines, say, someone working for Diebold, could throw an entire national election.
If the code were self modifying and obfuscated it could be very difficult to detect. Especially as the Diebold code used in this election has never been publicly scrutinized and may never be. And as the system is running Windows, it will have nearly endless areas in which an illicit bit of code could be inserted.
This single hacker could write a very small bit of code with any number of tests and checks to insure it only ran during an actual election. It could also have tests to insure it only skewed votes in districts with little oversight. I've only given it a moment's thought, but I've come up with a few good tests, I'm sure a bit of thought and intimate knowledge of voting procedures could devise even better ones.
Most obviously, these systems certainly have clocks, so the illicit code could wait until November 2nd. Then it could check for very complex schedules of events that only occur during an actual election. For example, the machine being turned on for many hours, yet only being asked to record a vote once a minute or less, on average.
A simple test like that could get past most quality assurance testing efforts. Most tests would fail to activate the hidden application because QA testers usually run through a testing process much faster than actual users (voters) use the machines. The hidden application could combine those tests with a bunch of other tests.
The illicit code could be designed to only skew the voting when the votes for a certain candidate (Bush) were overwhelming. Meaning it would never skew results in the districts strongly the other way, or districts with close finishes. So the districts with most of the monitoring would never have their votes altered.
But in each strongly republican district, this sort of check would change the tally to give Bush just a slightly larger percentage of votes than were actually cast.. I suspect few people would give a moment's thought to Bush winning a strongly republican district by 65% instead of 60%.
Yet skewing results exclusively in strongly republican districts could shift state-wide election totals by a percentage point or more. A close election such as those seen in any number of states this year could be stolen by just such an effort.
The system could have further checks to insure it was never activated when being tested or monitored. It could wait to skew results until it was uploading data back to the source. That source machine could have an otherwise innocuous vendor setting that the illicit application would recognize as the trigger to skew results.
Such a system could even potentially print extra paper receipts to cover its tracks in the case of a cursory audit. But that would probably not even be necessary. Because recounts cost candidates a lot of money. And I can't imagine a democratic candidate paying for a recount in an uncontested, heavily republican district.
This is not some nightmare scenario, if it hasn't happened yet, it is bound to happen sometime. Only by returning to some sort of user fulfilled ballot can we prevent a single hacker from fixing a national election.
The problem is that giving receipts to the voter allows vote-buying, and even extortion of voters by companies/employers/etc. Historically, in some districts, each voter was given two tokens (one for each candidate). He put one in the box (as the vote for that candidate), and kept the other. The plantation-owner would just insist on receiving the other token (the one for the candidate that the plantation-owner opposed) as a condition of continued employment.
Here we are, bickering about if there's any fraud in the election, while I'm sitting here wondering "what if there was a single event upset (SEU) in the memory of the damn machines, which resulted in a MSB flip for Bush from 0 to 1?" With semiconductors getting smaller and smaller, radiation plays a bigger role, and since we are talking about conspiracy theory and remote possibilities, here's another one to kick around...
The reason voters haven't been given proof of who they voted for is abuses that become possible given such proof -- from pay-per-vote to vote-as-boss-says-or-don't-come-back-to-work.
Okay, what's the ratio of people who voted in the exit poll to people who voted total?
Are certain people more likely to choose to take an exit poll than others?
Were the polls conducted at random throughout the state, or at specific locations?
What do you suppose the margin of error on this kind of essentially unscientific poll are? Maybe it isn't as bad as the slash-dot polls are, but they're probably not all that accurate either.
I your statement that they are "not at all statistically similar" probably isn't as accurate as you think it is.
The encumbent President who
* lost the popular vote in 2000 (winning by a hair on the basis of some very sketchy events)
* started a War on false pretenses (WMDs?)
* sent over 1000 young Americans to their death.
* and many thousands more mamed and disabled.
* not to mention many thousands of dead innocent Iraqis.
* who's Vice President's (prior?) employer received gigantic government contracts on a silver platter.
* Putting the nation into the Largest Debt ever. (20% and 420 billion dollars over budget in 03!)
All the while...
* Millions of Illegal Aliens have flooded into the country --over 12 million now make up the general population.
* the nation's Economy lost more Jobs than it has in over 70 years. Hundreds of thousands!
* average Wages are down.
* the Stock Markets have stagnated.
* Education, Health Care and Energy costs have risen multiple times more than the normal inflation rate.
* and plenty of other nasties.
And now you're telling me that he honestly earned _more_ of the popular vote? Why?
* Because homosexuals want to get married?
* Becasue he gave you a few dollars back on your tax return --and a whole lot of YOUR dollars to _millionares_?
* Becuase scientists want to use unviable fertility clinic embryos (_not_ abortion embryos) in order to try to save lives like Chris Reeves?
* Because he'll protect us better? Funny I think two big buildings were blown up on _his_ watch.
Again, you're telling me this President got _more_ of the popular vote this time around?
In an election where
* _all_ the exit poles are 5-10% "wrong"?
* in which more of the youth voted --voters well known to lean to the left.
* a larger turn out translated into more Republican votes, which has _never_ happened in history.
* thousands of new unverifiable e-voting machines have been used in, guess what, mostly Democratic and Africa American strong holds. Huh, that's odd.
...
If you haven't realized by now that this election has been rigged again, even better than the last time, then you are a dope.
Many republicans (I dare say "most" even) have listened to Limbaugh over the years, especially during presidential races. I used to listen in the 90's.
During election times, he would repeatedly suggest to his listeners that they should LIE to the exit pollers, if polled.
This is for the sole purpose of making the media look bad. Given the millions of people that have listened (or still do) to his show, it's no surprise that the exit polls would be off a few percent, artificially in favor of Kerry.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This is possibly the worst moderation I have ever read on Slashdot. There's nothing even the least bit insightful about this.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
But consider this....suppose they start an investigation of the voting process, and it is discovered that Kerry was just as fraudulant as Bush? Both candidates disqualified! Nader is the new president! Kerry wouldn't feel much better then, would he?
Qxe4
"I'm not even so concerned with overturning a bush presidency (although I will admit that from my point of view that would be sweet)"
And also very unlikely. It would be more likely that the Ohio electors would be disqualified completely, which would throw the election to the House (and Senate for VP). Bush wins (unless they also get enough House members disqualified to give a majority to the Dems; unlikely at the moment, since that would take something like 30 house seats).
Do NOT use Code 39. Or, if you do, use one of the variants that has a check digit or two.
We use Code39 here at work for some barcoding, and scanning errors happen all the time. Code128 is much more reliable, and leads to faster processing (in fact, some processes now require double scanning of some barcodes, to ensure that the scan is correct.)
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
debunked almost immediately at dailykos.com and other places. There is an 'odometer' that lists how many times the machine was used; the poll workers assumed it was a vote count and freaked. See dailykos et al. for the followups which came within an hour of the original report.
It now appears CNN changed their exit poll numbers when it looked like they didn't match the vote counts. It also seems interesting that FL and OH were the states with the exit poll discrepancies... and they use the Diebold "blackbox" voting machines, the ones where vote totals can be changed without leaving a trace.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I think your tinfoil hat may be just a shade too tight...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
They generally try to exit poll in multiple precincts with a representative sample of the state. According to here, CNN only got 28% of their exit poll data from Central Iowa (probably mostly Des Moines).
Okay, I totally agree with you and I'm definitely not telling that anyone rigged this election (and I'm not even american, so I could care less), but here is the question that I can't keep asking myself:
With systems such as the Diebold machines, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO CHECK IF THERE WAS, OR WASN'T, A FRAUD?
Look, I can think of many, many ways to scam that kind of system. Just add 50 votes for one of the candidates in each diebold machines (more than 46 000 used in this election) and you've just added 2,300,000 votes to that candidate.
These votes could be added prior to the election (database starts with 50 votes built-in), added randomly during the election process, or manually added later (it's a fsking Microsoft Access database), or when the machine "phones home" to send the results.
This is double-edged: on one hand, nobody will ever be able to prove that there was a fraud. But on the other hand, nobody will ever be able to prove that there was NO fraud either. How are you supposed to get a recount? The database will give you the same result over and over again... What's best is, all the counties who bought Diebold machines signed a deal with Diebold stating that in case of a recount, the county officials won't be able to even touch the machine, and Diebold staff will be responsible for "recounting"
So get ready for 20+ years of consipracy theories claiming that bush stole the election: nobody will EVER be able to prove the tinfoil-hat-and-not-so-tinfoil-hats theories wrong. It's funny when it's about Roswell and the moon landings; much less when it's about the American presidential election.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Like I said, Des Moines is the only place I heard about. I'd be interested to see where else they polled at. They claimed 48% from eastern Iowa (our population center). If you look at this map http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm you'll see that they got 76% of the states polls from the "blue" counties and 24% from the "red" counties.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Is there an open source voting software alternative to Diebold? A quick search at sourceforge doesn't show anything of national election quality. Is there an open source project for real voting? I'm still a student, but would donate time towards simpler coding tasks for such a project. Hell, these machines are owned by the gov't now, so they can install whatever software they like, right? I have read (prob'ly also at blackbox) that the Diebold crap runs WinXP and keeps records in Access!!!! Can't be that hard to beat. I mean, it only has to do ONE THING. This could be designed from the ground up with fair confidence of zero weaknesses, except for physical, which is where ya bring in an EE! We the people could do this!!!
I find it hard to believe only 3,000 requests is the largest. I've known people to make more then 10,000 at a time.
I lie about it just about everyday here in California just so I don't have to here another Moore-ish speech from some self-important political know-it-all. Its almost become reflex. If you jump in someone's face enough about their choices, it doesn't make them change their choice, they just change enough to get you out of their face. There are plenty of reasons to lie, some as innocent as convenience.
I remember looking at the TV images on the night of September 11, and saying "I hope this doesn't mean the end of democracy in America". (What's left of it, that is). Now, I feel prescient. This election is the last nail in the coffin of democracy.
