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2004 Election Weirdness Continues
I've read dozens of submissions about election anomalies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I've decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report
that shows that
optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry.
Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters;
that machines in LaPorte, Indiana discounted 50,000 voters;
in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes;
in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards;
Lastly,
precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.
to put me down for pointing out the glaringly obvious. Democracy is easily stolen, but I was ridiculed for mentioning that last wednesday. Dont you realize this isnt about Bush? I dont care who won! Its about E-voting removing your right to affect change in your country by making a democratic choice.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It's not about trying to get Kerry into office. It's about the fact that the voting system is flawed.
I believe Bush won fairly (even though I despise his policies), but I also believe we need to work on getting the most accurate vote count possible, and that's only possible when we admit there are flaws. Geesh.
Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
No.
All anonmilies should be investigated, even the ones that don't have a chance of changing the outcome.
If cheating is going on, then it should be stopped. No exceptions.
Even if it's just stupidity and not malice, it should be stopped.
-- should you believe authority without question?
Notice there are NO reports in the media of ballot count mistakes, or diebold glitches which gave Kerry votes. Hmmm Of all the precincts in the US, not one can be found to have one count mistake in Kerry's favor to report on.
One thing to bear in mind is that more than just the presidential election was on the ballot. Lots of state and local elections may have been affected by these anamolies and may have had their outcomes changed.
You are right. The outcome of the election will never be changed. It will never be allowed to. We can't allow this to continue though. The electoral process in this country should be as close to flawless as possible.
It is time to take the manufacture of voting devices and the auditing process out of the hands of partisans. And to all of you out there saying, "Boo hoo, Kerry lost. Get over it." How is it that Democracy in America is being hijacked, and you don't seem to give a shit? I'd wager you are the true anti-Americans. You do a lot of name calling, but when the shit hits the fan you show your true natures. Sunshine Patriots. Educate yourselves, and stand up for the Constitution you so loudly claim to believe in. Stop being little automatons.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
...but the title of the main story in the submission is:
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
It's comments like that that put people on the defensive, when we should be simply working to ensure ways to make the machines, systems, and processes more reliable, and that a voter-verified paper trail exists.
Though, someone raised a valid concern in a previous slashdot story: if we have so little faith in our ability to oversee, manage, and use e-voting systems, what's to stop any number of groups from demanding paper recounts in almost every jurisdiction, every time. Yes, our democracy is *that important*; I'm not saying it isn't. But this is a double-edged sword: many people have alleged that poorer communities have always gotten the shaft from old, poorly working, or broken election equipment; HAVA aims to ensure that consistent voting systems that meet a certain standard are available to ALL voters - and, naturally, we chose to go down the electronic path. We trust computers with just about everything under the sun: our power, our health, our lives, our money - and we've developed reliable systems for many tasks. Why can't the same be accomplished with e-voting? Sure, if Diebold itself was counting the votes on a single central computer under their control with no audit trail, I could understand the concern. But these are literally thousands of independent, non-network-connected systems in thousands of jurisdictions, monitored by people who have been charged with monitoring our elections forever.
So, what's fundamentally different now? And yes, I'm fully aware what not having a permanent audit trail means. We should have that. But that's not what I'm asking.
You always talking the same shit Dave. The last article on blackboxvoting I saw you posted 10 comments all spouting the same crap. You seem to be very fired up about this topic, perhaps because you either voted for Bush or perhaps you are a closet Republican.
The big point you don't seem to get is that without an audit trail these machines are totally unaccountable. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE, so yes, even the "300M Kerry campaign" wouldn't be able to find out what really happened. This is the whole fucking point. So, please, pull your head out of your ass. You can't say with *ANY* certainty that Bush actually won.
Actually, I don't think anyone (at least in the story) is crying foul that it was done on purpose. The point is the machines are showing signs that they screwed up.
Regardless of who won, and regardless if it was intentional or not, it is essential to investigate the problems, if only to prevent them from happening again. If it is determined that the errors are significant and widespread, then the elections must be redone. Those are the breaks.
We can discuss possible fraud once we know what the problem is.
Oh, and unless Diebold manufactured scantron-style counters and are responsible for printing provisional ballots with no addresses, I think your little rant is just slightly misplaced.
