Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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
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
to put me down for pointing out the glaringly obvious. Democracy is easily stolen, but I was ridiculed for mentioning that last wednesday. Dont you realize this isnt about Bush? I dont care who won! Its about E-voting removing your right to affect change in your country by making a democratic choice.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It's not about trying to get Kerry into office. It's about the fact that the voting system is flawed.
I believe Bush won fairly (even though I despise his policies), but I also believe we need to work on getting the most accurate vote count possible, and that's only possible when we admit there are flaws. Geesh.
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
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
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 don't trust this government.
I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club. The correct phrasing is I don't trust government.
Your statement implies there is/was/will be a government you trust. That thought is just plain scary.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
No.
All anonmilies should be investigated, even the ones that don't have a chance of changing the outcome.
If cheating is going on, then it should be stopped. No exceptions.
Even if it's just stupidity and not malice, it should be stopped.
-- should you believe authority without question?
This is not surprising; as the Diebold CEO has pledged to give Shrub the votes.
Right.
The Republicans faked 90% of every poll leading up to election day that showed Bush narrowly winning. And on election day they covertly added over 3 million votes to Bushes totals without anyone being caught red-handed, despite thousands of laywers and activists all over the country begging to catch someone in the act.
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...
my guy did lose, i don't agree with your "get over it" comment. but, your opinion doesn't make you a troll - that's just bad modding.
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
Is there anywhere I can invest in tinfoil futures?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Your side wins.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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
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.
In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):
==========
Thanks for sharing the data. Looking at it, I don't see any indications of Republican foul play. My analysis follows.
First, I loaded your data into R from The R Project for Statistical Computing:
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I fully agree that the voting system should be as fair and accurate as possible, and is currently in need of improvement, but people do need to put things in perspective. Voting has always been a somewhat inaccurate process. I'd say there were more problems years ago when technology wasn't as advanced. But it only becomes a big issue when the election will be close. Nobody disputed Clinton's reelection victory over Dole because everyone knew Clinton would win; he was way ahead in the polls. With the 2000 fiasco in recent memory, a lot of focus was put on the 2004 election being as accurate as possible. Inevitably, there were some mistakes, as there always will be, but I'd say that compared to previous elections, this one was surprisingly accurate. The people who are complaining the loudest about problems seem to be primarily the ones who are simply not satisfied with the outcome.
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.
You are right. The outcome of the election will never be changed. It will never be allowed to. We can't allow this to continue though. The electoral process in this country should be as close to flawless as possible.
It is time to take the manufacture of voting devices and the auditing process out of the hands of partisans. And to all of you out there saying, "Boo hoo, Kerry lost. Get over it." How is it that Democracy in America is being hijacked, and you don't seem to give a shit? I'd wager you are the true anti-Americans. You do a lot of name calling, but when the shit hits the fan you show your true natures. Sunshine Patriots. Educate yourselves, and stand up for the Constitution you so loudly claim to believe in. Stop being little automatons.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
The differences are not enough to change the outcome. If they were even remotely close, there'd be an army of 100,000 lawyers from both parties raising hell and generally making both parties appear far more unappealing than they already are.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
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?
Even if the anomalies were not were not enough to alter the outcome of the election, they may be enough to change who has the majority of the popular vote, which would affect the moral authority of the president.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...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.
actually, 300,000 votes in a single state could have swayed the election.
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
So whom are you going to fight? Just have a look here and ask yourself http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html#religions can you fight anyone and do you have a chance of winning. In fact it is pretty amazing and admirable that Kerry got whatever he got in first place.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Thank you. This is exactly what I think. We need to send out the message that election fraud _can not b e tolerated_. Period. The problem of course is that if you cheat, you win. And if you win, you get to make the agenda and so the agenda doesn't say a damn thing about stopping cheaters.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
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...
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.
Who says the votes were in Kerry's favor? The link you pointed doesn't even mention it at all.
This is a non-issue that Drudge invented, anyway. The machines hadn't been reset from the year previous; so someone reset them that morning as they were setting up which is why they check the things in the first place. Drudge reported this as "Machine reports extra votes!!!" and implied that it must have been a boon to Kerry, but there's no evidence that was the case.
Listen up.
I have news for you. Elections in this country have never, never, ever been "perfect". I agree they should be, but this type of questioning after the fact isn't all that new, or special.
Close elections happen every year. The nation is more evenly divided now than ever, which is making it seem like a big deal. It's not.
There is no hijacking going on. The real story is that semi-independent groups all over the country setup before the election with the specific intent of finding reasons to question the election if and only if it did not go there way. There were a ton of groups ready to swoop in and challenge result they didnt agree with.