The use of absolutely unauditable machines is unconscionable. I expected the Bushites to steal this election, just like last time, only more effectively. Now they have.
I am convinced that this election has been stolen. I do not accept Bush as a legitimate president. I never will. And those who support the use of these untraceable machines are supporting the antithesis of democracy.
Welcome to the USA, prime banana republic.
I wonder if the parent has a clue. This is not about some attempt to rig the elections by legal means. This is about whether elections will still make any sense in the future. If its possible to rig the system you could just save the money and run a random generator instead, chances are higher THAT outcome will match the will of the voter. So get out of you're partisan thinking, this is about the legitimacy of the whole process and thats got nothing to do with the outcome. By continuing to devaluate a legit audit to partisan maneuvers youre not doing any side a favour, just add more damage. Not that Id mind that... if corporate america fails to generate legitimacy once and for all at home as it already does abroad, thats a highly prefered outcome on this side of the keyboard. But it should be in your own best interest to prevent exactly that and hence you should thank bbv.org for blowing the slightest shadow of a doubt away. In case you think the prez is up for a third and fourth term, since he never got elected before... Well, sure thats another thing. To start the cover up operation right now makes perfect sense then. So, anonymous bushie, what about that?
Life has become the ideology of its absence - T.W. Adorno
I guess the election commissions are bound to deliver this data if they can. But how long will it take? What good will it be to know that Bush actually lost if we don't find out until 2007? I guess it would help ensure 2008 is fairer (if Bush hasn't been proclaimed President for Life by then :-(
SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis... ...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results.
In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.
So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits
vs.
A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits.
For full report , see link
http://www.rense.com/general59/steI.HTM/
With literally billions in contracts given away to companies (like Haliburton) without any bidding after the last 'election', and billions more available now, not thinking that the companies making voting equipment 'might' skew the outcome to get a piece of this pie is naïve. Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you?
Speaking as a board member for Blackboxvoting.org:
This is indeed going to be a hell of a lot of data, but our resources are considerable.
We were going to do this no matter WHO won. Because it's not just about the top of the ticket: more money gets tied up in local bond measures, construction projects and the like than in the "top of ticket campaigns" in many states. Check out how much money went into the California propositions, for starters.
It's also not just about the races themselves: folks, there are legal standards for the use of electronic voting machines at both the Fed and State levels. The garbage put out by Deibold for sure and probably ES&S, Sequoia and others DO NOT meet those legal standards!
But we have to prove it. For that, we need data.
We've gotten one KEY piece already: proof that King County hacked into their audit log and destroyed three hours worth of records on election night during the WA state primaries.
The fact that they COULD (on a Diebold box) proves that the gear doesn't meet legal security standards. The remaining question is "why did they hack the log?". Two possible answers:
1) It's possible the vote tally box went massively wonky, it took 'em three hours to clean up, and they didn't want to admit it had puked so they edited the log. Still an illegal-as-hell destruction of records and the fact that it's even possible is a gross condemnation of the gear in question...
2) They actually rigged the race with some crude clueless technique that left an audit trail item - so they scrubbed the log.
------
Speaking generally, this sort of "broad net" approach to FOIAs that BBV.org is undertaking is a pain, but it's how you scoop up killer documents that blow the lid off. Go watch the mostly factual movie "Erin Brokavich" for a real-world example of this.
We have a new advantage in California - Prop59 just "supercharged" our version of the FOIA (California Public Records Act) by establishing a constitutional right to public records. That will have a positive effect on the California requests.
--------
Speaking personally, I'm pretty sure Bush won it fair overall. If I'm eventually proven wrong, I don't think it'll be in Ohio, it'll be in Florida.
Full disclosure: I'm a Libertarian-leaning Republican who supported Bush over Kerry despite reservations. But I'm also a flat-out enemy of concealed-source, zero-paper-trail voting systems.
Jim March
Otherwise, what's to stop a hacker from "doubling up" multiple voters onto a single index? You'd have to pair votes with a hash whose source included voter-specific information (full name and exact time of vote would probably be sufficient) along with a random number long enough to prevent anyone malicious from brute forcing it to find out who you voted for.
Any voter can verify that his vote was counted by looking it up with his index, and can prove his vote to a third party by using the signed copy
One word: cameraphone. It's no longer very expensive or obtrusive to take a short video of yourself casting your vote. Blackmailing or bribing someone into recording their vote isn't as obvious (or as cheap) a hole as getting them to reveal their receipt and key, but it's already there.
Compare the number of respondents between the two screenshots. Number one has 1963, number two has 2020, a difference of only 57 people. Yet somehow Kerry's percentage for all categories that can be seen dropped at least 3 percent, one of them by 5 percent. 3 percent is possible if EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 57 extra people said they voted for Bush, but we all know the chances of this are basically zero. And that still doesnt explain the 5 percent difference for the first figure listed (males).
Joseph?
You mean the tally box registered a bunch of votes for Al Gore?
Article over 1 year old, merely restating what's been mentioned a million times before in this thread, that Diabold is owned by a republican, and this same republican has been donating to Bush. No fraud involved (However much I agree it's in bad taste)
Please at list read the links before you moderate them informative? +5 for this is a joke.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
The machines worked perfectly. The candidate who was supposed to get elected, did.
You want to report an election scandal, John Ashcroft will investigate this right away;
I hear Guantanamo Bay is looking for your type.
Have we ever had:
A president give the order for a terrorist attack on America?
A President lie in the State of the Union Address?
A president leak information about a CIA operative? During a time of War?
A president lie about the invasion of a foreign nation?
A VP who gives a no bid contract to his private company?
A President with a history of DUI?
A convicted felon as the Attorney General?
And we are worried about a swindled election.
OPEN YOUR EYES
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
...and blackboxvoting.org were the ones to discover it, back in Late August:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78
Quotations from that article:
"The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole":
Submitted by Bev Harris on Thu, 08/26/2004 - 11:43.
Investigations Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments."
But I assume you all already knew this...
Just got off the phone with Bev. She confirms that the PRARs started getting mailed *before* we had any clue at all whether Bush or Kerry was winning. Like I said, this was planned months ago (I oughta know, I helped plan it) and it's NOT about "crying foul over specific results".
We're more interested in the machines.
Let's be clear what's going on with this effort:
An "audit", when done properly, means using multiple pieces of information and matching them up to make sure the pieces fit right - and if they don't, figure out why.
We have basically three sources of info on what really happened last night for any given county:
1) Media reports;
2) Eyewitness reports from various election observers;
3) The FOIA (or state-level equivelent) data.
As just one example: media reports say that a Volusia County memory card went blotto last night. Observers saw the flurry of activity that surrounded this. There are also supposed to be "help desk trouble tickets" generated for any such malfunction, and the runaround needed to recreate the data (this was an optical scan Diebold county thank GOD!) should leave an audit trail.
So we'll be looking at this case from ALL angles. Carefully. The media report says it was a dead memory card, based on interviews with county elections officials. OK, no problem if true - with optical scan, you can go back to paper and recover, by hand if necessary.
But remember that in 2000, we *know* somebody attempted an inept hack of one of these same memory cards (PCMCIA). They duplicated a card, probably in a laptop on the way back from the field to county HQ and hacked the duplicate so it registered 16,022 negative votes for Gore and 4,000ish for Bush, in a precinct with 900-something voters tops.
Sure, it got caught and fixed, and somebody let Gore know in time for him to cancel his concession phone call - but the perpetrators were never caught and the county still has egg on it's face from this.
Did the same morons try something similar?
Dunno. But we'll find out. Bet on it.
Jim
I will concede that this may be true. I'm new to the area so I don't know that much about local politics. However, if people with an interest and a desire to change the outcome of an election are allowed unsecured access to the ballots, any election system would be suceptible to ballot box stuffing. (Or discarding of ballots, whatever that's called.) Even electronic voting machines that produce a paper "receipt" would be suceptible to this attack. If the ballots aren't secured, and you can't trust the people running the ballot counting machine, than all bets are off, regardless of what mechanism is used to tabulate the votes. So even if everything you said is true, I still prefer the paper ballots I used yesterday to any other mechanism.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
This is very helpful in showing what Blockboxvoting is working for--not overturning the election, but demonstrating where (or not) there are really problems with the voting systems. It is unlikely that there are problems in sufficient numbers to change the outcome, but if BBV.org is able to gather something like representative samples across the different technologies it will help the arguments on whether electronic voting is a good way to go.
eks
-- Mein Systemadminstrator hat einen großen schwarzen Moustache.
Here's an idea...
Why not create a national voter registry where all votes are uploaded / tabulated and available for review. Votes are tied to a voter id (unique to the individual) and can be reviewed by anyone. This would guarantee that at bare minimum the average joe / jane could verify that his / her vote was at least registered as they intended. It would also lend itself towards removing any chance of fraud or tampering.
I used a paper ballot but I still have no way of knowing for sure if my vote actually counted as the paper ballot is converted into an electronic request using opti-scan technology and presumably transmitted to a central server somewhere to be tallied.
Normally I would be angry at this whole subject and the content coming up on Slashdot as obviously biased tripe, but now I realize how pathetic and sad it is.
Many in this post are suggesting there was malfeasance in the election. Consider for just a moment the affect stealing the election (for someone as weak as Bush?) would have forevermore on the republican party. It would take decades for it to become a semi legitimate party again.
But the people who post to slashdot simply can't accept that their candidate lost. They have to use all of their brain power to discern some conspiracy.
A good republican would say "Great! Let them continue trying to believe these losses aren't because the people don't like their platform, but because they were shouted down by the conservative media, people that just don't understand, because someone cheated them, whatever. Just continue being what you're trying to be. It's worthy and working great for you."
But I'm not a good republican. I argue with my republican friends against bush all the time, and don't really care much for him, except that he is willing to fight for Western Civilization. But in spite of this, there is no way I will vote for the democrats in their current form. Just one example: Democrats rail against corporations because they are too large and powerful, but the largest and most powerful corporation is the US Federal Government.
