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Buggy Voting Machines
dkleinsc writes "The NYTimes is running an article arguing in layman's terms that voting machines are inherently buggier (Sperm sample required. Sorry ladies) than most software systems because they are not tested properly. A fun quote: "Extensive discussions are under way at sites like VerifiedVoting.org, CalVoter.org, and the "news for nerds" forum Slashdot.org about inexpensive, practical ways to make automated voting as reliable as, say, buying books online. Their recommendations make sense."" We makese sense? Wah?
Some poor old grandmother is going to read that, type in the url, and end up seeing goatse. Way to go!
stuff
That should have been the headline for this article.
==
no sig
"practical ways to make automated voting as reliable"
Is the winner preselected and 'voting' automated to make it happen?! Oh wait...
Something tells me that NYT reads /. with a +5 comment threshold, and deprecates "Funny".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
George W. Bush have also recommended: James Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Dad.
Sounds like a plan to me...
Saying slashdot makes sense is just a way to discredit the anti-voting-machine crowd. People will check out the dot, and they'll think it's a bunch of kooks complaining about this stuff.
I think this is just silly argument. Just because a system is used for voting can't make it inherently buggier. The problem is more that there isn't an established standart to which the machines are held. There should be a law put into effect that first defines what is expected from the voting machines, second there should be possiblity of independent review of these machines expressed in that law. Perhaps the touch screens of the voting machines could have socket to which a recorder could be attached so that separate count could be made with competitors machine.
No registration required link
Logic is the stock in trade of softare engineers. Yet when it comes to politics, so many of them are incapable of thinking rationally. I cannot think of a single other condition under which technically minded people will blame the machines before blaming the users.
While voting machines may be inherently buggy, I think in certain cases, the paper ones weren't much better. It also doesn't help that some voters can't read and/or fill out a paper ballot. For those of you that remember the 2000 election, the process of filling out a paper ballot was just as buggy, where bugs were "incomplete marks", "multiple marks", or "hanging chads".
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
Ever since I was a kid, my mom has been taking me into the voting booth (either to teach me the importance of voting, or for lack of babysitting). This year I voted for the first time, and it felt great. I don't mean emotionally, I mean physically. When I pulled the levers and flipped the switches, I was actually convinced that my vote counted. It was the neatest feeling.
It was rigged. Look at the Berkley paper backed by MIT.
a. The Supervisor of Elections has unreasonably delayed providing information.
b. The certification was based on inadequate and incomplete information regarding the election results.
6. Some or all of the information requested on Nov. 2, 2004 by Black Box Voting is still missing from 59 of the 179 voting precincts, including portions of or all of the voting machine tapes for those 59 precincts, which are a vital part of official paper record of the election results from those precincts.
7. Complete information on problems with the voting machines prior to and during the election has not been provided.
8. Complete information relating to memory card failures during the election has not yet been provided.
9. Only a partial list of the transmission logs from the Accu-Vote optical scan server has been provided. Despite repeated requests, the Elections office has refused to provide to the Volusia County Democratic party the official election results, now stating that those results will not be available until December 1, 2004.
10. The Elections office has provided incomplete data regarding Early Voting and Absentee ballots. The Supervisor of Elections, for example, reported that the total number of absentee ballots and Early voting ballots, combined equaled 89,999 votes, yet the published figures for those totals is 84,100 votes, leaving over 5,800 votes unaccounted for.
11. In addition to the pattern of delay in providing the requested information, the true election results are in doubt because of numerous violations of election law procedure and unanswered questions concerning the results.
12. The polls were opened early and closed late during Early Voting.
13. Many public records, including one signed results tape from a voting machine were found in the trash. Many of the requested records not furnished by the Elections office have been found in the trash. Results from the tapes found in the trash do not match the results of the copies of tapes furnished.
14. An email from Mark Earley, of Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., to the Elections office was provided which asked the recipient for an explanation of why Volusia County had more memory card failures than all of their other Florida customers combined, and then asked why the 17 memory card failures which the Elections office reported on November 3, increased to 25 before November 12, 2004.
15. The reported memory card failures were significant and troubling and included reporting zero votes after one week of voting, requesting permission to upload votes before the voting began, and messaging whether the card should be reformatted.
16. According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections on November 17, 2004, the GEMS computer is not networked, and is "stand alone." The furnished computer logs show evidence of at least two attempts to remotely access the GEMS central tabulator, which is claimed to be secure. A computer screen shot printout on November 17, 2004 (found in the trash) shows that the GEMS computer at that time had two networked hard drives.
The endless schemes that evil can conjure are amazing.
From Chuck Herrin's info sec website: It's an amazing demo. Be sure to check out the associated FAQ which is as easy to read for the layman as for the techie, and full of citations. Share it with you friends and family !
For you party-liners out there, Chuck is a Reublican who wants you to understand that this is not a partisan issue.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I think all slashdotters are probably smiling right now. I'm even about to cry. We're sharing a moment.
Zoeith
\/\/3 I\/I /\ |( E 5 3 I\I 5 3?
L337 |*0\/\/3R
~ Mooga
That's not the surprising part - we already knew as much.
The mystery is why they finally clued in. If we understand that and can repeat this feat more often, we might have a real impact on public opinion and policies.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Considering that many think that the election was rigged and that Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea wanted GWB, I would not worry too awfully much.
If you think ladies would have a problem providing a sperm sample, you REALLY don't get out enough.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Slashdotter
Since the New York Times started reporting it. Of course, these are the same folks who also brought us Jayson Blair, so it's not like it's much of an endorsement these days.
If we make sense, then I demand a retraction. Or a fish looking at a melted clock dial. This is not a |.
at least here in manitoba, canada, we use a process where you a) get a piece of paper with straight lines connecting the checkbox with the person you are voting for, b) you place a checkmark on the candidate you wish to vote for c) you feed it into a machine which records your vote, and d) if there are any discrepencies, all the ballots can be counted by hand. all the ballot stations are manned by volunteers representing all parties. I can't understand why places like the ukraine and the USA have made this process more difficult than it should be. It's not like any one party is beter than another. Perhaps its just nations that start with the letter U.. Ukraine, USA, Uganda .. Uruguay.. heh. Uruguay.
I TRUST computers. When I first used A.T.M.'s, nearly 30 years ago, I carefully saved receipts in a folder and matched them with the bank's monthly statement. Now I sometimes stuff the receipts in my wallet, but I almost never look at them again. The only banking error I've encountered in all those years was when a human teller left a final zero off a deposit I had made.
I still pore over credit card statements, but mainly to see whether some person, not some machine, has issued the proper refund credit or made an improper charge. I've sent e-mail messages to the wrong people by mistyping an address or hitting the oh-so-dangerous "Reply All" button, but never because the system routes it where it shouldn't go. When I travel, I assume that the e-ticket I booked through my computer will be valid and that frequent-flier miles will show up in my account.
Yet when I went to my polling place in Washington on Election Day, I waited an extra half-hour in line to cast a paper ballot, instead of using the computerized touch-screen voting machine. Am I irrational? Perhaps, but this would not be the evidence.
A columnist in The Washington Post recently suggested that nostalgia for paper ballots, in today's reliably computerized world, must reflect a Luddite disdain for technology in general or an Oliver Stone-style paranoia about the schemings of the political world.
Not at all. It can also arise from a clear understanding of how computers work - and don't. The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.
The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.
When I worked briefly on a product design team at Microsoft, I was sobered to learn that fully one-fourth of the company's typical two-year "product cycle time" was devoted to testing. Programmers spend 18 months designing and debugging a system. Then testers spend the next six months finding the problems they missed. It is no secret that even then, the "final" software from Microsoft, or any other company, is far from perfect.
Today's mature systems work as well as they do only because they are exposed to nonstop, high-stakes torture testing. EBay lists nearly four million new items each day. If a problem affects even a tiny fraction of its users, eBay will be swamped with reports immediately.
Millions of data packets are being routed across the Internet every second. If servers, domain-name directories or other components cannot handle the volume, the problem will become apparent quickly. Years ago, bank or airline computers would often be "down" because of unforeseen problems. Now they're mostly "up," because they've had so long for flaws to become exposed.
The second crucial element in making reliable systems is accountability. Users can trust today's systems precisely because they don't have to take them on trust. Some important computer systems run on open-source software, like Linux, in which the code itself can be examined by outsiders.
Virtually all systems provide some sort of confirmation of transactions. You have the slip from the A.T.M., the receipt for your credit card charge, the printout of your e-ticket reservation. If your e-mail message doesn't go through, there is still the copy in your "Sent" folder. This is the technology world's counterpart to the check-and-balance principle in the United States government. The first concept, robust testing, protects against unintended flaws. The second, accountability, guards against purposeful distortions.
Which brings us back to electronic voting. On the available evidence, I don't believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The appare
I'm not a very experience programmer by any means, but why the hell would it be so damn hard to make a voting machine that works properly? It seems like a simple concept that even beginning programmers could do a decent job of creating.
no matter what people should be required to make there physical marks on a ballot. i dont care if its a bubble scan type but they still need to TOUCH the ballot and leave there own marks. This is the most basic step in a democracy,. the removal of this requirement can only lead to falsified voting results. In my state they gave us the option "paper ballot or electronic one?" and you would be AMAZED at how many idiots voted on those touch screen machines.
Sperm sample required. Sorry ladies
/. XX readers to /. Xy readers, I'd think that the remaining 'ladies' would have no problem... er coming up with a sperm sample.
Given the assumed ratio of
Seriously folks, stop worrying about Ukraine and start looking at what went on in your own back yard. The Ukranians seem to be handling things quite nicely themselves, but where are the mass protests in the US?
