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4503 Electronic Votes Lost in NC
ctnp writes "While it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome, 4530 votes were lost in one North Carolina county after one machine was configured to store 3,005 votes instead of the expected 10,500. 'The machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots. 'Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked,' he [Jack Gerbel, CEO of machine-providing UniLect] wrote.'"
Hold on! You're surely not suggesting that those modern electronic computer machines might not work properly!
No, this must be the sneaky terrorist attack on democracy that Bin Laden promised last week!
Three Squirrels
What were they using? 8k memory sticks?
I live in NC. Yes, the ballot was long this time, but it still wasn't much data per voter. I don't think there were any votes that would have taken more than three bits (and none more than four) to store the choice.
Even if the entire ballot is stored verbatim per voter, I still don't think it would have amounted to more than one or two k per ballot.
The storage device must be tiny. Or the ballot data must be really inefficiently laid out.
My county uses pen and paper for voting. It's cheap and easy.
By design? Is there like an if(v<=3005) acceptVote()? How many of these machines served more than 3005 votes? And lastly, WTF???
Don't look now, but something even dumber happened in florida as well.
To summarize, since there should be no more than 32,000 people in a precinct, the machines were not configured to handle more votes than that. As a result, they counted BACKWARDS once the 32,000 person limit was reached.
Methinks this is a buffer overflow issue (32,768 votes as opposed to the 32,000 quoted in the article). How thick can you be to design a polling system storing votes in an int...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Which county? I live in North Carolina... I thought we all used the tried and true Florida-style punch card system (butterfly ballot optional).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The deeper you dig the more dirt piles up.
Mandate
this
lying
cheating
sinners.
Flordia 2000. I say we go back to the way the founding fathers wanted it. Instead of voting for a slate of electorals that have pre-promised their vote to a canidate. Lets bring polotics local again, and we vote for electors, that are well respected in the comunity, wise, etc.... Then let them go and think about the canidates for about a month and a half then they can vote for the prez.
everyone knew something like this would happen. its starting to be known. god (that i dont believe in) knows what's going to happen next...a few thousand more votes lost, especially in important swing states?
If we only hear about the minor problems, how many other problems are we not in the know about?
I'm not one who worships conspiracy theories, but what http://blackboxvoting.org/ talks about is entirely possible, on both small and large scales.
Actually, I don't want to know. Better to get the four years out of the way and then elect a more progressive president. (Sorry, but I'm a bit on the liberal side, seeing as how I'm almost everything that current republicans seem to despise and refuse to give rights to.)
"Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes."
So you have UniLect Corp. which needs to be held accountable for lying about the capabilities of their system, and you have the local officials who need to be held accountable for failing to veryify or evaluate the claims of of UniLect Corp. It seems to me that UniLect should be sued and the officials should be jailed. If thats not possible then a bunch of angry South Carolinans with pitch forks and torches should have a word with these folks.
I saw a pic of ballots being loaded into a truck with a Bush 2004 sticker on the back.
In other news, I talked to a guy on the internets that heard from someone else that there was a website that had a 2nd hand account of really nasty about what's his name. And when they went back the site was mysteriously gone.
Wait there, I think there is helicoptor above my house.
Time passes.
I heard it and it was too dark to see, guess it must have been one of those black helicopters.
You know what Stuart? I like you. You're not like the other people here
in the trailer park. Oh no, don't get me wrong, they're fine people, good
Americans. But they're content to sit back, maybe watch a little Mork and
Mindy on channel 57. Maybe kick back a cool Coors 16-ouncer. They're
good fine people, Stuart. But they don't know what the queers are doing
to the soil.
You know that Johnny Werzner kid - the kid who delivers papers in the
neighborhood? He's a fine kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes
crack, but I don't believe it. Anyway, for his 10th birthday, all he
wanted was a burrow owl, just like his old man. "Dad, get me a burrow
owl. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live". So the guy
breaks down and buys him a burrow owl. Anyway at 10:30 the other night I
go out into my yard and there's the Werzner kid looking up in the tree. I
said, "What are you looking for?" He said, "I'm looking for my burrow
owl." I say, "Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick! Everybody knows that a
burrow owl lives in a hole in the ground! Why the hell do you think they
call it a burrow owl, anyway?!" Now Stuart, do you think a kid like that
is gonna know what the queers are doing to the soil?
I first became aware of this, about 10 years ago, the summer my oldest boy
Bill Jr. died. You know that carnival that comes to town every year?