I'm now becoming worried that the republicans will increasingly dominate the elections in the years to come, and democrats will increasingly become confined to just a few coastal states. This means there will be no competition, and that concerns me, as the current long term war against terror pushes the country further right, potentially to a religious state.
So, if you want, take your intellectual and emotional energy and expend it on conspiracy theories. Don't discover why the platform isn't working. Continue to think the problem is outside, not inside. Claim that you were thwarted by Swift Boat Veterans, whatever, and ignore Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, etc.
Unfortunately, that will simply divide the country, and I think the losers will be the democrats.
These thoughts degrade our democracy, by casting doubt upon the process itself. And all for egotistical reasons that don't end up helping the democrat cause. As I was once told, it is time to find the adults (in the debate).
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Don't fall for it just to get those measly advantages. It is far better to make sure that nobody can change thousands of votes easily, and that's why paper is best.
A voting machine looks to me like a way to create more problems than to provide a real solution to anything. I won't support them because the average volunteer lacks the proficiency to know if anything is wrong with a complex system, and I don't want anyone handling the election except for ordinary citizens.
With a normal ballot box, it's obvious if someone is trying to break into it. It's obvious if it's being swapped with another ballot box. It's obvious if your paper ballot has been physically placed inside it. Many things are obvious that would remain hidden with a voting machine. It's just a risk not worth taking.
This audit needs to be done. A significant fraction of the US population is losing confidence that elections are being run fairly. The next step in this thought process is to decide that change can only come from methods outside the democratic process. Then we have bigger problems. Everyone, regardless of their political beliefs should be behind this.
That's easy for you to say. I had a bad case of "Sour Grapes" once. But, a penicillan shot cleared it up pretty good.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Yup. That's *exactly* what this is - check the machines, check the processes, if candidate info turns up we'll report but that's not our target.
:)
Heh. If y'all think *I* would get involved in a last ditch "save Kerry!" operation, I recently posted a pic of an old motorcycle I just partially rebuilt. Note my helmet:
http://www.equalccw.com/bikeone.jpg
Thanks to the huge liberties given to the "authorities" by the Patriot Act, there won't be any complainers around for long.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Nice stereotype. I don't mean to be rude, but you truly have no idea what you are talking about. If you're interested in some Bible study, feel free to e-mail me and I'll be glad to help in any way I can: 64xxh5jotu001@sneakemail.com (Sneakemail is great for stopping spam).
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
You forget what else I am:
California Field Rep and state lobbyist for the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (yeah, I know, long org name - see also www.ccrkba.org).
I happen to believe there's such a thing as a personal civil right to self defense. So does Bush. Kerry doesn't.
*Dean* supports that civil right - he proved it as Vermont's governor same as Bush proved it as the governor in TX. And amazingly enough, so does John Edwards, or at least that's what he claimed back when he was trying for the Dem primaries - along with hunting and sporting, he listed "self defense" as a legitimate reason for gun ownership, the only Dem to do so outright.
I would have considered voting for either Dean or Edwards. But once Kerry got the nomination, the Bush bumper stickers went on my helmet, I volunteered at the Bush phone bank, etc.
Because Kerry is an absolute enemy of the entire concept of self defense, and has proven it going back 20+ years.
Jim
Auditing is good and all, btu I Don't think we'll ever be able to be 100% confident in the votes. 90%, definitely. 99%, probably, but not 100%.
And in cases like 2000-FL, where there was a very small margin, I think we shoudl consider that difference statistically insignificant and find a way to resolve the issue coarsely.
Perhaps splitting electoral votes, or some sort of a showdown (i.e. candidates compete in a game of connect four).
If the people can't decide, then don't try to make a decision based on their indecision. Split the decision, or find another way to make the decision.
This is just bullshit. This is precisely the way we do things in Australia, and I would claim that our system is far less prone to electoral fraud, and in fact more honest, than most of the systems in use in the US.
And I _still_ believe this even though we just re-elected a despicable right-wing lying weasel as Prime Minister against all my hopes.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
That is simply absurd. Have you no free will? Have you no self-control? Are you a conscious, thinking human being, or are you simply an animal who does nothing but react to his instincts?
What the anti-choice people don't like is that to them, an abortion is going against god's will to be fruitful and multiply.
Maybe that's what some people think. What I think is that the Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill," and abortion is, by definition, killing.
People who willfully have sex and then have an abortion because they don't want to deal with a child--the consequences of their actions--are completely irresponsible. It's that simple.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Actually, most of Ohio uses the good old fashion punchcards - pregnant chads and all....
see title... :)
I'm wondering, do you respect Bush's intelligence? It seems odd to vote for him on this issue. You say you are a libertarian leaning republican right? If the government really wants to try to keep you from gun ownership that will be a direct violation of the constitution and an act of tyranny and you will fight that right? I'd say you would already have the guns(technically illegal in this scenario) and use them to fight the obviously gone mad government. I think the damage Bush has done to us in the diplomatic arena was a lot worse than somebody that has a belief that they can't really enforce(no changes to any gun law would've made it through congress even if Kerry were elected.)
The entire board of Blackboxvoting and its officers have been declaired enemy combatants, arrested, and moved to a Navy brig.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
probably one of the variant because i already made the font earlier this year.
I was planning on putting a check digit in it.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
classify it the same way that discrimination or sexual harrasment is classified: if after voting, you loose your job or are demoted, the employer can be sued and will have to justify his actions.
If instead the employer gives a promotion or a bonus, chances are somebody else will complain because they didn't know or didn't get one or think it unfair, etc.
Or you could also do what was mentioned elsewhere: print an index key to a database record on the stub that only the stubholder (yes it's a new word) will have access to.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
Ironically, Bush and Kerry have (as far as I can tell) identical stands on gay marriage. They are both against gay marriage, and for civil unions.
The Republican party's official stance is against recognition of any kind, but Bush said recently on Good Morning America that he felt civil unions should be allowed.
And yet people are deciding how to vote based on this issue, when we're at war and the economy is still in trouble? I don't get it. The abortion issue I understand slightly more, for people who are very religious... but the fact is that this is an issue almost totally in the hands of the courts. Bush didn't get anything significant done re abortion during the last 4 years (and he stated during the 2000 campaign and again after the "partial birth" abortion ban that he would not seek a total ban on abortion), and Kerry has already stated that he has no plans to do anything. Again, this is a top priority to voters? Boggles my mind.
Jason, I don't *want* to have to shoot it out.
I know enough about unconventional warfare to want NO part of that.
Christ, that's why I got involved in this whole Diebold/voting situation: given 15+ years of corporate-hosed elections, it'll mean civil war. Inevitably.
The good news is, we can win this electronic voting issue and we can win the self defense issue too!
On guns: the first thing you need to know is that the courts are completely screwed up on the issue. The most blatant example is the most recent decision out of the Federal 9th Circuit in Silveira - all you need to know about THAT fiasco is here:
http://www.americanminutemen.org/reinhardt.htm
We need Bush to put in pro-self-defense US Supreme Court justices - several are about to croak and with lower-court decisions that bad, the USSC can't dodge the issue forever.
With the courts untrustworthy, so far we've have to work within the political process.
So we've been going to each state, getting a basic right to self defense put into law:
http://www.gun-nuttery.com/rtc.php
This is a series of maps showing how we've been kicking butt state by state getting at a minimum the right to pack a self defense handgun with a background check and training ("blue states" in these maps) or in two cases since 2003, with no prior gov't permission needed to pack.
Take the blue and green states, and compare with the Bush/Kerry red/blue maps. You'll find that wherever self defense is widely allowed, the state went Bush. Usually...most of the exceptions were in the midwest.
(Note: there's a mistake on the gun-rights maps. Minnesota did indeed pass a law supporting self defense (going "blue") but their courts immedately put a temp stop to it pending a review of how it passed. So at present it's a "yellow state", not blue.)
In these various states where self defense is common and legal, gun-grabber Kerry didn't go over real well. None of these states has had a problem with their millions of armed residents. Newspaper reports from these states (often after it's been in a year or so) often remark on the lack of "wild west syndrome" or "blood in the streets", and then gun control simply stops being an issue.
http://www.equalccw.com/ccweffects.html
Gun-grabber politicians in those states are in trouble. South Dakota is one, and booted Daschle for his gun-grabber ways in the Senate this year.
We now hold at least 35 such states by anybody's count, over 50% of the US population, over 50% of the electoral college votes.
You know what that means?
We've won. OK? Long term, legal self defense will become the norm in the US in the holdout states. The sooner the Dems get a clue and quit trying to disarm those "evil rednecks" as they misunderstand us, the better.
I will never, ever support a politician who doesn't trust me with my civil right to self defense.
----------------
As to how smart Bush is? See how Texas flipped from Red to Blue in the CCW maps in 1995?
That's because Bush took office on a pro-self-defense platform.
He's a damned sight smarter than Kerry.
Jim
Diebold (and Sequoia & suchl) must provide us with proof that the above is, indeed, an unsubstantiated allegation.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Wooo, felt good to get that out didn't it? Call fundamentalist religious people dumb for having faith in something greater than man, and that makes you smart? I'll say this to you, as I say to a lot of people who belittle the religious/moral, PROVE THEM WRONG! Until you can definitively prove them wrong on God or their faith, your opinion on the matter isn't worth it's wait in salt.
Please, we're both in Wisconsin, so you can come over and see that I haven't donned a tin-foil hat since dressing as a robot at age 8.
Check out my page to see how CNN silently revised its exit poll results for Ohio between 12:24am and 1:41am. In order for their numbers to make sense, Kerry must have received negative votes in later exit polls.
thanks
Then masturbating is murder too.
See, a fetus is not a human being for the simple reason that a fetus cannot survive on its own. It is, until then, completely dependent on the mother.