I heard that if you pressed UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-RIGHT-RIGHT-A-B-A-B it takes you to a hidden screen that lets you put in how many times you want your vote to count
A buggy voting machine it's really a bing problem. But a suspicious voter is bad to democracy as well.
All countries aren't going to belive election results like in the U.S.A. And called for a new vote it's expensive and dangerous.
Scary Movie IV starring Voting Machine, really really scary.
My city: Barcelona.
When officials refuse to adopt secure voting machines, there are two explanations. Incompetence, or bad will.
In either case, these process by which such officials get themselves into positions of power over the voting system should be examined very closely. No democratic government can rule when it stands of being accused of stealing an election.
Unless of course that is what it has done.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
yeah well here in america actually GW won fair and square. i think we hold the most transparent election process in the world
Like the US would check any, let alone all foreign elections... elections in US are best in the world by definition
I can't understand why places like the ukraine and the USA have made this process more difficult than it should be.
On purpose. If an evel candidate seems to be taking over a precinct, despite his evelness, the precinct official can adjust the voting machine to correct for the injustice done by the evel voters of the evel candidate. You can't do that with paper ballots.
Of course, the Soviet Russia solution was even better - they simply put only one candidate on the ballot. Just ONE. This way there was no way for any evel candidate to take the election, ever, because he simply wasn't on the ballot.
This article compares India voting machines vis-a-vis Dieblold.There was also a previous slashdot story on this. These machines are much simpler and hence lesser prone to bugs.As discussed by the article , faith in this machines have been established simply because they have been used over the past few years by over 670 million registered voters in elections at national as well as state levels.
This simple article explains the EVM's used
I will support voting machine reform when those same advocates support registration reform. This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations. From illegal aliens to cartoon characters, the number of bogus registrations was staggering. Lets make sure all votes are counted, as long as those votes are from citizens of United States. I need a drivers license to rent a movie or fly to Vegas, its not too much to ask a voter for a state drivers license to vote in that state and for a drivers license that states if a person is a citizen. Its not intimidation or voter suppression. If showing your ID to a little old lady at the polling place is intimidation, then what is showing it to a pimply teenager at Blockbuster?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Electronic voting should be as easy as standard, non-electronic voting. My parents couldn't buy a book of Amazon if their life depended on it. Why are we making this so hard. Electronic voting should work as follows:
1. The voting machine does not keep track of any votes. A voter will walk up to the machine and be presented with a list of candidates. Next to each name there will be a box. The voter makes a mark in the desired box with an electronic stylus. A write in blank will be available if needed.
2. At the bottom of the screen there will be two large boxes. One will be red and says "I wish to make changes on my ballot." The other box will be green and it says "I am satisfied with my ballot." After touching the green box another screen will come up. It will basically say that by touching continue you will be done voting. A go back button will be provided in case someone got to this screen by accident.
3. After clicking done, your ballot will be printed out at the machine you are at. This will allow you to look over the completed ballot before having it counted.
This system is the best of both worlds. The voting machine itself does not count anything. It is just an interface for making the completed ballot. There is a paper trail with this system. This system will also cut down on waste due to extra ballots that were not used. Finally a change the ballot at the last minute will not be a big deal since the interface is electronic. The ballots won't have to be printed weeks in advance.
For the last two evenings, I've been slowly going through the data on machine problems at EIRS
and I can say that while voting machines in general are not something much more complicated than an application preferences menu, the ones we used here in the U.S. in 2004 ARE inherently buggy.
Even when they were not switching votes, or crashing in the middle of voting, there were fundamental user interface design issues.
For example, a large number of complaints were lodged because machines would not allow a person to vote a party line, and then modify one or two votes. Any sensible designer knows how to do something like this right.
Another problem is that they had a big flashing vote button that turned on as soon as a ballot had any votes on it. So if you were at the first screen, and you voted, the vote button would start flashing. Any sensible designer would know that some users would think that they should press the vote button to get to the next screen, but when pressed, the ballot would be cast and the ability to vote on all the other candidates would be lost.
Finally, there were machines that showed you a review screen, but on the review screen, hitting enter, which is the key used normally to scroll down, to see if there is more, would actually alter the first vote on the screen. On a review screen. Ah and cooincidentally, the first vote on the screen was for president and hitting enter would switch it to Bush.
Whether deliberate or caused by some of the most incompetant programmers on the face of the earth, that is some buggy shiznit.
(P.S. I'll be posting my results when I'm done, probably on daily kos. I'll link that somewhere in the page you get when you click on my signature.)
Someone had to do it.
I heard that the code "IDGWB" will enable you to elect Bush for the office of "God".
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
An open-source system that runs on commodity hardware, with an encrypted, anonymous ballot. Definite paper trail to allow for recounts. Why there isn't a clamor to get this off the ground is beyond me. A similar system has been working in Australia for years.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Are all these groups really bipartisan, or are they just a reaction to Bush's election win? I've got a hunch that if Kerry had won, we wouldn't have heard anything from these groups.
I dislike Bush as much as the next guy, but please, just get over it; like in 2000, WE LOST.
that is debatable. That is the problem with the black boxes in Ohio and Florida. They are not even translucent, let alone transparent. Everything is hidden and it is unknown as to what the real count is. Since the vote does not align with exit polls at the black box sites, it would seem that something is wrong. Of course, you could argue that people lied, but the problem is t would be at only the black box sites.
Bruce Scnheier:
Computerized systems with these characteristics won't be perfect -- no piece of software is -- but they'll be much better than what we have now. We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/
It may seem funny to you, but it looks like a troll to me. I'd vote for modding the parent down to flamebait, but there's no paper balloting so I can't trust you to count my vote.
...I thought netcraft had confirmed that BSD was dead?
No wonder it's intelligent and no particular surprise it mentions Slashdot -- the article was written by James Fallows, who as a long-time writer for The Atlantic was also a long-time technophile, or at least one who appreciated the productive uses of technology. I venerated him because he was a very public user and proponent of Lotus Agenda, a product which was unfortunately orphaned way back when and whose intelligence and functionality have never been duplicated.
Yeah, well this year if you had gone to vote in queens, bronx, or any other inner city district,
the experience would probably have gone more like this (if you were trying to vote for Kerry)
1) When you get to the front of the line, be told that if you want to vote a straight Republican ticket you can use any of the machines, but if not, you have to wait a little longer because half of the machines are "stuck on the republican side"
2) Get in the booth, pull down a lever, and have it not quite click. Or refuse to go down.
3) Notice that for some strange reason, you can only vote for Kerry as a Democrat, not on any of the other party lines, because the levers are broken (New York allows third-parties to nominate a major party candidate, so votes for that candidate get counted for the purposes of party viability. The Dems hate third parties.)
Someone had to do it.
I followed the problems with these machines on the news and apparently one of the most important problems is that there isn't a way to verify the vote count on each machine. These machines have a function where they print the total votes cast and that's it. No audit trial.
... And at the end of the day if for some reason there is a problem with the voting machines you can always go back to the transparent ballot boxes and count each individual vote all over again.
/obviously this calls for a reliable printer mechanism, like the ones with see on ATMs or Cash Machines, at least!
Why can't they attach a printer to each machine where the voter will see a paper ballot being printed at the same time he/she submitted their vote on the screen? They will hava a last chance to see their vote before it is automatically dropped into a see through box.
If there was a problem with an individual vote the person will call for assistance immediately and with a proper procedure in place, the vote could either be cancelled or approved.
Makes sense?
There's no reason on god's green earth the USA needs electronic voting. eVoting should be eliminated. Why? 1. Because there is commercial (read: political) interest behind all voting machine companies. 2. Any software/firmware anywhere CAN be futzed with. The ONLY reason to NOT go with a nation-wide standardized, paper ballot is to fuck "The People" out of a _verifiable_ election.
Well, people who want a full range organized links of a much higher quality that the grandparent, are welcome to check my signature.
"Instead of trying to find the man behind the curtain"
You know, I would choose my allusions more carefully if I were you. This one actually betrays you for who and what you are.
Someone had to do it.
Although the machines may well be buggy, other sources of error may be more commonplace and more insidious. A prior /. article shows that some bugs occur in the metadata configuration created by officials of the particular election. Vote counting is really more vote interpretation than simply doing Votes[Candidate]++. And if the people configuring the software for a particular election make a formating mistake, the wrong bits will be counted for the wrong candidates.
These types of errors are hard to test for because it is not testable until the ballot is set and every new ballot demand a new round of testing. These types of errors won't be solved by better testing of the machine or by OSS. At best, the voting machine software designer can provide easy-to-use tools to ensure that the ballot layout and voting interpretation/tallying software is in sync.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
... and in the past it has been correct within .5 percent of the vote before the absentee ballots are figured in.
The rock solid trend diverged in Florida 2000. Now it has strangely diverged in most of the Battleground states.
There is no way to prove that the electronic vote was hacked. Conversely, there is no way to prove that the electronic vote is correct. We have lost the concept of auditability.
As Stalin once said, it doesn't matter who does the voting, it's who does the COUNTING!!!! Well, Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia and other companies led by Republican devotees seem poised to take over the counting in US elections. One can only speculate as to the results and why they differ so much from exit polls.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The world's first national vote in which citizens could vote via Internet took place in Switzerland on September 3. The country, which has a direct democracy that calls on citizens to vote on issues as often as four times a year, has had much success in allowing Internet votes in several cantons over the past several years. Swiss officials, recognizing the success of the local programs, became convinced that it was secure enough to try it out in four Geneva suburbs on a national referendum. Citizens of those regions were allowed to choose between postal voting, going to a traditional ballot booth, or voting via Internet.