=Smidge=
Maybe Kerry (and any other person who might care) isn't making a big fuss because there isn't enough evidence to make a case yet. Seriously, I doubt anybody who had the ability to rig a national election would do it in a sloppy manner that was easy to detect (Dunno what happened in Ohio, that could be pure user error, although it's odd that the errors seem to favor Republicans in nearly every case). I suspect that if the vote was rigged that we will never get more than some statistical oddities out of it. Even when the same irregularities show up year after year, there isn't enough evidence to make a case out of it. Besides, it would take an act of Congress to get a real investigation going, and somehow I don't see that happening (not as long as these strange coincidences keep getting them elected).
College professors and other academics can point out the irregularities in the system all they want, they don't have the power to actually change anything (what are they going to do? Vote those jokers out? Ha!)
At this point I havn't seen anything like a smoking gun (don't expect to either), but I also have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that appeared right when it became obvious that yet again the exit polls (the primary measure of voting fraud in foreign countries) were skewed yet again this year (even with different people in charge!). Either 5% of the population have started systematically lying to exit pollsters (refusal rates havn't changed significantly), or there is something else odd happening.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'll also give the requirements for perpetrating a fraud such as you're proposing and making it statistically significant:
1) You would have to have many individuals involved in the fraud because voting twice in the same precinct would be too dangerous - a person could easily be recognized as voting multiple times and possibly arrested.
2) Once you have the people, you now have to have access to multiple registered identities, one per precinct per person involved in the fraud.
2a) You need to be certain that those multiple registered identities aren't going to vote, either by registering nonexistant people or somehow figuring out who is not going to show up.
3) Now, you have to have each person travel to every precinct to be defrauded and vote.
3a) Absentee ballots could simplify this process but given how few elections have turned on these ballots over the years it hardly seems credible that this could be done without detection.
Bottom line? Your "undoubtable fact" is very much in doubt and would be difficult to perpetrate under ideal circumstances. Far easier (though I've gotta think still difficult) would be coopting election officials themselves and taking that more direct route to fixing an election.
We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes.
You're right, it's been really hard to get over the fact that the worst president ever was backed by that many people. I've been incredulous all week.
However, Bush didn't win by 3.5 million votes. He lost by about 130,000 votes. If 131,000 more people voted for Kerry in Ohio - he would be our new president-elect. It is for this reason that we should be examining the voting mechanics errors, the number of which are approaching that winning margin. We learned this rather clearly 4 years ago, I'm surprised that you haven't... let me guess, you probably also believe that WMDs were found in Iraq and Saddam was behind 9/11?
Taco isn't saying that crackers were messing with the system. The story that I read from his headline was that the system is messed up enough as it is, and we aren't getting fair or accurate vote counts. We can't have a truly functioning democracy when so many people's votes aren't counted properly. I mean, how are we supposed to tell Afganistan and Iraq that we know how to run a country better than they do?
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin
- passion
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We use these in Loudoun County, Virginia and I can't imagine a reason for not doing it this way. There's nothing mechanical like all these goofy punch card systems... state-of-the-art 1890's technology, with their byzantine layouts. The ballots are incredibly simple and clear, so there's confusion down in the old folks' home where someone mixed up the medications.
And unless you have some kind of seizure while wielding the pen, there's no chance of ambiguity. But it doesn't reap millions of dollars to a company for forcing expensive, buggy, hopelessly complex solutions, where simple tried and true technology serves effectively, so I guess it's just not a feasible solution.
In addition to being prone to ridiculous errors, there is also the possibility of fraud, although I don't believe most of these can be attributed to some widespread conspiracy to cheat. As I've always said "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence." and to that I would add, "The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I only get one vote. Just like everyone else. I absolutely need to know that my one vote counts and has been counted. It is that simple. There is no just concept where "most" votes count.
I am floored at the number of /. apologists with regard to this topic. The software development community should be outraged that systems that are fundamentally supposed to do ADDITION are not doing so in a reliable, secure manner. If we can't secure ADDITION, then what can we secure?! There are people in my professional community that should be profoundly ashamed at the results of their incompetence.
The poster you're replying to noted a trend in states, not a universal quality of all individuals who voted for Bush. Yes, you have a job paid for by government spending. Big spender Bush does serve your interest. That doesn't explain the pattern among states.
4000 votes for Bush from a tiny county in Ohio that decided the election and where the margin is just over 100,000 is obviously significant.
The optical scanner anomalies in Florida are potentially hugely significant.
The anomalies in New Mexico could easily flip the state in to the Kerry column so they are statistically significant though they can't change the outcome of the election without Ohio or Florida.
The key point is if there is election rigging or incompetence its ALWAYS significant. If you don't report it, investigate it and punish it your opening the floodgates to everyone to do it in every election and your elections turn in to dodo.
