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WA Governor Race Ends
Republican Dino Rossi decided last night to not appeal yesterday's decision by Chelan judge John Bridges to let last November's governor election stand -- the closest in U.S. history -- which keeps Christine Gregoire, who won by 129 votes after two recounts, in office. The Republicans claimed that fraud and mistakes far exceeded the difference between the candidates, and that statistical analysis showed Rossi might have received more legal votes. Bridges concluded there were thousands of incorrect votes and other major problems, but that the Republicans didn't meet the high threshold of proof that the result was incorrect. He also said he feared current law will make elections problems even worse, and urged the government and voters to work to fix the system.
In races this close, call it a statistical tie, and run a revote.
You'll get a bigger turnout, and possibly a true outcome.
Jay | http://oldos.org
GW Bush won his office through some questionable means. Not once, but twice. Every single instance of an election problem worked out in Bush's favor. When a voting machine screwed up, it was inevitably adding votes to Bush, or counting Kerry votes as votes for someone else. Right now in Ohio, there's a big scandal where money meant for investment wound up in the pockets of Republican campaigns.
t m
I predict that some people will try to mod me down to suppress the truth, but they will fail.
More information:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.h
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I sure am glad that SlashDot covers these important technological issues because we sure won't be able to read about this story in the mainstream press.
You got the white house, give us one governor in one state.
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What he was asking for was that the questionable results be set aside and the state be given a chance to have an honest election. (i.e. without King County's felons and dead voting)
That being said, I will abide by the rule of law and accept Gov. G. as our overlord for now. On the other hand I sure hope we can all work to prevent this from happening again.
Perhaps those of us in Island county can set the example since it seems we were one of the few places that seem to have a properly working election board.
Share and Enjoy! (tm)
This doesn't justify the errors in Washington, but it doesn't justify villifying one side either. Just about everyone cheated, somewhere.
I believe that it is vital, if democracy is to have any meaning, to work on developing a system that is provably reliable. It is possible to create essentially tamper-proof cryptographic signatures. If you add votes via a version control system of some kind, then sign every "version", you can "prove" the stream has not been modified since being created.
The vote would be in the form of a written-out XML file, so that it was absolutely clear as to what a vote was. Signatures would be in the form of an RSA public-key signature, where the signer was the voting machine, not the voter.
The first "signature" would cover the first vote. The second would cover both the first and second votes plus the first signature, etc.
This would prevent tampering, but it would also prevent database corruption as votes could only be added via the intended interface, as the signature entry would not be present.
There are other methods. I've suggested before that you could have "anonymous" encryption - unassociated private keys, with the voter using a public key they were provided with as their "voter registration card". That way, the vote would still be anonymous, but as only valid decryption keys would be used, only valid encryption keys could be used to generate the vote and provably only used once.
Indeed, you wouldn't even need high-tech voting. Anti-counterfeit measures used on currency would work just as well on ballot papers. Voting stations would then need to account for every ballot paper (unused, discarded, vote) going through them. It would make it considerably harder to add votes prior to the election, or for anyone to swipe a ballot box in transit and change the contents.
In the first two cases, system errors would not add valid information and therefore not produce fake votes, and the requirements to perpetrate electoral fraud (by a voter, candidate or party) would be raised sufficiently high to put it beyond the reach of the usual suspects.
In the third case, the bar would be lower than with the high-tech solutions, but definitely raised from where it is now. The idea is not to make fraud impossible, but to put it beyond the reach of "opportunists" and outside the realm of "accidents". There will always be people who try to beat any system, but you can reduce the number of people who have the skill to succeed from a few hundred million to a few hundred.
In other words, we don't need faulty systems in this day and age. Faulty systems are a choice, not a necessity, and I personally regard them as a remarkably stupid choice.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why can't we develop a more accurate system for counting votes? With our current resources, the court contest in Washington should have been a moot point: we should have known the exact vote totals without room for doubt.
I think a reasonable margin of victory could be at about 0.1%. For ten millions votes, you would need to win by 10,000. For 100,000 votes, that's only 100 votes.
Currently, Washington State does have a method whereby close elections are handled without long, drawn-out challenges. The legislature can refuse to accept any result with a majority vote. If there was any candidate for the legislature to exercise this power, the governor's race of 2004 was it. It was too close and there were too many weird things happening. It was a Democrat controlled legislature and they refused to accept responsibility, instead telling the courts to fix it. The courts made the right decision and explained that the remedy that should be applied can't be applied because they are bound by the law as it is written. The voters are going to have to have the final say on whether the legislators made the right decision or not.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Wow....all you need to do is replace 'Gore' and 'Gov. G' with 'Bush' and 'Rossi' with 'Gore', and you have exactly what Dems were saying after the 2000 election.
Funny how being on the other side of the issue can change your tune, isn't it?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
That didn't happen after Bush v. Gore, not even in Florida. I don't see why Washington should expect anything different.
You need to read the news. The largest problems were supposedly with absentee ballots, which don't use those electronic voting systems.
The Republican judge in this case found against every point the Republicans brought up for their case, including the fraud charges.
No, Rossi tried everything he could to become governor, including the fraud that got his original cheating victory thrown out. When he originally won (by the skin of his cheating teeth), he blabbed all about how Gregoire should let him keep the office "for the good of the state", without all that "divisive" complaining. When the tables were turned, Rossi of course ignored all his own self-serving "advice", and the "good of the state", in favor of his attempts to try again in the courts himself. Then, when he got his day in court, he charged Gregoire's campaign with "fraud", but presented no evidence of fraud. Just evidence of the same kind of badly run election we've got all over the country, that usually favors the Republicans running their state election commissions.
You can try to spin this (repeated) Republican defeat in attempting to take office through a court. But it's obvious that Rossi was doing everything he could, even things he couldn't, to take the Governor's office, regardless of the merits, or the damage to Washington. Of course politicians do anything to win, but we don't have to like it.
Now that both sides have been hurt in their war over shoddy state election work, maybe there's a mutual interest in fixing the system. Continuing to fight the war after its over will only get in the way of that more important work.
--
make install -not war
From the Seattle Times (emphasis mine): [Judge] Bridges said there was no evidence to suggest fraud, intentional misconduct or any attempt to manipulate the election. He said election officials "attempted to perform their responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner."
... clear and convincing evidence that improper conduct or irregularity procured Ms. Gregoire's election," the judge said.
Now please stop spreading your lies.
While he had stern words about how King County ran the election, Bridges said that even there, Republicans failed to show any intentional wrongdoing.
"While there is evidence of irregularities, as there appears to be in every election based on the testimony of various county election officials, there is no
You are a nutball.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23