Geneva's e-voting system uses a method of two-factor authentication that provides foolproof security. Citizens receive a card which gives them their option of voting over the internet, by mail or in person. The card includes a 16-character personal ID code, and a four-character security code, similar to a PIN number, which voters must scratch off to reveal. The voter who chooses the online option then visits a Web site and types in the personal ID code, and then a secure connection is established. Then, an online ballot form is provided. Before casting their vote, the second authorization factor must be entered, and the voter then types in their security code, along with their date and place of birth.
Because the online voting system is tied to a single register of voters, authorities can protect against voter fraud (multiple voting). The safeguard guarantees that a person can vote only once, whether in person, by mail or on the Internet. There are, of course, no hanging chads, and the results are extremely accurate. It took Swiss officials 13 minutes and five seconds to count the online votes in September's ballot. Twenty-two percent of voters from the test regions cast their ballots online.
You sir, are a fucking idiot. And I mean that in the best possible way. Right now, the biggest obstacle to democracy in this election is the combined work of both the Republican "lose the tinfoil hats" Party, and the Democratic "it doesn't matter" Party.
Yeah well, guess what. The President wasn't the only question on those ballots. Volusia county wouldn't have changed the outcome of the presidential election if it had voted 100% Kerry. But what about state elections? County seats? Mayors? Democracy must happen at all levels!
Why don't you get over your obsession with Kerry and Bush, and look at the big picture here? Accept that the truth is that Volusia county for certain has MAJOR human-created voting problems (or are you going to tell me that a bug in the machine made the election officials "forget" to sign the forged results that Volusia has been giving out as real? BBV pulled the real signed results out of the trash. Or are you going to tell me that BBV has a forgery, that they successfully forged the signatures of ALL of the election officials and the real document was accidentally signed in invisible ink?) and other counties may have had problems either human-made or machine-made.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
would they be wrong?
Each machine could have it's one "ballot roll" that only displays YOUR vote in a private place (like the old voting booths).
Now that I think of it, it's an EXCELLENT solution. Save that it would require more specialized equipment to do OCR for counting.
Electronic tabulation should be BANNED completely. There is NO NEED to hack individual machines when you can hack the tabluator.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Sounds good. Source?
I apologize for posting an incomplete list - it's difficult typing with one hand while my two year old son is sleeping in the other.
t ml
c ti on04_WPwappendices.pdf
Here is the complete list, which happens to be
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT
SEVENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT OF FLORIDA
IN AND FOR VOLUSIA COUNTY, FLORIDA
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/volusia-lawsuit.h
FYI:
Those SIGNED screen shots retrieved from the trash provided different results favorable to Mr. Kerry from those that was unsigned and offered to blackboxvoting.org. For what it's worth Florida sheriffs attempted to prevent the retrieval of these documents.
Please stick to the facts backed by numbers. The report I was referring to can be found here:
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/ele
Please reference page 5. Take a close look at the graph.
Well I don't know if I want their vote recorded if that is the case. Buying a book on Amazon is simple, simple. Fill in a couple of blanks then its One-Click shopping from the rest of your life. If your folks can't handle one mouse click, how are they going to handle your system? I bet when it comes to government benefits or lottery tickets, they can handle anything presented to them.
The best thing for our democracy is weeding out the voters that are too lazy or stupid to follow simple instructions. Voting is a right and rights require responsibility.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
In any case, you can trust the individual vote totals on the machines (with manual central tabluation) just so long as you do random audits, or targeted challenge audits to check for irregularities.
Any audit that turns up a problem would trigger a manual recount of all precincts.
BTW, I don't think there is anything wrong with hand counting. You may think it's too expensive. But what is Democracy worth to you???
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You assume that exit polling is a scientific process. Fact is, political groups have picked up on exit polling as a way to attempt to skew elections, if they can get major media to pick up their story (or, alternatively, if major media is doing the exit polling). Example:
10am-
CBS News: Exit polls show that Candidate A has taken a COMMANDING lead in Ohio.
Supporters of Candidate B: Well, shit, there's no use voting, we're going to lose anyway.
Exit polling also requres honesty out of those polled, which may or may not happen. This IS politics, ya know.
Comparing exit polling with actual voting results, and claiming something is wrong with the voting results if there's a discrepancy, is just stupid.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The *counting* portion of any voting system *MUST* be wide open, and subject to public scrutiny, and there *must* be a physical (paper being the most logical) record of an individuals vote, that *that* individual can verify correctly recorded their votes.
The mechanism used to *create* that paper record doesnt matter, so long as it remains in the posession of, and can be inspected by, the individual casting the vote, after it is created and before it is counted. It can be done by hand, or with the assistance of some ATM-like machine that then *PRINTS* the paper which neither does any counting, nor keeps any record of who is voting. In fact other than the printed output, it should keep no records whatsoever. It should not even know the identity of the voter.
The paper vote record itself, should also not have any sort of information which could identify *who* the voter is. The machine used to read and count the paper record *MUST* be open, auditable and its entire process and function must be fully and publically documented. After counting, the paper ballots should drop into a box, or otherwise be retained to allow for recounts.
It's been pretty well established that we won't have a fair and functional voting system until we have a considerably greater level of transparency and accountability.
You won't have transparency until every part of the voting process has been moved into the open source domain for thorough examination and auditing. The current systems are all closed source, and the system which "prevents" cheating is controlled by the same people responsible for gerimandering, and is readily bypassed via "emergency" updates.
Furthermore, we shouldn't have to file Freedom of Information Act requests in order to have ballot results released. This information should be freely available, preferably on the websites of the various counties that do the tallying.
Also, a person's vote absolutely must be recorded in a non-electronic manner at the time of polling. Paper ballots are essential. Even if those paper ballots are printed by the voting machine after the voter casts their votes, it must be produced. Otherwise, a recount is no different than refreshing the calculations on a spreadsheet.
While this is all a good idea, it isn't like a system like I described actually exists. I believe MIT formed a group to produce such a system, but four years later they've mostly just produced research papers. There is a group which is currently working on such a system, but they are currently suffering from severe under-funding and various bits of social blockage. They're the Open Voting Consortium. I strongly urge everyone to go check them out.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
The huge irony here is that a "voting program" is about the simplist thing you could write. Thousands of people have written RPG character generators that are more complicated than a voting program.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Easy, I'll soon have a low ID#, and you'll have a godolithic one....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
But who really wants the endorsment of an outfit that gave us Jayson Blair, and harped on Bush IIs National Guard "service" while completely ignoring the fact that Kerry never released all his records - and if you think Kerry did release all his records, answer me why Kerry's discharge that he did release is dated from the Jimmy Carter years - 1978 to be exact. One wonders why that could be... Of course, Kerry didn't release the records on that.
And that's not a story for the NY Times? Why not?
If someone wants voting machines, then they want to make it easier to steal your vote.
The rest is bullshit.
What OSCE thinks about it: http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2004/11/3779_e n.pdf.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
You don't have to be a republican or a democrat or a supporter of a third party to want everyone's vote to count. That should be what everyone wants. And the only way that will happen is with constant vigilance.
Nice ad hominem dude:
Were they drunk? Who makes a list of points starting with "a" and "b" then ends it with "16".
How about actually refuting the points themselves in stead of making smart alec remarks about the presentation?
Apparently there's already proof of voting fraud in Ohio. Both of Ralph Nader's votes have been disqualified
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Voting may seem similar but it is VERY different. You get a statement every month to reconcile against your personal records. There is an individual trail that you can take to the bank and say "see, you fucked up!!! Give me my money back!!!"
No such burden exists for voting systems. The customer does NOT receive a statment in the mail.
Furthermore, I would suggest that the "once a year" model of "use" should NOT be a problem since these systems are SO FUCKING SIMPLE!!! Any developer worth his salt could design tests to find errors. And any company worth it's salt would EXTENSIVELY test their software before deploying it to the field.
The "private" nature of voting means that any system designed to allow a voter to "check", will probably allow others to "check" as well. The best solution I could think of is smartcard driver licenses that digitally sign your vote. But even then, the motor vehicle dept will have your "private key" as well as any other personal parameters.
I guess one could add randomly seeded keys to the voting machines and randomly generated numbers to hash each vote ID. But those to seem succeptible to precinct worker mischief.
In the end, the easiest solution is to BAN, the on-screen vote verfication phase. Vote verification takes place after a ballot is printed behind glass. If the voters rejects the ballot it is visibly voided in some way and the voter get to change their choices. If it's accepted, it's automatically placed in the ballot box.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The best e-tally I've seen in the last while (and I've voted in 3 general elections in the past 5 months) is a paper ballot which you put into a cardboard sleeve when leaving the polling booth (so no one can see your vote). The sleeve with ballot is taken to a counting machine. It looks a lot like an electronic sheet feeder. You place the sleeve with a bit of the ballot sticking out face down into the feeder. It pulls your completed ballot out, and electronically records your vote. There is a small digital display showing your vote for 3 seconds. You can confirm that it scored your ballot correctly. The display blanks, and the paper copy of your ballot is stored (the machine sits on top of a large box which holds completed paper ballots). Electronic reporting is complete and exact, and there is a paper trail for recounts if necessary.
"This man is clearly a threat to National Security," the DHS spokesman said. "America will not stand idly by while terrorists interfere with our voting process."
The Justice Department said in a statement that Mr. Herrin was arrested by FBI and military forces at his home in North Carolina. Although the Justice Department declined to comment on exactly what charges Mr. Herrin will be facing or when his trial might be, they did say that "Americans can rest assured that this international terrorist will be held under the tightest security possible in our Guantanamo prison camp."
Mr. Herrin's lawyer declined to comment because he has not been able to contact Mr. Herrin since he was arrested.
The President told reporters "truely this is a great day for American democracy and the democratic process."
Actually, the fraud was so obvious in some places you don't need a CS degree to know something was wrong.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Yeah, thats where we're going. Vote for the fascist or the feds will weed you out.