When a fetus is able to survive on its own, then it is a human being, and that is why abortion is legal only up to the time when the fetus can survive on its own.
A fetus, before that time, is a potential human being, just as an egg is a potential human being. We don't hear pro-life advocates calling menstruation murder though.
No, idiot. This is the classic whine of a religious wacko. It is not our job to prove that your particular lunacy is wrong. You make the claim that is the truth as given to you via direct pipe to an unseeable and unknowable supernatural deity. It is your fundamentalist drooling imbecilism, thus it is your job to prove it to us, not the other way around. Next thing you will be claiming to have the ability to see planets in a galaxy on the other end of a universe and demand that we prove that you dont. Nice try. You just exposed the rot that passes for thought in a religious zealot's mind.
The audit needs to be done -- and done thoroughly, not some lame 9/11 commission style hand job.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No matter what the truth, no matter what you said before or how valid your position, the instant you say "300 years of opression" we stop listening and thinking about your position.
Talk about how things are today. Talk about how they must be better tomorrow. Give numbers. Provide passion. All of that is good, and it works. You'll at least have a chance of getting your message across.
But say "300 years" and it all flys out the window, you might as well have stayed home.
This is not a "racest position" this a statement of well understood cultural bias. I am comming right out and _telling_ _you_ what that alien thing is that seems to secretly unite white men of european dissent. This is what is happening in our minds behind that inscrutable and perplexing white-man-grin. That is what is passing between us when we do that glance-around as you are speaking. It's what is happening behind-the-scenes when you get that strange feeling that you are losing your audience. Honestly and truely.
I'm a pragmatic liberal white male, a truck-driving pusdo-redneck, a homosexual, and a European mongrel of the most pervasive kind. I am a prime example of one of your greatest potential allies in the white establishment(*), and even _I_ cannot force my self to keep listening when people talk about "historical injustice". I have been pre-programmed to tune that out, and that programming runs almost impossibly deep. What chance do you think you are going to have with an old-south good-old-boy.
For two thousand years "western culture", or the men in it anyway, have been weened on "suck it up" and "take it like a man." It's _engrained_ in our cultural psyche. Take. Own. Conquer. Belittle and discard the weak. We are raised to devalue *ANYONE* who compains about past injustice. Just watch any two white boys, age 12, pick on a third and you will get the picture.
Really.
I'm just trying to tell you something here.
Watch some "hick comedy" sometime. "(She|They) are talking about *that* again" is the gal-darn _refrain_ of every white male complaining about "them" no-matter _who_ "they" happen to be this time.
Most of the glass ceiling that women and minorities run into is simply a loss of audience. Like magic, there are certian things you can say or do that turn your words to "blah blah blah" _instantly_. When you do those things that make any particular people stop listening to you, you lose the power to influence those people. If you want to get anywhere with us, you have to cut that out.
Why do you think that the white-male media always trots out King's "I have a Dream" speach? It was by no measure the most intellegent or insightful thing he said. He was much deeper and more eloquent later in his mission. But it is a powerful image and it unremittingly looks forward. We are *programed* to respect that. Read a press release some time, any press release, but especially one from a company who has "had a bad last quarter."
I'm not telling you your wrong to _feel_ the ways you feel. I'm just trying to tell you that when you *say* it you are shooting yourself in the foot.
The word "injustice" is almost enough right there, but "historical injustice"? Please. You might as well put on floppy shoes and a clown nose. There has been virtually no _historical_ _justice_. The "injustice" is just background noise. Everybody, every ethnic people, every cultural group, every political class, was screwed for "their turn" in european/western history.
You will *NEVER*, no matter how you "[call] a spade a spade", find your ideas or solutions have fallen on fertile ears when you cast your argument in terms of reparations of *ANY* sort. The very mention of the idea _salts_ _the_ _earth_ you are trying to sow.
There has never, in all of recorded history, been a conclave of white european men gathered together discussing "reparations" for the socally injured, where that conversation did _NOT_ end in a chuckle of "yea, sure, any day
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
These are the guys who have massive experience in observing elections. Their report is due later today, but from what has leaked through, I expect it to be damning.
Some things the observers from OSCE said:
* In some areas, they (as official observers!) had less access to the polls than during the elections in Kasachstan.
* The computer systems in many places were less secured than in Venecuela.
* A polish observer said the polls in Serbia(!) were easier to watch and more transparent.
That's a bunch of slap-down from professionals with years of experience. The US has, election-wise, officially fallen to the standards of a third-world country.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you have nothing to worry about, then why moan about an audit?
Seriously though, I am suprised that Republicans are spinning it as "Sore Losers" instead of "Ok lets do this and then STFU".
Errr..I dunno about *your* MSM, but the Canadian news media generally refers to the plethora of voting styles as "punch cards, paper ballots, ..., and dubious new touch screen voting machines" or something along those lines.
/always/ imply that the new machines are suspect, and I think I've heard them go into some degree of detail.
They
-Rob Ewaschuk
Im sure its much better... I cant speak to the quality of canadian media, but around here I have been consistently disappointed.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Politicians campaigning in churches is not religion in politics, it's politics in religion. There's a difference.
-rozzin.
You don't have to be from Eastern Europe to know election fraud.
We've had our share. Chicago was infamous for machine politics and ballot-stuffing. Anyone else remember Box 13 that helped LBJ win a US Senate seat in 1948.
Time was, a political boss could call precinct vote-counter and ask "how many votes did I win" and the vote-counter would reply "how many do you need?"
We all hope those days are over.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am curious about the level of weaponry necessary for self defense in your opinion. Is a 44 magnum required/necessary? 18 shot mag? full auto? armor penatrating rounds?
Just wondering where we draw the line on what is acceptable for self defense and what is a manace to society at large, given that many weapons purchased for self defense are stolen and end up in the wrong hands. There is a real downside to having even more guns out in out towns.
What's reasonable is directly connected to the potential threat to innocent bystanders, and the threat potential.
:). It'd be insane on planet earth of course...now or then.
In other words, for urban apartment defense, using a potent hunting rifle is crazy, it'll go through dozens of interior walls if you miss. A shotgun with one of the lighter loads (#4 shot or whatever) or a non-magnum handgun makes sense.
In an urban "street defense" gun the 44Mag would be overkill but if that's all you have available, it'll eat 44Special ammo which is much milder and as appropriate for urban defense as typical police handgun ammo.
Conversely, head out on a fishing trip into bear country and the hottest 44Mags or hotter caliber you can get make perfect sense. If all you have is the one gun, it can change jobs by changing ammo power levels...one reason I like revolvers over semi-autos, you can do that.
All of this "scales up" just fine.
It's 300 years from now, you've got your own private asteroid floating out past Ceres and you're worried about space pirates or whatever? A nuke-powered home defense system measured in megatons makes perfect sense
---
Mag capacity is a different issue and is again connected to the threat. Got a job erasing gang tags in the "hood"? As many standard-capacity handgun mags as you can easily pack makes sense.
For the record, the biggest handgun I own is a 38Spl 5-shot snubbie (2" barrel) revolver, which I consider a very good basic defensive handgun.
Jim
You are violating other people rights by denying them life. No one has ever argued you have the right to do that. However using morals, gleanerd from the Bible or from your parents or wherever, to argue for or against laws is a long rooted American tradition. I've posted about the jurisprudence regarding Gay Marriage elsewhere, as it is a complicated legal issue. If however you reject the application of morals into law, whomever's morals they are, then I assume you argue for extreme libertarianism and a laisez-faire government which only protects life and property, as everything else is basically a moral call.
I object to singling out one sect of people and degrading and debasing them based on their belief system, while holding up people with similar beliefs as intelligent and reasonable.
And by asserting that a form of christianity doesn't have a place in the world anymore, are there more belief sets we can eliminate? How about socialism? What if your belief system was suddenly determined to not have a place in this world? Who is the arbiter of that?
on the Thom Hartmann program. (about 40 min in)
1 -2004).mp3
(best show out there)
http://homepage.mac.com/benburch/HartmanShow-(3-1
telly
According to www.gregpalast.com there appears to major discrepencies and he is theorising that it comes down to ballots invalidated. Some quarter of a million to be exact. He is also arguing that the exit polls showed kerry way ahead and the exit polls were accurate everywhere except for Ohio and Florida.
Although Palast is definitely a Bush hater he is a respected journalist and he does check his facts.
And until you can prove yourself right on the matter your opinion is worthless too. The difference is that you are shoving your worthless opinion down their throats, while they aren't doing anything with their worthless opinions that affects you in any way.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
So, in you example, would use of the hunting rifle in the apt be considered negligent by measure of the extreem danger to bystanders? By that measure your snubbie in a reasonably public urban area carries just as much hazard to bystanders, correct?
Bizarre as it may be, there are more women than men.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Quoting:
.308 or 30-06 will punch through well over 48" of flesh. That's why they can stop a charging Grizzly :). The difference in hard barrier penetration is similar - the snub's loads aren't going to penetrate most exterior building walls and will be rapidly slowed even by interior walls.
.55" or more. That slows it down fast (and leaves the target in a world of hurt). Fewer rounds are needed to drop a bad guy, so the actual risk of killing versus wounding isn't all that much higher with hollowpoints and the reduced number of rounds which are more likely to stay in-target reduces bystander risks.
:).
"So, in you example, would use of the hunting rifle in the apt be considered negligent by measure of the extreem danger to bystanders?"
Yes, except that I'm ignoring the existence of specialty "frangible" rifle ammo for exactly that situation. These are expensive and uncommon but if a hunting rifle is all you have, that sort of ammo that breaks up on the first thing hit does exist. Not common, it's expensive and has to be ordered special...
Think of the gun as a computer and the ammo as software, and you can "change applications" for the task at hand. We'll ignore that for the moment and assume the most common ammo for each gun.