@de_machina
Your post is riddled with falsehoods and deceptions.
and some even stated their intentions to do everything they could to give Bush the election.
One life-long Republican supporter of one company pledged to support Bush and deliver Ohio to Bush. All of the sudden this taken as sometype of public admission that he was going to steal the election. That's a big time deception you tried to lay on everyone. It wasn't the companies. It wasn't companies. It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter! And, oh, the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad. You make it seem like a bunch of people pledged openly to comitt election fraud. Very deceptive!
The question was going on long before the fact, in case you hadn't noticed. Blackboxvoting.org was specifically set up to contest the media hype surrounding the infallibility of electronic voting.
This type of question has been around for 200 years. Not two years. Blackbox voting has always been an issue. Before there were telephones and fax machines and video cameras people complained: how do we really know who California voted for? They are so far away? Who are these people claiming to be electors? Same story, different century. Again, deceptive on your part. This is a very old problem for our country. Additionally, I urge you to find for me one media article that claims infalability of electonic voting machines. Finally, I urge you to find me one article or study that can prove that electronic voting machines - flawed as they are - are anything short of the most accurate and secure voting system we have.
Which I intend to do. Loudly. Obnoxiously, even. So in the immortal, family-friendly version of the words of Dick Cheney:
You ought to examine why you are in this mess. Assuming that in fact your guy won deep down and that everything is wrong and that the only way Bush could be re-elected is through Republican fraud is why instead of walking away this election like he should have Kerry is going back to the Senate.
The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get. You needed these votes: conservative democrats, conservative minorities, moderate Republicans. You cannot win a national election without them. It's actually like the democratic party was searching for a condescending attitude, found yours, and ran with it.
"Voting equipment today is just about as good as it has ever been in the country's history."
Sorry by MS windows based touch screens storing data in MS Access is just not as good as a pen and a piece of paper and 10 scrutineers counting by hand. A kid in highschool could hack that.
Electronic voting of this nature is quite new and if there is even a possibility that there could have been this kind of fraud, it is prudent to investigate whether it will eventually change the outcome of this particular election or not.
You wouldn't trust your personal data or credit card information to a company that stored it on an ordinary Windows computer using Access, why would you trust your votes to the same?
If the the process is so open, what has happened with Blackboxvoting.orgs FOIA request? As a matter of fact, what happened the blackboxvoting.org today?
I suspect any investigation will likely show that Bush really did win. That's beside the point. Do you really want there to be a possibility in the future of someone using the techniques mentioned in the articles to alter election results?
Think of this as an ethical hacker informing a big company of an enormous hole in their firewall (or other devastating security violation). Don't attack the hacker, fix the fucking hole.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
people don't line up in the rain for nine hours to tell the president what a good job he is doing.
What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.
With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.
Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.
It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!
Go check this to see where the sympathies of the voting machine companies lie. Any claims of non-partisanship on the part of the companies should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad
Best kind of candidate, if you think about it. How much money they make is a non-issue. I don't care how much they make - what I'm worried about is how they handle the election.
This type of question has been around for 200 years.
Sure. But now we can ask it loudly until someone actually answers the damn question! We have at our hands a tool to make sure it gets in front of as many faces as possible. So why not use it?
The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get.
So, what? Just shut up and take it? In case you hadn't noticed, moderation doesn't go over with this administration. Bush was the one who said "You are either with us, or against us." So, I'm coming down on the side specifically against him and his fellow Republiban.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
So, to ease my state of mind over this, can someone point to significant errors in Kerry's favor? Surely if these are random and unrelated occurances, the distribution of who is being favored should be about equal, right?
Bullshit -- Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy reduced the amount of federal money going to things like schools, etc. This in turn raises the local tax burden.
I dispute the "minor job loss" claim.
In 2000, there were 110M jobs and 281M people, so a rough estimate is that you need (on average) one job to support 2.6 people. We've probably gained about 10,000,000 people since Bush started in 2000, which means that about 3.8M jobs needed to be created during his administration, just to keep pace with population growth. Even if there are the same number of jobs as when he took office, he's nearly four million jobs in the hole.
Nor is it just a matter of liberal arts majors not being able to find work. The total job numbers hide the number of underemployed, who are working fewer hours than they would like or working in jobs that don't utilize their skills and training.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, total jobs increased by about 22M, more than two jobs for every three people added to the population. Historically, the fastest job growth has always occurred when Democrats were in the White House.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!