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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?
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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!!!
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
I've got a hunch that if Kerry had won, we wouldn't have heard anything from these groups.
Of course not, if Kerry had won we would now be bombarded by every born-again christian and neoconservative with an access to a TV transmitter, radiostation or an internet website about how the American people is about to be smitten by the wrath of the lord like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah for electing John "the antichrist" Kerry as president. Same whining, different theme. You can point at alot of things that have come out of the Democrats corner as being less than honorable. However, It's not as if the Republican partisans have behaved entirely honorably throughout the election and its aftermath either. The swiftboat veterans alone took mudslinging and character assassination in American politics to a new low.
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
Maybe these systems are being built based on the wrong models.
People often compare these machines to ATM machines, electronic cash registers, and on-line transaction systems. OK - maybe there is some valid basis for comparison to on-line transaction systems.
When I think of e-voting systems, I look at them and the appropriate design discipline in terms of embedded [weapons] systems and controllers.
- The choice (or new development) of an O/S should reflect only the requirements for the application (in this case e-voting) to be supported
- Security policy should be formalized
- formal tests against policy should be tested
- all privacy must be preserved
- all transactions should be logged as appropriate
** without violating policy - not necessarily an easy trade-off
- systems should fail to a safe state. This takes some consideration when dealing with the nature of voting systems
- appropriate training and maintenance to be mandated. no use of non-certified and properly readied systems
- auto-detection of the system entering 'invalid' states. Has once vote been recorded per lever-pull? Do votes since power-on reflect total votes? Flag erroneous results
- you get the idea...
Anyway, I think that they need a rigorous approach from design-to-maintenance-to retirement.
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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And those machines have got to be used hundreds of thousands of times a day in this country! It's past time for americans to wake the fuck up and start demanding to know why the fucking automated cash touch screen cash register at the fucking grocery store does flawlessly what these idiots claim they can't do for voting.
The Farewell Tour II
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.
How can there possibly be this many "memory card failures?" I mean, really, even if you go down to Best Buy and just buy a pile of CF cards, they just don't fail that often. I've only bought a dozen or so cards, but I've used them a bunch in the last 4 years or so, my GB card gets filled nearly full every day and then erased, as I transport data around, and I've never had a failure. How many times have you heard of thumb drives failing? I never have.
I'd think if they bought good cards, pretested them, and used a filesystem that could guard against corruption, there should hardly ever be a problem. I could imagine maybe putting up with ONE failure across all deployed machines per election. More than that, there's something wrong.
I personally feel that the companies building these machines do not take the job seriously enough. I think this is something that ought to be open-sourced. There are a HELL of a lot of people who would GLADLY donate their time to vet this code.
This is the whole problem. Flawed election, and then everyone says "Well, Thank goodness that's over. We can stop thinking about it." Then they're all completely suprised when it happens four years later.
"But if the economy continues to improve over the next 4 years and the war in Iraq is concluded the Democrats major issues will have gone away."
If everything is better then all is well.
But, I think you'll find Democrats having a hard time beliving that America's troops will be back home in four years and our economy will be back on it's feet. (Remember National Debt == Future Taxes) But if it does happen, if things do get better, if the national debt goes down, if we got back the freedoms we lost right after 9/11, and if we bring our troops home (alive), all over the next four years, are you suggesting the democrats in general will be unhappy?
Don't be silly. If Bush and the Republican congress can really make this country a better place, then Yay! Four more years! We just don't think he can do it. He certainly didn't with his first four.
We're not voting for prom queen here. We're voteing for who we think can make a diference.
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?
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?
Slashdot doesn't have permission to repost the stories, but guess what? No one cares. Why?
Because we're expected to respect the copyright and wishes of people who develop GPLed software, anf ignore those of other people? Or just people we don't like for some reason?
It's quite simple. You want someone to respect your copyrights (or even just those you agree with), you have to respect the copyrights of others. Just because they ask for something in return for access to the material (money, registration details, your first born, whatever) that you'd rather not give doesn't make violating their copyright right.
NO ONE WANTS TO REGISTER FOR FUCKING NEWS.
THEN DON'T FUCKING READ IT. Read it somewhere else. If it's not worth the registration, then go without.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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
Who the hell cares if Bush or anyone else tried to get out of being thrown into the slaughter pit that was Vietnam. Bush dodged the draft by joining the reserves and doing everything in his power to get out. I don't see a damn thing wrong with that. I would have done the exact same thing. If I couldn't have gotten the family doctor to find an excuse for me to not get FORCED by the government to go fight in a war I didn't want to fight in, I would have merrily joined the reserves and then done everything to keep from being shipped out.