That's the true story here. These types of actions are reprehensible.
Voting equipment today is just about as good as it has ever been in the country's history. There are several bills in Congress that will require all systems to have a standardized requirement and verification trail.
The electronic systems that are out there now are 100 times more verifiable than most princints in the country. Some of which are operated out of the homes and living rooms of citizens. Despite their flaws, systems that are recently installed and used are less like to cause spoilage, easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to operate by poll workers.
...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.
No, the hole is there, it's just that people choose not to see it. They get hurricanes, that in and of itself is par for the course in Florida. However, the frequency has been going up, possibly climatic change, and Bush isn't doing anything to stop that. What he IS doing is giving them federal aid.
Playing parent again. Which is the one thing he's done consistently well with his first term in office.
He's there to make it so the people don't need to worry or think, because he's strong and he'll take care of them. Or so they think, and he'd like them to think...
I think it's a great way to get votes from dumb voters who don't know how to take care of themselves.
Let's get ready to RUUUUUMMMMMBLE!
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.
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
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
Because a way of cheating the results could be follow the approx distribution of previous election + a random value adjusted to the levels of actual, registered voters.
Ok, this objection could not have statistical meaning, nor means that because after existed a "proof" that things were fair, before the cheat was done specifically with that proof as target. But as I said, have very little knowledge on this topics.
Florida also added the bulk of 330,000 jobs in October, mostly in construction.
Kerry is running around Florida talking about the crappy economy when all of the sudden more people are working than have in months.
Throw onto that bin Laden's last minute tape, the desire not to change "horses midstream" and other issues like gay marriage, and a 3% margin isn't all that far fetched. Not to mention that Kerry hadn't been shown winning in a major national poll for quite some time, with the vast majority of all recent polls showing Bush winning a narrow victory.
Your statement implies there is/was/will be a government you trust. That thought is just plain scary.
Yeah, I was going to trust a government that was run solely by me, but that was because I paid myself off...little do I know I'm double crossing myself, and won't really support myself when it comes time to vote.
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
...generally making both parties appear far more unappealing than they already are.
That's possible?
Well, the machines in Ft Lauderdale which were counting backwards after the 32,767th voter (ok, the article said 32,000, but damnit, I know 16-bit binary hitting twos-complement zone when I see it) since nobody knows how often these machines rolled over, there could easily be millions of spare votes for Kerry AND Bush that will never be recorded.
And since Diebold CEO said he'd deliver votes to Bush- well, that's all the doubt you need about the RECORDED votes- provisional ballots be damned.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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)
Ah the vote count is irrelevant. It's virtually all noise with no signal.
And it's all because of the multiple choice ballot. People go in there and pick red or blue. So when someone with no real clue goes in, he does eenie-meenie-miney-moe, and chalks up another in the Kerry or Bush column. Pure noise. All the "get out the vote" drives just serve to amplify the noise. People who think they have to vote "the lesser of two evils" just amplify the noise. Not liking Bush is not the same as supporting Kerry. Polls seemed to show that most of Americans didn't like either of them.
So now I'm supposed to believe 52% of Americans want Bush as president? I don't. I believe he won, but his mandate isn't that strong. The fact that most ballots present you with two choices makes the result pure noise.
With a write-in ballot, like the country used to use, we would see some numbers that accurately reflect the american voters. When someone clueless goes in and doesn't take it seriously, he writes in "Pee Wee Herman", and we can easily identify it as noise, and ignore it.
Then we'd see some meaningful stats as the result of the election. We'd probably see GWB at 20%, Kerry at maybe 15%, and all of these third partie guys at 10% or lower. Bush still goes to the White House, but there's no "52% of America is behind him" falsities behind it. Those numbers are completely made up, but I'm sure thats how an election would look. That's how they look in every other democracy that doesn't buy into this two-party crap.
What I'm getting at is, it's not a two party system, but you combine the multiple choice ballot with rules to make it nigh-impossible for anyone else to get on the ballot, mix it up with the current debate formats - which are openly set up to exclude any third parties, and you have a recipe for meaningless bullshit joke of an election.
So who cares if the machines work or not. Flipping a fucking coin would just as adequately represent the will of the american people. Bush/Kerry/Clinton whatever. Many, if not most, are sick of the same old party lines and stump speeches.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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)
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
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.
We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes.
You're right, it's been really hard to get over the fact that the worst president ever was backed by that many people. I've been incredulous all week.