Note: loads that will "tame" a 44Mag down into "reasonable street defense" range are NOT uncommon, they're in every decent gun shop - 44Special hollowpoints. By the same measure, 357Magnum guns can shoot the older, milder 38special ammo more suited to bystander-dense situations. In each case, the "magnum" version has a shell stretched longer so that the hotter magnum loads can't fit into older/weaker guns like my 38Spl - but the shorter ammo fits and works in the magnums just fine.
Quoting:
"By that measure your snubbie in a reasonably public urban area carries just as much hazard to bystanders, correct?"
Not at all. The snub 38 with the best possible loads will penetrate about 10" - 12" worth of flesh tops and usually less. The danger to bystanders is less than that of modern police handgun loads in 9mm/40S&W/45ACP.
A hunting rifle in, say,
But back to the snubbie or other reasonable street-defense handgun: for defensive use, it's well understood that the shooter is 100% legally, morally and financially responsible for what those rounds do, and needs to understand the concept of "backstop" - "what's behind the target if I miss?".
If it's REALLY crowded, one trick is to drop as low as you can and fire upwards, so the round can't go horizontally towards bystanders if you miss.
Police agencies find the risks acceptable compared to the known danger of being unable to defend themselves against criminals. The situation is no different for anybody else - but most folks simply ignore the risk.
One factor that's helped control bystander risks is hollowpoint ammo, which has improved a lot in the last 10 years or so. You fire a round that starts out as 38cal and on target expands to
---------
All of this fails to take into account how often guns of any size successfully get used for defense without actually having to go "bang". The vast majority of all muggers, rapists, etc. run like hell if they realized they've done a poor job of victim selection. These "chase offs" are extremely common - I've personally done it twice on human assailants, once on dogs (with knives, California gun law being still screwed up). Haven't had to kill or even hurt anything with a weapon yet, thank God, and I hope I never have to
Jim
First, I am not actually someone who believes that I should strap a bomb to my chest, and blow people up... I just want to make that clear...
However, if I were, you mention that this would be wrong by my "violating other peoples rights by denying them life" I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. You're right! However, Christianity is a religion that has thrived on the blood of the people it's killed. And I'm not talking about the people it killed after the book was written and done (crusades, inquisition) I'm talking about the people it lists as being struck down by those following Gods will. The different civilizations ended, the different families slaughtered (not just soldiers killed in these wars, children were slaughtered, and virgin girls were taken and raped) all condoned by the christian god (that is, if you take the bible is complete fact... if you don't, you don't count as a right wing puritan radicalist, and this conversation isn't attacking you)
Now, its arguable whether or not people are killed today by this country because someone in command believes god wants them dead... and I'm not saying that is the case, but I am saying that a good deal of people are getting the christian morality's pushed on them. Gay marriage, for example. This is a case of christians forcing the morality's specified in their book, on others who do not believe in their ways. This is just as wrong, as radical muslims forcing their morals on christians. I've heard the argument that marriage is a sanctioned union between the two people and god... which is poppycock... if this were true, christianity (or judaism) would have been the first religion with marriages... but this is completely untrue. Marriages have existed in most cultures as far back as history exists (that we have records of)
And because of the forceful application of morals into law by such a large group of people, onto people who disagree with them (and are arguably, not harming anyone, anyone who's bothered by their existance should deal with their own issues) I spit on you, and your groups ignorance, and I wish that you would exit that box you're in, and realize that there is much more to this world than your small little book provides.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voting in U.S. elections this week was mostly fair, but the lines were too long at some polling stations, according to an international rights group monitoring the presidential contest for first time.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Thursday that before the vote it had received "widespread" allegations of fraud and voter suppression, mainly among minorities, and raised concern that confidence in the system could be undermined.
However, the group said it was unable to substantiate the allegations. It also said that on election day it observed relatively few attempts to challenge a voter's eligibility, despite concerns before the vote.
Europe's top rights watchdog, which groups 55 countries including the United States, said the election "mostly met" international standards for free and fair elections and defied fears of a repeat of 2000's debacle.
The OSCE's observations basically matched civil-rights groups' assessments that while there were voting problems, they were not on such a widespread scale to call into question the result -- unlike in Florida in 2000.
"The system has been improved because the poll workers and officials were so eager to have things work well and there was also high awareness among voters to make sure their vote counted," the OSCE delegation head, Rita Suessmuth, said.
It might be impossible to know if any votes were recorded incorrectly (or perhaps maliciously altered in secret) by technology. This applies to all political platforms, etc.
If that was all we had to worry about there wouldn't be nearly as many angry people as there are now after the elections. Unfortunately we all know what those Justices will really be for. pro-gun doesn't worry me, pro-god does.
while they aren't doing anything with their worthless opinions that affects you in any way.
This isn't true, so far as those who argue against 'moral' issues are concerned. Abortion is a question of state sponsored murder for many people, so saying it doesn't affect them is equivalent to saying we should allow murders to go free so long as they don't murder me. There are plenty of people opposed to Gay Marriage based not on religion, but on the belief, however well founded, that altering the historical role of marriage in society can be detrimental to the health and sustainability of society as a whole. That argument is generally the position held by supporters of civil unions and some of the more strict positions.
Also, legal institutionalizing of Gay Marriage(and possibly civil unions) is forcing that set of beliefs (that there is nothing different between same and mixed sexed couples) 'down their throats' as you put it. You may take this as fact, but it is a matter of opinion to some if not most people.
I do hope you see the hypocrisy in saying Group A shouldn't push their beliefs, while Group B should because their beliefs a) are better, b) are right or c) are mine.
Oh for...
Sigh. OK. What's the worst they could do on the "god issue"?
Seriously?
Prayer isn't going back into the schools. "Under God" might make it's way back into the pledge...big whoop.
The only "God issue" left that has any practical impact is whether or not the gov't can fund a charitable or educational activity that's run through a church.
In other words, should donations to the Salvation Army be tax-deductable, as long as they promise not to spend those funds on outright religion?
Why not?
The other side of the same coin is private schools and vouchers. Should parents be allowed to pick which school their kids go to, even if said school is run by nuns or whatever?
Why not, as long as it isn't mandatory? The current education monopoly is a very bad joke. Care to guess the main lesson I learned in "High School"?
"Never leave the house unarmed."
Let parents decide.
Do you really think we're going to regress back to a state religion or something? Sheesh.
We don't have to worry about God. Long term, she can take care of herself.
Jim
First off, you response was reasoned up until the end. I spit on you is the quickest way to end constructive debate, though I don't necessarily feel you care to have that, since you view Evangelical Christians as not worthy of your consideration. I am not an EC, though I am Christian and am offended by constant attacks on a religious group, regardless of whom they are. Isolating them based on their faith seems to be restricted in America to EC's, while it manifests itself as rabid Antisemitism in Europe and various clashes around the globe.
and are arguably, not harming anyone
There in lies the rub. People, both Christians and non-Christians can and do hold the belief that Abortion and Gay Marriage are wrong. The former since it is state sponsored murder to them, the latter because of the negative effects they believe it will have on society. A fringe may argue to outlaw homosexuality, but grouping those together with mainstream anti-gay marriage advocates is both disingenuous and wrong. Why do we outlaw incestual marriages or polygamous ones? Can those arguments plausibly apply to same sex marriages? That is the real debate.
CNN reports that a queen of clubs broke an 1,847-1,847 tie in a local election.
If this had been on touch-screen, how would you do a recount?
Oh wait, Nevada was smart enough to insist on a paper printout. I guess this really was a tie after all.
I wonder if they used a real deck of cards or if they used MS-Windows Solitaire????
--
I've earned karma, I've done moderator duty, why the #$@^* can't I get a Slashdot story accepted?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank you Lulu for clearing up and addressing some of my concerns. The OVC design is far preferable to some of the other options out there.
But, whatever the technical excellence of the design that is adopted, in the long term, I expect that certain undesirable changes will creep in under the tent as a result of public ignorance.
For instance, don't you see it coming with all the brouhaha over illegal aliens? Soon a driver license RFID reader will be integrated with such a system tied to an identity database so as to "make sure" that only legal, registered voters can vote. It'll easily pass right under the radar of the voting public without guessing that such a system takes away their right to the secret ballot (not that most people know that they have this right).
Specifically, this can evolve into a system where the record of each voter is stored for later review by profile-builders in order to investigate those who did not vote for the Great Leader. Then, elections will always go 99% to the same party. Oh wait...
Aparently all I've managed to tell you is NOTHING...
You aparently cannot read.
Keep holding yourself down my brother, it's what you seem best at.
You say I'm racest because I am trying to tell you that your aproach isn't workable, and I tell you how come black slavery doesn't make you any more special or deserving of some cash prize compared to any other descendent of an oppressed person?
You say I'm racest because I don't buy your racest justifications for your own self-centerd feelings of unfulfilled entitlement?
Nobody will take you seriously when you demand reperations, because *everybody* deserves reperations for *something* back there somewhere. And not "way back", but just contemporarily back. Do you know how many white men were slaves in that same period? (I'm guessing no.) Quite frankly, my cut-off point is two generations. If you havn't shaken hands with the enslaved ancestor the statue of limitations is expired. I don't see you offering reperations to the chineese workers that were killed after the age of black slavery in order to build the transportation infrastructure (railroads) do I? Do I see you running overseas to give a cheque to the people who your government is exploiting and killing for oil today? I don't beleive I do.
Face it, your high horse is down here in the mud with the rest of us.
And nobody likes a whiner.
I am not trying to deny your place in this world, I'm trying to tell you that this world doesn't owe you a thing that it magically does owe someone else.
Demand your share because you deserve it for who you are, not who great grand parents were.
Besides, did my ancestors own black slaves? Do you know? Do I know? (I do know, it so happens, and none of them did; but I bet you think I owe you soemthing anyway because I am white...) I am descended from Strongbow however, so should I send my black reparation check to the Ireland?
You seem to feel that "this country's foundation" is limited to the purely local events. Like the USA has no basis in its own history, and that somehow there is some sort of conservation of injustice. You have all these myopic theories that just happen to star you as the beneficiary.
