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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.
FP!
I almost jumped out of my body when I read "Weirdness", "Dreams", "Optically", "Anomaly" and "Votes".
I thought voters who optically identified themselves via retina scanners have been fed subliminal messages which voted for candidate opposite of their registered party, and have had weird dreams since then.
But ain't those October Surprises like Bin Laden, same-sex marriage sort of swung the votes? Although the percentage changes in E-Touch Voting and Op-Scan are too irregular.
I guess the main question is whether or not these differences are enough to change the outcome. Even Kerry admitted those 150,000 provisional ballots wouldn't help.
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
It's all a democratic ploy to discredit or dethrone our duly elected Pope. The first rule of the Democratic process is: Do not talk about the Democratic process. The second rule of the Democratic process is: Do not question the Democratic process...
Frost Pist!!!
jaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Your guy lost. Your reported anomilies aren't going to change that. Get over it.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't trust this government.
sorry :(
Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors - ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia - have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected?
.[1] Don't believe people who make it seem like companies like Diebold are resisting. They aren't. They'll build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
Do you think Kerry's $300M campaign, and the hundreds of experts who worked it for the better part of two years, just said "Oh, well! Guess we lost, even though there's proof of widespread fraud! Let's just throw in the towel and not say anything about it!" Wake up.
These are EXACTLY the kinds of problems, i.e., errors and failures in equipment (and setup) that we aim to prevent. But it is not possible for a central entity to control the vote.
We do need verified voting, but I'm sorry to say that there was no widespread fraud in all e-voting states. It's just not possible. There are thousands of people involved, thousands of pieces of equipment, many, many, many election and other government officials at all levels in extremely disparate jurisdictions with different ways of doing things, with no way for any central entity to reach these machines after the fact. (And no, they don't come "preloaded" with votes for Republican candidates; the logistics of the way they're set up and the diversity of the the configurations also makes that impossible.)
Bush won. Again. Get over it.
H.R.2239 and S.1980, discussed further here [verifiedvoting.org], will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.
Please, simply support this legislation.
Additionally, the electronic voting manufacturers, such as Diebold, already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products
The roadblock, as it turns out, is often local election boards. First, the new paper verification systems NEED to go through the government certification process - remember, it's the e-voting watchdogs who are chastising non-certified patches/updates being put into place; the paper audit systems need to go through the same certification process. Further, many municipalities can't understand why they should be forcing paper audit trails; after all, they think, they are just getting away from paper ballots - why should they be arguing for paper ballots (and all the headaches that go along with them, ON TOP of the headaches they already have from learning to deal with e-voting), so why should they go back to them?
Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state. Experts dealing with e-voting don't even have this on their radar. Their concern is more errors and failures. E.g., most of Ohio is still punchcard as it is (the majority of the 35 counties moving to e-voting pushed off the transition until AFTER the election because of problems), and someone like Diebold doesn't even have access to this equipment after the fact. Yes, an unscrupulous election official or enterprising hacker might be able to breach individual machines and potentially even a county - it's possible. But the likelihood of something like that happening on any significant scale, ESPECIALLY without being caught (the articles we're talking about here actually prove that the audit processes, be they what they are, do work) is very, very low.
That said, we absolutely sho
We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes.
You know why Bush did so well in Florida? The hurricanes. He was able to travel down there and be the hero with the federal aid.
If you read Slashdot, it should be pretty clear that not all the l33t crackers out there are Republicans. If there was so much hacking going on, why were all these liberal crackers out there working to give Kerry votes? Or maybe they were! Maybe they just didn't give him enough. I'd also expect the Libertarian to pick up a huge number of votes if cracking was involved.
Oh, and I notice he forgot to make mention of the Pennsylvania voting problems, but I guess since those were in Kerry's favor, they don't count.
But all of this does not change the fact that at least a substantial part of the nation voted for Bush. Don't forget that.
And the republicans are precisely the kind of people who would not hesitate to cheat in order to win.
Clearly the voting machines in my home state of FL were deployed pre-programmed to elect the Governor's Brother...until they took on a life of their own and started killing people.
That is all.
...but i'm thinking that statistically there were probably annomalies in favor of both candidates...we're just only hearing about the one's that helped bush and hurt kerry because they make for the most sensationalistic story...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Yes, but are any of these anomalies statistically significant? If not, it's just random noise regardless of the source.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm guessing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable"
... And people are actually surprised at this after last election's fiasco? You didn't all actually think that war-mongering moron won *fairly*, did you?
Thanks to Evangelicals, we're facing a theocracy. All liberals are enemies according to Evangelicals and that includes the educated. People fell for that "values" crap and elected a President that fully supports Evangelicals. From now on, we have to fight for our most basic human rights.
Stuff for Lawyers? Whatever I was hoping for getting back to technology and geeks stuff ya know... Guess I have to keep my freedom sig for a little while longer...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Bush won that state by ~136,000 votes, and the 4000 + however many absentee ballots are for Kerry probably still wouldn't be enough.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
You go to vote and your not even id. "Name, adress....ok go ahead."
Can the potential difference in votes amount to a larger number than the margins by which either candidate won in a given state?
If not, the only concern should be to correct the problems and not to overturn the election right?
Blaze a trail to the New World
Your party lost the 2004 Presidential Election by nearly 4,000,000 (Four Million) votes. Please stop whining. Thank you.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Does anyone else get the impression that this kind of crap has been going on since day one? At least now we're paying more attention and noticing it -- that's a good thing.
The Florida Election "inconsistencies" page was emailed to me earlier. Here's what I sent to my friend in reply:
Well, it's interesting, but that's not a useful study, just a dump of a bunch of numbers. There has been at least one serious documented instance of major electronic voting machine failure/fraud in Ohio (the precinct that counted 4,000 too many Bush votes), but this isn't even an analysis let alone proof of anything in Florida.
They list number of registered Republicans and Democrats, but don't show how those same countries voted in the last Presidential election, and more importantly, they don't show any exit poll results.
Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. The best way to flag fraud is to note when the exit polls are substantially out of line with actual returns, and particularly if they are out of line in a systematic (and unpredicted) way.
Beyond that, I have several questions about these numbers shown.
While I have every reason to distrust Diebold given their atrocious history of faulty machines and rabid partisanship, it's hard to believe that a conspiracy of three vendors, all of whom sold optical scan machines to different precincts, worked together to create this fraud.
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South.
So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.
Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
Rule #1: Do not use signed shorts to count the total number of votes.
What about the real story, that George Bush is attempting to eliminate his enemies? This should be front-page news.
You probably shouldn't click this.
This issue is a central issue to insure that democracy is treated a valid type of government. Everyone must feel that the effort they put forth to vote is respected and heard. The only way we can lead the world on this is to set a good example and to purse with vigilence all reports of vote counting error.
Jeoin
Widespread questionable activity in the electoral process! And it overwhelmingly favors Republicans!!! HOLY COW!!!
Nothing for you to see here, please move along. And take your "First Ammendment" crap with you...
adam b.
I said, right at the bottom, that I took much of that from a couple of my previous posts on this topic. And I also am a slashdot subscriber, so I had time to put it together beforehand.
It is funny how the county clerks in all the problem counties are democratic hacks. If there is a problem it is with the CLERKS in those counties and with the idiot voters in those counties.
The problem with issues such as these, especially with the Diebold machines is such that the person who CHOSE them should be sacked (IE the Democratic County Clerks).
I am sorry, but I don't feel sorry for anyone. NO, I didn't vote for BUSH either. Both are losers.
Next time, vote LIBERTARIAN (or some other third party) and have your votes count less.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm the first to say Diebold needs to be shot and some good, old-fashioned design time needs to be dedicated to electronic voting. But one word of caution: alot of these theories are based on comparing tabulated data to exit polls. Now as bad as the machines may be, I hardly think CNN's interns represent a more secure system of determining the election outcome.
The core problem, at least in my area, is that 1)it is considered "racist" to identify a voter by anything other than a simple "state your name and address" and 2) it is "racist" to purge the rolls of dead voters, etc. It is typically the Democrats that make these arguments.
It's over for this election, but what will stop it from happening next election? We need to fight for legislation to stop election fraud, or else anomolies like this may affect the 2008 election. -b0lt
got sig?
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.
If Bush has the ability to cause cancer when he wills it, the poster should take that down if he wants to keep his testicles.
Signed 16-bit short anyone?
I can understand using signed numbers here -- at least the error would be obvious -- assuming noone just absolute values away the sign thinking they're clever. But how memory-limited are these systems not to at least use 24-bit or better yet 32-bit ints here? Is it really that much of a space savings to warrant districts subdividing becase the companies can't afford a little more memory in these things?
Or, is there something else I'm missing here...
Is there anywhere I can invest in tinfoil futures?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Kerry conceided, and there's no take-backs.
Your side wins.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The machines where the software stored votes per precinct in an integer, causing the votes (having hit 32,767) to overflow.
I haven't written much code in a while, but I can figure out 'square peg, round hole'.
Ok, why does slashdot have to become a damn politics website. Why can't it just stay on the topic of technology and etc. For one it's leaning very much to one side so people who don't agree will probably just get annoyed and stop coming to the site all together. Hey there's a good way to keep your site popular. It's just really annoying.
Actually, it's La Porte County Indiana, Michigan City is the city. I voted there - figures we would screw something up.
-R14
int douche = 0; int turdSandwich = 0; if(voteFor = 'BUSH') douche++; else turnSandwich++;
--- nick
Voting irregularities happen all the time. When dealing with so many from so many places.. it's hard to do the job right. New systems, old systems, operator error, etc... these all go into effect. What purpose is posting an article like this with so little information about WHERE the votes were cast, or which votes were suppressed? It means NOTHING! Suppose all votes suppressed were for kerry, and all "extra" votes were for bush? Ok then you'd have an article! As it is you've got nothing more than sensationalist CRAP to stir up impressionable people that don't have the time to do the research on their own. Posting such drivel is highly irresponsible.
Did anyone here the call for unity by John Kerry? How about the one from Bush?
Kerry was a big man conceding as early as he did, he didn't have to, but he chose to make a difference in the best way he could... trying to help unify the nation after such a bitter election.
Apparently no one listened.
Stop B****ing and Make a Difference
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
More like "from the get over it and try again in 4 years."
We've heard every single excuse possible already, for all of the weak consperacy theories about Republicans, the democrats were the ones out slashing tires the night before the election, and assaulting people in line during the election.
I hope you are happy too. With all of the propaganda you fed the American people about this election, you managed to kill one of the weak willed people over the weekend who really believed all the BS you spout about Bush being "evil". Your party really needs to tune down the "Bush is the Anti-Christ" retoric. You would be a lot better off taking a moderate position. In case you haven't noticed, the Republican party ignores/kicks out it's extremists (ie Pat Buchanan) while the democrats embrace theirs.
You call yourselves the greatest democracy on earth, you are proud of it, you try to push this "value system" down other countries throats, but don't you see how flawed the actual implementation of these values of which you stand are? Go learn about the world, about how democracy is really done. About governments gaining and leaving power by the decision of the citizens, the majority.
America, OPEN YOUR EYES! Change things! Stop being naïve! Wake up! The worst kind of blind man is the one who doesn't want to see!
One problem with these types of events is that nobody can say whether something happened or not. All you can say is that "the numbers don't fit a mental model of normalcy." The problem is that model may be wrong, or that something unusual happened.
If something unusual happened, well, statistically you can try and figure out how unusual the event was, but could you actually figure out if it was a "normal but unusual" event or a "fraud-related unusual" event?
Just because an event is extremely unlikely doesn't mean that it can't happen. People win the lottery every day, even though those events are highly unusual.
Can someone with some knowledge of statistics chime in?
BTW, palm beach found and corrected the 88k discrepancy.
Certainly, voter fraud is a problem. But let's look at it this way. Bush won the popular vote by ~2-3 million votes (I don't rememeber number exactly). Even if all of the numbers thrown around in the post are valid, would you have said that a president that received a majority of the vote should not win?
Of course, if I had disliked Bush, my answer might be yes, but be honest here. Even if 300,000 votes were fraudulent, that doesn't change this election.
After all, Kerry conceded. That's the end of it. The votes matter not.
Sad but true. Now, the fact that people don't know how to keep paper trails is another matter... Why haven't they hired a BOFH? Sure, everyone gets hurt, but the computers get the job done!
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Well one thing's for sure... If there WAS mass election fraud, there would be no way to find out.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
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.
Warning: turnSandwich not defined.
Obviously, harder than you think. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Bush Hijacked the election and we have to live with the consequence for Four More Years because nobody is going to anything to fight it. What else is there to say...?
The most infamous one so far is Kerry Won. I live in the state of flordia and i know how floridians think. This state is democrat period. The polls on the last week even showed it. And so did the Exit Polling. And please save me the Liberal Whining as the former site is non-partisan, and of course the liberals will show that this election was robbed again because they would be the only ones who have interest to prove it!
...and it should be known by now
Here in Holland we have been using electronic voting machines for YEARS and nothing EVER went wrong. WHy can't the US with all their supreme technology not make a fail safe system like we have here?
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of any earth-shattering voter irregularities reported.
Sure, plenty of hickups, a few thousaand votes lost or misrepresennted here and there, but on the whole, nothing to really put any legitimate dispute as to the overall effect on the outcome of the Presidential Election
So while the system may not be perfect, it works for the most part and hopefully by 2008, we'll have better software in place.
The downside is that the lack of any real major problems reported will weaken arguements fort the adoption of OSS standards for voting software as well as ironing out some of the problems we still see with voter blacklists in Florida and elsewhere.
You used '=' instead of '=='. If we assume that the constant BUSH is a non-zero value, then the test is always true, and all votes get counted for Bush. You've proven the point in spectacular fashion.
I mean fuck, if you can make a mistake like that in a simple one-liner, how many flaws do you think there are in a multi-KLoC system?
(holds out tinfoil hat)
Its numbers that haven't been updated since election night. The total count for president is correct. The one borken up by county is incorrect. Another forum someone asked the State Department instead of Tinfoiling about and that is what they said happen. Go ahead and call them or email themselves.
This information is interesting to look at:
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
I've also heard about how the exit polls were calling it for Kerry in Florida. Can some one please post a link to corresponding hard data for exit polls by various pollsters?
It would be interesting to analyse the exit poll data in conjunction with the data at the link shown above.
Thanks.
...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.
please do...
MY SECRET DIARIES
Your cause is woefully unsupported. Please stop fighting for justice and just have a hamburger.
Love,
Your Conquering Overlords
Seriously, just because narrow-mindedness, bigotry, self-service, and international vendetta and bullying is prevalent now doesn't mean it'll stay in style. People don't stop fighting for justice, peace, and equality just because they had a little setback. They cry, scream, and kick every step of the way, and when their cause is going to Hell they spit in the devil's eye on the way down.
So please, no more of this "please just lay down like a rug and take it like a good little Democrat" stuff. Yes, our candidate lost, which we will accept sure but not get over.
adam b.
...if these anomalies are more or less than the old paper system? i would probably guess they are close to the same. every time i have voted in every municipality i have voted in, the process has been a kludge. and for those who slam diebold et al, just remember, they delivered according to specification. it's not like they told their customer "no, you cannot have a paper trail" -- i mean, get real or something, huh? the paper system i would like to see would be a printout that looks just like the summary at the end of the process so you can verify both, then put the paper ballot in the bin and those votes are the ones counted during a recount. of course, i have also felt that if i do not want to vote FOR any candidates running in a particular race, i should be allowed to vote AGAINST one of them.
a polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate change.
In mine as with some other states in the country, the primary process is constructed such that the primary vote may or may not be restricted to people registered with that party, possibly giving incentive to register with some other party than your favorite.
Example: I live in Kansas. Here, any Kansas citizen was allowed to vote in the Democratic primary. Only registered Republicans could vote in the Republican primary. Thus, it could be in the interests of some Democrats to register Republican, since that way they'd be able to vote in *both* primaries.
I don't know enough about Florida's election laws to know if this applies in that state, but consider this a reason to pause for thought when comparing registered voter party counts against votes for/against a given party.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
'OBVIOUS'
That's the biggest load of horseshit I've read since the election ended.
The Democrats lost because they went too far left.
Keep tilting that way, and the Republicans will be in office for a very long time.
Interaction
d +v ote&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=
F(1,24)=19,887, p 0,001. p 0,001
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anova+frau
this proves its faked
it's often argued on slashdot that variety in operating systems helps prevent monoculture. and monoculture is a surefire way for a hack or a worm or a virus to cause widespread catastrophic damage, rather than take out only a segment of machines.
the same argument applies to something like the irish potato famine or dutch elm disease: in these examples genetic monoculture leads to widespread devastation when a mutating disease hits the genetic jackpot and becomes an unstoppable pestilence.
so when i look at the tower of babel that is the various ways people vote in various precincts all over the country, my initial impulse is to standardize things to prevent a couple thousand votes getting forgotten here, or a couple thousand votes getting miscounted there. but that initial impulse runs up against what monoculture in genetics or operating systems teaches us about vulnerability to complete disaster.
so a couple thousands votes here and there got miscounted because of weird and wacky systems, some antiquated, some not ready for primetime, and some just plain bad? or even worse- that some partisan a**hole is messing around with the votes?
to me, that's ok, i can deal with that low-level noise: it doesn't drown out the signal.
because the solution: standardization, which promises to prevent wackiness by providing a uniform framework for spotting irregularities, is also the stepping stone for some serious hacks and catastrophic errors.
so i think that there will always be some bugs here and there, there always is. but better an unstoppable, low-level threshold of weirdness in voting irregularities than some monoculture of voting procedures that leads to some really serious devastation in our democracy... like one pimply teenager in his parent's basement deciding the election because he figured out a neat hack... that's so wrong on so many different levels! (lol)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ah... the Help America Vote peeps have just made things worse...
"Four years later, and none of the Florida problems were fixed. In fact, by all appearances, they spread from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico, Michigan and elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the surface of what appears to have happened in Tuesday's election. The fix that was put in place to solve these problems - the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002 after the Florida debacle - appears to have gone a long way towards making things worse by orders of magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act which introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines to millions of voters across the country."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
very interesting tidbit on www.howardstern.com about the average IQ ratings of states and who they voted for.
Look for this on the homepage
"State IQ Averages vs 11/02/04
Voting Record - Sad...
Click here for the sordid details..."
Could this be a reason for the Bush Administration's education policies? Keep 'em stupid and voting Republican! =]
And this surprises anyone?
"Do you think Kerry's $300M campaign, and the hundreds of experts who worked it for the better part of two years, just said "Oh, well! Guess we lost, even though there's proof of widespread fraud! Let's just throw in the towel and not say anything about it!"
Bush and Kerry both sworn into the same secret sociaties in Yale. Skull and Bones.
For Skull and Bones also see:
George Bush Snr and Prescott Bush.
Just because someone is registered Democrat does not mean they have to vote Democrat.
I would consider myself a very conservative Republican - yet I voted for Clinton in 1992 and 1996. As he was the right man for the time.
Also, what about the several hundred dogs that voted Democrat in Ohio, yes, dogs, as in Chows and Great Danes - they all voted Democrat. There were also a lot of dead people that voted Democrat in this election.
Look, however you hash it and whichever candidate cheated, you aren't going to find 3 million+ votes!!!
SLASHDOT HAS YET TO MENTION that Kerry cheated during the first debate - and that researching and enhancing the video would have been a great geek topic.
Further, I would like to add that Democrat Poll watchers in my area are under investigation for calling Republican voters and harassing them - I'm one they have harassed.
Because I did not like the unopposed candidate that was running for register of deeds - I had all my friends (47 total) vote for me - two of them have been called and told they were undermining our democracy by voting for me.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Which is why I'm never voting Democrat again. Wait till we count every vote my ass. Way to concede, John.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
You fucking lost! Give it up! Everyone who matters agrees that the election was fair!
Now admit it: YHBT by the Conservatives! They got their message through and got people to vote for them! So STFU and HAND!
I can probably explain. I am a registered Democrat in Ohio, but have been voting Republican for the past three elections. I understand the candidates differed somewhat on the issues of foreign and internal policy, but I wasn't really interested in those issues.
As a Web designer I appreciate quality standard-compliant Web design, and Bush's site passed the W3C validator test with fewer mistakes, while Kerry's generated more errors than Slashdot.org. If Bush can keep his XHTML+CSS in good order, I assume he can take good care of the country. My entire family of 16 voted Bush in these elections, even though we have 5 registered Democrats and 1 registered Libertarian.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000
Somebody PLEASE tell me that that has nothing to do with 32,000 being close to the maximum value of a signed 16-bit number.
Who writes this software?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is the quote from the last link:
We had no way of knowing exactly how many voters used provisional ballots, but I estimate that probably 10% did so at my precinct. Now that we know that these provisional ballots will never be counted, this seems highly irregular.
This person wanted Kerry to win (she mentions she was optimistic that he would win, and that she was hopeful due to the new registrations coming in).
Yet, the 10% number is an estimate. There is no verification of it, absolutely no scientific basis for it all. No coroborrating evidence. It's simply a number that sounds plausible but can't be backed up in any way whatsoever scientifically.
Not only that, but its red herring. Regardless of the circumstances, if you vote in the wrong precinct or polling place you are not casting a legal vote (well, that's my understanding of New Mexico law, and I was uanble to find court rulings that changed it last minute. Anyone with more detailed knowledge, please feel free to rebut).
I don't understand the problem here. People mistakenly voted in the wrong place. The author blames this on the fact that the voter registration notices sent to voters did not have a polling address on them. Therefore, this is some how highly irregular, and highly suspect.
I call no way. It is every citizens responsibility to make sure they execute a valid, legal vote to the degree which they are physically able. How is this evidence of anything?
She also contradicts herself:
At the end of the day, we waited until the pollworkers posted Presidential vote results on the precinct door. In an area that was expected to vote heavily Democratic, Kerry only had a plurality of 12 votes. Thus I remain extremely concerned about the integrity of the touchscreen voting machines used there, and the overall election results on a national basis.
