Slashdot Mirror
Florida Voting Machine Logs Reveal Anomalies
boot1780 writes "Having 'successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election,' Black Box Voting reports that the 'internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.' Besides the date discrepancies, they claim to have discovered countless other errors and anomalies, including a case of one voting machine being 'powered down 128 times during the election'." Given the findings here, can we have a do-over?
Quitcher whinin' 'bout the digital voting machines. You know as well as I do that the voting machine companies are wiser when it comes to choosing leaders than all you unwashed ignorant masses. (Sarcasm aside, I do hope this makes the national news)
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Does anybody still beleive that this election wasn't fixed? I mean, really. Of course it'll never be proven, but it's so freakin' obvious. Incompetence can only explain so many problems - I think we've passed that point a long time ago.
And once again - no matter what your political persuasion, you need to demand that your representatives introduce or support legislation that requires a voting machine to produce a paper receipt for each vote, or some equally verifiable and recountable paper trail. Any politician that objects to a fair election needs to be fired and replaced.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Stop whining.
Bush stole the election fair and square. It's our (Americans') fault for not creating a massive landslide against him. The fact that a near plurality of people voted for the wanker created an opportunity for Bush 43, his brother, Kathleen Harris and the Republicans to seize power.
History will show that this election was a coup d'état, and that we were the fools who let it happen.
Want to prevent this from happening again? Andrew Tobias is the DNC treasurer: http://www.andrewtobias.com/, send Andy a message and he will tell you how to get involved.
A new factor has come up in to addition to Stalin's old maxim "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
Or something like that. Since the media refuses to acknowledge that there are serious questions about legitimacy under electronic voting, pointing out the problems probably doesn't matter any more - any evidence of problems is perforce "nutty conspiracy theory material" and so is a non-starter.
They found anomolies in 40 machines? How many machines were there in total? Did all of the anomolies favor one candidate or were they seemingly random? Was the constantly rebooting machine having hardware problems? Were the machines with wierd date stamps having hardware clock issues?
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors. Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer.
I can already read the implication that W did the midnight voting himself. Conspiracies theorists amaze me, ie. The discrepancies and problems in the 2000 FLA vote were by and large in counties run by Democrat county clerks (FLA equivalent) You have to really squint your brain to think that Jeb poersuaded them to mess up their job as bad as they did in support of W. That said, yeah, investigate and audit the hell out of those voting machines. Any and all fraud needs to be vigorously prosecuted.
With a bad machine you can just as easily blame the machine as you could someone going in and changing the results.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Common knowledge? That our system is so corrupt that people who do take the time to vote don't matter? I don't care about which side, if any, a person is on. Failing to secure voting and ensuring fair and free elections is the basis for our whole country. Granted it's turned into a joke. However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent.
Yes, it's called "pen, paper and sealed box".
It's massively inefficient, which is a good thing in elections. Efficiency only makes cheating easier.
The only way someone can beat you is by cheating, right?
If there were only one or two instances where people said "Hm, something slightly fishy seems to have happened..." then you'd likely have a point.
But when there are dozens of reports of voting machines not working correctly, and when each and every time the errors seem to be in favor of the party that won... Yeah, I'd say calling shenannigans is justified.
Maybe it'll turn out that the errors didn't actually occur - maybe it'll turn out that the tracking software is fucked, but the votes were counted correctly. Maybe it'll turn out that there was some vast conspiracy. Maybe it'll turn out that the Democrats would have gotten *fewer* votes if the machines had worked properly. Whatever the results, what's important is this:
The machines don't seem to be working correctly when handling a very important task. We need to investigate this, no matter what. It isn't a matter of sour grapes (well, except for some people, maybe) but it IS a matter of finding out what the hell is going on.
Surely you don't think that we shouldn't investigate anomalous situations?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Something many people here and in other predominantly-left forums seem to be missing is that many Americans truly, honestly believed that Bush was the better candidate. I doubt that your average Republican voted for Bush any more automatically than the typical Democrat voted for Kerry, and yet everyone seems to think that only Republicans were partisan voters. Well, guess what: there are sheep on both sides of the fence. Singling out one group of them will only alienate the bloc of voters you should be trying to persuade.
I voted for Bush for various reasons, but I would probably stand alongside you if a recall vote were held today. The time for partisan sniping is over. We need to work together if we want to make a difference.
As a side note to fellow Republicans, his closing advice is just as valid for us. Contact the RNC and make your opinion known. Write to your representatives and senate and let them know that you disagree with executive branch policies. This is your party: step up and take charge of it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The ability of the government to control the media, even in the face of the Internet, is astounding. But then, when half of the voting population is willing to believe anything they say, it's really not that hard for them to keep us "on message." What will really be surprising about this story is if it gets any attention in the mainstream media.
That proves it, humans are incapable of using technology such as computers for important events because there's always someone that tries to/does tamper with the technology to tip the balance.
If even the good ole paper ballot can't do it, exactly who thought something as complex (and programmable) as a computer could make any difference ?
Personally I'm not surprised, it was just waiting to happen.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
A few comments.