Well this year it came with a ride called the Mixer. The man said "Keep
your head and arms inside the mixer at all times." But Bill Jr., he was a
daredevil, just like his old man. He was leaning out saying, "Hey
everybody! Look at me, look at me!" POW! He was decapitated. They found
his head over by the snowcone concession. A few days after that, I open
up the mail and there's a pamphlet in there, from Pueblo, Colorado. And
it's addressed to Bill Jr. And it's entitled, "Do you know what the
queers are doing to our soil?"
Now Stuart, if you look at the soil around any large U.S. city with a big
underground homosexual population - Des Moines, Iowa, perfect example.
Look at the soil around Des Moines, Stuart. You can't build on it, you
can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming.
But I know what's really going on, Stuart. I know it's the queers.
They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay
Martians. I swear to God.
You know what Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people, here
in the trailer park.
Thanks to the Dead Milkmen, And since you read this all the way to the end, I should mention I am pro-kerry. It's over folks, they won this round.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Because obviously machines never fail. Wouldn't it make more sense if the machine refused to allow voting until the problem was fixed? Wouldn't one of 4,530 voters have noticed the warning? What the hell is really going on here?
Three words.... Digital Rights Management. The company artifically limits its products, they had multiple lines one that could do 3,005 votes and one that did 10,000 votes, they told the people in charge that they were selling them 10,000 vote machines and slipped them the 3,005 models.
Anyway, thanks /. for giving me all the info about evoting fraud that I needed before the election. I was expecting for it not to work, but the machines are dead fuckin simple.
God bless America, and my h4xxor 5killz 2.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
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By all accounts, the election was won fair and square. Making such unfounded claims is just reaching out in utter desperation for that last gasp of breath. How pathetic!
what's going on here. we all know that electronic voting is far superior in terms of potential power compared to those old messy methods. why does everyone drag their heels and throw a tantrum?
yes there are problems with the machines... but that is a design issue, not a problem with the technology itself. why don't you all use your talent and design Open Source Software + hardware designs that are foolproof?
Everyone was afraid of what would happen if things went blatantly wrong. We appear to have avoided that malady. But there was always the question, how will we know if they've tampered with it? The answer was a meek "Well, the exit polls will keep the ballots true."
And today we see the exit polls distinctly differing from the actual counts, and collectively sigh that our nation won't go through the same disaster it did four years ago. If we can't trust the exit polls, why can we trust the voting machines?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
How about:
"Evidently, our voting system was so poorly designed we didn't bother to prevent people from using it once the system knew it couldn't store any new vote."
The more I read about those voting machines, the more 2 possibilities come into focus:
- The field of voting machine design and development attracts the dumbest people in the country, or
- The glaring design flaws have been inserted purposefully, to achieve plausible deniability.
To explain the 2d one a bit, if a system appears to have a sound design, yet it is somehow exposed that the votes stored by that system were manipulated, the focus will quickly go toward the people in control of the system.
On the other hand, if the current designs happen to miscount votes, it may be a local nerd that happened to carry a few smartcards in his pocket, it may be some foreign hacker that was wardialing random US numbers using carded VoIP accounts and found a voting system that picked up, or it may just be the system crumbling under the weight of its own ineptitude, among 20 other possible reasons.
Since each of those scenarios is more likely than a global conspiracy scenario, Occam's razor ends up providing a nice layer of protection.
Of course this is silly. The first explanation is the correct one.
Diebold as a collective entity is stupid. Unilect is stupid. W is stupid.
Let's all point our fingers and laugh at them.
People will want to know who the elector will vote for before they will choose them. So you'll have the same voting problems voting for someone who promises to vote for X instead of directly voting for X.
From one of the linked articles: "We need to take a few days to plan and then take to the streets in massive numbers."
That's just plain irresponsible.
Bush was reelected because more voters believed he was trustworthy than believed Kerry was. You may disagree with the outcome, but that's why we have elections.
Rather than protest this election, pick a better guy next time.
sigs, as if you care.
You know as well as anybody that calling Republicans stupid, in addition to being childish name-calling, is a gross generalization that cannot be justified at all. There are intelligent people in both parties, just as there are less intelligent people in both parties. That liberal elitism is probably why the poorer people reflected in your link on commonality.com know better than to vote for a wealthy elitist liberal candidate like Kerry. Why should anyone in the poorer states vote for someone who doesn't insults their intelligence?
As a fellow Democrat who sincerely hates Bush and believes that Republican voters are deaf, blind, narrow, and ignorant, I should point out that your sig is incorrect and should be changed.
Republican voters do not have lower IQ's on average. I'll give them that. Nor are they less educated, as far as holding college degrees. The data in your sig is completely made up to insult Republicans. I've seen it elsewhere. And Bush's past test scores suggest that he is probably more intelligent than Kerry, and 98% of the population.