Read Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" on why "stupidity" has little to do with vote spoilage. And read some accounts of the mischeif that occured on electronic machines on www.blackboxvoting.org, and you'll find out that it has NOTHING to do with smarts.
It DOES have something to do with how white your area is. See, whites tend to vote Republican. So there is little need to rig their equipment to spoil votes.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Not much of a point of choosing any candidate if your opponents control the voting machinery, is there?
I have a low-tech solution to the voting problem: Use paper ballots.
Here is the process:
- A voter arrives at their polling station.
- An election official confirms that the voter is eligible to cast a ballot.
- The official hands the voter a paper ballot and is told to make their choice in private behind a screen or inside a booth.
- The voter takes the ballot, goes into the private area, and makes their choice by placing an X next to the candidate of their choice.
- The voter returns with their folded ballot and deposits it into a sealed ballot box.
At the end of the night, the official opens the ballot box, tallies the totals for each candidate, and reports the totals to the main office conducting the election.Elections held this way are simple and secure. There is no worry about paper trails or verification, because the ballots themselves are the proof.
As for the ballots themselves, they look something like this:
I guess what I am trying to say is that elections do not need to be complicated by technology. The method I am proposing there depends on the ability of people to count, nothing else.
The method I propose here really works too. Where I live, it is the standard for both my provincial and federal elections.
I really hope that the voting method throughout every county in the U.S. is reformed. Personally, I know it is hard to accept election results when your preferred candidate loses, but at least where I live, I know that the vote itself was fair.
Yes, they performed an AUDIT, not a recount. And the headline was spun to "legitamize" the election. Indeed, if you knocked out all the ballots that the machines ignored, Bush DID indeed win the election.
If you used the standards of counting a hanging chad where no other chads were displaced, and you counted obvious write ins, Gore was the winner.
But I am glad to see a Republican who mistrusts these machines. Primaries can be hacked just as well as genreal elections
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Noooo! A girl might read it and come here!! Won't someone think of the children!?
I like muppets.
If Kerry had won, would the voting machines still be buggy?
Just a thought.
Really? I live in Queens and I voted for John Kerry on a third-party ticket without any problem or delay. Kerry won NYC by a margin of 3 to 1 overall, and much higher in Manhattan and the Bronx. It would have been pretty foolish of Republicans to waste time and resources on voter suppression here, if that's what you're suggesting.
Will the person with the funniest political signature I have seen all year please step forward and reply to this?
IIRC, it went something like:
"Now that the election is over it is time for Deomcrats to put aside partisan differences and support our commander in chief.... just like the Republicans did for Clinton"
Someone had to do it.
Folks its time to move on. George Bush did not win because of some evil Diebold exec or magical vote changing election booths. He won because over 61 million Americans pulled the lever for him.
Erm. How do you know that? I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, I'd just like to know what special information that you have access to that, say, the New York Times doesn't? If you've got some sort of audit logs from all of the voting machines, please, by all means, share with the GAO.
This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations.
I call bullshit. There two -- two -- known incidents of people being registered fraudulently, according to the Republican National Committee Vote Fraud group. (Listen to This American Life's November 1 episode, "Swing Set," Act 2, which is 21:10 into the episode.) Not only were both of these committed by petty criminals paid by the registrant to sign up voters (that is, it was not systemic, just a pair of dopes), but it doesn't matter, since there is, in fact, no way for Mary Poppins to show up and vote. The other case was a Colorado man who registered 35 times. He can only vote once, as you can imagine, so, again, it doesn't matter.
Your implication that there is any parity between two isolated incidents of greedy workers signing up people wrongly and the massive, jail-time-yielding Republican work to suppress the vote or, worse still, systemic Diebold/ES&S fraud is well beyond ludicrous; it is, simply, stupid, and I am embarrassed on your behalf, because it seems that you don't have the good sense to be embarrassed for yourself.
-Waldo Jaquith
Bush governs as if he's a dictator. He does what he wants.
By NO means is 3% a mandate. But he seemed to indicate he had a mandate when his mandate was -.5% in the last election. So whats the difference.
Bush does what he wants
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
No, but judging from the many many reports of screwed up machines and results, it's obvious that there was some shenanigans going on. Either during the election itself, or before it due to, let us say questionable, choices in voting systems.
My favourite excerpt is the following:
Of course, there is no proof that these gentleman have continued their illegal ways. They could have become completely reformed, law-abiding citizens by the time they started work on the Diebold voting systems.
...
Despite India's increased use, there is STILL no way to validate the election. You can hack the machines and then have the malicious software delete itself without a trace. All you leave is your desired vote count.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
By automated voting you mean, the candidate is selected for you, automatically, right? Hey, I call it like I see it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Frankly neither are acceptable
when it comes to our election
machinery.
Further: stupidity is too often
invoked as an excuse in cases
where malice is a more plausible
cause.
...
While I think US skills in algebra, trig, geometry and calculas are lacking. I'm pretty sure that were just fine with checking place counting marks in column A vs column B.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You know that 61 million people pulled the lever for George Bush only because a system of machines told you so. If you have faith both in those machines and in every fallible human being in the system running the machines on the basis of no proof whatsoever and in the light of many counterproofs, then hats off too you! You live in a world of absolute faith and trust and things must be very happy and rosey for you there.
The truth, however, is that the election is not auditted as your bank is. The truth is that the election is not audited as your credit card balance is. Your bank asks for even less identification than the polls do, but despite this identifying lack, you can have reasonable faith in the financial system because of auditting. Though the auditting is nothing more than a really long, virtual, double-entry accounts book repeated at every step in the transaction.
The truth is that the election is not audited at all. There is no debit column, with which we can reconcile the credit column of our vote ledger. Until we can reconcile the debits and credits in our voting system, until those numbers can be adjudged provably to be equal; the vote as counted on November 2, 2004 is an article of faith.
Perhaps you have that much faith in an unauditted system? I do not. Echoing another's immortal words, I insist, "Trust, but verify." Pointing out inequities and protesting the vote is an insistence that the government verify. Without verification, we should not believe as we are told.
Yes, I agree, if Kerry had won; there would be no NYT editorial. Rather, a similar editorial, written by a conservative, would have been in a conservative newspaper of which there are many. Those hypothetical writings would be saying exactly what this NYT editorial does: trust, but verify. Insist on verification. Verification should be your right as a citizen: your vote, my vote, Republican votes, Libertarian votes, Green votes, American Communist Party votes, Democrat votes - everyone's votes!
Get it? The security of your vote and my vote are equally important. However, you take the security of yours on faith. Both votes, though, are equal and deserve equal inspection, respect, and security. Such security is worth any amount of money to guarantee, since a Democratic Republic such as ours simply cannot function without an absolute and absolutely verifiable vote.
Faith in the number is not enough. There must be proof.
PS - I didn't attack your position on ID at the polls, because I happen to agree with it. I disagree that you should need that ID to rent a video or travel to LAs Vegas, but hey, at least we agree on one thing!
What a cynical view you have of the world? Yes, the machines would still be buggy. The editorial on their bugginess, however, would have been in a neo-con leaning newspaper. The complaint would be the same. The metaphors would be the same. Only the writers and the publication place would be different.
The Republicans don't put all their eggs in one basket. They run the gambit of dirty tricks:
* Deliberate false character assasination
* Minority vote suppression
* Ballot tampering
* Machine tampering
* Moving polling places
* Baseless voter challenges (against minorities)
* Tabulation fraud
* Feeding the pres audio cues during the debates
* Voter intimidation
* Registration suppression among likely democratic voters
Yeah, they cover all the bases. But most of those things can be overcome. But if they CONTROL 1/3 of the vote counting stations across the US, they'll NEVER loose another presidential election!!!!
Simply put, electronic voting is the end of Democracy.
In 2000, Bush pulled out all the SAME stops in Florida and he STILL came up short in the vote count. So they had to back out some results of an electronic machine in Volusia county. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in a matter of minutes.
They CLAIMED that the results were faulty due to a malfunctioning memory card (compact flash). In other words, they said that the vote total wasn't written totally down and some of the data was a residual image on the card. But ORIGINAL vote total CORRECTLY added up to the total number of voters!!!!
The "CORRECTED" card, distributed Al Gore's 16,000 votes among third party candidates.
Al Gore ONE the Florida 2000 election. The vote was STOLEN in 2000 by black box voting. The vote in 2002 was STOLEN by black box voting. The vote in 2004 was STOLEN by black box voting. And if we don't fix things, the vote in 2006 and 2008 will be stolen by black box voting!!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Read the reports yourself at EIRS. For New York machine problems, they are
here,
Not that I think New York's problems are definitively intentional... in this case, unlike the e-votes in Texas, Florida, and Ohio, the errors are explained by the fact that poor districts get crummy machines, and a single cooincidence of ballot layout and machine technology could explain the "republican lockout," though odds are the machine problems are not new and the person who designed the ballot knew that the order of the candidates as they appeared on the ballot would give one party the advantage.
But note, I did mention Texas, right? Just because a state is not a battleground does not mean Bush padding did not take place there. Bush needed a "mandate" after all. A counterfeit mandate, that is.
Someone had to do it.
We need to create a federal bureau of IDs and just contract the state B/DMVs to be identification authorities. We'll all have private keys so we can securely "sign" transactions.
Voters will need one of these authenticated/secure identifications to vote.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Grr, I know, CTFU. Here is the URL correctly hyperlinked. Apologies to all:
New York Lever Machine problems.
Someone had to do it.
... I'm starting to believe Ralph Nader. The Democrats seem to have neither spines nor BALLS to address the issues that are truly plagueing our nation.
BTW, Volusia county was also the place that turned the 2000 election for Bush. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in an electronic voting machine there. They published the results, than the state was called for Gore. THAN, they [b]YANKED[/b] the results and those 16,000 votes were distributed among 3rd party candidates.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Evidence for rigged voting in Ukraine? Exit polls DRASTICALLY different from the real results....
