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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
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)
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