I was just trying to tell you that your audience isn't listening *BECAUSE* you are bringing up things your _audience_ thinks are IRRELEVANT because it is to late to change any of that, and it is a few drops of blood on the floor of the abattoir.
You tell me that I don't understand the foundation of this country simply because my scope isn't focused on your grevance. Quite frankly your herratage is one pretty-tiny list of grevances snuggled inside a much longer and more serious set of problems.
I fully apreciate that a black man is way more likely to end up in jail than any other ethnic group.
I know that the life expectancy and infant mortality for blacks is much wors than for whites.
I know that young black people are getting an consistently and persistently inferior education.
I know that all of the above are contributing factors to the systematic financial restraint of black people (it's harder for black people to get credit, good jobs, etc.)
All of these things need to be fixed. Not "addressed" not "workded out" but FIXED.
NONE OF IT, however, needs to be fixed "because of 300 years of oppression".
It needs to be fixed because it is wrong *TODAY* and it weakens EVERYBODY when we are raising an undereducated and angry group of people who are getting screwed TODAY.
See, "today" and "tomorrow", THOSE are the words of social change. Those are the words of people with a future. The argument can be made without "you hurt my forebearers so you owe me."
The more you simper and whine about this (noun) owing you that (whatever) because of who your great grandparents were, the closer you come to a word-substitution joke about rich white kids.
Youre demands are falling on deaf ears precisely because
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Thank you for summing up one of the major differences between "blue state" and "red state" world views.
So you think allowing people to defend themselves is nuts?
Take a look at these maps:
http://www.gun-nuttery.com/rtc.php
(Yeah, it's a funky domain name, wouldn't have been my pick, but the data is accurate.)
Here, "red states" are those that ban "street self defense" with concealed handguns, and yellow severely restricts the practice.
Blue states have permit programs that are fairly and widely applied - pass a background check and training and you can pack heat. Green is the most radically pro-self-defense, where there's no permit needed to pack, concealed or open, your choice.
Check out just how many blue (pro-self-defense) states there are. If I'm crazy, I got one hell of a lot of company.
Jim
Now Moore can write another 2 books and a few films about how Bush stole his second election. ;)
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
P.P.S.
And no, my entire post cannot "be summed up as some sort of demand that blacks ask nicely for they're Civil Rights".
It could _actually_ be summed up nicely by saying "blacks should demand their civil rights without trying to justify them as repayment and reparations. Their rights exist as an absolute, completely without the 'but my pappy' crap, and whenever someone says 'but they were slaves and that means they deserve more' everybody stops listening and nothing gets done."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Bwaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaaahaa aaahaaaaaahaaaaahaaaahaahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!1111 Your post is the funniest thing I ever read.
Don't forget that the governor of FL is Mr. Bush's brother. Hmmmmm....... I smell smoke
The two most liberal counties in the state have the highest number of no-shows, and a turnout rate that was almost 10% lower than the state average? Hmm...I guess Dubya just didn't piss off the liberal city slickers enough to get them out to vote.
On the one hand, the rate of no-shows seems to correlate with population: the third highest number of no-shows was in the third most populous county (Hamilton). On the other hand, Hamilton had a higher-than-average turnout rate, and guess who they voted for? Hint: it's Cinncinati, which borders Kentucky.
This could be a completely legal, if unethical, tactic by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to suppress the vote: there simply weren't enough voting machines. I arrived at the polls at 6:30AM, when they opened, and had to wait an hour to vote. Many people waited much longer, and many people simply left when they saw how long the lines were, or after waiting in the rain for a few hours. Curiously, you didn't heat about these problems in the Republican-dominated suburbs. Remember, Blackwell is the guy who refused to accept new registrations that weren't printed on bond paper until the courts slapped his wrist. According to a poll worker, voting machines are allocated according to turnout in the previous election, which means that last-minute voter drives are going to result in longer waits, but if those liberal counties really did register hundreds of thousands of new voters, how come lines were so long if the turnout rate was actually lower in those counties?
Note the San Jose Mercury News http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/sp ecial_packages/election2004/10091977.htm/
headline: "Despite long lines, voter turnout in Ohio not record breaking". And from the article: "The county just didn't plan on having a whole college to vote," said Sussman, who waited 10 hours to cast his vote for Kerry at 9 p.m., two and a half hours after the polls closed.
This also puts into perspective Blackwell's successful battle in the days before the election to prevent provisional ballots from being cast outside of one's own precinct. I suspect Blackwell knew there weren't nearly enough voting machines in certain precincts, and wanted to prevent voters from simply trotting to the next precinct to vote. For instance, in Republican-dominated Worthington, 10 minutes north of my precinct, there were no lines. The most clever thing about it is that it's not illegal, just unfair.
Meanwhile, if half of those 670,000 voters did actually show up at the polls, and if their votes tracked the actual results in those counties (Cleveland 66% for Kerry, Columbus 54%), that would have swung the election, since the difference in Ohio was around 136,000 votes.
Brushing aside conspiracy theories, it seems that blackboxvoting.org would do well to at least question how voting machines were allocated in Ohio. It wouldn't be too hard to look at voter turnout in the last election, and compare that with actual voting machine allocations. Who will bet me $1 that left-leaning precincts were short-shrifted?
I think a president that claims to pray for his answers is a threat. You can't go wrong if you claim your god gave you the answer now can you? The ironic thing is that you don't find mention of god in the text of the Articles of Confederation or The Constitution. "Nature's God" is mentioned once along with the "Creator" in the Decleration of Independence. That people want to believe this country was founded on Christian beliefs or morals is dead wrong.
So basically your argument is that Bush supports your gun rights so he is smart? Knowing how to easily placate or manipluate the masses isn't a "damned sight smarter" than anybody.
If you're trying to say that Bush should be blocked from office because he's openly religious, well, you're pretty deep in the minority.
Bush was a party-boy druggie until he got religion. It works like that for some people. And when it does, they get pretty serious about it. It's hard to call him a fool when it had that sort of effect on him personally...
----------
You're actually treading on an area of very core Constitutional theory here.
The people that founded the US were trying to say that basic civil rights are not "supplied by" human government. They can be respected by them, they're all too often infringed by them, but per the Founder's theory rights "come from God".
I personally think that's wrong, but not in a very dangerous way and it was the best they could do back then.
All humans have similar standards for the concept of "justice". An alternate view of where that came from is that it's an outgrowth of what we are biologically as "pack animals".
Take wolves as an obvious example. Try to take their dead caribou or whatever away from them, and you'll rapidly learn their opinion of the concept of "property rights". But it's more than that: in order to stay together as a pack to improve their hunting ability, they have to have standards of "justice" inside the pack - if a momma wolf thought her pups were in danger from the other pack members, she'd have to leave ASAP and it would all come unglued.
This tendency can get VERY advanced even in "animals". Gray whales migrate up and down the Pacific coast in pods, but not all in one lump - "scouts" consisting of pairs of younger adults (usually but not always males) rove up to 20 miles ahead, behind and to the sides of the main pack, checking for hazards and reporting back to the pod leaders with information-dense sound bursts.
All of our nearest relatives are "pack animals", and the evidence is overwhelming for the same being true of our ancestors. And in those packs can be found the basis for our ideas regarding civil rights.
Whether this (our biology) or "God" is the "supplier" of civil rights, what matters is that they can't be lawfully taken away from us by human action.
And THAT is what "big government statists" like Kerry don't understand. To Kerry, if you repeal the 2nd Amendment, we have no right to arms. Repeal the 5th Amendment, people can be forced to testify against themselves.
That scares me one HELL of a lot more than Dubya praying too often.
The other offshoot of this concept is that under the "civil rights don't come from man" line is that ALL humans anywhere on the planet have the same civil rights. It may be infringed brutally by dictators; they may have lost the ability to defend those rights by their own carelessness, but they still have those civil rights.
To Kerry, civil rights are a "nuanced gray area" when it comes to other nations and cultures.
Yet another reason I voted Bush.
Jim
Bush supports a basic civil right that is widely popular, although you'd never know that in the more Liberal zones or from the urban-dominated media.
Yes, that's pretty damn smart.
Jim
OK, we aren't going to see eye to eye. Kerry repealing anything from the bill of rights was about as likely as Bush taking away the right of consenting adults to do as they wish. You want to talk about statist? Let's talk DMCA and USAPATRIOT act. Whip the people up in a frenzy about terrrorist to pass your laws and use them for uses other than what you claimed they were intended for. Are you really libertarian leaning? You seem polarized on one issue and too willing ot ignore other freedoms taken from you.
Quoting:
"Parents are already allowed to choose which school their kids go to -- they just need to pay for it themselves. I thought you said that you're a Libertarian."
Under the current system, money is taken from parents by force (theft) to pay for a school system. If they want to use a different school system they can do so, but their money is still stolen.
Under vouchers, the money stolen from them can at least be directed in the fashion the parents choose.
Not perfect, but a damn sight better than we're at now.
Quoting:
"If you don't like the public school system then advocate for getting rid of all school subsidy completely -- public or private."
You insist that I advocate something politically impossible (at least near term) in order to marginalize my effort?
I'm not impressed. I'm libertarian all right, but that doesn't translate to "idiot" despite your fond wishes.
Jim
And you think Kerry would have been any better on basic civil rights?
3 11203&tid=158&tid=93&tid=103&tid=2 19
:).
:).
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/26/2
Look, you may see me as "hung up on guns" and maybe there's some truth to that. But the gun issue is a direct measure of the personal trust of the people by politicians.
I know somebody in Alaska who owns a gun shop, and recently ran into the state governor in line behind him at a grocery store, no bodyguards around
What's remarkable about this is that since mid-2003, it's been legal to pack a gun in Alaska concealed or open carry with NO prior government permission ("permit") needed. They're one of only two states with laws this cool - Vermont's been that way since 1903.