The U.S should take a lesson from the Ukraine right now. what they are doing as a result of their rigged election is what YOU should be doing about your rigged election.
It appears that as soon as you Americans saw hooded iraqis in Abu Ghreib, you donned the same hoods yourselves and are still wearing them now.
Or does anyone else here notice a distinct LACK of "terror threat" now the election is over?
... the "news for nerds" forum Slashdot.org about inexpensive, practical ways to make automated voting as reliable as, say, buying books online.
That line should removed any belief as to the NYTimes being a trustworthy news source, especially after the slashdot part.
http://thehighroad.org/attachment.php?attachmentid =18516
...it'll auto-start.
.AVI :).
It's a 158meg Bittorrent file (GEMSDEMO.avi.torrent) - if you have a client installed such as Azureus:
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php
Playing time is only 15 minutes. File size is that big because it's in 800x600
I "filmed" it with a screen record utility with audio commentary voice-over. Sound is a bit low, but crank the volume and it'll work. It uses the Intel Indeo codex which I understand is problematic on Macs...sorry. Windoze Media handles it and I would suspect there's some Linux player available?
If anybody here doesn't "get it" yet about how screwed up their "security" (ha!) is, this will do. Makes sense to most non-techies, too.
...
Because some of the voting machines out there cannot handle more than 32,768 votes in a race. They can only handle 16-bit integers. It's NOT a limitation of the 32-bit machines they're using.
Apparantly the term "long int" isn't in their vocabulary.
Look, there is nothing wrong with making "new mistakes". But programmers should be a little more mature to realize that they aren't working on systems with 64k or RAM anymore.
The "programs" used in this election software would probably take the average slashdotter a week to write. The good ones (myself not included) could write it in a day.
The testing for these systems is EXTREMELY simple and can be EASILY automated.
The fact that these machines don't even perform their BASIC functionality is a sign that they are FUBARd. The fact that they contain ZERO security is evidence that they are MEANT to be hacked.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Umm... The guy is attacking a Windows ME machine. The C$ access to shares requires a password to get into the machine. He assumes that there are no passwords for connecting to the machine over the phone line or network. He assumes that the networks are not locked down to prevent unauthorized access (like via the WAP he sugests). He attacked a machine running a full version of windows instead of a stripped down version like Win CE.
In short, he was set up a laboratory system with all the settings in his favor. There is no proof that anyone is using a system like this. Until someone actually does a proof of this with a real world system with the actual security used there is no point in paying attention to this.
you may rank me as a 5 funny but the bottom line is that if you think this country is a big conspiracy why dont you head on over to your favorite socialist country in the EU
Ok so you put voting machines in a buggy to harvest the Amish vote...
FOOLS! Amish won't use a MACHINE to vote!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The Moonie Paper, written by Moonies, edited by Moonies. OWNED AND OPERATED as a propaganda arm for a man who believes himself to be the arisen Jesus Christ.
Syun Myung Moon, the man who claims to commune with the spirits of Hitler and Stalin, has given you the leading conservative paper in the nation. It's NOT a commercial venture. If it was, he wouldn't have lost half a BILLION dollars operating it!!!!
Look, I really don't like the NY Times. I don't like ANY paper because they're ALL corporate/conservatively biased. The ONLY liberal sources of information out there are Mother Jones, The Nation, Genesis Communication Network, blogs and Air America.
Everything else
FOX News(F/X, Fox Network) - Blatently right wing biased
ABC (Disney/ESPN etc..) - Right wingers
NBC (GE, MSNBC, etc..) - Corporate Syncophantic war provacateurs. Shoddy consultant run news division. Brokaw is a blatant partisan.
CBS/Viacom (Comedy Central, MTV) - Center Right. These guys are the closest to fair and balanced in commercial TV.
PBS/NPR - straight down the middle. Many of Fuax's "left wing" commentators are "right wing" commentators on NPR
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I don't know what you were doing election day, but apparently it didn't involve watching TV news. None of the networks even mentioned exit poll results until after the polls had closed.
And even if they had, it skews both ways. People who would have voted for the losing candidate say "I don't need to vote, they'll lose anyway", and people who would have voted for the winner say "I don't need to vote, they'll win anyway".
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Pssst... do you know where I can buy some of those voter cards on the black market? You know, the ones sold by poor people and drug addicts?
Someone had to do it.
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people. If this is in fact true, the various exit polls likely underrepresented many Republican candidates. Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system, and politicizing the issue by making claims against one particular candidate only stands in the way of getting our political leaders to support the election system we need.
If Kerry came up a winner, they Republicans would have done the SAME thing they'd done in 2000. They would have voided the results of an electronic voting machine (Volusia County 2000) and taken votes AWAY from Kerry.
This time, their vote theft was so overkill as to avoid that unfortunate event in 2000.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush fan (I voted for McCain in 2000 and while I wasn't a fan of Kerry either, I voted for him to vote against Bush this year) but I'm getting sick and tired of conspiracy theorists on Slashdot. If you check out my signature, you'll see an insightful speech made by Bill Clinton on why the Democrats lost this election but I will expend on it here. Also note that I used the term "left-wingers" to describe far left liberals, not the Democrats in general.
1. Democrats relied too much on young voters: Problem is that while the 18-24 year old age group makes the most noise, when it comes to voting, they consistently turn out to have the worst voting record. Hollywood celebrities and singers backing Kerry (in hopes of getting young citizens to vote) probably harmed him more by alienating the older voters. Bill Clinton didn't win the election by capturing young voters' votes, he won by capturing the older voters' votes. Now back to Bush vs. Kerry. Majority of voters 65 and older voted for Bush. Majority of voters 24 and younger voted for Kerry. And guess who won?
2. Democrats did not learn form the Austrian elections: The Australian Prime Minister Howard took a lot of heat for supporting Bush and his war in Iraq. The media expected a big loss for Howard on the last election, but Howard ended winning by a good margin. When the Austrian voters were polled, most of them responded that they voted for Howard because economy was a bigger issue than the Iraqi war.
3. Michael Moore and Bin Laden: Telling you that those two guys dislike Bush would be an understatement. However, their messages probably ended up helping Bush more than hurting him. I like Moore's movies because they are entertaining, but unlike the left-wingers, I find his movies highly biased. What Fahrenheit 9/11 did was it ended up causing Bush supporters to work harder to get Bush fans to vote. It's the same thing with the Bin Laden message before the election. Most Americans hate Bin Laden so why does he believe that Americans will listen to him? If he came out and told the Americans to drink milk on Mondays, most Americans will stop drinking milk on Mondays just to spite him.
4. Democrats relied too much on minority voters: Minorities tend to vote Democrat but Democrats didn't realize that minorities can be religious as well and the religious tend to vote Republican. The Republicans pushed the gay marriage and abortion issues to successfully split the minority votes. Why do you think that 44% of Hispanics voted for Bush? Kerry realized this and pushed the fact that he is a Catholic but that fall short of Bush and him pushing the religious agenda for the past four years.
5. Democrats discounting the gun owner voters: There is a good reason why the 2nd Amendment has not be abolished; many Americans own guns or believe that they should have the right to own a gun. (BTW, commander-in-chief for the National Guard is still the President, thus making them more like a federal troop than state militia). Kerry knew about this and pointed out numerous times that he's also a hunter and he'll never take the guns away. However, his voting records betray him and the Bush camp used it to win the votes of the gun owners.
6. Democrats pushed the draft issue: Another issue pushed by the left-wingers was the draft, when only draft bill presented so far was by a democrat and only one other democrat voted for it. Now with Bush reelected, where's the draft? Do the left-wingers honestly believe that most Republicans and Democrats will cast a career ending vote for a draft bill even if one makes it to the floor?
I stayed up on the election night to track the results and the exit polls in general seemed to give Bush an edge so I really wasn't surprised that he ended up winning and Kerry conceding rather early. I'm pretty sure that there were miscounted votes and other voting difficulties but I'm pretty sure those issues exis
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
But it's still not tamper proof. And it certainly is NOT auditable.
It is the equivalent to the mechanical tabluting voting booths that we employ in the US. Except, that you cannot watch the wheels spin. And that is STILL an essential problem.
Yes, the software cannot be reprogrammed at the site. But the election officials control the machines themselves. That means they can replace the motherboards with more "favorable" hard wired microprocessors. As long as the local officials are in on the fix, they can effectively control the elction and the people would NEVER know.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The Beauty of a Smartcard system is that you HAVE an ID. But you really don't know what it is. Only the smartcard and the ID bureau would know.
This would make it possible to index databases by a unique but private identifier. It would make it IMPOSSIBLE to cross-link databases by individuals since private keys are NEVER given out, you only get a hash out of the smartcard based on a key fed by whoever wants your info.
This provides unique identification as well as privacy protection.
This legislation would and should be accompanied by a law making indexing on social security numbers ILLEGAL for non governmental organizations. Everyone would use the new ID methodology in their databases.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
For me anyway, it's not about who won or lost THIS election. It's about making sure the next election, and the ones after that, are fair. The best way to do that is to do a deep analysis of problems with THIS election, find the reasons for the problem, and figure out how to fix them without causing more problems.
If you register at a new address and the registrar is sloppy about notifying the previous registrar, or you "make a typo" when stating your previous registration address, you may wind up registered more than once.
You could probably get away with voting twice, at least initially. If you were later caught, you could spend time in federal or state prison, or both.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Theoretically, an infinite percent of registered voters could've voted in an election:
If there was nobody registered until election day, even if 1 person registered, the ratio would be infinity.
What actually happened in Washington is that a lot of people registered on election day.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://www.dailyhowler.com
The NY Times is just like everybody else.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The Ledger is carrying the story.