The political environment is obsessed with one-upping each other with stupid minor political victories. For a politician, a single slip of the tongue or off handed comment that any human would make could be the end of their career. This dumb shit about who tried to dodge what or who said what after they got back is fucking childish and completely irrelevant to real issues.
Kerry came back from his four month tour in Vietnam a left wing nut who wanted to freeze the nuclear arms build up leaving the Soviet Union with the advantage. Bush did just about everything to get out of being shot at, and in the ended succeeded.
Who the fuck cares? They were both CHILDREN. You are talking about two boys who were not old enough to fucking drink. Who gives a shit if Kerry jumped off the left end of the pool and Bush ran away? Hell, I know people who grew up in the 70's that were self declared communist who stuffed every drug into their body they could find, and who are now soccer moms and hold management positions in corporations. No one would dig up their childhood to find all the dumb shit they did before they were men.
Who Bush and Kerry were as CHILDREN is utterly irrelevant. There are a lot of good reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry. I could make a big list for both of them. No where on that list would I bother to mention what they did 40 years ago when they were.
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...
That's funny, because last time I used one, I followed the directions. Then it told me to remove the unpurchased item from the bag. I had no unpurchased item in my bag. So, I took out a carrot I bought. Then after doing the next item, it had me put the item in the bag... the item was already in the bag. So I put the carrot back in. Then after repeating this cycle a few times, I just gave up and went to a human.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
I think the issue of Bush being a draft-dodger comes to the forefront when he sends *other* people's children to war.
To force others to fight for your country when you were not willing to is hypocrisy, and it's relevant to know that about one's president.
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
I think you miss the point entirely. Draft dodgers elected to their position have the right to send a volunteer army arm into war. The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, and this is a stark difference, is that the army fighting in Iraq is made up of men and woman who volunteered to fight in the US armed services. They made a conscious choice to their life to whatever endeavor that the US puts them too. In this case, the congress gave the president the power to go to war, and the president used it. The system worked like it was supposed to. You might not like the outcome. Hell, I don't like the outcome, but the simple fact of the matter is that Iraq is a far cry from being anything like Vietnam so long as it is fought with a volunteer army.
The draft is a disgusting practice. I can't think of anything more revolting then a nation demanding that its citizens surrender their lives against their will. I don't care what the cause is. If the cause is so good and so great, they will do it willingly. If Bush or Kerry dodged the draft or came back to speak against it, good for them. Decrying this disgusting practice or dodging it all together - especially when they are still CHILDREN - doesn't cause me to lose any sleep. If Bush wanted to reinstate the draft, you would certainly have flimsy, but at least credible argument, if you utterly ignoring that you are judging the actions of someone who was just barely a man, some 30 years after the fact.
Dredging up what those two did as children when the government was using violence against its own populace to compel them to go to war is stupid and childish political banter. There are a lot of reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry, but none of those reasons have anything to do with what either one of those children did in Vietnam
I wasn't talking about Kerry vote, (he says didn't mean to actualy USE force, well he shouldn't have voted that way then IMHO) I'm talking about what he actually said. He actually said that we shouldn't vote for him if we didn't believe Saddam should be removed because of his wmds. He said we should take him out. then when Dean got so much traction with jis anti-war crusade he adopted it. Conviently forgetting that he was for removing Saddam and considered, or at least apeared to consider, Saddam a real threat with wmds before the invasion as well as voted for the authority to invade.
Also getting Saddam removed from power started as a Clinton administration policy. Not that Bush wasn't ready to go ahead with it.
There are a lot of things you can point out that don't exactly show Bush in the best light (to put in mildly), but somehow claim the Iraq invasion and the WMD scandle isn't one shared by Kerry is false, the best you can say is that some of the time Kerry left hedge words, or worded things to give himself semantic loopholes should he change his mind.
Mycroft
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"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.
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That's like saying that voting to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War is the same thing as voting to nuke Russia. If you build nukes, it's obvious that you're putting it on the table as an option, but it doesn't logically follow that you automatically support excercising the option to bomb the Soviets back to the stone age. The point of these weapons was the threat they posed; likewise Kerry's position was always that he supported force as an option which would improve the leverage of the United States... which would be available when all other options were exhausted. But from the beginning of the situation, it's clear that war was Bush's first choice.
Yeah, Kerry was too much of a politician- trying to please all Americans simultaneously- but in my mind that would have beat the hell out of W. trying to please just the warmongering neocons, bigoted Bible-thumpers, and greedy Halliburton execs.