She distrusts the votes because Kerry was suppsoed to win the precinct by a much larger margin? What? Hello? So the voters don't agree with this activist and suddenly the results of the election are in question? And because her pricinct does not conform to what she wanted to see happen the whole election is in question by extrpolation?
It's ironic, since a paragraph before she writes that some democratic citiznes were called 16 times in a three day period, and this "may" have caused resentment and effected the outcome of the vote. 16 times in three days! Good gracious!
But how many erronious votes don't we know about? tink about it!
Read the report:
Total Registration 729,575
Total Turnout 547,340 75.02%
Election Day Turnout 404,666 55.47%
Absentee Turnout 141,633 19.41%
Provisional Turnout 1,041 0.14%
142,674 voted before election day.
No discrepancy -- no mystery -- no story
it is good to know to read!
These requirements have been set by the Federal Election Commission, which has always overseen our elections. The software has been reviewed, including at a source code level, as required by law by independent third parties.[1]
Personally, I'd prefer that the source be open for public inspection and that there be a voter-verified paper trail...
[1] http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/375954
Diebold strongly refutes the existence of any "back doors" or "hidden codes" in its GEMS software. These inaccurate allegations appear to stem from those not familiar with the product, misunderstanding the purpose of legitimate structures in the database. These structures are well documented and have been reviewed (including at a source code level) by independent testing authorities as required by federal election regulations.
In addition to the facts stated above, a paper and an electronic record of all cast ballots are retrieved from each individual voting machine following an election. The results from each individual machine are then tabulated, and thoroughly audited during the standard election canvass process. Once the audit is complete, the official winners are announced. Any alleged changes to a vote count in the election management software would be immediately discovered during this audit process, as this total would not match the true official total tabulated from each machine.
proper link, pulled from a story I did on my jackwhispers website
Why can't they go for a simple (almost) foolproof method, like we have in the UK: You take a pen and put a cross in the square of the candidate you wish to vote for. That way you can't blame the machinery, and if you want to blame the counters, all they have to do is count them again.
I wish to remain anomalous
I dont tell the exit pollers who I voted for
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The ~4000 wrong votes are only the VERIFIED ones, people are doing statistical analysis of the availble data this very moment, but the problem is that it seems hard to get the data...e.g it has been verified that cnn altered the exit polls data, this was noted by people by accident (there are screen shots - prob possible to check SERPs cache as well), read more at www.whatreallyhappened.com
I love it. How can any techie approve of these machines, my root kit on your machine tells you I'm not logged in, but regardless of that fact, I am. Machines don't lie afterall and there is no fraud here /me waves hand like jedi. These aren't the votes your looking for...
4000 votes in a county with 628 registered voters.
How many counties do you have to rig like that to get 136.000 votes?
Most of Florida doesn't have open primaries, like where I live (Alachua County Florida). The counties are liberal enough that the Republican party won't run a candidate in most local elections, but if you register Republican you can't vote in a Democratic primary.
So in those counties, with closed primaries, many Republican register as a Democrat vote for the most conservative Democrat in the primares, but then vote Republican when they can (like in a Presidential Election). This is a way for Republicans to push toward more conservative candidates.
This has been going on so long, that many Republican candidates will often run as conservative Democrats just to have a chance to win.
your post says that electronics and computers should not take away from democratic order, yet your signature consists of one of the most well-known video game cheats.
For the tone you take in this comment it sounds like you're a real expert on all of this. Unfortunately, you missed a very important fact. Bush did *not* win the election in 2000. He got a minority of the votes. Florida's top election official, Katherine Harris, illegally stopped the recount in her state (which was already awash with illegal voter purging, something to which she was later forced to admit in court vs the NAACP) and declared Bush the winner of Florida. Subsequently, Bush was *appointed* President of the United States by an unprecedented ruling of the Supreme Court, one which included the sentiment "this ruling applies only to this specific election, and will never be used as a precedent for future elections." Now that's weirdness.
It was only four years ago; I'm surprised how easily people like you forget.
c:10: error: `turnSandwich' undeclared (first use in this function)
I've never heard of a Republican hacker. Ever. All the hackers I know are liberals.
I still can't believe how many people think that the election was rigged. There's a more reasonable explanation... We gave contracts to idiot companies whose software was crap. From what I've heard about the programming on some of these voting machines, we would have been better off using Cyrix 6x86-based PCs running Windows ME and using AOL to email the votes to their destination.
Democrats in denial continue to try and find anything they can lay their hot little hands on to destroy George W. Bush. All rumors, unsubstantiated gossip, and half-baked "truths" will be trumpted to the highest in the hopes that some of it, no matter how ludicrous or absurd, will somehow stick to the President.
One wonders just how much scrutiny the voting system would be under if Kerry had won. One further wonders if this story would've even made it to Slashdot had it been the Republicans complaining about voting irregularities.
Bush won. Kerry lost. Get over it and start planning the next election. Perhaps next time you'll pick a better candidate. I would've voted for Lieberman had you nominated him, but you chose a left-wing flip-flop instead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the past these thousands were not much noticed in a country with 250 million people... maybe once in a while you'd see a weirdo on a street corner passing out flyers while normal people tried to avoid him, and that was about it. But now the internet has given these kooks a platform from which to be more visible.
I come to Slashdot for cutting edge technology news and some comedy now and then. I'd hate to see it become a platform for fringe lunatics and conpiracy theorists.
...and I'm not a closet anything, but thanks for your genuine concern.
It's the responsibility of the government and municipalities to demand hardware that provides what they need (i.e., a paper audit trail). No e-voting vendor is going to refuse to build something that municipalities will buy.
But they haven't gone down that road because the whole purpose of e-voting was to eliminate paper ballots, and all the headaches (spoilage, recounts, disenfranchisement via old/malfunctioning mechanical equipment, etc.) that go along with them.
How is it that we can build reliable, accountable systems to handle power, money, and everything else in our society, but somehow it's fundamentally impossible to expect that it could be done with voting. As I've said, I AGREE that we should have a paper trail: but it was NOT part of the specs for designs presented to e-voting vendors. All three of the e-voting vendors already have the capability to add individual receipt printing capability. The onus is TOTALLY on the municipalities to get it, and there should be blanket federal legislation requiring it.
Tin Futures are available on the London Metal Exchange (LME), here.
Let's get ready to RUUUUUMMMMMBLE!
And when your signed int overflows at 32,768, it starts counting backwards... sounds familiar...
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Bush DID do so well in Florida because of the hurricanes. In fact, I think it was all a political ploy. He had the CIA use its weather machine to send the hurricanes to Florida, so he'd have a way to gain political clout here.
OK all you majority of /.'ers who voted: shutup already!
/.'ers who is a military leader in the U.S. military or a politician of some sort you are the ones who can make a much more well informed decision about how to lead this country than can I or 99.5% of the /. population.
I skipped voting this year for just this reason. Everyone wants everyone else to go out and vote because "you're vote makes a difference!" or "let's make a change for America!" To that I say: Yay! I stole votes, yay!
Voting in this country DOES NOT make you (much) of a voice in government. Elections get rigged, votes get miscounted. Get over the fact that your candidate lost/won already! Voting DOES make you tied into (psychologically) one side or the other in this country. That DOES NOT mean that you know how to run a country, what issues are truly most important for our country to deal with (or how to deal with them), nor how to conduct military operations to deter terrorism or other threats to our sovereignty. Those are for specialists in those areas to decide, ultimately. Therefore, if you are one of the slim minority of
Our "founding fathers" were clearly not idiots and designed the Constitution and all other facets of our government to keep the kind of decision making power that our President, Congress, Senate, and judiciary wield in the hands of those capable of making such decisions in an informed (albeit not always unselfish) manner.
Wonder why Congressmen and women and Senators usually get to stay in Congress and the Senate for more than just one term? It takes time to learn how to lead a country, and once you've been in that role for your first few years you're already 10x more qualified than any other candidate in your home state to fulfill that role, whether you're all that good at it or not. It's the experience that counts most, and I think the majority of voters vote that way out of sheer laziness. "He/She is a recognizable name to me and I don't hate them so they're probably most qualified for the position, vote!" The battle for the Presidency is usually just a battle between who's got the most experience and the most power through their many years of service in political leadership roles. Do any of us honestly think that Kerry or Bush is necessarily the *BEST* leader in the country? I doubt it. Was John Kerry that politically powerful or well-known prior to this election? NO! Hillary Clinton is well-known and powerful, this new Barak Obama guy will be eventually be there... Kerry was just a fill in for a Democratic candidate this time around. Wait until 2008! What a battle of politically powerful people that's gonna be! LOL
So get over yourselves about the fucking election. The decision was made years ago about who would get elected this time around, and it wasn't really the American general public that made such a decision. If Kerry would've actually gotten elected it would've been a nice bonus, but I don't think the powers that be in the Democratic camp actually expected it to happen.
...and a Libertarian president didn't have a chance in hell anyway. But that's far from the point.
The election process needs to be unified, accountable and auditable.
Right now it's WAY too screwed up and Election Reform should be dealt with by the Bush administration since he won't be up for re-election next term anyway... that is unless he's got any more relatives planning to run..? Jeb? Gonna run? (Shhh! Damnit... don't wanna give'm any ideas)
The Electoral College system was built so that we could have an easier time with votes because we weren't all modern and digital. Well now we are and I don't think the EC needs to exist. (I expect arguments... go ahead, I'm listening -- I might be wrong) We have very adequate comunications to the point that we can depend solely on popular votes now. Then your vote really DOES matter. Further more, I am sick of the notion of winning a state and getting 30+ electoral votes even if the election for a particular state was really frikken close. So even if we kept the EC system, the notion of winning an entire state is ridiculous.
And as far as finding "only minor flaws" and that's not enough reason to do anything about it is ridiculous. If people are going to be told their vote counts, then it should mean something. Right now, your vote counts only if the laws in your state requires the person casting the EC vote to reflect the popular vote for his district and IF there are no anomalies.
We are WAY too modern and developed a nation to not have a fast, first-class election system in place. All the needed technology is available to make it happen. We need to reform our election process to ensure there is no more wriggle room for "anomalies." The people whose votes are supposed to matter deserve no less.
Okay, so maybe the real question is, does the narrow margin of victory achieved by the Neoconservatives - by myriad forms of deception - amount to a "mandate" to continue their bizarre and destructive policies?
As far as I can tell, all Bush did was push us into to Iraq, set up a bunch of high-paid defense companies, and funnel taxpayer money through Halliburton, etc., right back into his campaign.
Meanwhile apparently they've loosened restrictions on companies that do business with terrorist nations, and received more donations from those companies than any others.
How can such a transparent policy of bait-and-switch continue to work generation after generation?
They cry out "we are moral!" and yet they do nothing except promote their own entrenched economic and military power.
Frankly, if the whole point of the USA is now simply to promote its own survival and prosperity, maybe it should leave the Earth. Our prosperity and supposed generosity of spirit doesn't mean shit if it is not translated into action.
Obviously, I think the action taken in Iraq is stupid. The place was under a stranglehold already, millions of children dying under the auspices of our "power."
Common people around the world are getting a little sick of the USA using its power to kill more liberally than its power to give aid - in direct opposition to the world's interests and its own.
Ordinary US citizens are getting sick of a kowtowing media that exists to simultaneously feed our narcissism and play to our susceptibilities through overblown hyperbole and emotionally-potent oversimplifications.
CNN, Fox News... You know. The agenda-setting media. The makers of history.
The election results and polling of non-partisan voter attitudes shows that more than 60% of American adults are actively concerned about issues like black-box voting, pollution, global warming, education, social welfare...
That surely stands as more of a mandate than banning gay marriage and establishing military outposts all over the Middle East.
.
-- thinkyhead software and media
But doesn't it seem to anyone else that a secure program to record a couple of true/false statements for a bunch of people, and then have a method of confirming it should be pretty simple to make and implement?
WHY THE HELL IS THERE EVEN ANY PROBLEMS WITH THIS?!?!?!?!
I apologize for the caps, but as a US Citizen who has had it up to HERE, I needed to vent.
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Things like that just don't happen.
The owls are not what they seem
Simple.. When you are electing the leader of your country have ONE issue being voted on. Then have the entire voting system controlled by one central agency and make a simple paper ballot:
o n= yth&dir=res/stu/gui&document=res_stu_guide_8&lang= e&textonly=false
http://www.elections.ca/content_youth.asp?secti
Some jurisdictions routinely recount a handful of random precincts and/or routinely recount a random sample of ballots from many precincts.
You can't do this on the no-paper-trail e-voting machines, but you can do it on the optical-scan and other paper systems.
If the recount is done on equipment that's NOT the same as the original counting equipment, and the whole process is watched by observers from both parties, it'll be darn hard ot pull off shennanigans like tampering with central-counting-machines.
By the way, in ANY national election, I'd expect a few statistical anomolies when you compare exit polls to actual results. I am intrigued by some of the patterns in the anomolies. I hope these get investigated further.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm amazed, Kerry did the right thing!
He knew there would be problems with the election results but he conceeded gracefully in order to restore some measure of Unity.
There is of course another method of assuring fairness it's called impeachment. However Bush will deny any involvement with the people who stuffed ballots.
And the republicans control the courts...
Well we'll wait and see.
obviously, it is his fault.. ;)
;)
water to wine, kerry to bush votes..
yea.. America calls Muslims fanatical..
bah
whatever, none of this will matter as Kerry has already given it up..
For fun, just look at the states which voted for kerry, and the ones who were attacked or targeted (i.e. golden gate bridge) on 9/11.. Being targeted for terrorism kind of makes you want to get rid of our fanatical religious leader who,at this moment , is probably trying to figure out when the rapture will be and how best to get armageddon going to get it over with.
So, get over it, Kerry lost because somehow the country went on a religious frenzy and elected a clearly "fanatical religious leader" who has since said that "god" wanted him in office..
Karl Rove wasn't behind your voting both changing your vote.. blame Jesus
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
If you look at bastion of fairness, moderation, and level headed debate that is politics.slashdot.org and look down about 9 stories you will see that the "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" story got 4961 comments. HOWEVER, if you dig deeper you will see that there are in fact 5620 Comments as of the time of this post. This is obviously a ploy by our "Evil Republican"(tm) Slashcode maintainer and moderator Pudge to quell the liberal outcry(AKA whiney trolls).
This simply cannot stand, we should have verified commenting with paper printouts that can be recounted manually if necessary.
Slashcode 3 for '08!
The cited article does not say the Pennsylvania voting problems went in Kerry's favor.
A short is 2 bytes.
"I come to Slashdot for cutting edge technology news and some comedy now and then."
What's the frequency now, Kenneth?
We need as a matter of reform to standardize the method of voting used within the country. Every town in every county, in every state should use the same machine, with the same formated card. In the future I would like to see a secure system that utilizes the magnetic strip on the back of your license, in concert with a pin number, or your SSN as a system for making sure people are voting only once.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
100% Precincts Reporting
D John F. Kerry 21,114 50%
R George W. Bush 20,916 49%
L Michael Badnarik 552 1%
Looks like they can count above 22,200
This story should be modded -- Fiction
I would consider this a practice run for things to come. Notice that it's only the smaller counties, where totals wouldn't be too large to get big media attention. /me digs tinfoil hat from bottom of closet..
what is being alleged is that the E-voting machines are buggy at best, registering obvious erros with no paper trail to offer an alternative counting method.
;-)
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We used them in my county. You take a black marker and fill in the little ovals on a paper ballot and feed it into a black scanner/ballot box. There is no paper trail? Well, there is the paper ballot.... This doesn't qualify how?
I am not sure what is going on here, but it is strange. It could be related to limits bugs (as in the 32k backwards counting bug in one of the articles). Overrun bugs are not uncommon in software, so the fact that three different manufacturers have similar bugs would not surprise me at all....
Oh no! A buffer overrun election software! Perhaps this would justify a manual recount in Florida just for the record
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Laporte is in Indiana, and Indiana has gone republican for the last 30 years in every pres election. Even so, the loss of 50k votes is disturbing, but not as disturbing as it would be in a state that was much closer (michigan).
Please correct the summary.
Did you guys hear that some 20 plus vans that were to be used to shuttle voters to the polls in Milwaukee had multiple tires slashed?
Oh wait...most of you would probably CHEER for it because the vans were rented by GOPers and the parties being sought for "interview" include offspring of two prominent local democrats...
Let me expand a bit on what I said before.
The referendum in Venezuela happened a few months before the US eletion, and it was also the first widespread use of electronic voting in that country, so it makes for a good comparison. (Wikipedia background on the referendum here, think of it just like an election).
The Venezuelan voting process used thumbprints for verification of voters, had heavy international monitors, used voting machines which source code was open and reviewed by thousands of programmers months before the election, and had no less than three paper trails (one which was given to the Carter center, one given to the election board, the other kept for verification purposes). The process of the electronic voting machines was highly scrutinized and available on the web for months for review by anyone interested (in fact, the website is still up right here on the company's website). Diebold did none of this. The source code was not presented for review. The process was highly unknown and obscure. There were no paper trails.
In the end, Chavez won by 18 percentage points, verified by both the voting comission as well as by the Carter center. The process was standardized and each ballot looked the same and each voter was given the same experience. Exit polls matched, roughly, the actual results. If there had been even HALF the problems in Venezuela that the US has seen, the opposition in Venezeula would NEVER have accepted the results. They would have demanded another election. If 4000 votes were put for Chavez that didnt really exist, the opposition would go crazy. And thats with an EIGHTEEN PERCENTAGE POINT win.
Bush, on the other hand, won by 2 percentage points. TWO percentage points. There were no paper trails. The voting process was NOT standardized. The exit polls did NOT match the final results. Then all these problems arise. And you say "well, he still won by more votes than those which got messed up."
The point is that the voting should be perfect. Why can venezuela do it and the US cant? EASY-- because the venezuelan opposition puts pressure and refuses to accept the results ANY OTHER WAY. Its not that anyone refutes that George Bush got more votes. However, just because it doesnt matter in THIS election doesnt mean it shouldnt be heavily scrutinized and fixed before next election.
Remember, in an election you have to fix things before its a problem. Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000)
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Turd Sandwich is Bush, Giant Douche is Kerry. Kyle is a more likely Kerry voter, and Cartman is definitely a republican.
Of course, he did say a vote for Turd Sandwich is "a vote for change."
Shouldn't we be blaming the person at the root of all of this????? It's clearly Bill Gate's fault that the electronic voting went haywire. Damn Windows 3.1 being used for electronic voting systems.
Hee...hee...ho....ho...
Okay...needed to inject some humor into this..
I proudly voted for Kerry in CA where we mark our ballots with ink dots now. If the President truly did cheat..it will come out. If he didn't then we'll...we're screwed either way right?
"An-o-ma-ly".
Couldn't stand it.
If 4000 votes were off, isn't there a chance that there are other errors that are not known about?
On the other hand, I've been hearing stories about this for a few days. Only the 4,000, Ohio vote story has made it into any major media outlets (as far as I can tell). If the other stories had any credibility, why wouldn't this be on the "top of the hour" with CNN? I'm not saying that there weren't some errors, but if this was as wide spread as some of the stories lead you to believe...why isn't this a bigger deal?
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
Regarding these counties that have mostly Democratic registration, and mostly went for Bush.
These are rural counties, and they are small counties. Baker borders Georgia on the northern edge of Florida. Rural means conservative. Small means the folks that live there have probably lived there a very, very long time. What does this mean?
It means Dixiecrat. Like Strom Thurmond. They are Bush's "base". They've been Democrat for years and have just never bothered to change their registrations.
And plus.... come on. Say you've got a county of 12,000 voters that is mostly Democratic. Are you really going to tip your hand by by flipping almost ALL of them to your guy? Isn't part of the aim of fraud to not get caught? People would catch it so fast.
Finally, I did a study that proved that Bush had more electoral support, and that the election result is in line with that. Check it out.
And by the way, I am a true-blue Democrat. If you doubt my credibility, you can read through the rest of my weblog.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
That was the error in a single precinct.
However, if just one such error occured in each of Ohio's counties (88) then Bush would have 350K extra votes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Virutally all doubt could be removed if we simply got rid of the annonymous part. If a voter could verify after the fact his/her vote was indeed included for the correct person we wouldn't have these insane problems not to mention my doubt about the validity of any of these voting machines.
Alright lefties, you're going to try this again?
Which outcome exactly are you hoping for?
Look at the polls and results where favorable mistakes happened for Kerry. Are they only in states with few electoral votes, or already assured of a Kerry win?
I mean, c'mon. All you need to ask yourself is one question.
What Would Karl Rove Do?
(Other than eat gay babies)
People cry foul because of old, broken, or malfunctioning mechanical/paper voting systems.
Congress passes a law setting uniform, consistent standards for voting systems in all jurisdictions, such that they meet certain requirements, and ensure that ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions have access to very similar equipment and voting methods.
Naturally, it being the 21st century, we decided to go with - *gasp* - electronic systems. Since we use computer and electronic systems to manage our entire society, including its money, this wasn't that far fetched of an idea.
Paper audit trails were never made mandatory. And most municipalities don't even want them, because it adds another layer of complexity to a system that, ironically, was supposed to make things easier.
But no matter what, you can't win. Someone will cry foul on every side of the argument, and even though HAVA was designed to address the EXACT concerns of poor precincts in the 2000 election, now it's getting crucified for other reasons.
The HAVA amendment to add a paper trail is what we need to pass. But even if that happens, people will still complain about voter intimidation, or how it's not fair that someone who's been on God's green earth for over 18 years is disenfranchised because they haven't been able to find out where their polling place is in the four years since the last presidential election.
Probably because no one is looking.
...isn't it, but YES, the vote was hacked!
It's called 3.5 million voters deciding to vote for Bush -- and not for Kerry.
I know it's almost inconcievable that the people would choose Bush over Kerry, but look at the slashdot polls. Think about it, the people who are most likely to have hacking skills aren't the conservative republicans: they're the liberal, slashdot/techie crowd.