News.google.com is your friend.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Potential problem: The vote isn't anonymous, which means that voters can possibly be intimidated into voting differently than they would otherwise.
"Look, Joey, we told you to vote for Mr. Smith. Now, our man in the voting office says you voted for Mr. Jones. Say goodbye to your kneecaps, Joey...."
Got mead?
"...Instead of trying to find the man behind the curtain...
Yes, but there really WAS a man behind the curtain. That changed everything.
I read that as relating to the voting needs of people who can't actually walk normally into a polling station.
This happened once when I was telling at a UK election. The voter was driven up in a car, but was unable to walk into the polling station. The presiding officer then asked the representatives of the candidates if we would object to him taking a ballot paper out to her car.
Of course we didn't object, he took a ballot paper out to her car, she marked her cross, he put it in the ballot box. Quite possibly illegal, for all we knew, but there was a clear agreement between the election official and representatives of all the political parties that this was the right thing to do.
How would she have voted at a polling station that used machines rather than pencils and pieces of paper?
It's interesting that the article you linked to mentions problems with optical scan machines. I had previously thought optical scan machines were okay, due to their simplicity and reliable paper trail. I wonder if any of those counties in Florida did recounts to double-check the discrepancies.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
That attitiude of you are either with me or against me gets REAL old. People need to know that their government is honest and that the people elected are honest. We have not had an honest president since carter. Hence the reason why this election was most likely stolen.
Hitler, USSR, etc. all got started by groups of people with the same attitude. We are far more fasicst than people are willing to acknowledge. Worse, we are killing our country with huge deficits and unjust wars.
I suspect that if the exit pollers gave the true results, you'd have had the networks reporting that "None of your fucking business" held a huge lead.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
fast way to read the original article
It is also the non-partisians who's vote is effected by misleading or biased exit poll reporting.
I know it's dumb, but there ARE people who feel compelled to vote for 'the winner'. Thier ego's are so week, or they so desire to be on the winning side, that they vote for whomever is ahead.
Also there are people who honestly can't decide who to vote for, but feel they must vote, so the assume if one candidate is significantly ahead then they must be the better candidate or so many wouldn't be voting for him.
Plus Both sides have reason to fear "oh we've lost then no point trying" or "Well we've won, no point wasting my time if we got it so in hand." Neigther side is willing to lose a vote through eigther circumstance. This is why exit polling was so downplayed this time around, after the debacle on the calling of florida last time.
Plus the demographics for not voting because "we/they already won" is not necesarily and even distribution for both parties in every precinct. In some party A) will lose or gain votes from thier side more than party B) and in others it's the other way around. This happens in the wrong precint in the wrong state and a lot of electoral college votes could shift if it's a close race.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
System is approximately the same as in Ukraine, but - don't mix two entirely different things:
In Ukraine the issue was that while working with the good old paper based voting method there are serious doubts about the overall elections since:
- Counting process of ballots was often handled by officials ordered by current government.
- There were cases (a lot of them, actually - almost as a law) where independent observers were denied any access to the counting or verifying process.
- People were denied entry in the voting office. Sometimes with guns.
- Current government didn't even bothered to hide the fact that they are holding a good old CCCP elections where the supposed candidate wins with 99% of voters voting for him (and 100% of registered voters appears at the voting office). Just smarter and with nicer looking percentages (for all of those who are watching the results from outside to make at least an impression).
- Ukraine still has a lot of CCCP legacy and populacy generally active and concerned about their future and democratic process.
In USA:
- Electronic voting had numerous problems starting with hanging machines up to a machines that had votes on them when firing up at the beginning of voting process or changed their mind about vote count during the voting process.
- In addition to the above - there is NO WAY to even detect any problems with voting machines afterwards. And while at it, most election officials, noting such problems, reacted - "oh, never mind, we have voters at the door, nothing can be done about that". And later the only results there is, simply is. No chance to recount the results and no chance to detect that recound may be required.
- A lot of ballots simply wasn't counted. As an interesting sidenote - a very significant portion of them were people who, quite correctly, distrusting electronic voting process required paper "absentee" (or how they are correctly called) ballots - basically ensuring that votes from significant portion of the population that IS aware about those problems, simply were not counted.
- PostElection statistical analysis shows or do not shows that actual results produced doesn't matches with the exit polls or population counts. But again - this is statistics.
- Population is generally inert about political issues and under quite strong impression that a) democracy and b) fair voting is guranteed in USA.
As a summary - those two are entirely different things. In Ukraine people had election under guns and population is on the verge of revolt (similarry to what happened in 1990s in CCCP (not to count, of course, that CCCP was the ones that mastered and ordered revolts then)). In USA people, except for a very small and smarter group of population, naively believes that everything is fine and okay.
This is the thing that worries me more. In Ukraine will be bloodshed, but at least - they will eventually get to democratic election process. In USA, if everything will go on as of now, we will have election day parties where nobody will ever bother to pretend that their vote counts and the results will be prepared by Administration anyway.
In short - In Ukraine people care - they will get it soon. In USA the averange voter cares for his sixpack and a tv.
It's quite a comparison to the situation in the Ukraine. Even bush says the whole world is watching. Apparently the bush administration thinks that no one is watching the situation in the U.S. Well, if they can have a do-over in the Ukraine, why not in the U.S.?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
September 1, you move.
October 1, you re-register.
October 15, you vote absentee in your old precinct.
Election day, you vote in your new precinct.
January 5, new registrar alerts old registrar that you registered on October 1.
February 1, computer check of changed registrations at old precinct shows you voted absentee AFTER you registered elsewhere, effective October 1.
February 2, after some phone calls to verify there wasn't a paperwork error, a warrant is issued for your arrest. The charge: Illegal voting.
Alternative scenario:
You are a known [insert locally powerful political party here] supporter. All records of your misdeeds magically disappear.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The Swiss system doesn't provide propper 2-factor authentication, as both pieces of information are something the user knows. No biometric or hardware token authentication is invoved. Itercepting the card and knowing a little about the person will give an attacker access.
Even 3-factor authentication doesn't provide foolproof security, unless you mean secure against fools as attackers.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
You forgot the added bonus: everyone gets to feel like a winner, because they backed the right horse!
"He liked Democracy. One Man, One Vote. He was the Man, and the vote was His."
But either way.... its fucked up
Maybe the US is becoming complacent to democracy. The Ukraine hasn't been free for that long and so its people know what the alternative is like, and will fight for it. To be honest, from the outside, it seems a lot of people in the US and many other democratic countries just don't care...
It could be made anonymous using public key authentication , read up on the work of david chaum on anonymous and secure e-cash. simply 1 token allows 1 vote. secure the token dispensation (electoral roll) and secure the voting machine which could be a website or a pc running with a browser and a net connection and checked by third parties.
personally i see an approach like this to be only way to get secure and anonymous e-voting. bonus no disputed elections, no need for recounts though in theory they could be performed.voters could check there vote, and verify it went to who it was they voted for.
on the topic of diebold and bush , i just say diebold has a history of insecure machines based on what i have read and shouldn't be allowed near it with a barge pole. also the source code for voting should be open , and the exes able to be checksummed so independant authorities can verify the software is the version it says it is.
Disclaimer : I'm not a fucking american and i give thanks for that.
Historically, I bet there have been tons of screwed up things that happen in US elections with noticable rates of error (not this few thousand votes type crap, like 10% not counted) How many electronic voting machines were used in the swing states? Ohio was something like 98+% non-electronic.
There are solutions but they aren't technical, first step, do away with the secret ballot, register a voter to a vote, record that, maybe even make it a public record. How's that going to make the people that are convinced of fraud feel? They are already paranoid, that would kill them. Regardless of the technology, methods of recounting only provide fuel for the masses to get pissed off. Electronic machines with a paper trail, well what happens when a recount changes the outcome? You do another one. You'll never get the same results (counts) from multiple recounts, even a hand recount, humans screw up, ballots may become corrupted by the recounting process and being handled. At best it will confirm the outcome of the election multiple times with different counts of the votes. As has been mentioned many times, what if they change the software that counts them? In Boulder colorado they had that problem, the printer had different specs for the scan sheets than the scanners, the good thing was that they couldn't read the ballots rather than miscounting the results. So the actual votes themselves are questioned, then the reciept can be questioned, then the machine that recounts the reciept can be questioned, then if there is a recount everything can be questioned again.
The real solution is to have some ideas and generate support for your candidate without snap polls. Right now they are using all the same data to formulate their "opinions" that the elections have to be close, it's not that the country is divided, I think they want us to believe that, it's that they are feeding us a bunch of bullshit ideas and at the end of the day both parties are in the pockets of a few big corporations, we can't vote for a different party to cause change.. As long as the American political process is this way, all future elections will be close like this until the electorate becomes jaded enough to stop showing up again.
Because all of the claims of fraud in the US election have been, or are being investigated. The same cannot be said for Ukraine.
Did Clinton invade Iraq? No. So it's not hypocritical for him to have tried to keep from getting sent to war. Bush on the other hand wants to avoid the war himself while sending others into harms way.
And this volunteer army you go on about... Did they volunteer to serve and protect their country, or to go fight a war based on lies? Maybe it was short sighted of them, but they didn't sign up for a pointless war to back Dubya's revenge.
Those hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths mean something to me, as did the offensive policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush didn't lift a finger to help any of them - they only became his justification after he didn't catch Osama and didn't find the WMDs he lied about.
Note that I'm not saying this to support any other president or candidate - Bush is just worst.
Actually you can prove that the machines reported incorrectly, in some cases.
For example, there was at least one case in Florida where the machine reported more votes for GW than actual registered voters.
Tell me there's a logical explanation for that.
