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Evoting Problems in Ohio
deus_X_machina writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that a computer error involving one voting-machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, says the cartridge was retested yesterday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned."
I'msure this is only the first of many, many such stories we wil hear.... No paper audit trail in many places. fun fun fun
I reject your reality
As the article says, that's why election-night results are unofficial. They don't just count these things once and then throw them away. It's already been corrected, so it's not even a problem. blah blah blah well what if it wasn't detected blah blah blah. That is a valid concern, but posting this article on slashdot is just flaimbait.
I don't think the article is really concerned with WHO the extra votes were for, it is just indicating that there are problems with a electronic voting system that does not include paper trails to provide a more reliable count. The article is trying to indicate that we should not just blindly trust electronic machines, and I agree with them. Whether the extra votes were for Bush or Kerry is beside the point really.
--David
The interesting thing is that if just a few, say 20, votes were changed on every machine, it'd be enough to make a huge difference, and no one would be the wiser.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Yeah, whatever - Fox news would have been all over a story about Kerry getting extra votes, so don't fucking call the media "liberal" because there is more than one media outlet, and they slant both ways.
but that requires intent, not just incompetence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Personally, I would love to be a diebold programmer who was tasked with stealing this election.
My statement would go into a pair of safe deposit boxes controlled by attorneys with secret instructions to open the contents and make them public if they don't hear from me in 180 days.
I'd have Diebold by the balls.
This is why it would be stupid to try to steal the election this way. It's too hard to keep secret.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are you saying that there is no intent to steal votes by Nader? :-)
What really happened is that fear won. Fear of terrorism, fear of gay marriage, fear of a lot of things. Most of the people I talked to that voted for Bush didn't do so because they thought he was good, they did it because he wasn't Kerry. And vice versa. On top of that only about 30% of eligible voter voted for Bush and if Kerry had won it would have been a similar percentage.
On another topic, what happened to "no taxation without representation"? How easily we forget.
A blog about stuff.
Apparently the republicans are invulnerable to truth and reason. Fairly or unfairly, they've taken the election. Since the conservative trolls and their mod abusing partners are still running rampant, let me cut to the chase.
We as democrats face a strategic gap. Our agenda of promoting civil rights and defending the lower class and the environment isn't grabbing the middle aged voters. In order to turn back the tide of partisan villification and party unilateralism we need to have referendum.
As americans we already have the ability to contact our representatives. Because of the situation we are in, we need to do something more than that. We need our democratic representatives to lead us by calling us together to share our insights and regroup as democrats.
If we do not act now we will be swept away. Discussing our hopes and desires with our neighbors is not going to cut it. Similarly just contacting our reps isn't enough. We need to professionally analyze and resynthsize our mode of operation. Clearly something has to change. We can do this the dumb, easy way, and go about business as usual. Or we can take a comprehensive accounting of ourselves and act.
Beyond that, I have some minor opinions of what we need to do; but these are just guesses in the dark on my part. To firm up our strategy we need to organize. Here's my 2 cents:
The republican agenda is set at the top and their rhetoric is uniform - they listen to Rush Limbaugh and everyone knows what lie to use, what button to push to aggravate us, and which slur to accuse us with. IMHO, we need to fight fire with fire on this. I've heard that we democrats function best as a party when we work from the grassroots up. If this election was our best, we're screwed. We need to oppose fundamentalist christianity's drive to weld their theology to the federal government, but we can embrace christians in the middle and on our side without giving up that goal. Republicans often go against the teachings of Jesus. We need to bring christianity to the fore so that we can counter their "blah blah bible" arguments. We can still embrace non christians by preserving the constitutional foundations of the separation of church and state, and the freedom of religion.
We may want to look at the South, and see if there is room for compromise with southern ideals. Personally, I view the north-south differences in terms of slavery. It appears to me that the big issue we have to face with the south is bigotry against non-whites and non-fundamentalist christians. We can embrace southerners without embracing racism and theological intolerance.
Finally I think we have all seen how much damage the conservative media bias has done to the national discourse. Their spinjockeys and pundits pound out two messages continuously to all their members: The first message is one of reinforcing hatred of democrats. They brand us all as communists, all as unamerican, all as unpatriotic and they're getting cocky about calling us terrorists. We have to give them a few bloody noses or it's never going to end, and America will spiral into theocracy and or fascism.
The second message of the conservative pundit is the party message of the moment. They always have ammo. If you win a discussion on one topic, they turn on you with another. Every time you argue, you're arguing with Karl Rove. It's like playing chess against an army of Kasparovs.
We need to reassert our party identity, and then we need to fight tooth and nail.
One last thing... we need to use our philibuster ability. We may need to compromise unduly... but we can not give up entirely.