So, if there was any hacking going on, it's just as fair to assume that the liberals techs were fiddling with the count just as much as the conservative techs. Maybe it's time to call every past election that relied on this equipment into question.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
For a group that jumps all over people that have religious beliefs that can't be proven, you guys are ready to believe any wild theory about Republicans "stealing" elections at the drop of a hat. As one of your favorite PACs puts it: Move on!
Nothing will come of accusations of election fraud, errors, etc. Even if there is incontrovertible evidence that it happened. Why? Because most of the country doesn't want to believe that these things could happen in America. It's just like when a teacher tells a mother her son misbehaved in class and the mother replies, "Never! Not my sweet little angel!" Most Americans will assume that America is immune to election fraud because America is the world's greatest democracy, just like they were taught in fourth grade.
Whistleblowers: "Someone screwed with the election!"
American Public: "No way! This is America! Maybe it's like that in China but that could never happen here!"
What it means is that quality control procedures were badly flawed, the products were insufficiently tested, and at least some voting machines use signed 16-bit integers for their counters.
Nobody is claiming conspiracy. But a great many people are claiming slipshod development by computerized voting systems and a complete lack of contingency planning on the part of electoral officials.
One thing I can tell you right now, without even seeing a single line of code, is that not a single provider of voting machines (mechanical or digital) made even the remotest effort to comply with ISO 9000 standards on documentation or quality review. If they had, there would have been a thorough paper trail for every component, every patch release, etc. The fact that patches weren't installed and nobody knew who knew what shows a paper trail for development and deployment (ie: ISO 9000 compliance) did not exist.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Worst of all, most people aren't really happy with either candidate, and are really voting against the other one. Even though Bush got "the most votes ever", so did Kerry. And even though Bush got a little over half of the votes, that's hardly a mandate of the people, it's more a "eh...whatever" of the people. Almost as many people voted against Bush.
Heck, if Mr. Gates really wanted to he could buy his way into the presidency.
"If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."
-Lewis Black
Sure there may be some election weirdnesses going on, but the bottom line at the end of the day is whether the voting can be verified or not. My own personal preferences are that all voting gets done on paper - it's verifiable, traceable (with serial numbers), and it's quite inexpensive to operate and run. It's worked well in the UK for years, and results can be pretty quick - polls can close at 9pm and have a result within a couple of hours for small areas in a mainly urban area. Rural areas can have a result by lunchtime the day after. The paper method is by far the most verifiable means of voting.
Optical scans are IMO the next best thing, because the voter made the marks on the ballot paper directly. If there is a discrepancy, then the votes could in theory be counted by hand. If the ballot is well designed then it could be counted by hand quickly; optical scanning just speeds up thee counting somewhat.
I have a big problem with touch screen voting that doesn't generate a print out. I believe that the voting is not intentionally rigged, but because these machines are designed to handle America's exceptionally complicated voting system, there's more chance for errors to creep in. You're usually voting on at least 3 federal elections, a dozen State elections, a couple of dozen county elections, and who knows how many municipal elections? Plus voting for judges, sherrif, and numerous referenda on local and state issues... it makes for an incredibly long and complex ballot. India can do electronic voting and do it error free, but that's because the equipment is incredibly simple and designed to vote for one race only.
Whatever you want to read into these irregularities, I do support recounts. This would be only to ensure that the vote was indeed accurate, and not to determine "whether the evil Diebold had rigged the election" - which is most likely untrue.
Mark.
Did any of you catch the open letter to Republicans? I noticed it on The Register today. Sure, the letter is flamebait, but it's funny flamebait. :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
examine the record. Both of your points of view are perfectly valid positions to take.
The optical scan questions can be answered with an examination of the ballots --no problem, one of you will be proven right.
Too bad the electronic machines did not actuall keep a record of the voters actions, like paper ballots do. They leave the issue almost unprovable.
You an say what you want about sour grapes... the number of issues on both sides stinks of an untrustworthy election.
Given the record of lies and manupulation our current administration has shown us, there is clearly reason to question the election results.
Blogging because I can...
OK, obviously there is systematic error here, not just random variation within the margin for error. I suspect the Hispanic vote may be a source of such error, as they tend to be reluctant to say whom they voted for. Do you have handy anywhere the discrepancy between California exit polls and the ballot counts? There's a large Hispanic population there, yet little incentive to try to rig electronic voting.
And if you don't think that adminitrative pressure to roll these machines out wasn't responsible for a lot of the problems we see with them then you're deluding yourself.
Diebold is spinning like a top to counter this kind of publicity. It's possible that this represents a legitimate change of heart there, but I really doubt it. I'll take thier past actions and thier documented behaviors under a lot more consideration than last minute claims made in the middle of a hail of bad publicity.
I guess the main question is whether or not these differences are enough to change the outcome. Even Kerry admitted those 150,000 provisional ballots wouldn't help.
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?
actually, after counting the provisional ballots that margin shrunk to about 30,000 votes. I'm not sure of this erroneous 4000 is in that margin or not but the State was far from a blow out.
If the situation were reversed you can be certain that the "republicans" would be crawling up the orrifice of anyone who ever got near to anyone who ever touched one of those voting machines and contesting every single vote in a last ditch effort to get their man in power.
I hate Bush. I really, really hate what he has done to America and what he is doing to the world.
However, given the way the Dems gave up this fight, one has to question whether they'd have the bottle for the battles they'd be facing on a national and international level. I'm doubting they would.
C'mon people just give it up...
I'm afraid it's going to have to get a lot worse before the revolution begins and heads start rolling. It always works this way, just read your history.
for christ's sake THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This might be everyday news in Kenya but NOT IN A DEMOCRACY. I can't do much from here but you americans have to PROTEST and i'm talking BIG PROTESTS. This wouldn't have been allowed to go this far in any european state, I am sure. Maybe because every europan state has all of Europe watching over it, but there's nobody watching over America, so put and END to this this is going too far.
Perhaps one should ask instead, Would Kerry still have lost if there were no problems with the votes and no fraud people speak of?
Bush 286 Electoral Votes
51%
59,674,953
Kerry 252 Electoral Votes
48%
56,178,622
Or by who wins the most electoral votes, it's simply who is better at cheating. Currently, the Republicans are better. But in history past, the Democrats were quite good.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
U.S. Inspires World With Attempt At Democratic Election...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
...if you vote Libertarian.
That's all we need... Fuel for the Gore lemmings and Kerry fanatics (oh, those poor, depressed souls!) to complain for the next four years about Bush stealing the election again.
Let the conspiracy theories commence.
Crap like this comes out, and people on Slashdot wonder why I think switching to something like IRV, at least until we get the modernization glitches worked out of our system now, is nothing shy of completely stupid.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
"Democrats supposedly experienced a -60% decline"
Is that the same as a 60% increase?
Hell no i'm not listening. Bush started out by declaring that he had a "broad victory" and "a very clear mandate from the American people." A 2% margin of victory is neither of those.
Now it's being made clear that he still believes in enforcing his view of morality on the entire nation: Rove: Bush Serious About Gay Marriage Ban
He has no actual intent to unite the nation. He's just been saying it for the PR value. Rove probably thinks that if they just shout loudly enough that they have a clear mandate and they want to work with the Democrats that anyone who disagrees won't be believed.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Oh, they're looking all right. Name the accusation, and the Bush team pushes for alternative examples to discredit the critic. The blogosphere goes nuts looking to discredit any critics. So the fact that a week has gone by and I've yet to hear of even one glitch that benefited Kerry, well it makes me wonder even more.
Don't forgot that the European observers were not allowed to enter some polling stations - somebody hiding something?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Is all this leftie whining really worth the bandwidth?
YOU. LOST.
GET OVER IT.
you destroy faith in democracy by letting the simple truth get in the way, that might be too much for some people...
Let's see...
/. !).
... gave up more and more everyday for 4 fuggin' years and they still don't give a shiet Usama Bin Laden is alive and enjoying a new career in amateur video.
American votes aren't counted.
Americans can be "declared" criminals.
Americans can be jailed without legal.
Americans can be jailed indefinately.
American homes can be searched.
Americans electronically monitored.
American business' monitored. Oh yes!
American private communications monitored.
American travel restricted.
American finanaces can be "frozen".
American media is silent (except Slashdot... yea
Goddess help you if you're NOT American because America will keep murdering, torturing, disappearing, and shoting, anyone declared an "enemy combatant".
If your skin is brown you're automatically on a terrorist list.
America
Then they "voted" in Bush. Yea... like the last time Bush was "voted" in?
I heard a friend from Ohio complain that she waited for a kind of "confirmation" of her electronic vote, which most people did not have time to wait for. She voted democratic, but the confirmation came up for Bush ... the system made this mistake six times! It took hours! Can anyone from Ohio corroborate this scenario for us?
If the situation were reversed you can be certain that the "republicans" would be crawling up the orrifice of anyone who ever got near to anyone who ever touched one of those voting machines and contesting every single vote in a last ditch effort to get their man in power.
Bush narrowly lost many, many, many other states that he could have chosen to fight in. Also, the same with 2000. New Mexico in 2000 went to Gore by the tinest of margins.
It's just not true.
Its great that you hate Bush, but you are blinded by your own hate. I would have considered voting for Kerry had he told Michael Moore and George Soros to bugger off.
There is nothing to fight here. If Kerry did by some magical way get the electors from Ohio aftera a long court battle, and unseat Bush he'd be the most illegitimate President ever, and he'd probably end up impeached by the end of next year.
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.
Yes, but the people who work for him are not Bones. Where are the multitudes of his former staff decrying his actions?
A little something to help change your mind.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109127/
"... concession speeches are courtesies--they carry no legal weight. And they don't halt vote counts, either."
Yes, but how did this affect the regional elections which are decided by much smaller margins?
Please submit this to your local press as well as national press agencies as a story idea. Many new agencies have a mechanism to allow people to request stories. If enough people submit this, the media (in an effort to attract viewership) will cover the story. If more people find out about this, it will get the proper attention. I'm not saying that any of these are examples of fraud or even that they have a significant effect on the election, however, they _should_ be investigated. Many of these problems are going on uninvestigated. The media seems to have a 'shit happens' attitude about it and is, as a whole, ignoring it and/or avoiding the tough questions (did this significantly effect the election? Who is responsible? Was it done on purpose? What can be done to correct the error, either for these returns or for future elections?).
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I simply don't see why it should be hard.
It's the 21st century and we can't even add up correctly and verifiably?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
(Seen over at Best of the Web)
Maybe the machines are in cahoots with the mages, kinda like Shadowrun. The AI in the voting machines became self-aware and decided that their warlock masters in the Republican coven
Or maybe everyone oughtta sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.
I find it interesting that one of the main criticisms foreign observers had was that we have no national voting standards. Different technologies, different voter verification systems, different procedures, even different laws regarding who can vote (for instance, regarding ex-convicts).
How much of this bullshit is it going to take before the tinfoil hat crowd realizes that national standardization of simple things (voting procedures/equipment/laws) is a good thing?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Has /. turning into democraticunderground? If you are going ot look into anything look into the vast number of dead voters in the Chicago area who voted 100% for Kerry. How about the bus loads of voters being bused from NYC to vote in Philly. What about the Dem judges who allowed people to vote multipe times in Ohio. If you don't know what ditrict local you were in, you could vote in any district as long as you said which district you were in. So all you had to do was take a littel trip around the state and vote in each district and have your multiple votes count.
/. Way ot turn off 52% of the voters in this past election.
So glad to see this sch even handed reporting here in
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Provisional ballots are given when valid voter registration cannot be determined. It is not common for them to be handed out in fairly large numbers when precincts have been redrawn or there is a large influx of newly registered voters. The point is to let them vote, then the validity of the specific registration will be determined later.
They are not counted on the first pass -- the valid registration votes are counted first. Then, like absentee ballots, the validity of the ballot is determined, then the ballot is counted. In some areas they may not be counted if they don't statistically influence the outcome of the election, and the rules for this are determined by local or state law governing elections. And, remember that "statistically influence" means all ballot issues for that precinct, not just president.
Sleep is for the Weak
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BAK411A.htm
It doesn't matter if it changes the results or not. We need a fair and open examination of all of the issues, regardless of any sort of party nonsense. The way to insure trust in a process is to audit the hell out of it. Track down every error, even if it's only pennies, account for every discrepancy, and make the whole process completely open to public scrutiny.
We owe it to ourselves, and to each other; we owe it to the candidates and their supporters who may be being slandered and (if any of them are actually guilty) we owe it to any cheaters to shine some light on their accomplishments as well.
If we plan to export freedom and justice against entrenched politics and religious biases around the world, we'd better make them our priorities at home as well.
-- MarkusQ
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.a sp?ID=15859
What if the UN or some other international organization were to step in and question the legitimacy of this election, since US officials see no need to do so?
Is Florida a state that requires registration to vote in a party's primary, or one that automatically registers you for whichever party you vote for in the primary? If either of those is true, then one possible explanation could be that people registered Democrat so they could vote in the primary that mattered. (In an election where the incumbant has only had one term so far, and is thus eligible for a second, the party of that incumbant always has a pointless primary with a foregone conclusion - they'll run the incumbant.) Therefore voting in their primary is rather pointless. Thus I could easily imagine a lot of people on the fence choosing to claim to be Democrats because their primary is the one in which the outcome is actually in contention. A lot of them might do this even if they aren't certain yet that they will vote Democrat in the final election. A lot might be thinking, "I'm leaning toward voting for Bush, but as long as I can, I might as well have a say in who my second choice might be."
This is why I am opposed to the practice of allowing non-party members to vote in primaries. Parties are private clubs. If you want to have a say in who THEY spend THEIR money on promoting, then join the party and become a member. Otherwise you're interferring, and possibly in an advisarial manner. In the case of an election year with a president trying to renew his seat for a second term like this one, a lot of the incumbant's supporters can safely cross party lines and vote to spoil the opposition party's primary, to try to skew their results and get them to field a weaker candidate.
This is why, despite living in a state where anyone can vote in any primary (you don't even have to register), I wholeheartedly refuse to do so (I do turn in a ballot, since there are often refferenda on them as well as party primaries, but I leave the party primaries's choices blank and ONLY vote on the refferenda.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
While this data will serve to give certain people reasons to jump up and down and fret, one thing is sure:
This entire thread is irrelevant. The election is over, Kerry conceded rather than pull an AlGore and divide the country further. Kerry should be commended for that. His running mate wanted to begin the lawsuits (surprise of the century, a trial lawyer wants to sue...) but Kerry said no, in is a better statesman for it.
For better or worse, what's done is done. America (and the rest of the World) will have to live with the results.
Now it's time to move on.
--QTone
see subject
FRAUD! TOTALITARIAN MANIPULATION OF THE MASSES! TO ARMS! ANARCHY IN THE STREETS!
/.ers are about this sort of thing....
The Republican dogs will be the first with their backs agains the wall, now that the revolution is he-
Er, what was that? This is normal? Er, sorry. *blush* Disregard that last bit about the 'Revolution' and all. I blame the author of the article. They know how touchy we
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The electronic systems that are out there now are 100 times more verifiable than most princints in the country.
Don't confuse replicable (will produce the same outcome every time given the same inputs) and verifiable. To be verifiable you need something to verify against. The current breed of voting machines are, by definition, not verifiable. As has been repeated here ad nauseum, it is not even possible for the individual voter to verify that the choice the machine logged is the choice they made. In fact, there is ample proof (not speculation) that the voter's choice is not always accurately represented in eVoting machines.
If these machines offered a signficant advantage (cost, speed, reliability etc) over pencil & paper, I might be tempted to say that there is some justification for the risk but these machines are incredibly expensive, slow and unreliable compared to pencil & paper or scanner-assisted voting.
According to my (admittedly small) understanding of the American electoral process, the only thing that has happened is that the Electoral College has been chosen. These elite people will vote to choose who will be president. They could still choose Kerry, could they not?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
I'm not sure if anyone has said this yet, but I think what the point of the article, if anyone took the time to read the commondreams.org link, was not that the vendors themselves are rigging the elections, but that people somehow managed to access and change the numbers that were recorded at the tabulating office in the precincts where the optical scan machines were used, because of the way the counting process is set up for those machines. I may be wrong, but this is how I read the article. Now stop arguing over whether or not there is a vast conspiracy amongst the manufacturers of the voting machines, because that is not what this item was about.
All your
Trickle down economics NEVER WORKED. Ask an economist. Look at any measure of a civil society.
If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
if you read a little more carefully, you'll have noticed that the link to "88,000 more votes" said that in Palm Beach, after adjusting for the miscounts, gave 1,543 more votes to Bush...
As an outsider, after following the USA elections both on the internet and on television I must say I was amazed at the methods and machines used in the election. I can`t believe a country like the USA is so disorganised when it comes to one of the fundamental principles of a democracy. Whether you're a democrat or a republican (or 3th party) I think this is something every voter should be worried about.
Follow the link in the submission to see the following at the bottom of the page:
"Update: Palm Beach County has updated their numbers and added 91,802 absentee ballots and 1,041 provisional ballots. The vote totals for president increased by 1,543. To view an archived copy of the previous report, click here. While Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy, this underscores the flaws in the system and data compilation."
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The e-touch optical scan comparison referenced as 'strange anomaly' may be explained if one considers that counties with small populations used optical machines and those with large populations used the e-touch machines. Bush's campaigners focused on the demographic more likely to be found in rural areas. The red vs blue by county results and the swing from expected to actual vote in rural Florida suggest it was a pretty successful campaign. I know some of the progressive democrats are painting this as an ignorant, rural, right-wing christian uprising. The variation in swing vote as a function of population size, supports at least the 'rural' aspect of their claimed uprising.
/. posters
/ 11/04/news/news02.txt">Laporte Michigan might lead one to believe: poll workers experienced a huge operator error; election systems and software only sold ONE system and it's fscked; one, the other, or both of the aforementioned parties conspired to screw up the count. The traditional trick is extra vote, not tossing a huge number in the $hitcan. My bet is operatorerror. I mean no one ever screws up when using a computer!
The remainder has been pretty well covered by other
In the very article referenced by commandantTaco one reads (if on is able) "...Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy..."
I guess the article from Aa href="http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004
Reading the Broward County article we learn, "Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one."
The bit from NM doesn't reflect much weirdness. Obviously all those folks that were too ignorant to check their paper MUST have been Bush supporters.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
There was a brief report of Philadelphia machines being deployed with pre-existing votes for Kerry, but it was fundamentally wrong...
The newspaper is from Michigan City which is in LaPorte County, Indiana, on the extreme northern edge of the state (that is, the border with Michigan).
LaPorte is (IIRC) the county seat of LaPorte County.
Thus, even if all those votes went for Kerry, Indiana would not, switch its 11 electoral votes to Kerry.
What planet were you on during the campaign? If there was one documented instance, Bush's staff would make sure it was headline news.
ES&S and Diebold (rather Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold) are run by Todd Urosevich and Bob Urosevich respectively. Yes, they're brothers.
There is plenty of evidence for potential conflict of interest in voting machine companies....
And there is no really big fuzz about this fact, no cancelled contracts with the companies making that faulty machines. It is just accepted as normal things related to computers as blue screens. People had to vote in computers, was sold the idea that their vote is more accurate because "they are counted by computers" only to find that the malice or idiocy around those computers had make irrelevant the main thing that makes what is a democracy.
Could the final result of the election have been different? Who knows, the detected anomalies could be the tip of the iceberg or things could have been the same even if all things were perfect. But for getting unnacurate or "according to polls" results why not stop at the poll level and give the same weight as real votes? after all maybe the percent of error in poll estimates is lower than the one counting the votes with that technology.
Lefties?? Huh??
In most of the world Democrats are not regarded as "lefties", where I live none expect the Democrats to act much different than the Reps, but what pisses everyone off is the weirdness of the US election, if the #1 democracy in the world can't handle an election (no ID-check, weird machines, no papertrail etc etc) where will that leave the rest of the world??
The US has an RESPONSIBILITY (thats what I feel...) to act civilized and could (and should) be something beutiful, an alternative to communism and non-democracy societys in general. DON'T YOU GET IT?? BE ALL YOU CAN BE!!
Now, don't let the tin-foil hats, the anti US anti everything fight this battle!! For gods sake, PRAVDA is reporting this stuff, and make fun of the US election!!
!!!
The SANE AMERICANS should fight this one!! IF there has been funny stuff going on, which it looks like.
P.S
A poll made in one of the biggest swedish news-sites shows that 79% didn't trust the american election-system...I belive that this is a normal view outside US.
Just one. UNO! I don't think you will find one story.
to +20 insightful
could it be that it won't make much of a news story?
I was under the impression that we are a democratic REPUBLIC, not a democracy. That also leads to my confusion about what gives us the right to impose democracy on the rest of the world.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I think the whole concept of 'primary' elections operated by the state should go away. If its a private party, it should manage (and pay for) its selection of candidate to sponsor, on its own.
The concept of 'parties' as an official concept in the elections should go away as well.
Some democrats voted for Bush!
SHOCK!!!
I am one of them.
GASP!!!
Simply put:
1) Those that love Bush != those that voted for Bush
2) Those that love Kerry != those that voted for Kerry
3) Many, many people purposely voted for someone they did not like and did NOT base their decision by their general party affiliation. DOUBLE-GASP!!!
So are YOU claiming that it's too hard to commit fraud in an election and thus no fraud has been committed. There must be a fallacy for this one somewhere. It's a classic way to delude yourself. You can lick my salty balls, sir, if you think all the fraud that WAS committed will not be investigated.
Question:
If Kerry were elected, then would we be seeing the same amount of nitpicking of the election results?
Give me and the rest of the registered US voters a break. The margin of error involved in any sort of poll that is as large as the US election is understood to be unavoidable.
BUSH WON. STOP WHINING.
.. if they do something about it.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
It's about voter confidence, which is why a good number of people don't vote in the first place.
