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...
...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."
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.
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.
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.
John Kerry's name is mentioned nowhere in the article. Its just about the quirks of the voting system, which should by and large be fixed. Stop being so defensive, not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
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?
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.
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
Notice there are NO reports in the media of ballot count mistakes, or diebold glitches which gave Kerry votes. Hmmm Of all the precincts in the US, not one can be found to have one count mistake in Kerry's favor to report on.
One thing to bear in mind is that more than just the presidential election was on the ballot. Lots of state and local elections may have been affected by these anamolies and may have had their outcomes changed.
You are right. The outcome of the election will never be changed. It will never be allowed to. We can't allow this to continue though. The electoral process in this country should be as close to flawless as possible.
It is time to take the manufacture of voting devices and the auditing process out of the hands of partisans. And to all of you out there saying, "Boo hoo, Kerry lost. Get over it." How is it that Democracy in America is being hijacked, and you don't seem to give a shit? I'd wager you are the true anti-Americans. You do a lot of name calling, but when the shit hits the fan you show your true natures. Sunshine Patriots. Educate yourselves, and stand up for the Constitution you so loudly claim to believe in. Stop being little automatons.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
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?
...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.
Bush won. Again. Get over it.
I believe this. The electronic voting issues have been issues since well before this election however, and I'm not about to stop inquiring into the many documented problems just because I accept that Bush won this one any way you slice it.
As for why it takes a while for this stuff to start coming out, a lot of the detailed numbers and vote counts aren't released until at least a week or two after the election occurs. So it's not possible to find these serious errors on day 1.
I think a lot of this stuff is being overstated, like the Florida "inconsistencies", which don't seem so unreasonable to me when you correct for geography, cultural makeup, campaign time and other issues. And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable.
However, the 4000 Bush votes that mysteriously appeared in an Ohio precinct with less than 1000 registred voters is a proven and acknowledged issue - that's why this story was carried by CNN, not just some crazy blogger. And other legitimate issues will crop up, I'm certain of it. Whether anything will indicate provable, large-scale fraud, I am very doubtful, but more evidence is surely forthcoming that indicates the inherent weaknesses of many of the black box electronic voting systems that have been put in place over the last few years.
actually, 300,000 votes in a single state could have swayed the election.
You always talking the same shit Dave. The last article on blackboxvoting I saw you posted 10 comments all spouting the same crap. You seem to be very fired up about this topic, perhaps because you either voted for Bush or perhaps you are a closet Republican.
The big point you don't seem to get is that without an audit trail these machines are totally unaccountable. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE, so yes, even the "300M Kerry campaign" wouldn't be able to find out what really happened. This is the whole fucking point. So, please, pull your head out of your ass. You can't say with *ANY* certainty that Bush actually won.
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
Actually, I don't think anyone (at least in the story) is crying foul that it was done on purpose. The point is the machines are showing signs that they screwed up.
Regardless of who won, and regardless if it was intentional or not, it is essential to investigate the problems, if only to prevent them from happening again. If it is determined that the errors are significant and widespread, then the elections must be redone. Those are the breaks.
We can discuss possible fraud once we know what the problem is.
Oh, and unless Diebold manufactured scantron-style counters and are responsible for printing provisional ballots with no addresses, I think your little rant is just slightly misplaced.
=Smidge=
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
So just because it happens every year means we should just sit down and go ho-hum?
I really don't think anyone here would claim that Kerry lost the election because of these anomalies. Any ones that would think that probably wear tin foil hats. Anyone that thinks Kerry lost the election because of these and thinks posting about it on the internet will change anything is just plain ignorant.
However, we should be paying attention to this. These are not your common irregularities. This is a whole new system of casting your vote. I've seen statistics that 30% of the votes this election were cast electronically. When we have such a large percentage of participation with these things, don't you think it's time we looked at the problems of them? And when stories like these come out about malfunctions and obvious conflicts of interest, don't you think that we, citizens, should make sure they're fixed before the next election?
Personally, I've written several members of my state congress asking about possible bills for requirements of electronic voting machines, such as the all-so-important paper trail. What have you done?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Nothing to see here. Go look at the results from 2000 and they show the same thing:
http://www.duke.edu/~mth6/florida2000.xls
I bet that if you took the time to look at 96, 92, etc, you'd see the same trend. For some reason a bunch of voters in those precincts register as Democrats, but always vote for Republicans.
-Matt
Duke '05
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
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.
Maybe Kerry (and any other person who might care) isn't making a big fuss because there isn't enough evidence to make a case yet. Seriously, I doubt anybody who had the ability to rig a national election would do it in a sloppy manner that was easy to detect (Dunno what happened in Ohio, that could be pure user error, although it's odd that the errors seem to favor Republicans in nearly every case). I suspect that if the vote was rigged that we will never get more than some statistical oddities out of it. Even when the same irregularities show up year after year, there isn't enough evidence to make a case out of it. Besides, it would take an act of Congress to get a real investigation going, and somehow I don't see that happening (not as long as these strange coincidences keep getting them elected).