However, Bush didn't win by 3.5 million votes. He lost by about 130,000 votes. If 131,000 more people voted for Kerry in Ohio - he would be our new president-elect. It is for this reason that we should be examining the voting mechanics errors, the number of which are approaching that winning margin. We learned this rather clearly 4 years ago, I'm surprised that you haven't... let me guess, you probably also believe that WMDs were found in Iraq and Saddam was behind 9/11?
Taco isn't saying that crackers were messing with the system. The story that I read from his headline was that the system is messed up enough as it is, and we aren't getting fair or accurate vote counts. We can't have a truly functioning democracy when so many people's votes aren't counted properly. I mean, how are we supposed to tell Afganistan and Iraq that we know how to run a country better than they do?
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin
- passion
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.
A big complaintant of the whiners in this case have been people who thought all the newly registered democrats would vote democratic. They said: "registrations are up 3:1 Democrat versus Republican. Great. We'll get 3 new votes for everyone 1 they get".
When that doesn't happen, they get all whacked out. Ohh no they say! Some thing bad has happened.
What happened is that the new democratic vote never materialized. They didnt vote in the proportions they registered. And, on top of that, they didnt stick with the party they registered with. Just because you stop youth on the street and ask them to register and they check the democrat box does mean they are going to vote for Kerry.
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
Maybe a lot of people -liked- what happened in the Bush administration.
This is my sig.
The second paragraph of your comment, however, is almost as bad. Posted anonymously without any attribution, it is an example of the un-civil discourse plaguing the United States today. It puts those that disagree with you in a bad light and spreads a rumor about those responsible for the act that is yet to be confirmed. Your statement is a perfect example of saying just a bit too much.
Let's remember how to speak politely in public before the next election. Please.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
this type of questioning after the fact isn't all that new, or special
The question was going on long before the fact, in case you hadn't noticed. Blackboxvoting.org was specifically set up to contest the media hype surrounding the infallibility of electronic voting.
These types of actions are reprehensible.
How exactly were they supposed to swoop in before the fact? The voting companies were working with unproven technology in a partisan atmosphere, and some even stated their intentions to do everything they could to give Bush the election. While it is not fair to claim that all the problems of this election were due to partisan chicanery, it is absolutely right to view the errors with a high degree of suspicion.
I can agree that Bush possibly won the election, but until certainty is established, it will only be a probability and I for one, will view it with a high degree of skepticism. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about it except suffer through another four years.
Which I intend to do. Loudly. Obnoxiously, even. So in the immortal, family-friendly version of the words of Dick Cheney:
Go fsck yourself.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The members of the electoral college are under no law that controls their vote.
Well, that's not exactly true.
It depends on the state.
Some states threaten the electors with penalties if they don't vote along with the popular vote of the state. (Whether or not any of them are actually punished is another story.)
Other states allow the electors to vote for whoever they want.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
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.
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!"
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
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.
I am a democrat, and I agree with you. There are too many people here yelling about hijacking and conspiracies because they are unable to accept their candidates loss.
With so much hatred and FUD being spewed here, I wonder how people are going to even last the next 4 more years. We already have people foaming at the mouth over the election outcome, and are trying to come up with ways to "prove" the election was "stolen."
I am willing to bet a lot of them are hypocrites, and while they wouldn't admit it, would support or ignore their candidates doing of the same stuff that they are claiming Bush did.
So, if it is FUD and lies from Microsoft/SCO/RIAA/Bush it is bad, but FUD and lies are ok if it is against Microsoft/SCO/RIAA/Bush.
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.
Relatively more open and more democratic governments are more trustworthy.
I trust the government more after the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. It's not a cure-all, but it was a huge step in the right direction.
I do not trust the government more if the same party has unmitigated control over every check and balance. I don't think that was such a good idea. I guess we'll see!
Local governments are probably more trustworthy than national governments.
Nationalistic national governments are probably the worst of all. A government that also controls the sources of information is also really bad (see Italy, Russia, currently where the leader also own ).
It's not a matter of black and white. There are things that can be changed that induce governments to be more trustworthy, and they really are affected by democratic processes. It's not a matter of whether governments are evil or not, there are very important differences in the shades in between.
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
I don't quite get it how anyone in their right mind would really expect that any voting system registers all the votes correctly.
Things like that just don't happen.
But that's absolutely no excuse not to try and eliminate errors, especially systemic errors, wherever possible. I mean, why not just have the electoral officials in each precinct take a guess as to how the precinct voted. Sure there's a certain statistical error in that, but errors happen right, so we should just accept that...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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...
I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club.
Liar, you don't have the power. There's only one member of the Tinfoil Hat Club who holds the power to revoke membership, and he/she would never reveal himself to Them by actually using it.