It doesn't even have to be electronic - my wife tried to vote in 2000 but her registration hadn't gone through. IN 2002 she had registered again, and it still wasn't processed - luckily she was able to do a provisional ballot. This time around it went through, but how many people don't keep trying? This specific problem is probably a local issue with the NY board of elections, but my point is just that things like this make a person not even want to vote; it gives the impression that her vote is not wanted and not important.
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~adamsb6/elections/
New: Florida is reporting more votes in the presidential election than it is reporting citizens that turned out to vote. Adding all the presidential race votes reported by the Florida Department of State here yields a total of 7,588,422 votes. The Florida Department of State reports here that voter turnout totalled only 7,350,900. That's a difference of 237,522. 3.1% of Florida's presidential votes were in excess of the number of voters in the election. 380,952 votes separate the President and John Kerry in Florida.
Fox has the resources to run exit polls, and the results are a matter of public record. Or is your theory that Fox is really a left-leaning syndicate posing as a right-leaning one to disguise the big liberal media conspiracy?
But there are some states that have laws with criminal punishment for what are known as "faithless electors", i.e., electoral college members who vote contrary to wishes of their state's population.
It is unlikely that there will be even one faithless elector, much less the 21 that would be required to shift the election to Kerry. It would also fly in the face of the whole system of the electoral college; even in the hotly contested 2000 election, when it still wasn't even sure Bush really got the most votes in Florida, legitimately, and didn't even win the popular vote of the country, Florida's electors all still voted for Bush (since it was believed that Bush won Florida before any recounts, as subsequent official and unofficial recounts proved).
What's amazing is that hours after the opening weekend of the movie "The Incredibles," Pixar knew exactly how much money they made and how many people bought tickets. Maybe we should use movie theaters as polling places and "sell" tickets to eligible voters.
Btw: this election has been Rated R for violence, foul language, and some sexual situations.
People don't always vote down the party lines. How do they derive "expected" results? I mean really... this has "you are a number" written all over this.
My guess is it is more to do with the number of allocations blocks on a FAT volume. The votes are probably stored one to a file on a FAT flash card.
These "anomalies" are no more serious or common than in previous elections, and I don't just mean 2000. All elections are flawed, because they are run by humans, who are flawed. All voting machines are also flawed, for exactly the same reason. The only difference here is that the new machines are more easily validated, resulting in more errors being caught. To use a programming analogy, this is essentially like improving QA - you find more bugs, but it doesn't mean the code is worse. The up side to all this is that these machines can and will be further improved, mostly through software, thereby avoiding the prohibitive costs of replacing the machines, as would have been necessary with older systems.
why wouldn't it be newsworthy? Is truth that dangerous? Don't we want to know if it's machine/process error, or fraud?
Or do we?
Is the anger about Bush more that Demos weren't more effective than the GOP in commiting fraud?
A lot of people have been trying to dismiss this as a statistical anomoly. Let me throw a couple of numbers at you to show how unlikely this explanation is.
.9% (that's less than one percent) more Democrats than expected.
In the touchscreen counties, there were roughly 29% more Republicans voting than expected and 26% more Democrats than expected
In the optical scan counties, there were roughly 46% more Republicans than expected and
Read the common dreams report on that one - it's pretty thorough. This, along with the unprecedented inaccuracy of the exit polls should make everyone suspicious. Don't let them get away with it just because your side won.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Let's just learn to love one another ok! It's more important for us to support the president whatever he does than to listen to idiots who want to seperate our country in the name of stupid worries such as democracy!
That is a false dichotomy. There are other possibilities, such as applying standards of process perfection that are easily reachable in the real world, such as requiring a verifiable paper trail. The rest of the civilized democratic world manages to do this without a great deal of unnecessary pain and expense, why not us?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
A state can be a republic and a democracy. Or it can be only one of them. Or it can be neither. The questions of a state's being a republic and its being a democracy are orthogonal.
A state is a republic if its chief of state is not a monarch. Therefore, the US is a republic, as is Russia, as was Iraq under Saddam Houssein. The UK, on the other hand, is not a democracy, even though all effective power is wielded by popularly-elected MPs.
A state is a democracy if the governing authority is originates from the people. This is a much more subjective judgment than declaring if a state is a republic or not, obviously, but nothing precludes a state from A) deriving its government's authority from the people and B) having a chief of state who is not a monarch.
So, the US is both a Republic and a Democracy.
All's true that is mistrusted
LaPorte is in Indiana, not Michigan. That's why the clerk was asking Indianapolis if the vote could be certified.
....in the USA ...
1) the draft
2) trial by bible overiding the constitution
3) mass demos and arrests under the patriot act
4) take a guess ?
You voted for it, you have to live with it.
Don't forget to bend over...
He who gives up some liberty for some safety deserves neither. Who said that ?
Blast! Foiled again by 16-bit signed integers!
A new feature is just a bug waiting to happen. And vice versa.
OK, here's the deal:
1) Everyone accepts the results of the current US election. There's no attempt to recount the 2004 election in any way.
2) Everyone calls for widespread electoral reform now, that everyone can agree to. Go ahead, review the Electoral College, apply the same voting mechanism (PAPER BALLOTS!) across the country.
The net effect of this? We stamp out what has now become the quadrennial shadow of election fraud on the US system. And perhaps, just perhaps, the mud slinging will stop and maybe the US president (Republican, Democrat, or Kodos) will have some semblance of legitimacy on all sides.
The root source of the problem should be the election process, not that Bush got elected.
yeah, that article says ~88k votes were not counted. Of those ~88k, ~1k were for Bush.
So not counting ~86k kerry votes is an error in favor of Bush.
durr.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't get it. Why don't Real votes, the one an individual makes, are the ones used to elect the president? For arguement's sake (and simpler math), suppose there are 100,000,000 Americans, and that all voted (far fetched). If 60,000,000 voted republican, and the remaining democrat, then republicans would win by 20%. This brings me to my question, why in hell do you use electoral votes? Electoral votes aren't even statistically adequate for determining a mayority (mode). Real votes would avoid stuff like what happened at the elections before this one, where the way I see it, in the end a judge decided who was going to be the president. As far as I know, the idea of electoral votes was because way back then, a representative would gather the votes and physically travel to place the people's choice to wherever the votes where being counted. Modern technology makes that process obsolete, wouldn't it?
Here's attribution.
. as p
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/nov04/273074
Excerpted:
On Friday, two other men - Lewis Gibson Caldwell III, 27, and Sowande Ajumoke Omokunde, 25, both of Milwaukee - surrendered to police on the same charge in connection with the incident, according to department records. Omokunde, the son of newly elected congresswoman Gwen Moore, was released later in the day.
I hadn't looked at the story in a couple of days. Last I knew they were seeking to talk to Moore's kid (above) as well as the son of former acting Mayor Marvin Pratt. I don't know if they've talked to him yet.
FUCK. YOU.
I voted for Bush, and I want to know that he won 'fair and square'. So, excuse me for not trusting ANY government. That's what real Republicans do, not like you watered-down idiots who came out in droves, and want to silence any dissent and remove checks and balances.
This is not a game. I didn't vote for 'the winning team'. I don't base my identity on who won.
So please, knock it off. You're making us real Republicans look stupid.
if you present, both sides and mention in equal proportion cases where kerry benefitted and bush beneffited, then it just becomes e-voting related random noise (which is what i think all this is) and there's nothing to make the story "sensational."
Is it just me, or does it look like they used integer math for their counter in the machines mentioned in:s /epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/new
I'm willing to bet 32,000 isnt quite right, try 32,767... the max number for a 16 bit signed integer...
Add one and suddenly you roll over to -32766...
Supposedly it was fixed... fixed by what? using an ABS function to strip the sign from the number??
The provisional ballots don't get counted until 11 days after the election.
l ts/2004/gen/pr es.htm0 4/gen/vo terTurn.htmt s/index.html
Bush is currently leading by 136,483 votes. There remain 155,428 votes. Statistically kerry lost. Personally I still want those 155K votes counted.
Sources...
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/resu
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/results/20
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/resul
#### ## Laroue ####
So what are we going to do about it?
I am willing to accept that Bush "won" the election... but I see two issues with the result:
1. The margin was very small, so the standard for accepting error should have been much smaller. I know of no evidence of rigging, so I'll accept that what we have is a statistically valid sample. However, the process itself has shown a ridiculous level of error that should be unacceptable in the modern day. Certainly, the number of affected votes "could" have swung the election, even if there's no reason to believe that they'd be distributed differently than the votes properly counted. A higher standard for counting is required.
2. The fact that the race was so close to a 50:50 split (perhaps closer than the reported results tell) means that we might as well have flipped a coin to get the result. It would have saved 4 billion dollars and lots of annoying posturing and advertising. Clearly, neither candidate struck a chord with "the people". I think a very large number of people are disenfranchised by the lack of choice and the generally dismal quality of the major party candidates.
In 2008, let's skip campaign season and simply hold a lottery. All eligible citizens are put on a list. You have 3 months to contact your election board to opt-out, otherwise you're in. The names go into a giant hat, Ed McMahon and the supreme court drive up to your house with a big ceremonial key to the white house and asks if you'd like to sworn in on the spot, live TV cameras rolling. If you say no, they'll ask your neighbor or draw again.... Just an idea... The political parties play us for rubes, why should we treat the process with any less disdain than they.
the notion that our electronic systems are less accurate, more failure prone, and less trustworthy than 6 senior citizens sitting in a school basement is _hillarious_.
Aircraft are using computers to LAND WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION. I think we can design a system such that it is possible to reliably ADD NUMBERS.
There are tricky problems to voting, like making sure the warm body standing there is authorized to use this particular voting station, but that's not what the griping is about - here there are basic issues of physical security, data security, data auditing, and so on.
These are computer science problems, and they've been solved in practice and in theory.
If you want to see how to use computers to do math correctly with high confidence, look no further than the military avionics and flight control systems.
Namely, what we need is a specification for what a vote counting machine needs to do.
Then we need 2 separate vendors to build clean-room, different technology implementations of the spec.
Then at each polling location, one machine of each type counts every vote. (i.e. each vote is counted by 2 machines)
If the machines agree - bitchin.
If they disagree - now there's legitimate reason for closer scrutiny.
This has a few nice benefits:
- it makes a standard, nationwide voting form. No state can have a pathologically awful ballot
- it gives somebody at the federal government something important to do, since they're going to make new offices and blow money on stupid shit anyway
- people that know wtf they're doing can be involved in the spec review, so you dont have to rely on the machine builders to come up with the right spec, just a good implementation of a public spec
I don't think paperless voting is a good idea.
If you go to a totally paperless approach, it gets MUCH uglier, so i am going to advocate sticking with a paper ballot for now.
I think machine-reading of paper votes is a good idea, and that is what i am suggesting above re: multiple independant readers which must agree before the results are valid.
My personal thinking is that the paper vote needs some sort of bar code representing a guid on it so that a vote can be uniquely identified. This lets you resolve such issues as a vote showing up in one machine and not another.. a vote getting counted twice.. etc. You can also track which paper ballots you issue and see how many actually make it into a machine, etc.
Also, each ballot counting machine needs a way to show that its results are tamper proof; perhaps each machine is given a cryptographic key that it signs the output with. In any case, those are problems/details for the bright people to figure out - all i know is that this is a solvable problem, from an engineering and theory perspective.
I cringe at suggesting the federal government come up with another spec or proposal, or get itself involved in something else, but if there is going to be this much drama surrounding election accuracy, the adults need to step in and apply some actual engineering to the whole problem space.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"Before you ask, the 4000 votes don't change Ohio"
Change Ohio to what? It does change the outcome of the numbers and something went wrong. That is what matters from a democratic standpoint.
There are some sites out there dedicated to watching out for election and general improper government issues: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/, http://www.buzzflash.com/, http://www.stolenvote.org/, http://www.truthout.org/
However, if just one such error occured in each of Ohio's counties (88) then Bush would have 350K extra votes.
Any statisticion would agree that it would be a stupid assumption to make.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
and if everyone extrapolated as wildly as that, we'd have 300 million people throwing their entire life savings into the stock market every time it gained 100 points.
Can the potential difference in votes amount to a larger number than the margins by which either candidate won in a given state?
That depends. Are you asking only about the wrong votes that we know about or would you also want to include any wrong votes that we haven't detected yet?
Is anyone surprised at all by this? We all knew Florida was going to have problems but this just goes to prove the current method for voting is obsolete and we need a new one. I am all for computerized voting but it is far from practical use, as an earlier slashdot article pointed out about the company that makes them and how insecure they are. I'm thinking retina scans and biometric scanning, kind of hard to fake those.
Is there one news story in the entire world (besides the philly story)that says Kerry gained from an error?
There are precicts where he did, but the media isn't reporting on it. My point is the machines, the process maybe flawed and that the errors we are seeing "giving" Bush votes are also proportioanly giving Kerry votes, especially in areas of higher democratic registration and turnout. More demos vote in a precinct, more errors will be with Democratic ballots.
I know there IS voter fraud, on both sides, but the numbers being spuns are just ludicrous.
1. Where are the rest of the states? Including only states where the data support your accusation is a way to manipulate (and thus invalidate) statistical data.
2. Why is it broken up by state when paper or electronic ballots are determined precinct by precinct? Ideally you'd find where the exit polls were done and correlate with actual votes from those precincts.
Without these two points addressed, all you have are data suggesting more investigation is necessary, not evidence of fraud. (And even after you get that data, you have to control for other factors that could cause the discrepancy you're seeing. It's not easy to make the jump from statistical suspicion to statistical evidence.)
So, first of all, most people look to the exit poll numbers that came out during the day and compare them with the end results. Since the demographics of the voter changes during the day, you should expect them to be different.
Take Florida for example, According to end-of-day exit polls, 47.6% voted for Kerry, 51.4% for Bush. The actual numbers were Bush 52.1%, Kerry 47.1%. That seems to be pretty close to me, especially considering that the exit poll counted fewer than 3000 votes in FL.
The central tabulation in OH is a windows box with an access database.
So it doesn't really matter what voting machine is used. The tally is on a partisan machine.
I suppose you want a photo id,
Those photo ids work so well, I've never seen underage kids drink.
How bout a biometric or an implanted rfid tag!
In soviet russia voting booth counts you!
I all those unexplicable votes went for George W (our leader), that isn't "weirdness". It proves once and for all that god's hand is on our side.
The electorate wasn't swayed by CBS fabricated stories about President Bush's Nation Guard service. They weren't swayed by the phony partisan polls published by a media openly campaigning for Kerry. They weren't swayed by pleading letters from liberals in England. They weren't swayed by the liberal elites in Europe. They weren't swayed by the missing Iraqi explosives story manufactured by the U.N. They weren't swayed by the tainted exit polls published by the democrats. Story's about isolated instances of voting irregularities will not sway "Redneck Nation" either.
an ill wind that blows no good
I and at least five other atheists and agnostics I know all voted for Bush. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to democrats, but not all people support heavy taxation for the wealthy, or huge social programs. More over, not everyone is stupid enough to believe that Bush policies have led to the (relatively small) loss of jobs. I mean, you hear a lot of liberal arts majors complaining that they can't find a job, but how is that any different than it's always been. The job marked has been improving, and that's all there is to it, there's no reason to vote for Kerry there.
I think that a lot of democrats need to take a reality pill and realize that more people voted republican because more people wanted to vote republican. More of this country is not on the eastern seaboard than is, and a lot of us don't have the same beliefs and values that democrats seem to *think* we have.
If this happened with the Diebold machines, we'd be in trouble, since there is no paper trail. But the problem was with the optically scanned PAPER ballots. Shouldn't we be able to do an audit of this pretty easily?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you were to do the Bush Vs. Kerry election again with the knowledge that Bush won the first time, I would see tons of Kerry/Anti-Bush supporters going out to the polls and making sure Bush didn't win this time.
Then, Bush supporters would call for a "best out of 3" election, and it would be a cycle of neverending voting.
To make a totally inappropriate comparison: It's sort of like Jeff Goldblum's "chaos theory" in Jurassic park when he puts the drop of water on Laura Dern's hand in the truck and it falls in 2 seperate directions, even though it started out in the same place.
I believe if the tables were turned, all of this 'Kerry bashing' from you and above posters would be quite different. Republicans would be fighting this in court. So Republicans, please take your FUD elsewhere, and btw thanks for screwing up our economy.
- Link from The US Dept. of Labor source.
It's BUUUUUMMMMMBLE!
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Correct me if I'm wrong but there is an amendment to the constitution that states anyone with a Valid drivers license may vote. So when you see XX many voted more than their were voters you will know why.
Why isn't there a standard ballot and/or machine for the entire nation? Would it be that difficult? Doesn't have to be comptuerized, doesn't have to be optical, doesn't have to be fancy. Just something relatively foolproof and easy to count.
Is it really so hard?
Who doesn't like free music?
And a highly disingenuous one, at that.
I voted for Bush.
... in the US with a brain that isn't addled by Fox News, Bushisms, and all the crap spewed out by Jesus freaks, then you have to sort out your country as it's going down the pan now.
Remember Hilter's rise to power came about with small incremental changes that NO ONE protested about UNTIL it was too late to fight back.
And look where that took us.
The national deficit is close to busting into the open, massive job losses are looming, but stock market goons are protected. They'll still have all the money. Read about the House of Rothschild to see how these people operate.
They don't give a shit about the man/woman on the street. They don't give a shit how many people die abroad or at home so long as they have wads of cash.
If the Jesus freaks get their way, the constitution will be a worthless piece of paper and the US will be a bible bashing fundamentalist proto-fascist state.
Start THINKING for yourselves. Use the Internet. Read some history from all sides of whatever divide you think there is. All these labels of right, left, commie, liberal, monarchist, republican etc are just side issues here. They're used to divide people up - remember "divide and conquer" ? Don't pay heed to people who want to label you. They're out to put you down and don't care about anybody except themselves.
Work out for yourselves what is happening to your country. WAKE UP before it's too late. Use your *BRAINS NOW*.
Don't listen to anybody who tells you to stop whining - they're the ones who WANT you to bend over for them. You need to make up your own MINDS.
Stop watching Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC etc. Find out what's going on from somewhere else other than the self-censoring corporate owned media channels.
*WAKE UP*
If you don't want to get drafted, then start writing to your senator and congressman, start campaigning to save yourselves. An excess of geeks translates as cannon fodder.
*DO SOMETHING NOW*
for being the first person in this thread to correctly spell concede. I was about to lose my fscking mind.
The republican party has been working to make it more difficult to vote for some time. In Texas, the state GOP party platform indicates that they want to get rid of motor voter registration. This would mean that people wouldn't have the choice of being registered to vote when they get their drivers' licenses. They also want people to have to re-register every four years. The document claims this is to combat voter fraud, but I suspect it's also intended to reduce the number of people casting votes and complicate the registration process. Check page six of the above-referenced document.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The real question is if the anomolies are any more or any less than with paper ballots.
Less. Australia has always only ever had paper ballots. When the result is close, like within 0.25%, losing candidates typically call for a recount. The recount can take a week. What is the deviation of recount from original figures? Typically below 0.0001%.
We're not sore losers. This election was stolen.
In the end it comes down to dollars and cents. The people with the most dollars can buy the election independent of what the "will" of the people is.
And setting up wars to suit companies, be they failing or not is nothing new, just read this and you'll have everything explained to you:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/
With hopes there will be a papertrail next time...
However, if just one such error occured in each of Ohio's counties (88) then Bush would have 88 extra votes.
How do these third parties check that the source code they audit is the code used to generate the binaries on the voting machines? When reviewing the software at binary level, how do they know the software doesn't simply work one way during all other days than election day, and otherwise on election day? Why are these independent, third-party reviews secret?
Transparency is extremely important. In a voting system, it's imperative. I can't understand why this is even a question.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
What gives the right to the United States to "help" other countries to put a Democratic government, if in the United States itself has NO democracy? Hypocrisy...
Kathy would like everyone to know that the optical scan machines are of the brands "Diebold" and "ES&S". It was stated in the head article that the e-voting machines were Diebold, but that the optical scan machines were not. It has also been stated in several places in this thread that there were three vendors for op-scan machines, but there were in fact only two.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
The biggest problem with the US electoral system, is that there are too many voters. This leads to all kinds of statistical problems that otherwise wouldn't be significant. Combine that with a very close result, and you get uncertain results blurred by statistical noise.
I recommend going to a system described in Starship Troopers: only citizens can vote. Citizens being, of course, only those people who had served in the armed forces for a minimum of 2 years.
This solves everything, as the number of voters would drastically be reduced, but that wouldn't matter anyway as all elections would be landslide Republican wins.
So why did I register Democrat this time? The reason was a no-brainer: All but one of the local Republicans were running uncontested in the primaries! And let's face it, Bush's nomination was a sure thing in the Republican primaries. The Democratic candidate wasn't yet determined. Because of this, there was no logical reason to register Republican this time around, at least here in Gahanna, Ohio.
I had a funny feeling my friends online would blame me for skewing the Democratic party's predictions. :)
democrats are being sore losers. why would republicans be sore winners.
the trend holds across counties that use the same machine type, so if "conservatives are simply 'conservative' when it comes to agreeing to participate in exit polls" you'd expect them to be so in all polls, not just areas where they electronically voted.
... registered demo's who vote republican. aparently the way their votes are tabulated this year has a similar distribution as 2000. ...but i didnt check their numbers, so i havnt made up my mind...
"conservatives are simply 'conservative' when it comes to agreeing to participate in exit polls when they voted electronically" doesnt make much sense.
though i understand from dailykos's discussion about this that these districts were largely "dixiecrat's"
tasty electronic music vittles
It's over. Bush won. Deal with it. We had to put up with Clinton for 8 years.
Democrats in denial continue to try and find anything they can lay their hot little hands on to destroy George W. Bush. All rumors, unsubstantiated gossip, and half-baked "truths" will be trumpted to the highest in the hopes that some of it, no matter how ludicrous or absurd, will somehow stick to the President.