And here's the governor who gladly signed that bill hangin' out buying munchies without a care in the world. For good reason - he's probably strapped himself and if somebody got stupid, there's a huge number of people around able to help out
Anyways.
Yeah, I may be kinda "focused" here but it really is a good "pointer" to all civil rights issues. And if you think a Gore administration wouldn't have gone completely gonzo on the civil rights front, the available evidence from the Clinton era says otherwise!
Jim
As you've correctly pointed out, the core concepts here are screwed up.
I'm not going to be able to unscrew it anytime soon. Nobody is. The fight against Diebold et al is MUCH more "winnable" than that, short term or long.
Yes, money is being taken from ALL of society to pay for schooling. Including the parents, including others.
Saying that "since others are taken from too, society can dictate to the parents what school their kids go to" only compounds the problem. (And yes, it IS a forced limit in choice; without the ability to get a refund for a service they refuse to use, most parents can't abandon the "free" service because they can't afford to.)
It also adds other problems:
1) Monopolies are seldom a good idea!
2) Government workers are usually fans of a big-government approach to society in general. That colors the politics of the school system as a whole in a liberal, socialistic fashion that not all parents are pleased with. Some are at the point of revolt. Mind you, I have no problem with parents being able to send their kids to "Che Gueverra Memorial Grade School" if they WANT to but I have a real problem with that being the sole financially practical choice!!!
3) Public schools basically can't throw the worst kids out, because there's no alternatives for them outside of juvenile hall once they get too screwball. There is NO WAY any kid of mine will ever go to public school, period, end of discussion...not given what happened to me there. (Then again, so far my only "kids" have been furry and four legged but at 39 that could still possibly change...)
Jim
I'm not arguing for Kerry(or Gore since you brought him up) at any point. Have you realized that? I do see you sticking to one issue as your focal point for your vote. My issue is the admiration and respect for the US is going down the tubes. I've said it before and I'll say it again, not one of our allies and many neutral countries had much of a problem with what we did in Afghanistan. Outside of England, no major ally has given aid or supported us with Iraq. Iraq was a bad idea and turned America from a country defending itself to an imperialist leaning nation. I understand the right to bear arms, you won't see me touting gun control. The violence issues in our society don't have to do with the availability of weapons.
Yeah, the rest of the world seems unconcerned about documented reports of prisons specifically for the children of anyone suspected of anti-Saddam tendencies.
Bugs the hell out of me, but hey, that's me.
Whatever. We'll know in two to four years if it's possible to export Democracy to the middle east. If it IS possible, it'll be a hell of a breakthrough.
It sounds impossible but Imperial Japanese culture was screwed up WAY worse and we set that right.
Again: do all human beings have civil rights, or only the ones in the USofA?
As to France and the like: their leadership was profiting off of the UN Food for Oil program. They didn't want the evidence of that (and Russia's illegal arms sales) turning up. So they dismiss us as "barbarians" to cover their own crimes.
Pathetic.
Jim
Outside of England, no major ally has given aid or supported us with Iraq.
No, there are no other major countries that came to Iraq. None at all. Especially countries that are on Osama's "countries to destroy" list, along with the US, and have also been attacked.
How many Australian troops have died in major support operations? The dollar and human effort put forth by Australia is pithy compared to what the US is doing. The point is that this is an American effort disguised as a "coalition".
Lots of people are suffering in this world. Get off your ass, move to those countries and do something about it. I'm tired of the moral line, it is bullshit. We supported that asshole when it behoved us.
Frankly if a Christian really believes what they believe they are telling me that they can break bread with evil but because of their beliefs they'll be still saved in the end. It's an awfully convenient belief system. Saddam could convert and all the Christians agnst would be for not because he would be saved. Bush is Christian but I bet he can't accept that last half of that "Chrisitan" truth.
I don't give a fuck what Russia or France think, I care what I think. We've stretched our military thin fighting a war that wasn't needed. If anything we need more efforts towards Al Qaeda, securing our border comes to mind. Do you know how many OTMs get picked up in small border towns, brought before a judge, and are given a summons and released to never be seen again? The war in Iraq didn't stop Bali, Madrid, Besland or any other terror attack outside of Iraq and has led to more terror attacks inside Iraq(I bet as an American you were much safer 5 years ago traveling to Iraq than you are now, wanna dispute that?). You've traded on terror for another.
Your so fucking concerned with your own way of life but think you can go in somewhere and tell somebody else how to live. The point is that we have a right to self defense, not to disrupt other governments and to place one favorable to us in. Don't lie to yourself that this was for moral reasons and your moral outrage at prisons for children and political prisoners.
Why don't you go ahead, get the CIA fact book out and make a list of countries that need to liberated from their ways by us. You can order the list in any way you want but be very specific as to why they'd be better off to have us occupy them and install a temporary government. Don't compare WWII to today, it's apples to oranges and the Middle East isn't Japan or Germany.
Quoting:
"Lots of people are suffering in this world. Get off your ass, move to those countries and do something about it."
Ummm...yeah, agreed, that's exactly what Bush just did!
Sigh.
Ok, before you freak out, you're right about the "lots of people are suffering" bit.
WHY ARE THEY SUFFERING, Jason?
Lemme give you a hint:
The biggest mass starvation in the 20th Century (that we can prove) was in the Ukraine, 1920s/30s. Stalin deliberately starved small farmers as a deliberate step towards centralized farm management. At least 10 million people died, probably more like 15mil. Understand, these were farmers starving ON THE RICHEST FARMLAND ON EARTH, with no drought conditions. That ONLY happened by deliberate policy.
The second biggest (possibly THE biggest, details are still sketchy) happened in China, when Mao decided to "revolutionize" agriculture without having a fucking clue and while taking time out between 10yr-old boys in bed.
Cambodia's famine and mass deaths happened as deliberate gov't policy. Pol Pot to this day holds the world record for "greatest percentage of his own people's population killed off by a dictator" at 1/3rd. The only part we're not sure of is "how many of those people starved versus shot/stabbed/etc.?" Best guess: about 50/50 each.
Ethiopia - same thing. Sudan right NOW - same thing - starvation as ethnic/religious "cleansing" by deliberate policy.
Your buddy Saddam was no different - he changed water flow patterns in Southern Iraq to induce drought in Shi'ite areas. That's in addition to the hundreds of thousands he directly killed in death camps.
Are you even aware that the "Ba'ath Party" of Syria and Iraq has direct Nazi ties? I don't mean retorical, I mean "trained in Berlin, hung out with Adolf" ties - see also:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Ba'ath%2 0Party
Upshot: if people are starving, it's ALWAYS because some government in charge is so fucked up, shooting every last one of them would be a humanitarian act.
There's so MANY of these, more than just Sudan and North Korea right this minute, that we can't deal with them all. Saddam, on top of all that, was a direct threat to his neigbors (ask a Kuwaiti) and did an amazing job of pretending to have seriously bad medicine. We NOW know it's because he'd lost his mind and towards the end spent all his time writing romance novels of all things...
Quote:
"I'm tired of the moral line, it is bullshit. We supported that asshole when it behoved us."
You're right. Flat out, no question, you're absolutely correct. We knew he was one of the last surviving Nazi evil dictators on the planet and we made a puppet out of him.
That was wrong and it's the sort of thing Dubya has pledged to end.
But for the record, Jimmy Carter was a BIG fan of the Shah of Iran just before that whole thing blew up...ignoring the Shah's secret police, murders and HIS Nazi ties.
Ever met somebody from Iran who insists they're "Persian", not "Iranian"? Ever wonder why?
"Iran" was called that by one of the Royal Family circa 1930s to suck up to, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. "Iran" is the local translation of the term "Aryan".
<puke>
Quote:
"Frankly if a Christian really believes what they believe they are telling me that they can break bread with evil but because of their beliefs they'll be still saved in the end. It's an awfully convenient belief system. Saddam could convert and all the Christians agnst would be for not because he would be saved. Bush is Christian but I bet he can't accept that last half of that "Chrisitan" truth."
You're ranting. Look at what Bush is actually doing AND saying: no more support for dictatorial assholes.
Quote:
"I don't give a fuck what Russia or France think, I care what I think."
Good for you.
Quoting:
"We've stretched our mil
What am I doing? I'm holding closer to Libertarian values than you ever are. You've gone from arguments citing Gore and Kerry, neither of which I ever supported or expressed admiration for, to now talking about Russia and France as examples of countries against the war in Iraq. A lot more countries than that were against it. Plenty of Amercian corporations benefited from violating the UN food for oil plan too. You don't sound like a Libertarian at all, you sound like a dyed in the wool Repbulican, you sure are toting enough of their party line. You're moralizing for your personal gain, simple as that. Everything you write is opinion for your belief about occuyping Iraq. I supported defending ourselves in Afghanistan, no amount of bluster will ever justfiy Iraq. Iraq didn't attack us and not liking us isn't a justification for 'pre-emption'. Why are people suffering? Resource contention. Tell me how to bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living with the finite resources we have? I am not aruging for going over and deposing governments, I'm not talking about how we have to tell people what to do. I'm aruging for taking care of ourselves. Can you come up with that list I asked for? Of course you dont' have to but it would be a fun excercise for you I think. With your thinking we are going to have another fucking crusade on our hands. Gotta teach them evil people to think like us. You really believe it's that simple. That will always fail.
You can't see the inherent contradiction in your position on "helping the starving/oppressed in other nations".
Go talk to people who actually do try to "help the starving" in various 3rd-world hellholes. They'll tell you universally that they are ALWAYS in danger of being shot.
Why?
Because whereever there's a bunch of people starving, some son of a bitch backed by a lot of guns and goons WANTS THEM TO STARVE. And when you try and feed them, you become that asshole's enemy.
You are arguing for the right of dictatorial assholes to determine who lives and who dies in their own nation.
Me, I think it's a crime against humanity when a murdering dictator dies of natural causes.
I think the link between asshole dictators and starvation is so DEAD OBVIOUS, that somebody oughta put together an international humanitarian relief effort all right, one composed entirely of very, VERY skilled assassins.