The enemies of Democracy are
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!
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.
Your post is riddled with falsehoods and deceptions.
and some even stated their intentions to do everything they could to give Bush the election.
One life-long Republican supporter of one company pledged to support Bush and deliver Ohio to Bush. All of the sudden this taken as sometype of public admission that he was going to steal the election. That's a big time deception you tried to lay on everyone. It wasn't the companies. It wasn't companies. It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter! And, oh, the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad. You make it seem like a bunch of people pledged openly to comitt election fraud. Very deceptive!
The question was going on long before the fact, in case you hadn't noticed. Blackboxvoting.org was specifically set up to contest the media hype surrounding the infallibility of electronic voting.
This type of question has been around for 200 years. Not two years. Blackbox voting has always been an issue. Before there were telephones and fax machines and video cameras people complained: how do we really know who California voted for? They are so far away? Who are these people claiming to be electors? Same story, different century. Again, deceptive on your part. This is a very old problem for our country. Additionally, I urge you to find for me one media article that claims infalability of electonic voting machines. Finally, I urge you to find me one article or study that can prove that electronic voting machines - flawed as they are - are anything short of the most accurate and secure voting system we have.
Which I intend to do. Loudly. Obnoxiously, even. So in the immortal, family-friendly version of the words of Dick Cheney:
You ought to examine why you are in this mess. Assuming that in fact your guy won deep down and that everything is wrong and that the only way Bush could be re-elected is through Republican fraud is why instead of walking away this election like he should have Kerry is going back to the Senate.
The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get. You needed these votes: conservative democrats, conservative minorities, moderate Republicans. You cannot win a national election without them. It's actually like the democratic party was searching for a condescending attitude, found yours, and ran with it.
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.
You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.
My point in this thread was simply that even if vote counting is "counting", there is still an acceptable statistical error in the results. I quite don't understand why people got so upset about what I said.
The owls are not what they seem
could it be that it won't make much of a news story?
.. if they do something about it.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
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?
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.
A concession isn't legally binding. If one candidate gets 100% of the vote and the other gets 0%, but the winner concedes the other guy doesn't get to be president.
The Farewell Tour II
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.
"Voting equipment today is just about as good as it has ever been in the country's history."
Sorry by MS windows based touch screens storing data in MS Access is just not as good as a pen and a piece of paper and 10 scrutineers counting by hand. A kid in highschool could hack that.
Electronic voting of this nature is quite new and if there is even a possibility that there could have been this kind of fraud, it is prudent to investigate whether it will eventually change the outcome of this particular election or not.
You wouldn't trust your personal data or credit card information to a company that stored it on an ordinary Windows computer using Access, why would you trust your votes to the same?
If the the process is so open, what has happened with Blackboxvoting.orgs FOIA request? As a matter of fact, what happened the blackboxvoting.org today?
I suspect any investigation will likely show that Bush really did win. That's beside the point. Do you really want there to be a possibility in the future of someone using the techniques mentioned in the articles to alter election results?
Think of this as an ethical hacker informing a big company of an enormous hole in their firewall (or other devastating security violation). Don't attack the hacker, fix the fucking hole.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Electronic voting, while a neat idea to speed up the vote counting process, seems to have run into a number of glitches (over 1100 nationwide) this November 2nd. In addition to seemingly random problems in Florida [1, 2], Ohio [1], and North Carolina [1], there are allegations of systematic fraud based on statistical comparison of exit polls to final results in precincts with audit trails and those without. It is also interesting that in Florida, the voting patterns do not match the voter registration patterns as they do nationwide. This has attracted the attention of numerous civil rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation that has filed at least two lawsuits since election day, and BlackboxVoting.org that has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain computer logs and documents from 3000 counties and districts across the US. Equally disturbing is the fact that CNN has (since Nov 2) changed its exit polling results to reflect the actual results. This has attracted the attention of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida who have jointly requested that the GAO immediately investigate the efficacy of e-voting machines.
In case you are thinking that this is just sour grapes from Democrats who lost the election, think again. BlackboxVoting.org has been investigating e-voting fraud for years. Likewise, the CEO of Diebold, one of the e-voting machine manufacturers has been quoted as saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." And if that's not conflict of interest enough for you, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (now resigned) is an owner of the largest e-voting machine company ES&S.