Did I mention that Republican voters are still deaf, blind, narrow, and ignorant as far as I'm concerned?
People, blame the machines all you want. But the truth is, GWB won the election by a wide margin. It's very sad, but there is a truth in this. Here's what my dad told me on Wed. morning: America is going down. Religious morons in the hick states are multiplying like rats. In 50 years the US will be a 3rd world country. If I weren't rooted here I would consider Canada or Italy.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Wow. Insults like that (claiming Republicans are stupid), and you can't see why you lost the election? Maybe the Democrats really DO need to evaluate themselves. Do they really want to be the party of arrogant rich snobs that look down on the less fortunate? With comments like that, and the Hollywood and Media elite in their corner, looks like that's who they want to be. You can't seriously expect a majority of any population to identify with a party like that. It couldn't be clearer why they lost the election...
Correction. Mistook that for a sig, on account of the dashes. But you still shouldn't go around posting such misinformation.
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European airports were operating at such insanely high levels of security on the 10th that it's impossible for me to believe anything other than that they were on alert for a hijacking + kamikaze attack like succeeded in the U.S. Remember that even since back in the days when Big Bush and Reagan were singing the praises of Osama bin Laden, calling him a freedom fighter, Osama's m.o. has been to call his shots in advance.
However, since most of the US presidential campaign has been to focus on generating raw emotional responses detached from facts and data, it would be too much to expect that voters make informed decisions.
McCain can't run cause the Little Bush coalition doesn't want him. Remember they knocked him out of the primaries only with the help of a nearly bottomless war chest. Arnold is a more likely bet, it'd be easier to pull a Reagan again, but you'd need to change a few things to allow a non-US born president. If that happend, then Little Bush's favorite butt boy, Tony Bliar, would have the hand up.
Anyway, without an audit trail, there is little point arguing about the votes, they could be real votes or someone could have FTP'd them in. If it were up to me, I'd disallow any vote whose provenance cannot be proven. Oh, and jail the 'e-vote machiine' vendors for fraud and willful negligence, etc. Gibbet them on Pay-per-view or something to cover the costs along with a random handful of MBAs.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Neither is Bush, For all that to be blunt 120-125 IQ does NOT impress me at all; I've TAed math classes in university where that apparently qualifies as below average...and when I think of the bottom half of my classes...oi.
Now please give me back the 20 minutes of my life I just wasted on searching Google.
Of course I live in a country where we are still using pen and paper. Also, I guess we would have a more difficult task of creating a UI for electronic voting, since we have 10+parties and personal votes with several candidates per party.
Anyway, congrats to the winners, although I would rather have seen Kerry as your president.
Its already happening.
I'm not American.
Greate...now they Republicans will attribute it as another attempt at foreigners trying to influence the elections.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It's not because of an evoting machine, but they've already found one example where Bush was given 4000 extra votes in Ohio. In one precinct.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct
638 TOTAL BALLOTS CAST
US Senator:
Fingerhut (D) - 167 votes
Voinovich (R) - 300 votes
US President:
Kerry (D) - 260 votes
Bush (R) - 4,258 votes
Hmmm...
Not sure where I got 3647 from... /Diebold math
From the website:
Someone hates these cans.
This machine's entire purpose in life is to count, and to count with perfect reliability. I'm a software quality engineer, and there is no way a bug of this sort would have made it past my team without all hell being raised-- and not just internally, given the product.
It's just not that hard to test a counting machine. Any freshman CS major can tell you what that machine should have done when it found it couldn't handle more votes. (Throw an error message and keep accepting votes? No.) The problems we're seeing can only be caused by extreme incompetence or by malice.
It's taking your eye off the ball to look for the problem in the operators rather than the machines and manufacturers.
following post is from http://www.democraticunderground.com/
m a tt .htm
Just for example:
Franklin County. 77.3% of voters registered Dems. Only 15.9% registered Reps. 58.5% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???
Holmes County. 72.7% of voters registered Dems. Only 21.3% registered Reps. 77% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???
Calhoun County. 82.4% of voters registered Dems. Only 11.9% registered Reps. 63.4% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???
See the data in following links.
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.ht
http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_p
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
Eat less. Feel better.
I think, Exersize more. Feel better. is a much better solution.
I find that when I am working out regularlly I tend to crave healthier foods, and I can still eat 5000 Calories a day and loose wieght (slowly, ~5 lbs/year).
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
No, the same comment applies.
His team still lost, even if he couldn't vote.