That would do far more good than trying to sneak pitiful amounts of food and medicine to the victims of these thugs.
Jim
I'd say that he won because he's anti-abortion/anti-gay marriage, and made a point out of wanting to make it so for everyone, while Kerry didn't want to force his Christian beliefs on others.
Clever signature text goes here.
Bush is far more dangerous, with his shameless flirting with fundamentalist Christians. The people who want to merge Church and State.
Bush lied to the people about Iraq too. Is that trustworthy? Is that smart?
Clever signature text goes here.
I support Kerry's position on both abortion and gay rights...well, on the latter, I'm fully in favor of gay marriage on the same basis as anybody else, which Kerry wasn't gutsy enough to say.
BUT Bush can't do much damage on those. Not long term. The courts are going to mandate gay marriage - they can't do anything else, not after first supporting equal protection in general and then legalized gay sex last year. Abortion? Roe v. Wade ain't going anywhere...maybe a few very late term procedures are at risk.
But the reality is, those issues are DONE. Stick a fork in 'em, walk away and talk about something else.
Guns are still up in the air.
Quoting: "Hmm, I still don't understand. Kerry wouldn't have completely banned personal arms." Supreme Court picks, mainly. Another issue is that there's a bill in play next year that will ban lawsuits against gunmakers on the basis of "the gun worked like it was designed, guns are evil so you're toast" even if we're talking about a stolen gun. Entire industries have been sued out of existence by crap lawsuits - small aircraft makers for example, and motorcycle helmets almost. More than half the money you spend on a bike hat is to cover legal liability for the manufacturers. The gunmaker suits are worse. Say somebody steals a Chevy and uses it as a bank getaway vehicle. You think the bank can sue GM? 'Course not. Or some drunk runs somebody over in a Ford - Ford pays? Hell no. But that's the basic concept behind the gunmaker lawsuits. They've been losing in droves but the gun-grabbers have realized what a small industry the gun biz is, and think they can run the whole biz into the ground with enough suits. That's gotta end. This last election ensured it will - that bill ending the BS is as good as signed. ----------- There ain't gonna be any "merger" of "church and state". That's idiocy. And the main one "lying about Iraq" was a certain insane sack o' shit name of Saddam.
You're joking right? If they put religious judges on the bench, including SCOTUS, of course it will.
You must be joking. Everything from homosexuality to abortion to separation of church and state, freedom from religion, and freedom of expression would be on the chopping block if the religous right get their way. Its not as if their members have spoken about what they want to do. They are single handedly responsible for putting Bush back in the White House, and everyone knows it. They'll soon be asking for compensation for their efforts on behalf of Bush.
Take a look around, fella, there are plenty of people who want EXACTLY THAT.
Quoting:
:).
"Take a look around, fella, there are plenty of people who want EXACTLY THAT."
Yeah, there's a small percentage of the GOP wired that way. I'll agree that Bush has some of those tendencies. But they do NOT dominate even the GOP.
A SCOTUS pick for confirmation who was wired hard fundie wouldn't make it. Ain't no way - it would take 100% of the GOP Senators to BE hard fundie and they're nowhere close to that. *Maybe* 20 out of 55, definately less than 30 of 55, and that leaves 45 Dems making up the difference.
Nope. We've got a good situation here: the Dems are still "in it" enough to keep anything really stupid on the GOP side from going down, while the better GOP ideas are going to go through like a marble through a toddler
Sorry, but this is just wishful thinking.
In truth they are very close to controlling the GOP right now. Look at what is happening to Arlan Spector (moderate Rep) for his comments on the judicial nomination process and Woe v. Wade. I make a prediction: if the GOP is controlled by the religious right, expect to see Spector lose his job on the judicial committee, thus paving the way for radical judges to be nominated. You'll see.
Arlen is in trouble mainly because he pissed all over Dubya's PR in public, not because of his actual stance.
He could have quietly gone about his business and been head of that committee despite his pro-choice views - because they weren't the problem.
It was his loud mouth that has his butt in a sling.
You don't see the contradiction in being a "Republican leaning Libertarian" but almost every thing you've supported is Republican and contrary to Libertarian beliefs? Where have I argued for helping nations? I think you'll find me arguing for other sovereign nations to take care of their own internals. I'm not saying that you don't take sides, but you don't occupy and wage war. You are arguging that we have a right to determine what others do, all the while saying that you shouldn't be told what you can do.
Even as a Kerry voter, I am still on the fence about this whole "voter fraud" thing, but do agree that an investigation should take place if any _solid and substantial_ evidence can be brought to a federal court.
Whether an investigation proves Bush or Kerry to have legitimately won the election is secondary to the notion that a high crime of voter tampering could have occurred, and also the fact that our e-voting system is insufficient for auditing purposes.
I'm at a loss, though. If Bush indeed has won and his "side" is still indicted on voter fraud, can these people be punished in any way? Conversely, if fruitless tampering on the Kerry site is proven, can Kerry and those in his team be punished in any way even if they are on the losing team anyway? This is given that a crime has been committed.
Finally, if voter fraud has been proven on either side and _Kerry_ is proven to be the legitimate winner, what happens next?
This has escalated to even more surreal proportions than I ever thought possible after November 2nd.
OK.
Here's the difference, and why you don't understand me:
You think of nations only in terms of their governments. I think of them as individuals first, nations second. You presume that every government on earth is "legitimate" *because* they're in power; my first assumption is that a government is PROBABLY there purely because they have the most guns - that is indeed the case with at least 1/3rd of the nations seated at the UN.
A guy like Pol Pot or Saddam or Kim Jung Illin' or whatever has no more "right" to govern than the Mafia has to run New York, Chicago, New Jersey or whatever, and for the exact same reason: they're not legitimate because their "leadership" isn't derived from the basic civil rights of the governed to control their destinies.
No government has the right to violate the civil rights of it's individual citizens to the degree Saddam, or Hitler, or Pol Pot or Imperial Japan did. Once officials or leaders of a government act in that fashion, it is perfectly legal and moral to kill them as a basic humanitarian act.
IF they're a threat to other nations too and if it's not possible to take them out without going through their supporting populace first, then so be it. Long term, the casualties for that population are significantly lower than leaving them under a murderous, expansionist tyrant.
Now at present, we've got too many of such maniacs to deal with all at once. We can only deal with those that become a threat beyond their own borders - and yes, Saddam did his damnest to appear to be such a threat.
One of them (in North Korea) has become so dangerous that we can't deal with them unless there is NO other choice. That's because Clinton let 'em score nukes. Which means they've probably got a long-term future as a large glowing parking lot, which will happen the *instant* they use such nukes. (And the bombs that flatten them will probably be of Chinese origin versus American.)
My next point:
Cowardice is a crime sometimes calling for the death penalty. It happens when a population supports deranged leadership without doing something about it, either because they're too scared of him/them or they outright support their policies. It's almost always a mixture. This was the case in both Japan and Germany some years back. The population of Japan is ultimately to blame for Hiroshima - the population of Germany brought Dresden on themselves, as surely as a mugger with a baseball bat is the cause of his being shot the first time he screws up the victim selection process.
(Next you're going to turn around and ask why I don't want to shoot Bush on the same basis. Bush is NOT a murderer and is no threat to nations or populations that aren't run by homicidal lunatics.)
Jim
"When Noriega addressed the packed courtroom at his sentencing 10 months after the trial began, he dropped crumbs for the media to follow. The two-hour statement mentioned U.S. involvement in a 1979 attempt to murder the Shah of Iran and the 1981 air explosion that killed his predecessor, Gen. Omar Torrijos. He accused a former head of the DEA of perjury and George Bush of instigating phony terrorist disturbances in the Panama Canal Zone when he was CIA director in the mid-'70s."
Georges Bush instigating phony terrorist disturbances? Sounds familiar. I think I hear echo...
Now can we put that in wikipedia and make it stick? No.
Slashdot, for all its folly and opinionated people, still has somewhere portions of the truth other media do not. Somewhere between two arrogant opinions, usually. (-;
Joy!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
You're not a libertarian. You're avoiding your statement that you are a Republican leaning Libertarian. You're a dyed in the wool Republican and when you come to except that I'll be happy. All you statements are staunchly Republican and not based in any Libertarian dogma except where they intersect. I'd suggest you read the Libertarian Party platform, especially with regards to foreign intervention.
There is such a thing as a "Libertarian Hawk", who is into the entire end-the-drug-war, gay-marriage-is-fine, gun-control-sucks-period, free-market Libertarian school of thought but ALSO believes Osama Yo Mama is a threat and ditto Saddam (in the past tense now that the idjit is in jail) and believes that pounding on Osama's followers in Iraq is better than having to do so at NYC's Times Square or similar...
If you don't believe me:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fightforliberty/
The Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) of which I'm a member follows a very similar line.
Yes because Iraq was such a threat to us. Those Iraqi terrorists in Bali and Madrid. Those damn Iraqis on those Russian planes. No matter how you spin it Iraq was less of a threat than many other places to us. Meanwhile, were sucking the Saudi Royal Families collective cocks and when they fall(not if, but when), things are going to be a lot worse for us in the Middle East. Iraq was a bad idea, it's not bringing stability. You ever read Arab/Islamic media? If you did you'd realize how much occupying Iraq has hurt us. In Afghanistan it was within our rights to strike back. Iraq didn't have WMDs, and so what if they did, we do. If we get rid of ours then we have a leg to stand on instead of being hypocritical. There was no justification for Iraq. If you want to try to argue that that there was, grab the CIA fact book, like I said earlier, and list all the countries from first to last in order of which one needs to be occupied next for our freedom and explain to me just exactly what the delimiters are and why Iraq had to be first.
I can't find it in me to cry over a murderous dictator going down. You do the crying for both of us, you seem to be good at it.
The crazy SOB did his best to look like a threat. Bit of a mistake, no?