Other numerous problems have been found with the machines from nearly every company in the past [1, 2, 3]. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been investigating such machines on his own and has found a number of security issues. Swarthmore students stood up to Diebold in November of 2003 after discovering
"In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):"
Uh, Ohio didn't use electronic voting in most of the state, the one where the 4000 Bush votes happened being more an exception than a rule. So searching for electronic irregularities is for the most part stupid. Someone challenged paperless electronic voting in Ohio and won so most counties dropped it and used their old system, usually punch cards. A few pressed ahead with half assed paper trails that may or may not have conformed to the judges ruling and were hastily done.
You don't need electronic voting to rig elections. They've been rigged as long as people have been voting. Paperless electronic voting just makes it really easy to do in a big way and really hard to catch.
If anyone rigged Ohio they could have done it the old fashioned way. Send poor quality punch cards to Democratic districts so you get hanging chads, or somewhere along the way punch out a chad for Bush in some cards so if the voter votes for Kerry its thrown out. Punch card "spoilage" is a time proven method for rigging an election.
Just because there wasn't a big statistical swing in Ohio doesn't mean the election wasn't rigged. In fact if you are really good at rigging a state you won last time the perfect rigging is to make it come out the same as last time or actually give your opponent a few more votes. Then someone comes along and does what this guy did and says, "No swing, no rigging" and that is not what it means. Its possible Kerry swung a couple percent to his side, thanks to the fact Ohio's economy has cratered under Bush. If you rig the election and just erase that two percent swing you have done a perfect job of rigging.
Again the exit polls suggest there was a swing to Kerry in most of the swing states that disappeared in the actual results, while the exit polls were pretty accurate in most of the non swing states. All the exit polls were biased to Kerry which is distinctly odd. Either they should have been off in all states in Kerry's favor suggesting a model problem or they should have been randomly off in both Kerry and Bush's favor. Just being off in swing states and only in Kerry's favor is odd to put it mildly.
@de_machina
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 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.
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/
You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.
Pretty much all of those listed were statistically significant. Sure, on a national scale as a percentage they were not that significant, but that's the whole point of compartmentalizing into precincts for seperate counts - we can consider error rates on a per preceinct level, and thus expect a much greater degree of overall accuracy.
Pretty much all of the incidents listed were (a) potentially systemic, and thus possibly representative of similar errors throughout the system, (b) very statistically significant as far as the vote count for that preceinct is concerned.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of error in counting votes, but that error rate should be controlled at the precinct level. Having a 1000% error rate (such as one Ohio precinct) is not acceptable. I don;t care if it is detected after the fact - the fact that we're catching it is good, but we should be trying to eliminate it to begin with.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Despite their flaws[snip]
Why should we ignore the flaws? Shouldnt we explore them, correct them, and make them more secure? If the machines have a proven track record of flaws in state level elections, why would we expect them to work for federal elections?
Lincoln once said, the ballot over the bullet. I think hes right, if people don't think their ballots are being counted, then people might be voting with bullets.
Personally, I don't trust the companies that can't be held accountable. Voting machines vendors have no accountability. (Pun intended) If private watchgroups say they are flawed, and the flaw is exploited, who pays?
I just want to know, did they get hacked or was it just software errors. Dont hide the facts. After the facts come out, then you can figure out how to deal with them.
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 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.
I am not sure how common my scenario is. But, when questioned on who I was voting for I often replied Kerry, but I voted for Bush. I had to listen way to often to Kerry fanatics rambling for sometimes hours trying to change my mind. So, the easy way to save myself the pain, suffering and time was to say that I was voting for Kerry.
but this type of questioning after the fact isn't all that new, or special.
So why are you so upset about it? Sounds to me like we are continuing a grand tradition of public review and integrity enforcement.
There is no hijacking going on.
How do you know? The auditing must be performed before such a statement can be made.
There were a ton of groups ready to swoop in and challenge result they didnt agree with.
And there were some groups (such as BlackBoxVoting) ready to audit the result regardless of who won. They did this because they are keenly aware of the extreme weaknesses of the current systems.
These types of actions are reprehensible.
What is reprehensible about making sure that democracy was done properly? This sort of act is necessary to avoid the very sort of hijacking that you blindly insist isn't happening.
There are several bills in Congress that will require all systems to have a standardized requirement and verification trail.
And it is publicly known fact that many of the machines used in the 2004 election failed to live up to current legal standards. For this reason, their results must be scrutinized by members of all parties.
Despite their flaws, systems that are recently installed and used are less like to cause spoilage, easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to operate by poll workers.
That, at least, is what their makers would have us believe. But since they use a closed architecture, it is difficult to verify these claims. The only options we have available to us, at this point, is examination of the audit information.
I really can't understand your resistance...are you afraid that it will turn out that your favorite candidate didn't win? Truth has nothing to fear from honest investigation, and neither should you.
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?