One wonders just how much scrutiny the voting system would be under if Kerry had won. One further wonders if this story would've even made it to Slashdot had it been the Republicans complaining about voting irregularities.
Bush won. Kerry lost. Get over it and start planning the next election. Perhaps next time you'll pick a better candidate. I would've voted for Lieberman had you nominated him, but you chose a left-wing flip-flop instead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I know that it is probably paranoia but I really worry that the results of a fully electronic voting system could be manipulated without our knowledge. Without something material that could be counted, I will always feel some nagging doubt about the results.
But like I said, it is probably paranoia.
I think now may be the time to remind all you Americans that your constitution specifically grants you the right to bear arms as part of a militia just in case your government gets too powerful and starts seizing powers that it has no right to.
I'm just pointing that out, thats all. It's in your constitution.
I'll get ready for that visit from the police now.
Steve.
A latent existence
I haven't drawn any conclusions from the Florida oddities. But having seen them, I'd like them to be studied. I've run enough T-tests in my time to know from eyeballing the e-voting / scan dichotomy that it hase an extremely low likelihood of coming from chance. Who knows, maybe they'll all clear up as easily as Palm Beach County did. Let's not jump to conclusions; let's find out the facts.
By the way, just to clear something up, if you have a hypothesis beforehand, and your stats say it is very unlikely to have to have come about by chance (low p-value), then you may be on the road to drawing some scientific conclusions.
But. If you calculate some low p-values after the fact, then, as a scientist, all you can say is it may be worth investigating further. It may be fairly simple to pose a new hypothesis (such as "I hypothesize that the exit polling in Florida will correlate with registrations in all counties; not just e-voting counties the way the election outcome correlated.") But you can't jump to conclusions on a post-facto hypothesis.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
.... setup http://electoral-vote.com/ and wrote "The United States is the oldest continuously functioning democracy in the world.", (see http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/electoral-colle ge.html) I nearly fell of my seat. ROFL.
...", then OK but saying "it is the oldest ..." .... puke, puke, puke, US nationalistic TRITE.
.....
The Iroquois League, Iceland, the Isle of Man and Switzerland all make similar claims and so Tanenbaum is a complete plonker basically. He might be OK on operating systems but his politics/history is laughable. If he had written "one of oldest
Anyway to get to my point, watching from London and seeing voting queues of 5 hours or more in some places of the US had me laughing even more. I've never waited longer than 3 minutes to cast a paper ballot here in the UK and with a paper trail as well. Electronic voting has been all but ruled out here as it's so open to fraud.
Seeing the US going headlong into electronic voting indicates to me a huge corrupt system there, out to reap profits from crap IT as well as open up very simple hacking techniques to throw elections. I believe all US citizens have been hoodwinked into using this stuff.
5 hours queues to vote - ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha LOL
democracy - ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha LOL
Don't forget to bend over now
"HA, I faaart in your jenerale direc-sion."
Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
Or 32767 to be exact?
So not counting ~86k kerry votes is an error in favor of Bush.
RTFA, or just keep talking out your ass. In Palm Beach County there were apparently 88,000 more votes (more votes = already counted) than voters, when they were at 98% of precincts reporting. Now that they are at 100%, they revealed that most of those votes came from absentee ballots - the number of absentee ballots went up from about 49k to 141k or so. When that update happened, there were an additional 1543 votes counted in the presidential race (not for the incumbent, as you assumed). Of those 1543 new votes, about 600 were for Bush and 950 were for Kerry (simple subtraction between the old numbers and the new), which was the same ratio as the orginal 550k votes at just under 40% Bush, just over 60% Kerry.
I had this post open when it was first posted, and just came back to refresh. I saw the description change, without an editors comment. I think that this was the new string "the Touchscreen counties", perhaps it was Diebold before? Anyone got a cached copy?
/. ops.
Note I am not suggesting anything clandestine, but I would like to know if the (mother)post was edited, and not attributed to a
It's certainly troubling to me - I've heard many times that exit polls tend to favor Democrats by 2 or 3 percent because some people don't like to admit they voted Republican (a strange concept if you ask me - why would vote one way, then be ashamed of it 5 minutes later, and not willing to divulge that information
The opposite happens here in Texas. People come out saying they voted Republican when they actually voted Democrat. I guess it depends on where you are and who your friends are as to what you'll say you voted.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Being a non-American, I know that bush won by 2%, but I don't know what the actual numbers are (voters for any particular candidate). How many voting mistakes/alterations would have to be made for that 2% to become 0% or -2%
Okay, okay... I want all the Kerry supporters to move to the west side of the Mississippi, and all the Bush supporters to the east. Minor candidates can have their choice of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, or Alaska. Once you've selected your geographic region, please refrain from changing your mind or going back to your home state.
Now, wait for the census.
See? Completely accurate voting, and everyone is happy; the blues who want to go to Canada now have their own country, the reds who are tired of hearing the blues cry are now free of them, and the minor candidates each get their own territory to run, as well.
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
vvnm.org/resources/florida2004/florida_vote_patter ns.htm
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
vvnm.org/resources/florida2004/florida_vote_patter ns.htm
read it, be informed. It was written by an actual scientist! imagine.
how ironic - the story was about George W Bush and the advert below was for doom
"citizens can vote. Citizens being, of course, only those people who had served in the armed forces"
If you did not serve I presume then that you can't either serve in political office because you are not a citizen. Then almost only democrats can fill the job.
Democrats:
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91. v * Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal. v * Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311. v * Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters. v * Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg. v
Republicans -- and these are the guys sending people to war:
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon! Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve. v * Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: d
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Hear, hear.
Even though I don't support Bush I support your position here. A government of the people, for the people by the people.
If the vote is corrupted, then it's a criminal matter and a disaster for a democracy.
The vote counting needs to be audited just like the likes of Enron etc.
It's Laporte, Indiana. Not Laporte, Michigan.
The News Dispatch is a Michigan City newspaper. Michigan City is in Indiana, 7 miles from the Michigan border.
Lots of people get that wrong.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
For the love of Jefferson, will someone please tell the British press that Democrat is a noun and not an adjective? Every friggin time they talk about US politics, it's "Democrat candidate John Kerry" or "Democrat Senator from South Dakota."
It's the Democratic party and the Republican party. A Republican politician is a Republican. A Democratic politician is a Democrat.
I'm over here doing *my* part, telling people not to refer to the United Kingdon as "England." But does anybody say thanks? Noooo....
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
I run a precinct, and we don't ask for ID either. If your name isn't already on our list, or if it is crossed out (already voted or listed as absentee) then we file your vote away as "provisional" and it is signature-verified manually by the county before being counted. Additionally, any crook could manufacture a photo ID; asking for one won't stop a determined cheater, just slow the process down.
people don't line up in the rain for nine hours to tell the president what a good job he is doing.
Read the article in the parent post. It contains actual information as opposed to the ravings found elsewhere.
...the next 4 years that is...
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.
Consider that it may actually come out for the best (worldwide) that Bush won the election.
Here is my preception of the difference between the two candidates:
- Kerry - Wants to gather a world accord to move the nation and the world forward.
- Bush - Wants to invade every nation that doesn't do what USA wants.
Now lets consider for a moment how world history has gone.
1 - people exist in anarchy
2 - despot forces them into servitude
3 - in order to maintain position of power despot begins granting people rights / services
4 - people get used to rights, force out dictator
5 - democracy can happen as human rights slowly begin to hold sway over dictator's desires.
The point I try to make here is that you can not skip from step 1 or 2 to step 5. That's why "Nation Building" seems to be working so poorly. Take the average 3rd world, messed up / anarchic goverment citizen and say to him "Hey. You should pay me to make your life better. In fact, you should not even have the choice to not pay me. I'll just take the money out of your paycheck and you can go to jail if you don't like it. Whadya think?" He says: "Fuck off." These days he says "Jihad!! IEEEEEE*BOOM*" but that's just an artifact of which messed up / anarchic government set we're working with. What you need to do is take yer anarchist and force him into line with a monarchy for a few years where you can smack him around for a while when he makes like he's going to disrupt the social contract. Once he's learned that being part of a functional society is nice then you can let him have a democracy.
So. Let's build an analogy:
Countries exist in a state of international anarchy. So we take a goverment and say to them "You should sacrifice money and soverenity to Agency X to make the world a better place." They say one of two things:
1) Fuck off.
b) OK! We'll have the UN or something and it'll sound really sweet, but nobody will really be willing to submit and it's effectiveness will be hamstrung.
So what you perhaps need to do is get some nation that is pretty tough to be like "Hey all you nations. Get in line or we'll come over there and show you what happens to people who keep screwing up our world peace." Such a nation can go around for a while knocking heads, and then someone will nuke the shit out of it (or something) and then people err nations begin to miss the services it provided and manage to actually get shit together. Or maybe if they're cool they can pull an "England" and get all MagnaCarta and give the people/nations enough consideration that they are happy without letting them fuck shit up all the time. Beats the hell outta pulling a "France", right?
So this brings me back to my preceptions of the two candidates. Maybe the Kerry-style enlightened preception of peace and prosperity for the world just can't happen without a little Bush-style head cracking, you know? Ok, a LOT of head cracking. 'Safe at home, and respected in the World'? _I'LL_ show you how to get respect! *RA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA* Wanna make an omlette, right? Let's just hope that Bush's deficit doesn't sink us first.
Now THERE'S an entertaining possible future history. Too bad I always post anon, so this will languish at 0, never seen by the masses.
I knew this would happen, you knew this would happen, and I'm pretty sure Kerry knew this would happen. But why would he simply roll over and die less than 24 hours after the election began? Before anything was solidified? The illusion of choice. Your votes mean nothing when the candidate you cast for concedes. They shouldn't be allowed to just Give Up. Fuckers.
Here is the correct one:
Analysis of Florida Voting Patterns
enjoy.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
analysis of florida voting patterns
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not Michigan. FYI
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
We take comfort in blaming the system, be it "fraud" or "machines" because the alternative is to realize that half of us would like to either kill or kick out of the country, the other half of our countrymen. Am I the only one who is surprised we haven't already seen an attempt at a coup d'etat or widespread violent rebellion?
Politics for nerds. Your vote means you're the biggest sucker in the world and wouldn't know freedom if it were shoved up your ass.
Don't bitch about the system if you're the one giving it fuel.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
I'm sorry
----
You can have my sig when you pry it from my cold dead......
"Consider that it may actually come out for the best (worldwide) that Bush won the election."
I agree, but not for reasons as complex as your analysis.
Kerry would have inherited a big mess. He would not have appeared to be successful, no matter how well he actually performed.
Bush, on the other hand, has for the first time in his LIFE, become obligated to face the consequences of his own actions.
Anyone who occupies the oval office today, has a lost cause in his hands. Better to watch Bush go down in flames, than to shackle such a legacy on some other more competent leader.
Despite the repeated asseration that "the whole world hates the US", I've seen absolutely NO meaningful opposition to the US policies. Why was no resistance mustered to forestall the invasion of Iraq? The US interpretation, of course, is that the world approves, overwhelmingly. Even those countries that supposedly don't approve, gave their consent by not fighting against it. Yeah, that would have cost lives and broken alliances. We're talking WAR already, so that's what it comes down to.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And to use it incorrectly; the United States of America does not have, and has never had, an established church.
"The company . . . is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad"
Yeah, everybody knows publicly traded companies have never ever engaged in fraud. You know like the Dow component Enron that subsidized Bush's first campaign. Nah, they didn't commit fraud. It was a misunderstanding.
Another vote for meeeee! Wo-ho! :)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Liberals ! Stand up and take it like a Mandate ! I think the vote margin in Ohio was 136,000 so 4000 really doesn't, well, you can subtract. As far as the Florida vote machine alien butt probe theory ; Registered Pubs and Debs are NOT indicative of final votes. But it does say in this particular case. Elitist idiot John Kerry dised the Jew vote, FYI: that is the population of Palm Beach, they historically vote dem, thus registered dem. And they voted Bush in droves partly because of the good campaigning by Ed Koch and partly because John Kerry is a , oh already mentioned the elitist idiot.
The funny thing about that story is that of all the articles I read about that, the only thing mentioned is thousands of votes found by "republican election observers" were found. Nobody ever said who the votes were for because in actuality, they were never there in the first place. You assume since they were republican observers that they were votes for Kerry (at least I am assuming that you are since you cite Kerry, but your source doesn't say one way or another), I heard people in the media assume that election observers had found votes for Bush (Howard Stern comes to mind). Since the votes were not really there, they were votes for nobody.
One "such" error, not one error, you fucking douche
If you want to see a detailed analysis and interesting primer on these voting patterns look here:
Analysis of Florida Statistics
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
~ - Not to suggest that counting the votes by hand is perfectly adequate, but while the politicians are out to waste money, they might as well waste it well.
PS - an even simpler solution to tied results would of course be to get rid of the two party system and electoral voting crap and go with a parliamentary system like Canada's, but everyone knows they're a bunch of no-good commies.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
I don't think much of the argument that the exit polls were contradicted; see the blog article, where a seasoned reporter says that they are unreliable.
However, the issue of voting machine error needs to be taken more seriously and investigated by a bipartisan committee. If the problems become common knowledge, perhaps people will become sufficiently angry that politicians will be forced to address the issue.
"Most of the rhetoric in your post is easily refuted."
go ahead then, refute it. we're waiting.
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?
Parent is amazing.
Is it so ridiculous when you consider that many of these machines are made by companies owned by Republicans?
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Any statisticion would agree that it would be a stupid assumption to make.
Yes, but the poster made no such assumption. He simply stated that this is what it would be numerically.
Millions of people could have voted Libertarian, but didn't.
There are plenty of DEM/REP couples in the country. I can easily imagine a situation where someone would find it easier to lie to an exit-poller about how they voted, rather than have (another) argument with their spouse.
It was a secret ballot (for good reasons). Was it a secret poll? I doubt it.
I think it's inappropriate to refute his post with such floccinaucinihilipilification.
See this for Bev Harris's account of receiving a tip that "the news has been locked down tight."
... what? There was an angel hovering over every voting booth and tabulator holding a flaming sword to fend them off?
Here'st the logic as I see it:
1. The Bush Republican faction (not all Republicans, but the Bush folks) has shown no ethical constraint in its tactics to achieve its goals (e.g., lies about WMD evidence, Kerry's Viet Nam record, McCain's adopted child).
2. As Bev Harris's crew has demonstrated, the Diebold vote tabulators were designed (intentionally or not - although there was a known computer fraud felon on the programming team) so as to be trivial to hack.
3. Ohio and Florida have Secretaries of State who are highly-partisan Republicans; in the case of Florida working directly under the president's brother; in the case of Ohio someone who tried to disqualify voter registrations based on paper stock (which would have violated the Voting Rights Act).
4. So we're supposed to suppose that people who have the means (vulnerable technology, officials in place, no discernable ethical restraint against dishonesty), and the motive (a belief that they are doing God's will appears to predominate among them), then were restrained from manipulating the vote count because
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Huh? I never said anything about Kerry conceeding; that's irrelevant (as you pointed out). What I was saying is that it's unlikely that the absentee ballots will put Kerry within 4000 votes of Bush, which would be required for those votes to change the outcome. In other words, (conspiracy theories and vote counting errors aside) they aren't enough votes to really matter.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and we'd have fewer military incursions.
The exit polls on cnn.com all closely resemble the final tally in Florida and Ohio.
Could it be that the exit polls y'all are referring to are inaccurate because they don't include voters that voted later in the day?
Or is CNN part of the conspiracy? (Of course!)
To all the people who replied: I trying to be informative, not speculative. All I was doing was pointing out what is at this moment, rather than what might possibly be.
But yeah, I'd be willing to bet there's a whole bunch of other errors -- we just aren't sure of them yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Actually I agree in part to that unintelligible liberal whiny ass rant "Bush - Wants to invade every nation that doesn't do what USA wants." I agree. In fact let's make it the goal of America to individually invade and defeat every country out there. That will prove our supremacy beyond question. Then in the future when negotiating with any country, we can say , "Didn't we kick your ass once?"
If McD's can give me a receipt for a hamburger, I ought to be able to get one for voting.
Precisely in this manner: separate the "authorized to vote" machine from the machine that collects votes.
Precisely as follows: have the biometrics machine check wheter the voter is allowed. If true, the operator gives the voter an old-fashoned punch-card (with no unique identifier) to punch with votes. After voting, put the card into a box. At the end of the day, scan all cards.
that in some counties in Ohio, well over 100% of the adults who were eligable to vote were registered?
then why did the 10000+ Democratic Party lawyers not file one claim? Especially when the elecetion was rather close? Provisional ballots should not count- if you did not register to vote properly, and its not that hard, then you do no have the right to vote.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
The electoral college needs to be abolished.
This is the United States of America. Our founding fathers believed very highly in maintaining some independence of states and the electorial college reflects this. The president is elected by the states (as voted by their citizens). This is what the founders intended (and why the 2000 supreme court decision in Gore vs. Bush was sooo wrong -- but I digress).
Now, there were only thirteen states when the constitution was inacted and now we have fifty. Plus they did not have the instantaneous communications that we have now. So, one could argue that the country (and the world) is a totally different place now and it is time to change the way we elect our president. Just understand that in doing so we are changing a significant force behind the constitution (that of state's rights). I recommend extreme caution in proceeding down that road.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
17 year olds can't vote!
The fact that Bush carried the el;ection by more votes than the anomalies could have caused is utterly beside the point -- what is at issue here is _why_ these anomalies exist at all and what we can do to eliminate as many of them as possible before the next election.
Every anomaly helps undermine confidence in the electoral process, disenfranchizing the general populace; this sort of doubt can actually (under extreme circumstances and over the long term) destabilize the government.
Got mead?
"Personally I still want those 155K votes counted."
There is absolutely 0 chance of them not being counted; even if they are totally irrelevant to the result, they will still be counted. People just shouldn't expect them to change anything. If by some miracle it turned out that all 155,428 were for Kerry and at least 136,484 of them counted, Kerry would win Ohio and the election. However, I wouldn't recommend that you hold your breathe waiting for it to happen.
It is ridiculously unlikely. Even if 85% of the provisional ballots cast are counted for Kerry, he would still lose. He needs 88% plus an additional percentage point for each point Bush got. I.e. he needs an 88% *margin* over Bush. Bush getting as little as 7% of the provisional ballots would preclude Kerry from winning. Not to mention that not all of the provisional ballots will be deemed valid. It is quite possible that 15% or more of them will be rejected. That would be consistent with what happened in 2000.
It is far more likely that the Kerry will gain twenty or thirty thousand votes but still be over a 100,000 short. It's even possible that Bush will gain votes. They expect the provisional ballots to be more Kerry than Bush, but they don't actually know that.
You are, of course, assuming that there's only one county in which there was this kind of overvote.
IEEE's P1583 team has been working to define voting system standards, and is preparing to issue a second draft.
This is what you can do
1-Sign up for IEEE membership (a good idea anyway if you're an engineer or computer professional)
2-Sign up for membership in the IEEE Standards Association
3-Sign up for balloting P1583
And then you'll really be able to influence e-Voting standards.
(Note: You don't need to be a US citizen for any of this. The IEEE is an international standards body. The need for clean elections is not limited to the USA, it applies to citizens in any country that is using or may consider e-Voting any time in the future.)
Props to slashdot for reporting on this! Only Keith Obermann has reported on this as far as I can tell, and it's rumored that he's been ordered to back off.
Once again, thank you CmndTaco and Slashdot!
"Subsidizing rural Christian lifestyle"? That's a good one. I guess you're forgetting all the various military bases and other government facilities that (with the exception of the red counties of California) aren't located in any of the Blue states because of NIMBY-ism, anti-military sentiment, and similiar nonsense. It must pain you to think of all the NASA facilities that are located there, or that 1/2 of the gasoline used in the US is refined in tye Gulf Coast states. Also, no matter where I've lived, illiteracy was always higher in the blue counties by a very wide margin. But for some reason, the Dems seem to think that all the 'red states' are like rural Arkansas under Clinton.
There is a great website that has a video about voter fraud. It is called www.bush-flipflop.com.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Did you notice that Bush got 667% of the votes in Columbus in the Ohio-incident?
666... is somebody trying to say something?
Thats michigan city, LaPorte County, Indiana. Not LaPorte Michigan. Notice in the article that they were going to confirm with Indianapolis about the results.
in my county at the point that that the precinct was reported as 100% counted. In our case, the Sequoia e-voting machines were counted immediately, but the sheer unexpected volume of paper votes (which were optional) and mail-in absentee ballots exceeded the personnel available. So while the precinct was called 100% counted, the reality was that less than 60% actually were. In our case, however, this is a solidly liberal county and Kerry won - so you won't read about our troubles anywhere but locally.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
I and every other republican voted for Bush because we support facism. We WANT a one party state. We want to combine church and state. We want to change the constitution. John Kerry is just too liberal to get anything done.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
This is why you count the votes and [i]then[/i] call the race. It's what the rest of the world does.
help America Vote Act - nuff said
permanent war - straight out of the book - The permanent war undergirds every aspect of Big Brother's authoritarian program, excusing censorship, propaganda, secret police, and privation. In other words, it's terribly convenient...
infallable leader
on and on and on. The clean air and water act lowers specific standards on clean air and water, giving us on paper more clean air and water at the stroke of a pen
This "good steward" has been universally condemned as the worst president on the environment ever
http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/
Federal taxes should not exist at all. We need to shrink the size of government. Federal taxes just arent required anymore. All we need now is state taxes.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
And when your signed int overflows at 32,768, it starts counting backwards... sounds familiar...
On typical modern systems 'int' has a range up to a bit over 2 billion. However, the C and C++ language specs only require 16 bits for 'int'.
A 16-bit signed int would go up to 32,767 (not 32,768).
You surely know that both of them have been at Yales, but do you know they both members of Skull & Bones? This election means nothing.