You guys ALWAYS forget Payroll taxes after repeatedly being reminded.
One has to wonder if it's intentional.
See, if you forget about payroll taxes, you can claim Reagan never raised taxes. You can claim that revenue increased even though taxes were lowered.
Oh how convenient your memory is!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Cross state variances in the accuracy of exit polling appear to have largely correlated with the kinds of voting technology used.
Why should we expect variances in voter response to exit polls based on the technology voters used to vote. Sorry, I don't buy it.
Aww whats wrong, you can dish out ad hominem attacks but can't take it? If your argument adds up to roughly "neener neener you can't count from 1" or "neener neener you don't have every ballot choice memorized nationwide", then you're just blowing a whole hell of a lot of hot air.
So what is it now, we're only supposed to care about what goes on in our own county? Its ok if Florida falls off into the sea as long as we don't live there? Quite alright if the whole state becomes a monarchy and sells fiefdoms, as long as they still get to vote for the president?
I guess I'm just not supposed to care. I should grease up, grab my ankles and worship the holy dollar like everyone else, democrat and republican alike? Its not like the company I work for does business in Florida and we care about the local tax rates, the local shipping ordinances, etc. Oh wait, we do! Am I supposed to abandon the pride I have in my country and the way we do things because people like you refuse to face the fact that people have been corrupted by their power?
Not once did you have anything to say about the truth of the facts being presented. Remember that facts, when true, are unbiased. The truth is neither democratic or republican, it simply is. I guess since you had nothing intelligent to add besides your observation on how to count (which turned out to be unfounded since it turned out the original poster had pasted that from the court proceedings), I Had Been Trolled.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
In other consipiracy smashing news (that doesn't get due press)... try this debunking of the myth that Bush's wins in democratic counties was statisticly impossible.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
But Clinton did bomb Seribia, Afghanistan and the Sudan. Do they not count?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
i don't get the thing about the sperm sample. but that's ok, i'm a lesbian, so big deal.
Yeah well here in American, how would you know?
i think we hold the most transparent election process in the world
And no doubt that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11 and that WMD are still hidden in Iraq. I have no problem with Bush winning fair and square --- if the majority of Americans want a fundamentalist idiot for president, so be it. But with buggy, unreliable, completely unverifiable voting machines, there is absolutely no way to tell. "Voting" on Nov 2 was a Third World joke.
What do you call this?
Or this?
Or this?
Beyond that, the point is that a president does *have the power* to instate a draft, and it seems worth having a president who understands the full implications of that power.
In any case, I find it strange that you call Bush and Kerry children during Vietnam, but yet our all-volunteer military is mostly composed of persons the same age. If today's 18 year-olds are adult enough to make such a binding decision, wasn't Bush old enough not to make a "childish" decision during Vietnam?
What is even stranger is that the opscan machines seem to be the worst.
;-) Maybe maybe not....
Perhaps it is that they use older pre-Y2K versions of the software? Or is it tampering?
"All your votes are belong to W"
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How does public-key encryption prevent me from intimidating someone into voting for who I want them to while they're sitting at their computer?
But, obviously, that's not what the powers that be wanted, apparently. Unless they REALLY ARE too stupid to figure out that what you said is what is needed / wanted.
It's AS IF they wanted to make a system that made cheating difficult to impossible to detect. Nah, couldn't be...
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Rationalism.
The trouble lies only half with the psychopath. The other half lies with those who do backflips in order to rationalize the psyschopath's insane & destructive behavior.
The United States is going down the flusher; economically, militarily, socially, politically. You name it, Bush is deliberately trashing his country, and he's only getting started. It takes work to do so much damage so quickly.
--You voted for somebody you didn't like simply in order to vote against Bush, so you obviously recognize on some level what kind of specimen Bush is. If that is so, then what on earth makes you think he is honest and well-meaning enough to not to attempt to corrupt an election?
As 'sick and tired' as you may feel, to pretend that the current course of the U.S. is, -or ever was- in the hands of voters is a product of naivete. --But if that is too alarming thought for a fragile sense of reality, then sure, go back to the rationalist's pretend world where Television News always tells the truth, Terrorists are not encouraged by those with stock in the arms industry, (like the Bushes), those Anthrax spores didn't originate from a U.S. military lab, Flu shots are good for you, and Wellstone's plane went down accidentally. And where Bush would never, never cheat to win an election.
Stupid people are the reason the world is going to hell. Thank you for your contribution.
-FL
Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system,
Nor should insecure, unmonitored, unverifiable elections systems be used. In case you RTFA, that's the point of this f-cking thread.
The point is, without any kind of verification, all you HAVE are the poll results! This is terrible, and why thhis is oposed unilaterallyhere.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
CBS News: Exit polls show that Candidate A has taken a COMMANDING lead in Ohio.
Supporters of Candidate B: Well, shit, there's no use voting, we're going to lose anyway.
Or...
Supporters of Candidate B: I gotta get to the polls before it's too late!
~UP
Eat the Path.
I had long since suspected that there was something foul in latest elections in India, where electronic voting machines were extensively used. the way congress won the elections, it was unexpected to everyone, even to congress.
What a bullshit statement , that fault is common to every form of voting.Frankly its upto a person if they want to vote. How do you solve your problem with postal votes?How bout normal votes with people in adjacent booths?essentially what voters are concerned about is that only eligible votes count (only one vote per person) and the fact that the vote they cast gets counted for that candidate.
It would seem to me that this could EASILY backfire...
News organization: "Candidate A has taken a COMMANDING lead in battleground state B."
Supporters of candidate B: "I thought we had it in the bag and I didn't need to go vote, I'd better get moving!"
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Sadly the ones who can don't believe in democracy, because it dilutes their power to act decisively. An elected leader will always flip-flop to (aka respect) the nation's wishes (that's democracy) or else he has all the makings of a world changing dictator.
Go home, read some history and look at the people who made real differences in this world (Hitler to the Pharoahs)Remember Hitler was voted into power by a majority vote... In 2050 you might hear the same about George W .
I have been finding a few Xenophobic tendencies in USA and the Patriot act is very similar to the Nazi "Law for the Protection of the People and the State". Btw , Read this review by BBC.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Read your AP sites, Ukraine starting widespread election investigation today.
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
If America loves democracy so much, it should be up in arms about this. Check out Ukraine - they know how to get things done. They see election fraud, they get uppity. America sees election fraud, they turn on the TV and forget it. Apathy kills.
Clinton won twice with far greater margins and there was more controversy throughout his terms than Bush has experienced. Bush is no Rhodes scholar, has no "mandate" in the sense of a significant voting majority (if any) backing him, and may have "won" his first election through the Supreme's fiat. We will never know now.
His second election is now tainted by questionable results in key states, especially Ohio, the HOME of Diebold, where the discrepancy between the "vote" and the exit polling is so gross it looks as if the managers of the latest Ukrainian national election were in charge. The results were so questionable that in any other country the US would have been questioning them. His best serving cabinet members are gone and the proposed candidates are "yes" persons to a body, who have toed the president's line from the day they entered the Whitehouse as staff, despite the country's best interests.
If there isn't controversy over the president (any president really) the US is tetering on it's last legs as a democratic republic.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I didn't even have to RTFA - just from the submitter, I could tell that TFA was probably just a bunch of ignorant tripe... after all, they do refer to Slashdot as "news for nerds" when a more accurate reference would be "whining political liberals"...
"I know it's dumb, but there ARE people who feel compelled to vote for 'the winner'. Thier ego's are so week, or they so desire to be on the winning side, that they vote for whomever is ahead."
I'd give you an insightful, I actually have mod points too, but I just have to reply: This phenomenon is much, much more common than people believe, mostly because it doesn't work as obviously as it may seem from your argument. It's a little like women preferring rich men. Few would admit it, it's just that when Bush leads on the polls his speeches sound so much more reasonable, and his politics just become so much sexier!
This becomes especially apparent after one side has won. I haven't looked at any hard statistics for this, but judging by the media, Bush's popularity _soared_ after the election.
The more popular a position is, the easier it is to hold it, and vice versa. You don't have to have a weak ego to go with the winner.
This phenomenon has a more sinister side, which is called 'Contempt for weakness'.
I'd say this is a very important thing to remember in any election, but perhaps especially so in states where the population is sharply divided, or the political climate in general is very populistic.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Well, in a way the cycle is inevitable. People grow content, resign their rights, then end up with a dictatorship.
The Weimar Republic didn't even take too long to be replaced by the Third Reich. The French Revolution produced... emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The Romans killed Caesar to keep him from becoming king, and preserve their precious republic. Then named his successor, Octavian Augustus, _emperor_, high priest, tribune of the plebs, and half a dozen other titles. (And FFS, a noble as tribune of the plebs is freakin' ridiculous.) Ancient Greece, that was the birthplace of democracy (and gave us the word for it too), and... periodically some of the worst dictatorships in history. Etc.
Human civilization itself, was born of the water despotism of Messopotamia. I bet those people felt very secure at first knowing that those nice people are operating the water dams for them. Then it became a case of "pay up and obey, or we'll cut off your only water supply and laugh as you die and your crops wither."
Had some of the most fun ancient empires there too. The Assyrians for example. Now those were fun. That was an empire ruled by sheer terror. Fun stuff like not only having the most horrible executions, but then also burrying the bugger near a road and detailing the execution on the tombstone. Just so the others know what's waiting for them if they don't obey.
And so the wheel of history goes on and on. People become free, grow complacent, take democracy for granted, then they become slaves again. I suppose it can't be helped. The US is more of an exception, having lasted this long without a proper despotism. But, heck, they can't last for ever either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I appretiate the compliment. And I do prefer insightfull replies to insightfull mods. I've plenty of /. Karma, which I rate lower than good conversation.