Yeah, that is why I only choose to do business with companies that store their credit card numbers on little sticky notes...much more secure.
They even told me that they like to keep the said sticky notes in a "lock box".
So, I feel really safe now.
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%.
Just as an FYI: Franklin County is way more liberal than the rest of Ohio (it's one of the reasons I live here). Everyone worked hard to get out the vote, there are just a lot more democrats here than elsewhere in Ohio. The question wouldn't be whether or not we have fewer Bush supporters than the rest of the state, it would be if we have the right amount fewer.
We're not sore losers. This election was stolen.
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
And those measures were put on the ballot in those states thanks to the mayor of San Francisco and the Mass. Supreme Court making declarations on same-sex marriages last spring. Had those things not happened, these measures (while perhaps still on the ballot) would not have drawn out those voters.
There's no need to have a devious plan when your oppenents do poorly thought out things - and that cuts both ways.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Shows a lot about the Slashdot mods when a comment like that is modded funny.
I can't imagine how you could draw this conclusion. The Evoting systems in use today mostly have NO AUDIT TRAIL, aside from writing the vote count into two different data tables. Both the voting terminals and the central vote counting software run on Windows PCs and use standard MDB (Access-type) databases that are not encrypted. The software is closed source and is "certified" by commercial labs who have no published standards, who do not evaluate security issues, and whose results are trade secrets available only to the company who makes the machines (and pays for the test). See BlackBoxVoting.org for details of how this testing works.
The big difference between these systems and traditional systems is auditability--on the old systems, there is a paper ballot, which gives the ability to go back later and try to detect fraud. In E-voting systems fraud can rarely be detected because the only "record" is a value stored in a read/write disk file that supposedly reflects a real-time event (the voter making their choice).
This is not to say that it isn't possible to do computer based voting securely, but the system design must start with auditablilty as a priority. See the system they designed at OpenVotingConsortium.org which is an open source, low cost, simple system that give most of the benefits of E-voting (like ease of use, results checking, access for the disabled, etc.) without the risks of electronic tallys. How? They use the computer's touchscreen interface to produce a printed, barcoded ballot which becomes the only official record of the vote. These ballots are pre-checked for consistency before they are cast (no overvotes), are near-guaranteed machine readable (no hanging chads or stray marks) and can be verfied manually to ensure that the printed choices match the barcodes that are used to tally the votes.
And lest you come back with the "brainwashed minion" argument, let me tell you that these proud men are intelligent and informed. Remember, they have access to the same information you do. Being able to read is a prerequisite to admission to the military. They just happen to have a level of dedication and discipline and devotion to duty that few of your ilk have.
You have your choice. You can sit with your tin hat and think there is some great conspiracy to rob you of your predestined victory, or you can stop and really try to understand that the United States of America is greater by far than the low-life tricks that a very few of both sides of the spectrum try to hoist into the process.
Exit polls don't mean much though, democrats tend to be much more vocal and may actually flock to the exit pollers.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
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
Finally, I urge you to find me one article or study that can prove that electronic voting machines - flawed as they are - are anything short of the most accurate and secure voting system we have.
Perhaps these voting devices are the most accurate machines you have (err, sorry...precise, but not necessarily accurate) today. That doesn't mean that they are as precise as they could/should be. Why are these machines being made by third parties? Why are they not transparent? You accuse Democrats of being shrill and partisan, but you refuse to acknowledge that your assertion that Diebold's CEO's comment about Ohio was nothing more than "a fundraising pitch in a letter" is somewhat ludicrous. They make VOTING MACHINES for Christ's sake.
I am not so naive as to believe that you can find someone who will have no party affiliation to make this equipment, but is a contributer to the Republican party (or Democrat party, for that matter) whose CEO alluded to voter fraud in a "fundraising" letter, no matter what the context, really the best company for the job? If that is what he is willing to say out loud, what is he really thinking?
There is probably nothing amiss here, but the point that you refuse to admit is that these actions have led people to believe there is a serious conflict of interest here. Why are you so against pursuing this?
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.
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%
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.
"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
Actually, for something as important as the National Election, yes, I am.
This isn't a Slashdot poll. It isn't voting for your favorite M&M color. It isn't the MTV Music Awards. It is deciding who will preside over our country, and even more importantly, represent us to the rest of the world for the next four years.
There are currently processes in place in the government to get as close as possible to error-free code. Take a look at the code running the NASA shuttles for an example.
When a person is elected to be our President, I want to know that we did everything we could to make it a fair and impartial fight (from the voting standpoint---campaigns are a very different issue). I don't want to hear about 50 thousand votes being lost or machines counting backwards.