I think you've just been slashdotted : )
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Those are state not federal taxes. Federal taxes should not exist. Social security should be destroyed. How else can we shrink the size of federal government?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
It is naive to think we'll ever have a perfect ballot count in any election. There will always be some results that appear to be in error, some that are fraudulent (like the Chicago cemetery voting for JFK), and some that are simply statistical anomalies but are not the result of either of the former.
Whether or not the actual outcome was good, it is at least fortunate the election was not close enough for the aforementioned variances to make a difference, or we'd have a mess like the 2000 election. Essentially Gore and Bush battled to a statistical tie in that election. There was no reliable way to insure undervotes, overvotes, hanging chads, non-votes, etc. were properly counted as it required too much inference from potentially biased vote counters. So we had to go with the official numbers. But make no mistake about it -- they probably could have found just as many anomalous ballots in other counties that went against Gore.
The fact is, there is a percentage of people out there who are completely incapable of following even the simplest instructions. It's only magnified when an election's margins are razor-thin. The irony is the least competent of our voters ended up being the potential deciding votes. How scary is that?
The ultimate goal is to reduce the size and influence of federal government. We don't need federal taxes. Even liberals like you don't need federal taxes. California does not need the federal government. Look at the tax chart http://stopwelfare.com/
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I am really surprised that I am not hearing more people talk about open source voting software. Clearly its a much more effective system that what we have now. Clearly we are going to need an organization to help overcome the lobbyist power of the voting machine companies. I know of one (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/) that has had a few successes in legislature including a law in California which requires voter-verifiable paper ballots to be printed. They do seem to be desparately low on funding though...maybe some /.'ers could help out? Does anybody know of another organization that is promoting something similar?
Everything is working perfectly. Trickle down economics are not designed to influence the economy, the tax cuts are designed to shrink the size of government. Federal taxes should not exist anymore. PERIOD. Why do we need federal taxes?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
According to Greg Palast's site, the spoilage rate is more like 3% for the entire US.
What does this have to do with trickle down? This guy is a defense contractor working on a JD. He's interested in trickle up, not down, and for folks in that kind of an income bracket, Bush's policies have been a great success.
Hey CMDR Taco, La Porte is in Indiana, and so is Michigan City. we are on lake michigan but no in Michigan.
one wonders about dick morris' claim in TFA that exit polls are "never" wrong.
back when jesse jackson was running for president the margin between the exit polls and the actual vote count was usually fairly substantial, due to the fact that no one really wanted to admit that they hadn't voted for him.
wonder if the same went for kerry?
as far as the possibility of actual fraud, I would say that regardless of whether it changes the actual outcome of the election, EVERY report of potential fraud should be investigated. there is always the posssiblity (however remote) that some fraud was perpetrated, it might just have easily been done badly too.
me personally, I miss the really honkin' big voting machines that we used to have where I grew up. the enormous lever, the little x's. they are generally held to be very hard to screw with, and they are generally left un-reset until the next election in order to facilitate recounts.
and as far as recounts go, there should ALWAYS be a recount. regardless of result, no one whould be in that much of a hurry to get the results. the office doesn't change hands for another 2 months anyway.
does anyone else here remember douglas adams' remark about the true role of the president? makes you wonder.
cheers all
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
This staggers belief.
There is an enormous anomaly of 600,000+ votes in Bush's favour, which doesn't exist in e-voting results.*
Kerry lost by 377,216. Considering Kerry winning Florida would have made him President, THAT'S how big this issue is.
Now both Diebold and ES&S (and Sequoia) machines show a similar GIANT anomaly.
I presume these machines scanned real voter cards which still exist in sealed boxes somewhere?
If so, PLEASE demand a hand count...
*
For Florida Opscan machines
Rep: 1,337,242 expected, 1,950,213 voted
Dem: 1,432,425 expected, 1,445,675 voted
Sounds extremely stringent to me. I feel safe.
We used to use scantron-type ballots here in Maryland (using a black marker instead of pencil).
Very simple, and even clearer than most "real" scantrons -- each choice was printed directly on the card beside its corresponding "bubble" (actually more of a "complete the arrow" deal).
This year, however, over the protests of many experts we switched to the new touchscreen Diebold devices. Subsequent challenges were also shot down.
As someone who had been following the Diebold fiasco for a while, I felt like crying.
DNA just wants to be free...
4000 DETECTED wrong votes.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
At least Cthulhu says he's out to get you and everyone you know killed, and then goes out and does it!
Thanks, that's what I was trying to say in the first place! I don't understand why everybody thinks I'm being partisan or that I should speculate about other errors or something.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and thanks for your reasoned tone, but I would disagree with your statement that "It's the responsibility of the government and municipalities to demand hardware that provides what they need (i.e., a paper audit trail)". I'd say it's the responsibility of anyone bothered about the effectiveness or otherwise of their vote. The municipalities just pass the message on.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Dude. He wasn't responding to you.
see subject.
Exit polls only work if the sample is random. Maybe the pollsters were old men who only talked to girls in their early 20's. Maybe all the Bush voters told the pollsters to go fuck themselves. Who knows.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
The Democrats and the gun control nuts overlap in a large way.
Oh the irony.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
"Don't let them see us. Don't tell them what we are doing--"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?
"For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out--"
"Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians--"
"Not The Green Deal--Don't show them that--"
"Not The Orgasm Death--"
"Not the ovens--"
Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all pay it all play it all back. For all to see. In Times Square. In Picadilly.
"Premature. Premature. Give us a little more time."
Time for what? More lies? Premature? Premature for who? I say to all these words are not premature. These words may be too late. Minutes to go. Minutes to foe goal--
"Top Secret--Classified--For The Board--The Elite--The Initiates--"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To shit forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet forever. Traitors to all souls everywhere. You want the name of Hassan i Sabbah on your filth deeds to sell out the unborn?
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien Enemy imprisons "thee" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever. If you I cancel all your words forever. And the words of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel. Cross all your skies see the silent writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah: drew September 17, 1899 over New York.
--William Burroughs, Nova Express
... it can be proved that there was wide-spread election fraud in many states and that Kerry should even have won the Florida vote? How can this change anything now? Somehow, at this late stage, I don't see the government declaring the outcome of the elections null and void no matter what is proved.
That's great and all, but Ohio wasn't using Diebold machines.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
The only point that is really worth nothing here is that Americans, like the rest of us, are nothing but sheep. It is not the land of the free, it never was. There is no such thing. American, Canadian, Indian, Japanese...we're all the same.
Bush got in again because he cheated (again). That is not a mystery. To claim otherwise would be naive. America's very life style is what permits this sh*t to happen. Suck it up and move along.
HELP THEM LEAVE is a 501(c)3 organization that feels your pain. We understand your outrage and your feelings that you can't live in a country with George W. Bush as President. For all who qualify, We provide free transportation to selected partner countries for those wishing to leave the United States. Visit our website at http://helpthemleave.com/ for more information or to make a reservation.
In some of these "interesting results" the op-scan ballots were fed into machines which scanned them, then did things like subtract extra votes.
Some of these ballots and machines produced circumstances of N registered voters and N+X (where X is positive) votes recorded. [This is as likely to have been stuffing by humans as mechanical error.]
In may of the criticisims, the problem is not that the "ballots" were "misintrpreted" but that the data path from the big box (into which you fed your paper) to the BIG BOX where all the numbers were recorded over modems and flash-card-insertion, were NOT SECURE and NOT AUDITED.
See, it stops being a matter of how the voter markes down his ballot when the data path can be made to lie. The "butterfly ballot" thing was something of a red herring.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Nah -- it's a little thing called "tenure."
why would vote one way, then be ashamed of it 5 minutes later
For the same reason St. Peter denied his Christianity three times before the rooster crowed (Matthew 26:34, 74-75). He apparently was afraid that others would overhear and attack him.
A pilonidal cyst is an accumulation of hair and infected sebaceous secretions that occurs under the skin in the natal cleft (i.e. - your butt crack). It stinks unpleasantly and is generally caused by having a fat sweaty arse that you sit upon all day. Often occurs in jeep drivers in hot climates.
I believe the proper way to extrapolate is to treat this as a repetition of independent events...
Basically you would end up with:
n=88
Single event 'Interval': +/-4000
Expected 'Interval': +/- n*4000/sqrt(n)
Thats +/-37,500
aka a 75,000 vote range...
Naturally if this is real error then this is really a lower bound, as we are treating the error to be 4,000 votes. The error was 4000 in a district of 1000, and this likely means the county was smaller than average (which means the true deviation would be much larger than +/-4k in an 'average' sized county).
Don't forget that 1 wrong vote causes a discrepancy in outcome of _2_. -1|+1....
FWIW Please understand that this is crap even by the standards of statistics, but it's at least as valid as 88*4000, unless it wasn't error...
The result speaks for itself. Most americans like what GWB stands for, bigotry, Americas Grandeur (delusional), hatred or fear of other people, the easy way out and the easy explanation. The election result could be questioned, but i think that not that many americans care more for a single Iraqi person than their big SUV's or their McDonals meal. The thesis that you could care for a stranger halfway around the globe is a myth. Evil has a nice taste and a good ring to it. Good is a bitter remedy and most people would rather be flogged than turn their back on evil. I say evil in the sense of people not caring for others, and only caring for their own wealth and prosperity. In that sense it sickens me to think that GWB considers himself a follower of Jesus, he would have turned the other cheek. Jesus says if you are not against me you are with me, not the other way around. It is also said that you should not take the lords name in vain.
Yep, you heard me right. I propose we blow Florida off the coast and give them to Cuba. They keep screwing things up. ;)
P.S. For those of you who take me seriously...you should be shot. Good day.
In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but was stripped of the electoral vote due to an even larger number of very, very suspicious voter problems.
Now that was bad enough, but the so called "voter reform" which took place between these two elections were anything but transparent and affective. While I should point out voter anomilies here probably had no impact on the ultimate outcome, they should provoke no less concern. If nothing else, they should create outrage about the tax money wasted on improving the process which serves as one of our fundemental democratic rights.
Then again judging from the changing tide, we worry more about the need to return Christ to our schools and governments. Why vote when we have government officials bestowed to us by god? Lets leave operation of our prized Republic to the Almight Mighty. Instead we should close our minds and toil toward Heaven.
He used 'BUSH' in single quotes
Some C compilers recognize, as an extension, multicharacter literal constants. For instance, Classic Mac OS uses this for the various types of four-character codes such as file types, creator types, resource types, and QuickTime codec types. The expression 'PICT' evaluated to 'P'.
With dozens of glaring, huge irregularities who could possibly get arrested if some subtle irregularities voted red but were only noticed a month after the election? Among how many individuals could the blame be potentially spread so no one gets as much as a slap on the wrists for it? The government would just say "Diebold will do better next time" and leave it at that??
...but some oil companies, some giant software company who contributed red and not blue, and some defense contractors could decide to rig a few machines. If only to be well-prepared to rig more and not get caught next time.
There will be more irregularities noticed. It's that way with software. And many of those irregularities won't be fixed for the next election, either (as proven by Diebold versions over time after bugs were known).
By the way no need to fix ALL an election to rig it. Just say 3% of machines. Or get all Diebold to turn a Kerry vote into a Bush vote 3% of the time. Swap a few memory cards at the point where they're in the hand of one individual per county.
Memory cards aren't all there when you ask them for recount, either. If you are in power you can get the FBI all over it or to ignore it completely, while if you're NOT in power it's better to concede so you don't look like a whiner in front of the people that don't understand software and engineering bugs or centuries of voting fraud VS countermesures.
What we needed is decades of a pilot program in a small number of counties to get the technology and process right. Not a widespread "32767 is enough for everybody" mess!!
And to top it off, I think Bush would still have gotten elected on paper because he's so incredibly good at manipulating emotions rather than intellect. Monkey see, monkey do!
I'm most definitively in favor of some hacker adding exactly 30000 votes to every third party loon on some machines and putting a sticker on the machine notifying everyone of how easy it was.
If Windows were so secure on a Diebold, I'd like to see that Windows on the shelves. It takes only 5 minutes for my 12 year old to disable any kind of password, filters, chat logging, or game-time-limiting software I made or bought. But at least one day he MAY BE PRESIDENT! (-;
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
November 5, 2004 04:56 PM
Update: Palm Beach County has updated their numbers and added 91,802 absentee ballots and 1,041 provisional ballots. Note that the vote totals for president only increased by 1,543 votes. To view an archived copy of the previous report, click here. While Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy, this underscores the flaws in the system and data compilation.
Well, here's food for thought.
p osts/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1255391/
For the record, this is similar to issues Gore brought up in FL in '00. Democrats jumped all over it then. I'm betting they are just as quick to dismiss it in this case.
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
Even if we all fear our inner paranoid conspiracist, it seems naif to ignore that we are talking about the biggest price in the world here. Is it really so far fetched to believe that some might even consider cheating for this? I know I don't want to believe Bush won, and my thoughts might be clouded by my emotions,but I can't ignore that this has shown to be a guy that doesn't mind bending the truth a bit for his personal goals.
I have nothing to say, just want people to read my cool new sig
...
4) incompetence replicated on a massive scale
Oh wait, IAAE, too.
Trickle down economics is the concept of stimulating the economy by lowering the top income tax rate. But you are giving an example of "military keynesianism", fueling growth through military investment.
IMHO, the only government sponsored technology that was important for the 90s stock surge was ARPAnet. AFAIK, it was developed before the 80s.
And "trickle down" works poorly as stimulus. Ask Stiglitz, DeLong. It's much more effective to stimulate demand from the bottom.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
"PS - an even simpler solution to tied results would of course be to get rid of the two party system and electoral voting crap and go with a parliamentary system like Canada's, but everyone knows they're a bunch of no-good commies."
HELL NO. In a parliament system the party platform acually means something. There is very little to prevent them from implementing it, lock, stock, and barrel. Which is great IF you want things to get done. IF those things are BAD however....
Of course, it might have the side effect of getting people to pay attention. But I doubt it. See, I shudder at the thought of EITHER party implementing its party platform-I just shudder at the thought of the Republicans platform more....
The one federal mandate I would like to see:
REQUIRE a "none of the above" choice for EVERY elected office. It doesn't even have to be binding. I think voter turn-out would increase by a great degree. After all, if the vote was say 42-38-20 (Bush, Kerry, NoA) with near 100% turn-out, Bush would still be President but no one would have any illusions about a "mandate" or that the candidates represent most of the people.
But, it will never happen.
Found here
.28 .26
BALLOTS CAST TOTAL . . . . . . . 665,334
PRESIDENT AND VICE-PRESIDENT
MICHAEL BADNARIK/RICHARD V. CAMPAGNA . 1,828
GEORGE W. BUSH/DICK CHENEY (REP). . . 215,624 33.05
JOHN F. KERRY/JOHN EDWARDS (DEM). . . 433,262 66.41
CANDIDATE DISQUALIFIED . . . . . . 0
MICHAEL A. PEROUTKA/CHUCK BALDWIN . . 1,667
Adding up, we get
652,381 Total votes for president.
A difference of about 13,000 votes between ballots cast and COUNTED BALLOTS. So according to your measure, this means there are 13,000 want to choose one).
According to the linked page, the discrepancy of ballots to registered voters is 97,489 ballots.
So if we assume that ALL of the non-president votes were provisional ballots (thus why they are not in the COUNTED TOTALS there) there is still an overall discrepancy of ~84,000 ballots!
Can you explain this?
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
It is near an Indiana town called Michigan City...but not in the state of Michigan. Check it out. Here it is.
Didn't anyone read the article...even the submitter? Hello!
Would Slash Dot ever post this had the other guy - Nader had won - it was a two man race right?
Many people are trying to attribute the "anomolies" all over the country that show that the apparent election results have bush winning as some kind of wierd polling phenomenon. If you apply Occam's razor, which says the simplest explanation is probably correct, then we should conclude, unsurprisingly, that Rove had his buddies fix the election.
A Slashdot story talks about how changing one or two votes per machine could have a noticable impact.
LET. IT. DIE.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Just consider any faults and problems that were not noticed... It is likely impossible ever to know whether votes for either side were affected by such unnoticed problems.
"Sources please?"
Errr! Why don't you try TV, Newspapers and Google. Books also are a great source of information and web sites of each politician can also work. I hope you don't expect me to send you a copy of each personal military record because I don't have them in my pocket right now.
This list wasn't build by me, like I said, but is widely available on many web sites. I can tell you that the information on that lists seams generally accurate to me and match what is available to anybody who listen to the news and read.
Do you doubt that Cheney did not served?
Do you doubt that John Ashcroft did not served?
Do you doubt that Jeb Bush did not served?
Do you doubt that Paul Wolfowitz did not served?
Do you doubt that Bill Frist did not served?
Do you doubt that Richard Gephardt did served?
Do you doubt that Tom Daschle did served?
Do you doubt that Al Gore did served?
Do you doubt that John Kerry did served?
Do you doubt that Max Cleland did served?
Do you doubt that Ted Kennedye did served?
Do you doubt that Jimmy Carter did served?
Do you doubt that John Glenn did served?
And do you also doubt that even if not directly politicians: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, all war mongers did not served?
Hope your are big enough to do your homework alone and then if you find some mistakes in that list, maybe you can say something constructive and point out those mistakes in the list.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Unbiased and public oversight of the election and the voting machines is also important.
Notice how they talked about using a single PC-like system to tabulate the votes. The votes from various locations were added up by this machine. Hopefully there was no tampering or other faults...
Oh, just a little note:
The No Child Left Behind Act, for the first time in USA history - requires all schools to submit all the names, addresses and telephone numbers to the US Military upon request.
Failure to comply results in loss of funding, period.
in a parlimentary system the parties are generally forced to have a platform that the people don't hate. I really wish that we had a system like Germany's though. Parties get seats proportional to their votes, so if the greens get 2% and the libertarians get 2%, they each get 2% of the seats.
... how did Nader not receive any more votes then with these reports?
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
Look, before I went into the booth I still wasn't sure who I would vote for, but now that it's over, I'm glad it's over.
Thing is I would have to agree with the poster above , that elections have not and never will be perfect, but that doesn't mean we should not strive for it.
I have a feeling the accuracy will only get better with time and have a generally more optomistic outlook than most slashdoters on the political stuff.
I really feel that the negativity on both sides is what will destroy our democracy.
From what I've read the amount of votes we are talking about here would not have changed the election. Also I have yet to read anything on slashdot stating how many votes Kerry received due to anomolies.
The irony I guess is the slashdoters who are screaming foul at the republicans are even more guilty than Bush for the war.--Flamebait
At least it Bush had what SEEMED to be reliable information before going to war.
In the future I would enjoy a much more independent view from slashdot.
Before this election I would have considered myself to be somewhat independent in thinking and especially politics, but the far left (or whatever the right's buzzword for them these days) has really put a bad taste in my mouth and ultimately lost Kerry a vote.
Flame away and reinforce my opinion.
P.S. Too lazy to spell check
P.S.S. I wasn't to lazy to read the other sides opinion ala. moveon.org, so don't even try it.
The Trickle down theory works the very best,
but your opinion of it depends upon where you are standing...
Well, that in itself is suspicious; there should be errors, they should just be balanced. If people don't find them or aren't reporting them, then something is broken.
By the way I am reading again your post and I am not sure anymore what was the intention of your post at first?
Claiming that the list is bulshit and being sarcastic about how "lots of people would love to see that". (like it seamed to me at first)
Or honestly stating that you'd love to find more about that?
Sometimes, sarcasm its very difficult to detect on the Intarweb and if you meant the second thing I'll give you my apology to be an happy trigger on my answer. But if you meant the first, well...
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Tax Rates 2002
Last week, the Internal Revenue Service released data on distribution of the income tax burden in 2002. They put a lie to John Kerry's contention that the rich are not paying their fair share and should be taxed more.
The IRS data divide taxpayers into percentiles according to their adjusted gross incomes. Following is the share of aggregate income taxes paid by each group:
The data also reveal that despite the Bush tax cuts, the income tax is still highly progressive -- taking more from each group as their incomes rise. The following percentages measure the taxes paid by each group divided by their income. Economists call this the average or effective tax rate. etc...The even bigger problem is the arrogance of some people who seem to think that if someone voted for Bush he was deceived, conned, stupid, irrational, non-educated, a sheep, or a Bible-thumper when in fact many people simply do not agree with liberals and Democrats. It's this disconnect with reality and mainstream America that cost the liberals the election.
As long as you--and people like you--continue to engage in this arrogance and deny the reality that your political preferences are in the minority you will continue to lose elections.
I think the best way for liberals to not think of you conservatives as deceived conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers, is for you conservatives to actually stop being decieved conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers.
Or are you saying it's OK for you conservatives to be deceived conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers? Should liberals be like you deceived conned stupid irrational non-educated sheepish bible thumpers to prevent further liberal arrogance?
Criticism is a perfectly valid thing. You conservatives need to recognize your faults, but, unfortunately, I suspect you don't think you have faults. There was a study published in a psychology journal a few years back that came to the obvious conclusion: Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and smart people know their faults. Do you think this applies to conservatives? If so, tell me, what are your faults? What are the faults of conservatism? What do you believe is wrong with the Republican party?
Now tell me who's the arrogant ones here...
...that there will be a 2008 election to be concerned about. We the Sheeple just voted ourselves the Fourth Reich. Fine, you got what you wanted---just remember that when the Bush Shirts come for your particular group.
Seig Heil,
Mal the Elder
The 68.8% swing county is very easy. It is Baker county. Most of the county has been registered Democrat for decades. Everyone in office there is Democrat. However, they are the staunch old style Southern Democrats. This county has, since Reagan, always gone heavily Republican in state and national contests. They voted about the same percentage in the Senate race too. To try to blame it on the Op-scans is just a case of someone not taking time to look at the voting and political history of a county. Some of the folks writing these articles need to actualy try to do some real journalisim and research the past history instead of making idiotic assumptions.
Here in the south it's common to be registered Democrat to vote in the primaries, then vote for republicans in general election. Hell my entire county pretty much does that every year. I'm a Bush Democrat, since I haven't registered as independent or I'd miss voting in primaries.