As Barak Obama said, the Arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
We shall overcome.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
someone--anyone--
On the total reversal, if Kerry had won, a Replublican STILL wouldn't have tipped a reporter off.. at least in my opinion. This is simply because, as Democrat friends of mine have said, "Democrats are whiners.".
If that Republican gave a shit about democracy and the sanctity of the election system, then he damn well should start talking since that's the only way the problems will get fixed.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
All I hear from the citizens who voted for Kerry is "Let's move to Canada". Yeah right, move away and abandon fighting for democracy in your own country. Instead of fleeing to the Canuck Haven, they should stay and demand a re-election, with paper (trail or ballot) only. The remaining americans might have voted for Bush, but they don't deserve being deceived.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
First you say republicans don't whine, then you admit they do. And as someone who is most definitely not a liberal I must say that my big problem with FOX is not the spin, it is the complete disregard for unbiased commentary and the abandonment of any sort of journalistic objectivity. I have seen a "reporter" roll their eyes and dismisively laugh while reporting the statements of democrats, leftists or foreign governments.(only the ones that oppose US actions of course)
The sad part of it all is that I used to watch FOX news much more often, before 9/11, because they had a lot more real news than the other networks, and I could see through the bias. Now it's absurd.
On a side note, it would be nice to see a news channel that is closer to the content of "the economist". I'd love it regardless of the bias, just to get the damn news and not the fluff that everyone has today.
A blog about stuff.
...would account for GWB's entire lead in Ohio. Keep an eye out, folks.
Paper ballots are not as usuable by the blind and people with limited use of the hands as touch-screen balloting.
E-voting also makes providing multilingual ballots to all precincts easier.
In low-turnout elections it also facilitates combining polling stations.
On the down side, there's that nasty lack of an audit trail on SOME machines.
Memo to America: Listen to Nevada.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These errors do not change the election result! Bush won by too big of a margin in Ohio and Florida, any assumption that the machines threw it for Bush would mean that those counties would have had to vote in tremendous numbers for Kerry (like 70%), which is impossible. But that does NOT mean we should not investigate them. In fact it means it is the BEST time to investigate them!
Unfortunately I see way too many Republicans saying "it's those sore loser Democrats trying to cause trouble". And quite a few Democrats saying "this proves the election was wrong"
We MUST investigate these machines. This is the best time to do so, there is now tons of proof that they are screwed up, but the investigation can be just into the machines themselves and the people behind them, without any threat to the stability of our government.
But as long as people keep whining about "sore loser Democrats" or "election was wrong" then it will discourage any investigaton. This is BAD, BAD BAD!! These machines may throw the NEXT election. And Republicans had better realize that a single wild hippie Liberal in the wrong place could use them to throw it toward the left, this is NOT a partisian issue! Everybody should be in agreement that these machines need to be gotten rid of NOW. Don't blow our best chance by making this a partisian mess.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.
When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.
Insofar as you turn this into a political flame war, you're just distracting people from the real issue-- the use of electronic voting either needs to be reformed or ended.
The Diebold machines have told us that President Bush won the election. Why can't the Democrats be satisfied with that? I mean, the integrity of the votes was secured by a Microsoft Access database, which as we all know has *password protection*. The only way someone could have tampered with the results would be if the designers were somehow partisan and wanted to promise the election to a particular candidate.
And as if the people in the USA would stand for their black box voting machines to be designed by a pro-Bush partisan. It's just not realistic, so stop doubting and Praise Jesus. God Bless America.
501 Not Implemented
Because there is a box on the ballot that says "Vote for all Republicans" and one that says "Vote for all Democrats", but there are no boxes that say "Vote for all Green/Libertarian/Natural/Independant/Socialist
Where do you hail from? In New York each party has a separate line on the voting machine. If you want to do a party line vote all you need to do is find the line for your party and go all the way across pulling levers down.
Maybe the true problem is that the Libertarians and Greens didn't bother to field any candidates for any office other then the US President (and in New York the Senate race). Haven't you ever heard the expression "All politics are local"? I didn't decide my local votes until a day or so before the election -- after I personally met with and talked to the people on the ballot. Perhaps the little parties should focus on some county executive/mayoral/assemblyman races before the White House. What's more effective? Trying to appeal to 1,000s to 10,000s of people on local issues to build a base or trying to compete with the DNC and RNC warchests?
Just my two cents on the issue. Of course I'd rather see more use of Electoral Fusion to bring the major parties back into the mainstream -- rather then running third party candidates that either sabotage their own cause (Nader in 2000/Perot in 1992) by putting the other ideology into power or third party candidates that fail to accomplish anything (Nader this go around). I realize that's a minority opinion around here -- and I'm not trying to flame -- that's just my opinion on this issue.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
We need to do more than just reorganize; we need to restrategize.