Obviously electronic voting will be used, and I'm all for it. I just think we should turn it over to a group of NASA programmers, or programmers with the same mindset, procedures and policies in place, so we can rest easy, knowing we did all we could to make sure every one of our votes count.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
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.
Why are these machines being made by third parties?
As opposed to the government? Thats your choice. Government made. Or privately made. Choose your gun. I'll take a publically traded company in an industry of 5-10 competitors over the government any day.
Why are they not transparent?
They are transparent. Well Diebold is because they publically owned.
that your assertion that Diebold's CEO's comment about Ohio was nothing more than "a fundraising pitch in a letter" is somewhat ludicrous
What was it then? You really think he was saying "give us your donations, I am going to steal the election illegally using my voting machines (which I already sold to Ohio, by the way)?" Get real man. It was a fundraising pitch. Not a grand conspiracy that he accidentally let slip to 200,000 of his closet friends!
They make VOTING MACHINES for Christ's sake.
They make voting machines as 1% of their business. It's a big company, publically traded, and they make THOUSANDS of other devices. It's one segment of a big business. Really man. Get a grip. Somehow you hold this notion that the CEO of a large publically traded company formed a conspiracy to vote rig a battleground state and do so with no smoking gun and very cleverly, knowing that it'd come all down to Ohio, and in the process he accidentally forgot to keep it secret. It was all part of his diabological plan, I tell you.
If that is what he is willing to say out loud, what is he really thinking?
There isn't a person in the country who does't have a political opinion. I never said there wasn't a conflict of interest, but this one statement made by a lifelong avowed public Republican openly about "delivering Ohio's electroal votes" to the President hardly is evidence of a grand conspiracy that would be the mostly shocking, most widespread, and most sinister that the nation has ever seen. That is what you are suggesting. That there was this big conspiracy and that he just forgot to not mention it in his letter. Right.
Do what ever you want. But the voting machines used this election are the most accurate ever in the history of the country.
people don't line up in the rain for nine hours to tell the president what a good job he is doing.
I'll say what I say everyone time some dick complains about it:
Much truth is said in gest
It was a white tie dinner full of rich fat cats and the fact is they are his base. They give him buckets of money to campaign, he gives them huge tax breaks, interest free loans(from our tax dollars), tax dollar giveaways(a.k.a. "Medicare Reform"), relaxed environmental regulations and on and on.
Its my sig because George just had the poor judgement to say something, in gest, 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. It was right up there with his skit with the slides where he is "looking for the WMD's" and can't find any. Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's, thousands more are maimed for life and there are tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's who are dead and maimed too, and the tally is going up everyday and will for a really long time. Funny joke.
@de_machina
What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.
With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.
Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.
It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!
Go check this to see where the sympathies of the voting machine companies lie. Any claims of non-partisanship on the part of the companies should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad
Best kind of candidate, if you think about it. How much money they make is a non-issue. I don't care how much they make - what I'm worried about is how they handle the election.
This type of question has been around for 200 years.
Sure. But now we can ask it loudly until someone actually answers the damn question! We have at our hands a tool to make sure it gets in front of as many faces as possible. So why not use it?
The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get.
So, what? Just shut up and take it? In case you hadn't noticed, moderation doesn't go over with this administration. Bush was the one who said "You are either with us, or against us." So, I'm coming down on the side specifically against him and his fellow Republiban.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The same thing was said four years ago... and what did we get? No significant change. Why should this time be any different?
That idea is being promoted to shut people up.
What I don't get is why people who are so certain that there were no irregularities are opposed to independent verification of the election. If you're right and these machines don't have any problems at all, what could be so wrong with verifying their results? It would shut up most of the whiners and it would give further legitimacy to the winners. And, most importantly, it will help restore some faith in the system.
Sounds great, but it looks a bit rushed. The East would bring back slavery and bomb the West for fear of WMDs, everyone going to Nader's Hawaii would forget their boats, and Badnarik's Alaska would be overtaken by Canada after three days.
Hmm..
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
"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.
~ - 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.
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?
And as for the difference between flaws and fraud: when a huge number of flaws occur apparently independant of one another, but which all seem to favor the same outcome, then I do not think it is unreasonable to suspect that that the flaws may have been intentional (that is, fraudulent).
Did you consider that the flaws point one direction because only one side is looking? And your idea to repeat the election ad infinum until you get the result you desire could very well backfire giving Bush a real mandate.
Hell, as much as I despise him even I would consider switching my vote if that is what it would take to get through your head that Kerry lost because he didn't appeal to "middle" America, that huge expanse of land quaintly referred to as "fly over" country.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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
""Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's...". You obviously have no clue why we went to iraq. Don't say oil, because only 17% of oil comes from that area anyway."