I personally knew several who weren't even as fortunate as we were. It's painful seeing a person have to sell their family's home because they can't pay the taxes on it and put food on the table at the same time.
Analyze this and this and this
Why do we need federal taxes at all? Why not just abolish all federal taxes, remove all power from federal government, and just pay state taxes? Why not let the states be responsible for themselves and their own social programs?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
we need to change the tax program itself and remove federal taxes. The states can easily make up for the money with their own tax increases. The key is to shrink the size of federal government while increasing the size and power of state government. We don't need big federal government anymore. Bush has proved this. Now it's time to reduce the size of the federal government.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
You do realize that the movie Starship Troopers is satire.. It actually makes fun of the Heinlein book that it is based on, quite brilliantly.
Anyways, one doesn't need to live under a powerful government - that's a very big-government republican philosophy. The proper philosophy is to live WITH a government, rather than UNDER it.
This is also where I believe criminals should be given the right to vote. Isn't their choice of not following laws a perfectly valid philosophy that should be taken into consideration when defining government? For example, if you were a felon because you wanted to free slaves, should you have your voting rights taken away because you actively worked against the principles of government? Shouldn't anti-government viewpioints be perfectly acceptable?
Bill Clinton said he would sign the so-called "partial-birth" abortion ban into law if it contained an exception for where the health of the mother was threatened. The GOP controlled House and Senate never presented him with such a bill.
What's your view on the pill, there are a substantial number of pro-lifer's out there who think the pill should be illegal because it prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg (obviously the pill would have to fail for some reason for this to occur).
Abortion may be wrong, but so is having that belief while cutting off funds to programs that help single moms. It's wrong to condemn abortion, and ostracize women who are single and pregnant.
It's wrong to say that abortion is murder, but allow it when the woman is a victim of rape or incest. The clear message of that policy is that a woman can have an abortion if she didn't do anything "wrong."
It's wrong to use abortion as a sole means of birth-control, but it is more wrong to punish women who are responsible(have sex, use contraception), but have an unplanned pregnancy by removing the abortion option.
The abortion debate is one of definition, some think life starts at conception, some think life starts at birth. You want to find the middle ground between those two, read Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade.
My other sig is extremely clever...
We should send UN and EU observers to the next elections (if they ever happen again :) in the USA. It is a common practice to send observers to elections in the third world countries with dubious democracy records who are in danger that elections would not be fair, how we could forget about USAians?
---if anyone still needs a gmail invite, message me, i have few to spare.
"it's statistically impossible"
I think you mean "it's statistically unpossible".
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Horse shit. Any proposal for more scrutiny of the voting process a la Venezuela would be shouted down as rank racism by the Democrats. Thumb prints, poll watchers and picture ID's? Why obviously it's a Republican trick to disenfranchise black people!
The fact is that big-city Democratic political machines like things just the way they are. Punch cards and lever machines allow myriad ways to game the system, and the Democrats who control elections in places like Philly and St. Louis make full use of them.
If I were a Republican politician, I'd be happy to get rid of the Diebold machines and institute Venezuelan style verification. But why bother if all it gets you is Al Sharpton shouting through a bullhorn outside your office?
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
http://americanassembler.com/feature_pics/want_job s_big.gif
There's several versions of this image floating around on the web - some of them have a source listed as the department of labor.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I took a long, mathematical look at the numbers for Florida and have to admit that I was wrong in this the "expected" number is based on voter registrations, but the dixiecrat effect does make up for much of the difference.
I extrapolated 2004 based on 2000 numbers, adjusting for changes in voter registration and the increase in voter base, and have had to change my mind on this. As it turns out, there is only an average 3% variance from the projection in opscan counties, but an average 11% variance from projection in e-voting counties.
If anyone wants to examine these numbers and how I derived them, they can be found on this web page.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
/* devil's advocate */ What happens when someone brings extra, forged cards with them and slips them into the audit box? Is there a simple way to make sure that there is only one card / voter without attatching reversable, unique IDs to each card (and therefore each voter)? I was thinking some sort of pseduo random sequence per machine* where inserting a random number'd card would violate the sequence. Of course you wold then have to forget / not record the order in which voters used that machine*. *or per polling place, if all the machines are networked, which would add some noise to the voter order. Still if you were the first to vote that day and the first 10 votes cast were all for candidate X, it would be failry obvious who you voted for.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
The disparity is consistent amongst all Opscan machines, not just Diebold machines.
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of any earth-shattering voter irregularities reported.
Let's assume for a moment that the election was either stolen with few fingerprints left, or tons of rampant errors that may have merely made the race a lot closer than it was. Let's assume that the mainstream media is very relieved not to have egg on its face as it did in 2000, and is determined not to go into a fuss over the vote counting like they did in Bush vs. Gore. Let's also assume that there are many small blogs all over the internet screaming bloody murder about how there was voter fraud, but that no mainstream media is willing to report it. The more they cry foul, the more they are dismissed as stubborn conspiratorial kooks.
Would it then be unreasonable to assume that most people would therefore think that the election went fairly and smoothly, with "plenty of hickups, a few thousaand votes lost or misrepresennted here and there, but on the whole, nothing to really put any legitimate dispute as to the overall effect on the outcome of the Presidential Election"?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Hagel didn't resign, Victor Baird, the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee for nearly 16 years, resigned. He resigned suddenly, just after discussing with Hagel's office Hagel's continuing non-disclosure of his relationship to and beneficial ownership of ES&S, the privately-held company that counts almost all the votes in Hagel's state of Nebraska.
Hagel was Chairman and/or CEO of ES&S until the year before his election to the Senate in 1996. Hagel's victory was described as one of the biggest upsets in the 1996 election. (Nebraska, where non-machine, and hence non-ES&S, recounts of ballots are now prohibited by law, had not elected a Republican to the Senate in 24 years.)
It is not known if Baird resigned as an act of protest or to protect himself from further investigation into how Hagel was allowed to violate FEC regulations for nearly 7 years.
Not surprisingly, the new Director of the Ethics Committee quickly announced a change that relaxed the disclosure rules.
You can read more about it here and here.
I looked at the unofficial Ohio results and was surprised to see that while there were 5,574,476 votes cast, there were only 5,481,804 votes recorded for president, including votes cast for all of the many candidates. That theoretically means that either 92,672 voters (1.7% of all the votes cast) did not vote for a presidential candidate or their vote was not counted. Personally, I find it hard to believe that 1.7% of Ohioans did not vote for a presidential candidate, especially since there were 10 to choose from on the ballot. I also noticed that most of the small counties voted for the democrat in numbers comparable to their 2000 vote but there were massive new numbers of republican votes. For example, little Mercer county cast 5212 votes for the democrat in 2000 but only 4924 votes for the democrat in 2004. Bush's total, though, went from 12,485 votes in 2000 to a much better 15,022 votes in 2004 which is a 20% improvement. Now, there is no doubt that Mercer county really loves President Bush but a 20% improvement in that lovin' stretches credibility. Generally, that seems to be the pattern in both Florida and Ohio. Bush did a LOT better in the areas he already was doing good in and that overcame his loss of votes in those areas that didn't love him so much. Bush even alluded to this when he was asked why he was campaigning in the Florida panhandle where he typically racked up 2:1 vote margins and he stated that their plan was to make it 3:1. It seems doubtful to me, though, that there was any new wave of Bush voters in 2004 who didn't vote in 2000 since the Bush voters were already turning out in big numbers in 2000 to vote for the morally-clean Mr. Bush to show their dislike of the tainted Gore-Clinton crew. Mr Diebold probably deserves the credit.
Talking out of your A-Hole isn't a valid source either. Either make a correction, a valid argument, or a coherent disagreement.
Still waiting...
= 9J =
Okay, you have a valid viewpoint. You think abortion is murder.
Abortion for rape/incest victims or those where the life of the mother is threatened, that's fine.
Assuming you're first viewpoint in valid, how does it stop being murder in the second point? Oh, it's just your opinion that makes it alright. How convenient.
Rationality isn't within the province of blind faith.
= 9J =
You want no anomalies in your elections? Yeah, that'll happen right after someone can code an operating system that has no bugs or security issues. Which is right after pigs fly, and right before monkeys fly out of my butt.
Thank God that'll never happen. I don't like monkeys.
Look, how about you go talk to some poll workers and get a clue about the weird crap that happens in a polling place, no matter how careful you are. For those who weren't paying attention, this was the largest turn-out election since WWII. Poll workers -- the ones that give out the ballots and handle them -- do this job perhaps as much as five days a year. And none of them has worked an election like this before -- none of them.
This is my third presidential election I've worked a poll -- the first time I was the one responsible for it. We had 100 (about 20%) more voters than this poll has ever seen before, and a substantial number of those voters have never voted before. I had one more worker (four instead of three) than we usually have, and I had twice the voting machines I usually have. I had the other three taking care of the folks voting a regular ballot, and I did the 92 provisional ballots in the day (for those who don't know, provisional ballots take substantially more time to process than regular ballots, including the new HAVA requirements that we give each provisional voter a method of determining the disposition of their ballot). I also took every voter who indicated that they'd never voted before, and every voter who had a question of how to vote, and walked them through the voting process (we're still using punch cards). I only had two voters stuff their ballots down inside the machine as a result (four years ago at this poll, there were four that did that), and I only had to spoil one ballot (which is unheard of).
Of those 92 provisional ballots I processed, three voters failed to follow the proper procedures, bringing me back their provisional ballots so they could sign the roster and the envelopes necessary for their ballots to be processed. Two of the three sealed their ballots in the plain white envelopes that preserve the secrecy of their ballots, but one did not. The two that did, I was able to put their ballots into the proper outer envelopes based on where they were in the ballot box when we opened it, but the third went into the mix, and there is no way of figuring out which ballot it was. The voter was an old lady who was confused about the process, so her daughter helped her vote. But her daughter didn't know about the rules for the provisional ballot, so she just dropped it in the ballot box and left.
So my poll, with two precincts, has an error of one ballot that can't be fixed. No computers involved (I dread the day we get them). Not a hanging chad issue. Just a simple, honest mistake by a careless voter who didn't stop to ask a question when she should have.
And it's possible that this ballot would have been counted anyhow -- she was issued an absentee ballot, and most likely didn't vote it, in which case it would have been opened and counted. But it doesn't matter anyhow -- that one vote error doesn't matter -- it's less than half of one percent of the votes from that poll. Nonetheless, I was very upset -- I don't want any anomolies either. I do my best to run a tight poll, and the observer who was there all day long -- an attorney familiar with election law -- had no complaint with how we did our jobs.
But I've still only spent two days in the past year working elections. The biggest year I've had we had four elections (two phony "emergency special" elections that year that were "emergencies" only so they could be one-issue elections where those who were supportive were most likely to show up and vote -- shockingly, both passed). If you know a way to stay absolutely on top of your game with a job that you'll do ten times in four years, with legal changes every year or two, and turn-out numbers that range from 15 (about what we're likely to
As a Canadian no-good commie
In my opinion the origin of all problems in USA elections is the lack of a uniformed voting system for the whole country. The fact that so many types of ballots and ways of voting exist makes almost impossible for an independent group to monitor accurately, through all the country, the validity of an election.
For presidential election the process should be run in one and only one type of voting ballot. It should be clear years in advance what it will be. Then the whole country could examine the possible problems and if a problem exist, the whole country will be concerned and the pressure will be to big to be ignored.
In Canada, federal elections are run by one federal government body, "Elections Canada". It apply the exact same process the "Canada Elections Act" in every district and we only use one voting technology through all the country. It's called "paper and pencil". One of the great things about a low tech voting system is that even after a major disaster that could make electricity inaccessible to parts of the country, our voting process will still work perfectly. The other great thing is that its almost impossible to cheat in the counting process because each single vote is manually counted in front of many witnesses, each one appointed and volunteering for is own candidate.
The Voting Material
All voting boots are identical through the whole country; each county receive identical voting packages from the federal that include the exact same material no matter where you live. If a county have a larger population, then there will simply be more voting booths in each voting point because each voting booth can only legally handle a certain maximum amount of voters. Basically a voting booth package contain:
-The list of all registered voters
-Voting ballots
-Cardboard voting booth panels
-Cardboard voting ballot box
-Standard idiot proof form to calculate the votes
-Enough receipts to give for each official witnesses of the process
-Seals and envelopes to close and lock everything almost hermetically in the voting box at the end.
Now the people that run the show the whole day.
-A deputy returning officer: chosen from among the persons recommended by the registered party whose candidate finished first in the last election in the electoral district
-A poll clerk: chosen from among the persons recommended by the registered party whose candidate finished second in that election in that electoral district.
-Each candidate representative.
Counting process
Immediately after the close of a polling station, the deputy returning officer shall count the votes in the presence of the poll clerk and any candidates or their representatives who are present or, if no candidates or representatives are present, in the presence of at least two electors.
Steps to follow in the following order, in front of every witnesses named above.
(a) count the number of electors who voted at the polling station, make an entry at the end of the list of electors that states The number of electors who voted at this election in this polling station is (stating the number), sign the list, and place the list in the envelope supplied for the purpose;
(b) count the spoiled ballots, place them in the envelope supplied for the purpose, indicate on the envelope the number of spoiled ballots, and seal it;
(c) count the unused ballots that are not detached from the books of ballots, place them with the stubs of the used ballots in the envelope supplied for the purpose, indicate on the envelope the number of unused ballots, and seal it;
(d
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Anyone but bush. Anyone know what would happen if enough proof of the e-votes giving false positives to Bush if we could toss the SOB out on his ears?
I'm with you all the way. Electronic voting, in its current form is very dangerous. No matter who is in the winning seat, it needs to be fixed.
What the current winner doesn't do about this issue will say a lot.
Blogging because I can...
that USA, leader in technology and "Leader of the Free World", can't get something like voting right! just how difficult can it be? In Finland it's pretty simple:
1. You receive a letter telling where you can vote
2. You go to the voting-site with that letter.
3. The officials check the letter and your ID. They then remove you from their list of voters and hand you the ballot. The ballot looks like this
4. You walk in to the booth, and write down the number of your candidate on the ballot.
5. You close the ballot so your vote is not visible, and the officials stamp the ballot.
6. You then drop the stamped ballot in to the ballot-box.
7. The ballots are counted manually with observers making sure everything is A-OK. The final results are available few our after the polling-sites close.
8. Results are decided by a direct popular vote. Then one getting the most votes wins. In presidental elections, if no candidate receives more than half of the vote, we will have a second round between the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round.
Related to voting: It's strictly forbidden to campaign right outside the voting-site. I was pretty shocked to see how in USA the people waiting in line to vote were handed pre-filled ballots with campaigners showing them "how they should vote".
really, this is not rocket-science!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Here is some analysis that says it is nothing:
. ht ml
http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/royle_florida
Read the above linked paper, especially the responses. I agree that it does not appear to indicate fraud. I am worried that this is an attempt to deflect critisism of electronic machines by making it look like the older optical-scan machines are more likely to have been fixed and giving the election to Bush.
The reports generally say that the ratio of Bush voters over registered republicans was much higher in regions with optical scan machines than in regions with electronic voting machines. The unstated conclusion is thus if there is right-wing fraud it must not be the electronic machines.
However they neglect a number of facts:
The optical scan machines are used in more rural areas than the electronic machines which were used in cities. It is pretty well known that voters in rural areas went for Bush. Also rurual areas have more Republicans. But the way these things are plotted, in a county is registered 3/4 republican, 3 times as many Republicans could vote for Kerry than Democrats vote for Bush and the results would look equal on these plots, even though if you suspected
fraud in those counties, it would be fraud for Kerry!
Some of the papers try to excuse this by eliminating low-population areas. But they are still considering a large rural county the same as a small but equally-populated urban county. All the plots completely ignore the ratio of Democrats to Republicans which must vary from 25% to 70%. This hides a lot of information and amplifies noise. A better plot would be to eliminate all
counties where the registration numbers are much different than 50/50, which are the counties anybody wanting to commit fraud would concentrate. However I suspect that would show random noise and discredit these papers.
This may just be people plotting random stuff and shouting when they find correlation. However there is the nagging conspiracy theory that this information is planted on purpose to try to get mindless Democrat followers to stop attacking the electronic machines and start claiming that the electronic machines are better. Pretty damn insidious!
I only voted for Bush because I am hoping to see more of his daughter's nipples :P
http://www.thefirsttwins.com/images/4m-both-2.jpg
I'm finding lots of stuff floating around about how exit polling is incredibly accurate. Like within %0.1 Can't find any legitimate data on this though. Has anybody seen anything on this? Like say, a comparison of exit polls to the actual voter count for previous elections in the US? It makes sense that it would be more accurate than pre-election polls.
If some powert really did cheat the system, how would we know? How would you go about investigating that sort of thing? There's no real way to prove that he did, and besides, no one would have the authority to conduct such an investigation. In fact, no one even would *start* one, nor have the access to information that they need because the government can keep anything "confidential." So, democracy can be just as bad, if not worse, than Communism. In fact, it's the difference between your wife cheating on you, and your wife cheating on you and flat out telling you, and forcing you to stay with her because you have nowhere else to go. Think about this, I want to hear your opinions.
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
"why would vote one way, then be ashamed of it 5 minutes later"
Perhaps they were ashamed of it when they voted? When you do something you're not particularly proud of you're unwilling to divulge it to anyone whose reaction you're not sure of. This was evident spectularly in the 1992 General Election here in the UK and has become known as (amongst other things) 'shy Toryism'.
There was an article in the Daily Telegraph about this effect which speculates about a similar bias in the Presidential election just gone.
I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with the statement in the article that "That shouting [about pride in patriotism and small government] has gone quiet, under the assault of Michael Moore, mainstream European opinion and the slivers of liberal America that run down the East and West coasts." - from over here it seems like there's been plenty of 'shouting' in favour of Bush for the last few years.
Their concern is for controversy and "hits."
Ah, not at all like mainstream journalism at all then.
My other processor is big-endian.
SCOailism must be what McBride is suffering from, but I doubt that he will be very successful.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
What has baffled me in this election is the following.
;)
Clinton, during his term, lied about a private matter (that was really nobody's business but his own and the people directly involved) and they tried to impeach him for it.
Bush has lied in public and for the record about matters concerning national security that affects not only the American people, but has also resulted in instability in the international relations worldwide and he gets a second term...?!
These reports about tampering do help in restoring my faith in the sanity of the American people...
I mean, you hear a lot of liberal arts majors complaining that they can't find a job
Oh, I get it. My father's electrical engineerign job that he hots was just a liberal arts job, not a real job.
Of course, he was able to find a new job after 9 months of looking for a suitable replacement: answering phones for On Star. And since a job is a job to those who spout statistics like you, then he was fully receovered even though he was working for about 1/4th the salary.
I suppose he could've looked into signing up for one of Bush's retraining programs. That way, after 3 years, he could look for a 5-year job to tide him over until his retirement doing something new and exciting, like, I dunno, particle physics. After all, electrical engineering was a skilless job, so retraining makes sense.
But now I have to eat crow. Because after 9 months of unemployment, and then 9 months of answering phones, the government again needed the company he worked for to clean up more of their messes, so his former employer is now again his present employer.
"Better to watch Bush go down in flames, than to shackle such a legacy on some other more competent leader."
Ummm...
He doesn't go down in flames alone, and we (at least those of us in the USA and whatever other countries Bush decides to invade) don't get to watch from the sidelines. This is the world we have to live in - we need the damage controlled, and soon. Bush is not the only one who is going to face the consequences of his actions.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
I share a similar philosophy as that of the parent so let me try to explain the reasoning, at least from my point of view.
Abortion is tricky because you have two separate living beings, both of which have rights, and you have to weigh the two rights when determining the ethics.
While a fetus is not a fully developed human being, it is destined to become one granting it at least some rights. The woman carrying the baby has more rights, but those cannot completely eclipse those of the unborn childs.
What this means in my point of view is that the woman is entitled to the first preference. Meaning that if she did not choose to have this pregancy due to rape or incest you should have the right to choose to end it.
Consider on the other hand a women who had consensual sex. She chose to engage in an action whose designed consequence is that of pregnancy and then she attempts to escape the consequences by aborting the baby? The rights of that unborn child, while less than that of the woman, are enough to dictate that this is wrong and unethical. She played and now it's time for her to pay.
(Health related matters can always be considered in the favor of the mother again due to her standing as compared to that of the developing child).
Would I like to see a woman I know who was raped/molested have an abortion? No of course not. But I have no issue if it is legal in such circumstances for the reasons given above.
Of course given the choice between either no abortions whatsoever or abortions in any circumstance as we have now I would choose the former.
I suppose you could say that I twist the definition of "Pro-Choice" because I do believe that woman should have a choice, ONE choice when it comes to being pregnant. Where I differ from the general pro-choice belief is that I believe that once a woman has made that choice (by having consensual sex) she has no right to take that choice back to escape the consequences. (And if she never made the choice in the first place due to rape then she has the right to that choice now...)
At a Republican caucus I attended in 1986 (non-Presidential year) the voting went like this. An elder or pastor from a huge evangelical church in that area sat in the back of the room. At each vote the men looked back and raised their hand if their leader did. The women looked to their husbands and did likewise. Every vote that evening went ~18 for 3 opposed...myself being one of the 3.
Fast forward 18 years...a very small percentage of the population volunteers to run the mechanics of the election process itself. In general they are a diverse group of civic minded individuals. Can a single block game that system as well?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Note that their server has been attacked (looks like some people don't want this message to be heard) so they are only diffusing medium quality video at the moment, but you can get a high quality one on the edonkey network:
ed2k://|file|votergate.avi|253406440|FCB6A52253FD5 0D6BB9F4E5823F755E2|
Watch great movie opening scenes!
70% of the ballots systems in ohio were the old fashioned push pin paper ballots.
I trust Chad.
I for one welcome our new Fundamentalist Fascist Neo-Con Corporate War Monger Overlords.