College professors and other academics can point out the irregularities in the system all they want, they don't have the power to actually change anything (what are they going to do? Vote those jokers out? Ha!)
At this point I havn't seen anything like a smoking gun (don't expect to either), but I also have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that appeared right when it became obvious that yet again the exit polls (the primary measure of voting fraud in foreign countries) were skewed yet again this year (even with different people in charge!). Either 5% of the population have started systematically lying to exit pollsters (refusal rates havn't changed significantly), or there is something else odd happening.
I read the internet for the articles.
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!!!!
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.
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
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
I don't understand this attitude at all. Why would you lie to exit pollsters? Do you lie to your doctor when you go in for a checkup? Do you lie to the waiter about what you want to order in a restraunt?
Having accurate exit polls is to the advantage of everyone--everyone, that is, except people trying to rig an election. They are the only ones who benefit from trashing the exit polls. Are you trying to help them?
For that matter, why is it that we are expected to believe not only that lying is rampant, but that it is much, much more common for the sort of people who place high importance on "moral values" to lie? Remember, it's not as if a bunch of Kerry supporters are supposed to have lied and said they supported Bush, is it? It the conserviative, upright rural Bush supporters who think moral values are very important that are supposed to have lied en mass. Does that make sense?
-- MarkusQ
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We use these in Loudoun County, Virginia and I can't imagine a reason for not doing it this way. There's nothing mechanical like all these goofy punch card systems... state-of-the-art 1890's technology, with their byzantine layouts. The ballots are incredibly simple and clear, so there's confusion down in the old folks' home where someone mixed up the medications.
And unless you have some kind of seizure while wielding the pen, there's no chance of ambiguity. But it doesn't reap millions of dollars to a company for forcing expensive, buggy, hopelessly complex solutions, where simple tried and true technology serves effectively, so I guess it's just not a feasible solution.
In addition to being prone to ridiculous errors, there is also the possibility of fraud, although I don't believe most of these can be attributed to some widespread conspiracy to cheat. As I've always said "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence." and to that I would add, "The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Maybe a lot of people -liked- what happened in the Bush administration.
This is my sig.
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.
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
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.
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 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!
Yes. CNN says Bush had 52% of Florida vs Kerry's 47% (3,911,825 vs 3,534,609, a difference of 377,216 votes). The "strange anomoly" the article points to shows e-touch precints voting favoring Kerry more than expected (expected is total vote * %party) by 4,422 votes (out of 3,863,840 total). And the op-scan precints favored Bush more than expected by 599,721 votes (out of 3,419,852 total).
If the op-scan votes had favored Bush over expectations as much as the e-touch had favored Kerry over expectations, Kerry would have won Florida, and he would have won the national election.
I didn't run the numbers on any of the other anomalies.
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....
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.
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??
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
people don't line up in the rain for nine hours to tell the president what a good job he is doing.
What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.
With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.
Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.
It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!
Go check this to see where the sympathies of the voting machine companies lie. Any claims of non-partisanship on the part of the companies should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad
Best kind of candidate, if you think about it. How much money they make is a non-issue. I don't care how much they make - what I'm worried about is how they handle the election.
This type of question has been around for 200 years.
Sure. But now we can ask it loudly until someone actually answers the damn question! We have at our hands a tool to make sure it gets in front of as many faces as possible. So why not use it?
The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get.
So, what? Just shut up and take it? In case you hadn't noticed, moderation doesn't go over with this administration. Bush was the one who said "You are either with us, or against us." So, I'm coming down on the side specifically against him and his fellow Republiban.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
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.
I fail to see what values have to do with voting for a man that has so much contempt for the middle class American. I mean, as long as you don't work for a government contractor, own stock, or belong to the religious majority, there is little most people have in common with him. Then again, it's not like many people have much in common with Kerry either.
Can anyone really say, with a straight face, that they were satisfied with the two choices the system provided us with? Was there a good reason that the race was Bush v. Kerry instead of McCain V. Dean other than the bullshit notion of primaries? It disgusts me to no end that petty political difference can so blind the public that they forget that hedonistic political parties exist to serve themselves above all else.
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?
I think it's inappropriate to refute his post with such floccinaucinihilipilification.
""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 dispute the "minor job loss" claim.
In 2000, there were 110M jobs and 281M people, so a rough estimate is that you need (on average) one job to support 2.6 people. We've probably gained about 10,000,000 people since Bush started in 2000, which means that about 3.8M jobs needed to be created during his administration, just to keep pace with population growth. Even if there are the same number of jobs as when he took office, he's nearly four million jobs in the hole.
Nor is it just a matter of liberal arts majors not being able to find work. The total job numbers hide the number of underemployed, who are working fewer hours than they would like or working in jobs that don't utilize their skills and training.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, total jobs increased by about 22M, more than two jobs for every three people added to the population. Historically, the fastest job growth has always occurred when Democrats were in the White House.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
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.