I sure as hell do know why we went in to Iraq. We went in to it because Saddam had WMD's, and was going to use them on American cities, which is the reason I gave in first post, and which is what Bush/Cheney/Fox told us over and over again, and they never lie. It just happens there weren't any. We also went in because Saddam had ties to Al Qaida and was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. Why do I know this because Dick Cheney told me so, on Meet the Press, that it had been proven Iraqi intelligence met with the 9/11 ringleader in Prague. Unfortunately it appears it hasn't been proven and it probably didn't even happen and Saddam probably had nothing to do with 9/11. Reason three way down on the list was to bring freedom and democracy to the ragheads at the point of gun because God told George that this is what he put him on Earth and made him President to do.
Your the only one bringing up the oil angle here. I just have to go with the three reasons my President told me because he would never lie.
You probably haven't noticed but there are way more insane right wing talk show hosts, especially on radio, than there are liberal ones. I don't listen to any of them on either side, excepting Charlie Rose on PBS and I'm pretty sure he isn't insane. If anyone is insane its the right wing talk show hosts that are STILL ranting about the Clintons and seem to hate pretty much everyone and everything excepting their own. Liberal talk show hosts suck because they suck at hate filled, venomous rhetoric like its practiced by the wicked witch of the right, Ann Coulter.
@de_machina
I know of several Republicans who voted for Bush who claim to hold dear the fact that the Constitution should not be changed, especially by adding a ban on gay marriage. Unfortunately these so-called educational elites failed to pay attention when Bush was screaming for just a ban and continues to do so. These are the people who elected Bush. Not the moral majority.
And here's a simple system to eliminate the possibility of fraud.
1. Create a national database. Oh wait, one exists...Social Security Numbers.
2. Make results of all votes available to everyone via the web. This will allow anyone to check and see if the vote that they cast was actually counted as they intended. This also allows for immediate scrutiny to verify the results.
3. Investigate all "anomolies". Don't leave anything to chance. In the real world there shouldn't be any anomolies with an election system. If there are then there is an obvious issue.
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)
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...
The Democrats and the gun control nuts overlap in a large way.
Oh the irony.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
... 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.
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.
It has many, many established churches.
Dictionary.com lists the following definition of "establish" wrt religion: "To make a state institution of (a church)." None of the religious institutions in the United states can be considered a state institution, in the sense that the Church of England is established in the United Kingdom, or the Greek Orthodox Church in Greece.
In addition, any democracy may be considered to have a state religion when its electoral majority votes in accordance with their clergy.
That doesn't make it a "state institution." The church and state are still free to operate entirely independently of one another, the fact that they may at times choose not to do so notwithstanding.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Nova Express is an example of the "cut-up method" where Burroughs litterally cut up works he had writen and put them back together in an attempt to break away from internal forumlas. So if its hard to follow don't be suprised.
An interesting note, Burrough uncle is credited with inventing modern P.R. for the Standard Oil Company after a massacre of workers. I tired to argue in a paper that Burroughs was attempting to create ways to deprogram people as a reaction to his Uncle's invention.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Correct sir.
The philosophy of these people can be coined as Domonists and they are trying to pass laws to make it impossible to sue if someone passes a law that has a biblical basis. e.g. If some asshole passes a law saying that pi=3 because in the bible it says that it was a perfect circle and was 1 cubit wide and 3 in circumference, you can sue him for fucking your local science text books.
Its the same bullshit in the 10 commandments in the rotunda. FOR FUCK'S SAKE! The New Testament supersedes the 10 commandments, that's the point of the NEW COVENEANT. So why doesn't he put up the golden rule instead? Because that requires flexible thinking and empathy something most modern evangelicals lack. e.g. killing is bad. Killing babies is worse. No Abortion. Killing Iraq's? Why the fuck not, they hate us so we hate them. Boy Jesus is going like that kind of thinking let me tell you! If you want ancient laws put up Hammuarabi's code if you want the real historical basis for written laws.
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 for one welcome our new Fundamentalist Fascist Neo-Con Corporate War Monger Overlords.
"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."
.01 to 5% is IRresponsible. If you can't handle it, don't have sex. Why do we have to punish the baby because we "didn't plan for it".
How is having sex (even using contraception) and getting pregnant a responsible thing? You may not have noticed but there is NO contraception that is 100% effective. It even says it on the package of every contraception you can buy. Not planning for that other
By the way, I was an "unplanned pregnancy"
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
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."
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.