And while you restrategize, you really do need to pay attention to what trb0001 is saying. You're not going to win the 2008 election by insulting the 51% of the people who voted for Bush. If you continue insulting Christians, rural inhabitants, and blue collar workers, you will lose the next election. If you want to win you need to be the party of egalitarian inclusion, not elitist exclusion.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system. Danaher did not immediately return a message for comment.
Is it more important for you to be a Republican than an American? Who exactly is your "enemy"?
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Okay, turned on the news wondering what kind of spin CNN would have on this. Didn't come up. So I started doing searches....
CNN
Foxnews
BBC
CBC
Aljzeera's search engine is not working properly today; oh well.
Ohio News Now
Anyone care to tell me why this simply isn't being reported at all? I've never heard of the Columbus Dispatch. Nor have I heard of the Washington Dispatch (one other place I've seen run the story).
Is it too new to be picked up?
Is it not considered newsworthy as just correcting a routine error?
Is it being censored? And if so then why by every news company including those outside of US juristiction?
Forgive me for being a bit skeptical on this story, but I do tend to assume that vote talliers can spot an order of magnitude error.
They were probably balanced out by the criminal and borderline criminal acts the Democrats engaged in prior to the election.
Umm, actually no, they weren't. Read about it here. You may want to skip about 2/3s of the way down the page to this part:
This sums it up though:
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I.
Wall Street has volume in the hundreds of millions per hour. Every transaction must be documented and has a paper trail (or backup report) somewhere, and every participant can be held accountable. Failure to comply with the law can and does result in jail time for offenders.
II.
We have a world-wide network of ATM machines. Each produces a paper receipt, often with an internal duplicate copy for auditing purposes. Each customer has a unique network ID and a secret PIN. Many systems automatically detects fraud-like activity automatically notify customers via cell-phone within one minute of transaction being completed. Again: hundreds-of-thousands, even millions, of transactions happening hourly.
III.
The Federal Reserve processes millions of "paper ballots" (cheques) daily. Each "ballot" is optically scanned and routed to the correct party, with errors approaching zero. Fair system: errors totaling 0.01 dollars or greater are penalized with a monetary fine. 100% accuracy rate built-in and required by law.
Even during the 9/11 terrorist attack, the New York Federal Reserve - one block from WTC - managed move their operation to New Jersey and complete day's "ballot" processing.
Conclusion #1
"Help" America Vote Act is Orwellian double-speak at its finest. Federal Elections demand a Federal Employees, Federal Training, Federal Standard. We can have separate elections with their own method for local/state/federal offices. State/Local constitutions can easily be amended to this end - should be uncontroversial.
Federal elections should be fully staffed and trained, just like the TSA (Transportaion Security Administration). Some will argue that Federal Government is wrong solution for problem and will advocate private corporations as a solution. Some people are morons. TSA is many magnitudes superior to pre-existing private security (equivalent: Diebold), which allowed 9/11 slaughter. At the very least, system can be audited without resorting to lawsuit.
Conclusion #2
As with securities exchange, ATM, Federal Reserve examples cited above, electoral process can & should have accuracy approaching 100% accuracy and same-day efficiency. Primary obstacle is lack of incentive. All examples cited involve monetary transactions, which Americans are notorious for valuing above Liberty.
Ergo, values of average politician/American must change to value liberty. Of course, the only party that can change things is the party in power, and as long as they are in power "the system works" (Note: not a cut at any particular party, as this cuts both ways).
Real change will only occur after nation-destroying election scandal and ensuing violent revolution. Call me an optimist.
Unfortunately, many choose ruminate about voter irregularities as being part of a imperfect, but practical, system. We often hear these folks, when confronted with vote tally irregularies, shake their head and sigh "perhaps we'll never know for sure."
This attitude is completely unacceptable when elections are being decided by 1,000 votes out of 2 million.
Consider:
If my employer's Daily Statement of Condition was off by $1,000 out of $2MM, and I told our Controller that "perhaps we'll never know" why the difference existed, I would be fired immediately.
It's mind-blowing that certain parties feel this is acceptable standard for United States electoral system.
Problem: how to make voting analogous to monetary transactions?
A MODEST PROPOSAL
Make the election a lottery. Ten lucky voters get $10,000,000 tax-free. Winning chances would be better than "Powerball," which has far more than 100,000,000 tickets and odds of winning approaching zero. Turnout would easily top 60% each election, and voters would demand election integrity to ensure their chance for jackpot.
This is a no-brainer proposition that will never become reality in current America. Sometimes genius isn't a
Flaws in computerized voting could explain why the exit polls were so inconsistent with the election results. Other explanations have been presented, most notably in this recent article from Greg Palast:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-36.htm
Is that merely wishful thinking? I'm not convinced. I am convinced that it's a shame that so many votes in poor neighborhoods are routinely thrown out. Is anybody expecting this to be fixed by '08? Frankly, I'll consider it a minor miracle if we last that long.
It was so much fear as disgust. They're both reprehensible, and Kerry was somewhat more so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."