But yeah that's basically it. I phrased it to give people room to say 'glad I'm not one of <i>those</i> idiots. Rather than have them think ' i bet he thinks everyone is an idiot and probably me to'.
A corralary to this is that you don't necesarrily have to be rich or successull to get the reaction this creates, just carry yourself like you are. Controll of your own body language is a usefull art, though hard to make an automatic thing. I'm not that good at it (yet) but I've seen the difference carefull choices in gesture, posture, and wording can make.
Also being tall helps seriously, they've actually shown that taller people get more respect and better initial impressions from people accross the board.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
That just deals with the claim that the voting was miscounted in certain northern Florida counties that went solidly for Bush despite having an overwhelmingly Democratic (by registration) electorate.
Which, I'll notice, was not on the list.
An interesting thing, though, is why it was capable of being debunked: those counties use paper ballots (optical scan). Using the paper ballots does not seem to harm the counties in question any, and doesn't seem to delay results any more than other methods. Why people object to paper records is beyond me...
Sure, it's not "foolproof", but you'd need a concerted effort to commit election fraud. I think America should look towards this sort of methodology.
As for the paper trail, I guess they could mail out a physical record, or give you two pieces of information - your chosen candidate (for sake of simplicity), and a hash of your number, the candidate's number, and a secret string. You can then resubmit that hash to the auditors if they need to see it, and your vote can be authenticated. Of course, no-one can take that hash to see which way you voted, as unless they know your voter ID and the secret string, the hash is meaningless. or something. :)
That's funny, with Bush's deficit policies, I figured it would vote for Bush when you press, "Pay Later".
I have not yet seen an explanation of how a computer with all its vulnerabilities is a better solution than the mechanical lever machines now in widespread use around the larger metro areas. Their counters can be arranged to be reasonably tamper-proof and if their maintenance doors are under a tamper-resistant seal they can be left unchanged until the next election so that they can be checked after the fact. They are larger and heavier than the computers, but this seems a price worth paying. And they display the whole ballot, not just one screenful.
Of course, Clinton never quite managed a majority of the vote. 43% and 49%, as I recall.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
> Because all of the claims of fraud in the US election
> have been, or are being investigated.
by overworked volunteers. Who are being harassed by Republicans every step of the way. Who will bring their evidence before Republican judges who will throw them out.
there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people
Makes sense- I know if I voted Republican, I'd be ashamed to let anyone know, too.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Your comment is nothing more than a generalization that's trying to explain away an enormous voting discrepancy as simple human mental changes. Can you understand that this has never happened to this degree before? This many exit polls have never lied this badly before. Given how accurate they have been in the past (and really are) there's no reason to doubt them and believe you explanation.
This system has since been open sourced under the GPL license and my new research group here at University College Dublin is working on completing, documenting, evaluating, and formally specifying the system.
I led the evaluation of this system's external network security for the Dutch government while at the SoS Group at Radbound University Nijmegen.
I was also the co-author of the vote tally application for the European Elections in Holland. That application was written in less than eight weeks using formal methods to ensure that the software of extremely high quality and indeed every vote was counted. This system was written in Java with JML annotations and was partially statically checked (verified) with ESC/Java2.
See the paper "Electronic and Internet Voting in The Netherlands for more high-level information.
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://kind.ucd.ie/~kiniry/
Lecturer
UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics
this is not flame bait but a true opinion of mine. What other country do you think will hand over ballots to say a newspaper to count by hand.
I FIRMLY believe in the US election process. Its the damn liberals that think its a "big sham" and the election was stolen.
Dude, do some research before you try to "discredit" this. Diebold's own documentation shows that these machines run exactly like this, on either NT4 or 2000, and they ADVERTISE that GEMS works with Office. Yeah, it works particularly well with Access. This wasn't done on ME, it was on 2000 server, and if you bother to read the article I specifically address exactly what you're trying to say. This same demo was performed by a grandmother on national TV for Howard Dean. Here's an idea - why don't you try it yourself? Let us know how it goes. Chuck
Why should we expect variances in voter response to exit polls based on the technology voters used to vote.
Probably for the same reasons that there are variances in voter response to the actual election based on the technology they use to vote.
Well, another possibility is that the people doing the exit polling have a political agenda (specifically, they wanted to see Kerry in and Bush out) and so they either cherry-picked the precincts for exit polling or managed to get at least some precinct exit polls slanted in their preferred direction through poor methodology.
I don't get why there's such a comparative reluctance to believe actual election results, which at least have some safeguards in place to reduce the inaccuracy of the result; and at the same time people are willing to accept exit polls as gospel truth despite the complete lack of accuracy safeguards. Occam's Razor and all that. Yes, great care must be taken in determining actual election results, but that care must be applied without reference to outside sources of bias (such as exit polls).
You don't understand. The issue is not voter preference but statistical anomalies in measuring them.
Exit polling is targeted, large-n and technology-neutral. When its accuracy starts to correlate with binary variables like Paper_Record_Exists or Election_Results_Auditable there is reason to be suspicious.
So don't hold back.... If you've got a non-vacuous explanation by all means share it. The statisticians in the crowd would love to hear.
No. Not unless he ordered the army to fight an unpopular, pointless, and mishandled war like Vietnam or Iraq v2.
The issue is that Bush specifically did everything possible to avoid being sent into battle and then orders troops to do what he was afraid of. Clinton was a weenie as well, but at least he let the troops use cruise missiles for the most part.
Lest you think I'm just a democrat, I think Bush Sr. paid his dues - there's no question he was in WW2. Junior's just a hypocritical coward.
A reported did. There were a few votes they counted that the machine didn't but they would have been counted if a manual recount was required. His finding were in line with the machine. He check 3 Countys in FL that have way over 50% Dem reg but went for GW. What they found was that there counts were basicly the same as the machines and nothing major was wrong with the optical scan machines totals.
That's certainly a possibility but it's also statistically moot. One can be certain that a political bias has been present in the exit pollers at every poll in recorded history. This election shouldn't have been any different.
I don't get why there's such a comparative reluctance to believe actual election results, which at least have some safeguards in place to reduce the inaccuracy of the result; and at the same time people are willing to accept exit polls as gospel truth despite the complete lack of accuracy safeguards.
For starters the pollsters don't have a financial stake in the outcome of the election, barring the stake we all have as Americans, stockholders, current or future retirees, workers of various types, etc. There isn't a logical reason for the pollster to lie simply because they have nothing to gain. On the other hand the actual candidates, some of which may have direct or influential control over the instruements used to conduct the election, have an enormous financial and political stake in the election. The system should always be questioned. Answers don't come without someone to ask the questions.
Like I said above, the political bias of the individual exit pollers is statistically moot. It's always existed and always will as long as human run the exit polls and collect responses from human voters. In all the years of exit polling a statistical error as great as the perceived one of Nov 2 has never happened. In fact it's never been anywhere near that close. Massive amounts of voters don't suddenly become misleading when talking to exit pollers. Without an external force acting upon them that's a statistical impossibility.
Lets say you're the exit poller at a precint. 100 people vote. 80 talk to you on the way out with 25 ignoring you. 60 say with all the confidence in the world that they voted for candidate A. 20 tell you, also with all the confidence in the world, that they voted for candidate B. Your exit polls indicates that candidate A will win with 60% of the vote with a margin of error of +-20 votes for the voters that wouldn't talk to you. (Exit polls usually have a margin of error of 0.3-5%. When the official results come in that say candidate B won by 80 votes to 20. Wouldn't you say that disagreed with your tried and trued method of exit polling? What about a smaller margin. Lets say 60/40, or even 51/49. You were predicting 20-40/60-80. Wouldn't you question the results of the election when you own data so drastically disagrees with the results?
In 30 or 40 years they'll make some movies about this. I can't wait to see what they're going to say. It should be interesting nonetheless.
You have opened this splendid THREAD. Thank you very much.
I'm most honored to see the THREAD opened by the respectful person as you.
I respect you very much. I will tell my children and grandchildren about your exploit.
Whenever I read this THREAD, I feel better as if my whole body is purified.
I wonder why the nice person like you is not invited to the garden party.
I respect you very much.
Take care, and please watch over us.
Thank you again for this lovely THREAD.
Yeah, because conservative Democrats would NEVER vote for a conservative candidate, right? My parish in Louisiana is about 70% Democrat and has voted for the Republican presidential candidate overwhelmingly since 1980. The majority of the local government is Democrat, and the local representative is a Republican.
In many rural areas, political party affiliation has more to do with the dispensation of favors than any ideology.
Really, exit polls shouldn't be the only way to verify an election? Ya think?
The problem is in many cases THERE ARE NO OTHER WAYS TO VERIFY.
Bush had less than 50% both times too
I always lie to exit polsters. It's great fun!
No Ohio County used Diebold Electronic Voting Machines (See Press Release Below) Ohio did not use modern electronic voting machines in this election. Six counties use an older form of electronic voting, which has a means of verifying the accuracy of the vote. In 69 Ohio Counties, punch card ballots were used.
(July 16 Press Release) Blackwell Halts Deployment Of Diebold Voting Machines For 2004 July 16, 2004 COLUMBUS - Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state's second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues. Hardin, Lorain and Trumbull counties had selected to use new Diebold equipment this November. Those counties will use their current voting devices in 2004. "As I made clear last year, I will not place these voting devices before Ohio's voters until identified risks are corrected," Blackwell said. "Diebold Election Systems has successfully addressed many, but not all, of the problems that were identified in our first security review. The lack of comprehensive resolution prevents me from giving county boards of elections a green light for this November.
http://www.ohiodems.org/index.php?display=ReleaseD etails&id=192686
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people.
I'd just like to point out that this argument has been made on both sides of the political court. Supposedly left-leaners are also far less likely to share their votes than right-leaners. It all depends on who you ask.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.