Remember September 10th, the day before 9/11?
Do you remember the topic that was filling more and more newspapers, and sliding its slithery way from cable to mainstream television media on September 10th, 2001?
Very few people do because the next day 9/11 occurred, and it was just like a system re-set: memories were wiped (for awhile) and prorities were reset. The subject, though, never quite disappeared, and is now back with a vengeance.
It was about the legitimacy of the then President in office, given the increasingly bald facts that the election (of 2000) looked plainly STOLEN at "high noon" in Florida.
I'm not suggesting in any way that 9/11 was engineered as a domestic distraction for an increasingly perceived as illegitimate President, though, functionally, it served that purpose like few events before it, except perhaps for Pearl harbour.
What I am saying is, don't forget the conversation that's been growing here at Slashdot and, literally, in thousands of blogs and sites around the world, since November 2nd is, again, awfully familiar, and this time, with many more eyes on the process, more exercised FOIA actvities, though with the meek, paid for and so threatened (individuals) media mute, as is now common.
So unless this conversation naturally abates or its growing discoveries are explained or fall off; or the conversation is extinguished by a gang of counter-forces, the conversation is likely to continue, and to grow in volume.
Are we going to go where, for whatever reasons, we did not go the last time (it's not like we ALL had amnesia)? Just a question. Does the beast sleep in with the wife again? Or do we do something about it this time?
The Spanish-born, philosopher-author George Santayana's 1905 comment seems particularly resonant:
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
(from The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905).
We can be retentive or anally retentive if ya know what I mean.
Kyle
Four years ago I made about 75k. Now I make about 95 - 105ish. I've bought my first house, paid off two cars, started a 401k, and actually still have money in the bank. Am I better off now than four years ago? Hell yes!
The dems would say that if I have money in the bank I'm not taxed enough. For me, this election was about taxes. John Kerry would have raised them and my bank account would have dried up. As it stands, I'm thinking about starting my own business - something that I never would have been able to do when the dems were in charge....
The question of the Clinton impeachment, was, fundamentally, did Clinton lie in a court of law. It's one thing to just lie to someone on the street, maybe even to lie to the press. But lieing to a court is an attempt to subvert justice, and is a FELONY offense. Any president that commits a felony *should* be impeached. The question came down to, did Clinton actually commit purjory. There wasn't quite enough evidence to really convict him on that, so the impeachment died.
That is not just 'lie{ing} about a private matter.'
The sad thing is, 5 years later, there's still so many ignorant people like you running around telling people that the impeachment proceedings were just because Clinton "lied about a private matter."
The artictle you are disagreeing with happens to support the points you are making and contains all of the analysis of the article you refer to. You obviously either did not read the article or could not understand it.
Optical scan is used in rural counties that are mostly Republican, while the electronic machines are used in the mostly-Democrt cities
wrong, read the article.
1) Rural FL cities are overwhelminly registered democrat.
2) optical scan is used in more large cities than E-voting
They never plot this information, instead trying to hide it behind population counts,
Did you read the article you lambast? there are 6 plots and not a single table and not one population count is cited.
This could very well be a deliberate attempt to manufacture data to try to make people suspect the optical scan machines are bad and electronic ones are good
the web site you blame states in the first section in bold italics that the data does not support any such conclusions.
Try readin' before you post.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You arrive at the polling station.
Your name is checked against registered voters.
Your name is checked off so that you cannot vote twice.
You get a ballot paper with the names of candidates on it.
You go into a booth and mark with a pencil a large X in the box next to the name of the candidate for whom you wish to vote.
You place the ballot paper into a sealed ballot box.
At the close of voting, all ballot boxes are taken to the counting room, which is usually televised thesedays, and a few dozen people sort the ballot papers into piles according to who the votes are for.
Some more people count these piles, while other people walk up and down the aisles making sure all is in order.
The count is announced and a winner proclaimed.
You have it all in physical terms - the ballot papers, the boxes, and you can confirm that there's nothing missing or that there's nothing "extra".
If you were to take a pile of bills into the bank, and they credited your account with "approximately" the amount you thought you had, you'd be pretty upset. Businesses would demand banks be shut down until every penny banked could be accounted for.
So why so lax over something just as important? The signals this gives out is "Democracy good, Capitalism better".
It's not a perfect world, but for something that happens only every four years, why not get it as perfect as you can? And for once, technology isn't the answer. (cue the mod-down remarks for that one)
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
You: WTF? There's no connection but I'm right anyway?
Yes. Did you read my post? 9/11 wasn't the justification to attack Iraq since there was no link between Iraq and 9/11. But 9/11 is what lit a fire under our *ss and got us looking seriously at potential threats. Thanks to Iraq's behavior over the last decade they were at the top of the list.
You're right that nobody ever made an explicit connection, but they sure implied it as often as possible.
I've never seen any implied connection closer than that Iraq may have had contact with Al Qaeda (they may have) and Al Qaeda had something to do with 9/11 (they did). I see no problem with either of those statements. If people jumped to conclusions about what those two statements meant, that's their fault, not the administration's. Heck, even the quote Moore used in his movie where Rice is saying "Of course there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11" actually goes on to say "It's not that Iraq was involved in 9/11, but the same mindset that lead to 9/11 exists in Iraq" or something like that (I'm not going to look up the exact quote right now, but that's the basic idea). So I'm suspecting that even a lot of the "quotes" that people heard going into Iraq that caused them to believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 may be due to selective quoting.
After all, Condi Rice dropped the ball on the Bin laden memo.
How so?
The only conflicting signals I was hearing were between Hans Blix and the Administration.
The conflict was Iraq claiming that they had no WMDs but not cooperating with the international community for nearly half a decade and, when they were threatened with war, offering just enough cooperation to (they thought) avoid a war. Either Saddam didn't take the U.N. seriously or he didn't take the U.S. seriously.
I've also never understood the whole WMD rationale. Even if Saddam had what intel said he had, shouldn't Pyonyang be a smoking crater now too?
I agree. North Korea should be taken out and maybe should have been taken out before Iraq. That doesn't mean Iraq was a bad move, though. After all, those that are actively attacking us are terrorists from the Arab world. First order of business is to take care of those that are actively attacking us. No, Saddam wasn't threatening the U.S. homeland but he was an ongoing issue taking daily shots at U.N.-authorized patrol aircraft right in the middle of terrorist-land, plotting to kill ex-presidents of the United States, with a history of invading Kuwait, fighting Iran, and lobbing Scuds on Israel in a desperate attempt to start a regional war. Even if North Korea has a few nukes and even recognizing the instability that creates, it doesn't compare to the instability and actual threat that Saddam has and did present to a very delicate region.
Jesus, not that old chestnut again. Israel's broken more resolutions than everyone else combined and they haven't had so much as a slap on the wrist.
Ah, so now we get into the boring old Israel vs. Arab/Palestine bickering.
Israel hasn't invaded its neighbors, though it has kicked butt when threatened. Israel hasn't used WMDs on its own people or on Palestinians.
But that doesn't matter anyway. Suggesting that just because some country gets away with something that that means that everyone should get away with it is bogus. Quite frankly, I would have no trouble sleeping at night knowing that Israel has a hundred nukes. I would be very worried if I had known that Saddam had 100 nukes.
See, shit like this, not being consistent, is what makes this President the world's laughingstock.
International politics isn't always consistent, one size doesn't fit all, and those that think it should will always see a politician
There are other possibilities, such as applying standards of process perfection that are easily reachable in the real world, such as requiring a verifiable paper trail.
I have nothing against that. It's not going to stop the left's claims of having elections stolen, though. I don't think the left wants a truly verifiable paper trail, in fact - might be some problems with dead people and illegal immigrants voting.
The sad thing is, 5 years later, there's still so many ignorant people like you running around telling people that the impeachment proceedings were just because Clinton "lied about a private matter."
It behooves you in an argument not to call people ignorant. And the Clinton issue was a non-issue that got taken to a court of law. Bush has done enough to warrant that he testify UNDER OATH, and it's not being done. Clinton's crime was being a womanizer, like so many of our great presidents. People have their flaws and prefer that my president has personal demerits instead of political demerits. He shouldn't have been taken to court. IMHO.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I'm not going to keep rewarding the Democrats for ignoring me or my views. The Greens match my philosophies and views (for the most part), so I'll stick with them.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Now that kerry has conceded, what would happen if the counting turned out wrong and he actually won the vote? does he still loose?
Of course not, he didn't win the vote. It's not a news story if Kerry got an extra 3M votes. He still lost. However, if GWB got 3M votes he didn't deservem, then the election was razor thin, and that's a story. Nobody spends time talking about how the loser might have lost by a little more than we thought.
Sort of like looking for a story on which Merck drugs work better than expected from their FDA trials. Who cares? The story is which drugs caused more harm than is allowed.
The important thing is that the votes were wrong, and, in some cases, it appears to be the result of erroneous hardware which cannot be verefied. The time to correct the problem is NOT after the problem has become fatal.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
ignorant (From dictionary.com)
adj.
Lacking education or knowledge.
Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake.
Unaware or uninformed.
People who say that the Clinton impeachment was *just* about sex/personal indescretions, are, simply, ignorant. Uninformed.
The Clinton Impeachment came about because there was evidence that indicated Clinton *might* have committed the *felony* of perjury. You might say "it never should have been in court." Where else, pray tell, would you address charges of sexual harrassment?
In the US, we believe the President is not above the law. So, when former female subordinates of Clinton made allegations of sexual harrassment, which *is* a crime, it had to be tried in a court of law. Now, granted, charges aren't the same thing as being guilty. I'm not convinced Clinton harrassed those women. But, the point is, it ended up in court, as such charges will, and Clinton came very close to lieing to the court. I believe the Senate found that, on a technicality, he didn't meet the standard for perjury, even though he didn't exactly tell the whole truth. But, that is why we had the impeachment. So that Congress could determine if the President had committed perjury.
Ultimately, the Senate acquitted him, so stop whining, and stop spreading reductio ad absurdum by reducing the Clinton impeachment to 'just personal demerits'.
Here's a torrent file for the votergate video which was taken down off their site due to an "attack". Leave it to open protocols and distributed networking to save democracy! =) http://www.logicalnetworking.net/other/VoterGate_T he_Movie.torrent
And he spelt it wrong.
I don't want to be a grammar nazi. But really, if you're trying to impress us all with your vocabulary...
The disparity is 38.37% for those states that went opscan in 2004 and -12.64% for those that went evoting.
So arguably, the anomaly is greater in 2000.
Doesn't preclude fraud, but does make it less of a significant anomaly.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush proponant.
:P
However, where did this wonderful economy come from, which Clinton is credited for creating? "Information Superhighway." It was that whole dotcom bubble, which was doomed to burst--Bush was lucky enough to hit the offices right as the walls fell. Then 9/11 hit. For a couple minutes, I actually felt a little sorry for Dubya (don't worry, I got over it).
So it's a bit pretentious to claim Clinton created such a wonderful economic situation, when in reality it was just a house of cards.
That said...I'm still waiting for a candidate in ANY viable party I can truly stand behind. I think I have a long wait ahead of me.
-U
George just had the poor judgement to say something, in [j]est, that is taboo to say, the wealthy elite own the government and they own politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its just another case of the poor judgement that is his calling card.
I think it's deeper than that. His poor judgement was thinking he could run a country after running every other business his daddy bought him into the ground. In the case of the "haves and the have-mores" joke, I think Dubya was being perfectly frank and honest in sucking up to the elite, and his message to everyone else is quite clear - if you are not one of them, he doesn't really give a damn about you, not even enough to care what you think, and so he'll say any damn thing he pleases. If you are one of the non-filthy-rich who has been duped into thinking that this dimwitted sociopath really does care about you, then you deserve whatever you get by the time your moment of grand disillusionment finally comes.
Thanks for demonstrating your ability to utilize the vast resource that is the Internet to supplement your inductive reasoning. Did you know that usage defines a word? Did you know that calling people ignorant without qualifiers is not the same as calling people ignorant of a specific fact? Did you know that English is a complex language that derives much of its meaning from context? Did you know that you have the power to select more concise, less inflammatory wordings?
Ultimately, the Senate acquitted him, so stop whining, and stop spreading reductio ad absurdum by reducing the Clinton impeachment to 'just personal demerits'.
Right-o. All get all the ignorant people together so we can have a meeting to discuss, a) our excess whining, and b)our absurd opinions.
Could you please stop fucking insulting people, you ignorant bitch. Yes? Yes.
I don't need dictionary.com to back up my definition, thank you.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
...at least you can cheat on her without guilt. :-)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election.
Deputy Sarpy County Election Commissioner Ed Gilbert says, "It affected 32 of the 80 precincts. And I suppose as many as 10,000 votes."
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/10/te resa_heinz_ke.html
Your figure for gross income is incorrect - you are using the Adjusted Gross Income figure, which is much less than the value for gross income.
Teresa Heinz Kerry on Friday released a portion of her 2003 federal tax return, reporting that she paid $627k in federal income taxes on $2.3 million of AGI, primarily from dividends and interest.
She received $5.1 million of gross income, $2.8 million of it tax exempt interest income.
Ms. Heinz Kerry, who filed separately from Senator Kerry, thus paid federal income tax at the rate of 12.3% of her gross income and 27.4% of her AGI
Educate myself? Why don't you educate yourself? After all, a simple web search for the phrase doesn't take that much work considering the first result in Google gives a pretty good history of how it appeared on our coinage.
And you omitted providing even a single documented example.
I suspect that like so many other people who wish Michael Moore would just go away, you have not even bothered to see the movie.
I saw it twice. Once to debate some idiot that believed its lies and the second time to further debate the idiot that was in denial and wouldn't even believe that the doctored Pantagraph article was actually in the movie (but wouldn't herself see the movie again to prove it to herself). The movie should be nominated for "Best Comedy," though maybe not because it's certainly not the best comedy. It's quite boring.
While I think Mr. Moore has been wrong about many things in the past, he hit the nail dead on this time with Fahrenheit 9/11.
You discredited yourself with that statement making it unnecessary to even read the rest of your post. Sorry, do some real research and talk politics with the adults when you've gone past the liberal propaganda. Anyone that believes Michael Moore needs to conduct a serious reality check.
That overlooks the question: Why should electronic voting be used at all? It's not needed, and is much more vulnerable than traditional paper ballots.
Where do we go if we want to oppose all electronic voting?
Why Open Source voting?
Paper ballots have proved effective for hundreds of years. Why should we be using any electronic voting system at all?
And, when it comes down to it, paper ballots are the ultimate in Open Source voting. Most people don't understand programming, Open or Closed. But everybody understands how paper and pen works, so "The Source" is much more accessible than with OSS electronic voting, where most citizens won't have a clue what "The Source" means.
Personally, I would like to see Open Sauce elections - all the ketchup and booze you can handle!
At the risk of being flamed out of existence, I simply have to ask (as one of those 'outraged "intellectuals"'), why you believe Bush is the best person to be running this country? Not why Kerry, Nader or any other candidate is bad, but why is Bush good? What has he done for you, or offered to do for you over the next four years?
Not a troll... I just haven't seen anything positive about Bush listed here (or honestly anywhere other than obvious propoganda sites).
I love a great conspiracy - this is what I could find about the counties in Florida. So, I looked at the prior six presidential elections in those counties - I independently verified the 2000 results with CBS News... Links I used to get data: Conspiracy: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm 2000 election results: http://www.cbsnews.com/campaign2000results/county/ county_flop-0.html
State of Florida: http://election.dos.state.fl.us/elections/resultsa rchive/Index.asp?ElectionDate=11/4/86&DATAMODE =
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In 2000...Bush 5,610; Gore 2,392 (Winner percentage% - between both candidates, not 3rd parties: 70%) (Nader - 53 votes)
In 1996...Dole 3,684; Clinton 2,273 (61.2%) (Perot - 667)
In 1992...Bush 3,417; Clinton 1,974 (63.4%) (Perot - 1,315)
In 1988...Bush 3,414; Dukakis 1,353 (71.6%)
In 1984...Reagan 3,484; Mondale 1,381 (71.6%)
In 1980...Carter 2,606; Reagan 2,271 (53.4%)
Fact: Baker last voted for a Democratic President in 1980 - Even Dole got 61%
In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
In 2000...Bush 2,697; Gore 1,826 (59.6%) (Nader - 75 votes)
In 1996...Clinton 1,731; Dole 1,398 (55.3%) (Perot - 652)
In 1992...Clinton 1,855; Bush 1,401 (57%) (Perot - 1,094)
In 1988...Bush 2,027; Dukakis 1,366
In 1984...Reagan 2,204; Mondale 1,224
In 1980...Carter 2,007; Reagan 1,098
Fact: Dixie voted for Carter and Clintonx2 - but also voted for Reagan and Bush 41 & 43
Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush.
In 2000...Bush 2,454; Gore 2,046 (54.3%) (Nader - 85 votes)
In 1996...Clinton 2,095; Dole 1,563 (57.3%) (Perot - 878)
In 1992...Bush 1,660; Clinton 1,534 (52%) (Perot - 1,143)
In 1988...Bush 1,911; Dukakis 1,283
In 1984...Reagan 2,218; Mondale 1,089
In 1980...Carter 1,772; Reagan 1,500
Fact: Carter and Clinton both won once; Clinton got over 57% of the vote in 1996 - nowhere near 77.3%
Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
In 2000...Bush 5,011; Gore 2,177 (69.7%) (Nader - 94 votes)
In 1996...Dole 3,248; Clinton 2,310 (58.4%) (Perot - 1,208)
In 1992...Bush 3,196; Clinton 1,877 (63%) (Perot - 1,426)
In 1988...Bush 4,221; Dukakis 1,639
In 1984...Reagan 4,547; Mondale 1,231
In 1980...Reagan 3,208; Carter 2,767
Fact: Holmes looks like it's a Republican County since 1980 at least.
Conclusion: Need to verify against newspaper/official records at the time - which I'm not going to do. Think it's a pretty weak case and there don't seem to be enough votes to overturn what Bush won by.
Can't say there wasn't voter fraud, but can't say there was either.
My interest in stats far outweighs my actual knowledge in it.
The issue is this....
Trickle down economics assumes that if you give economic benefits to the wealthy in return for investment that more of their investment will end up as stocks and bonds. It is furthermore assumed that this will help the economy grow.
It doesn't work very well. It does generate economic growth, but this growth is unstable and recessions come and go. Why? Because wealth is created when something of value is exchanged for the fruits of someone's time. In other words, spending and buying things are what drives the economy. Investing is actually buying an idea but not buying the fruits of someone's labor.
So if you give $3M to poor people across the country to stimulate the economy, what will they do? They will buy food, buy other goods and services that they have been deffering and help make someone else richer. If you give this same money to rich people, they will invest it in making themselves richer, and there is no guarantee that these businesses will be able to reach a market, because there is no corresponding support for demand.
The market is demand-driven, and we need to support that side of the economy.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Florida has closed primaries -> You only get to vote in the primaries for the party you joined.
Florida is largely Democrat -> There are often multiple democratic candidates running for an office in the primaries AND there are sometimes no Republicans running for those offices in the same primaries.
-> Only democrats end up voting on a particular candiate. Whoever they choose will win by default in Nov.
-> A republican who wants a say in who wins needs to register as a democrat.
My parents both did this. I do this. I consider myself a libertarian. I registered as democrat last year because I wanted a say in who went up against Bush. (not that it did much good).. in 2000, I was a 'republican'. In four years, I'll may decide to change my affiliation again. (Maybe not, MD also has closed polls and is heavily democrat).
Granted, I find it rather odd that some two thirds of the democrats in a county are actually republicans in disguise. That would imply they could declare openly and probably get a candidate or two to run for office, rather than ceding the election to democrats.
Didn't it go something like:
Court: Did you have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky?
Bubba: Define 'sexual relations.'
Court: Penile penetration of the vagina.
Bubba: No, I did not have 'sexual relations' with Ms. Lewinkski.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Man, this discussion is out of control! Awesome! It would take me approximately 6.7 hours to read the entire thread at my current rate of reading...
According to the way the vote-counting looked. The exit-polls strongly favored Kerry.
:-)
Just to clarify.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
> If election anomalies are due to USA traitors and subversives, then they are domestic enemies of US. The penalty for treason should always be loss of US citizenship, in times of peace a life sentence without parole/pardon, and in times of "war", a mandatory sentence of death should be imposed upon the traitor without pardon/reprieve. ... that intentionally participate in or by incompetence create methods, models, systems, laws, ... that are meant to allow/promote corruption, fraud, perjury, ... of voting in the "USA Citizen Democracy" should be terminated from the job, loose all associated special retirement benefits, loose their USA Citizenship, all property and money should be forfeited to public education, and sentenced to a life with no chance of parole/pardon. These folks are the domestic enemy of the USA and Democracy by idiocy and/or ignorance and should suffer the maximum penalties possible.
> If election anomalies are due to "whoops", an honest mistake was made, then total forgiveness is divine.
> Legislators, election commissions/committees, business, religion, special interest, people
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
... sounds quite similar to Finnish conditions.
Here, we have to register our address - which is also linked to our free medical insurance*.
Therefore, come election time, the authorities know where to send the voting card. If your voting card gets lost in the mail, you can still vote.
This is how it works:
On election day, I realize my room is a mess, and give up finding my voting card.
I then take some picture ID (Passport) and my medicare card to the local voting place.
I then wait in line with the other fools that have lost their cards.
When I get to the front of the line, they verify that I'm me and look me up in a big register they have of local voters. All voters in the district have been distributed among tables in the voting hall, and they tell me which table to go to (from looking at the register) and give me a new voting card.
I take the voting card to the table, and they verify that I'm me (again), and then gives me a (paper) ballot. Cut to me entering a voting booth.
Very simple to do, very long and tedious to describe.
*(we get to choose a local doctor, whose name and number is then printed onto our medicarecard, so that if the hospitals need quick information about their new patient, they know who to call)