The voter should *not* get a "receipt", so that he/she can be paid/blackmailed to vote a certain way. However, the machines should produce a write-only-once piece of human (as well as machine) readable output, such as a paper or plastic card with holes punched or permanent OCR ink markings.
The use of a machine to make selections is OK, but under no circumstances should the "permanent" record of my vote be made on a piece of computer storage media such as a hard disk or flash memory card. That is completely insane.
Our elections MUST have an immutable audit trail, while remaining anonymous. Each voter (or a trusted friend/agent in the case of the visually impaired or otherwise disabled) verifies that the physical record of the vote is as intended, then deposits that record in a container kept under watch by multiple parties.
If the votes are tallied by computers (they're good at that), fine. BUT, a physical record is available for recounts and audits of accuracy.
Anybody wanting a system making auditing impossible must be assumed to be up to fraud. No other interpretation makes sense.
Is it too late? Would a voter initiative for auditable voting simply be rejected by the powers that be already put in place, even if favored by 75% of the public in polls? THIS is the gravest issue facing our democracy now, on which the fate of all other issues hang. It is a coup of horrific proportion. (though corporate financing of election campaigns is a close second to be sure)
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
You've unfortunately fallen into a hole that far too many people do, and it's stolen the thunder out of your argument. This story is about a large number of anomalies in Florida voting machines. You've hyperextended that to "However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent" and even though I'm of a notion to think that voting machines are a bad idea because of their lack of accountability, I start to tune you out as a conspiracy theorist. There's nothing to say that faults in the voting machines were purposeful, nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election. That's not to say that such things didn't happen, but these are different, unconnected things and the stuff in the article does nothing to prove that they did, so tying them together just shows that you're not using logic properly.
Virg
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
You've hit on something very interesting here, and at the risk of an aptly-modded OT ramble, I'd like to expand on it.
Do you ever pay attention to those 'News of the Weird' or 'Offbeat News' sections of your local website / newspaper? While some of it is truly in the oddball category, there is something else going on, and it's much more subtle.
From my perspective, many of these 'offbeat' news stories would fall under another category - "News You Did Not Expect To Hear". That is, the rest of the news is 'safe' news - news that you could have expected to hear, based on the ongoing conditioning by all of the other news you've heard recently. The 'offbeat' news is the unsafe news, that was interesting enough to make it to print, but is otherwise not part of the main program.
For instance, a woman might give birth to a 15 pound baby. This is very unusual, and also quite newsworthy. So why is it tagged as offbeat? Perhaps to prevent distracting the news consumer from the latest strife in the Islamic world?
Color me cynical, but the whole concept of 'offbeat' news seems to be about molding public opinion to the viewpoints of the newsmakers (whoever they are).
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Programming Voting Machines isn't exactly designing rockets, you know. When the task is fairly simple, any anomalies require for explanation either an escalating (and unlikely) level of incompetence...or malfeasance. It's not crazy to say: these machines are made to count and for this simple task they fail depressingly often. WTF? Now, given no direct evidence of specific malfeasance that obviously benefits one party over another, conspiracy theories are premature. However, starting to look in this direction based soley on the failure rate is not as crazy as you make it out to be.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
One of the more heinous human tragedies occured on September 11, 1973.
The democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvadore Allende was overthrown in a coup d'etat by General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime killed thousands of dissidents and other "enemies of the state".
The reason? Allende was a Marxist, and the CIA (and by extension, Richard Nixon) were keen to keep Latin America firmly in the American camp during the Cold War, even if installing fascist dictatorships was necessary.
I'm willing to bet anyone here that we'll attempt something similar in the Palestinian territory, so long as we can keep the Israelis from doing it themselves in some wickedly obvious fashion, like firing a rocket from a chopper, or hare-brained assassination attempts.
Of course, we're far more civilzed at home. We rely on factual information reported in an objective fashion to an educated public.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
How'd you go from errors in an audit log to fraudulent and corrupt? That's a mighty big accusation, do you have some evidence (there's none on BBV) that shows there was deliberate manipulation of votes?
If anyone believes that these sorts of discrepencies are new, or limited to computer voting, he is hopelessly naive. And the assertion that computer voting will make these disrepencies harder to uncover is pure bullshit, as proved by this episode. If a bunch of paper ballots were filled out before election day, or dumped in a river, how would anyone ever know?
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
While I applaud you for trying to maintain a sane and rational outlook and avoid falling into these conspiracy theories, this issue has far too many coincidences for you to dismiss like that. What would it take for you to change your stance from "no biggie, just a little smoke, no fire" to "fuck me, that's an awful lot of coincidence, maybe I should entertain the possibility that something is wrong here."
Hell, even assuming there's zero conspiracy, just a lot of blunders, should still make you nervous as it still means there's been a perversion of democracy.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Every day almost we hear about another computer exploit, some drive by malware download, another botnet, etc, all so some scumbags can make a few thousand dollars. That's it, a few thou. It's easy enough to understand the motivation, and easy enough to see that they use unsecured computers and peoples naievete to accomplish this task.
Now, just imagine,if the scumware guys OWN the computer that you and everyone else uses. Now imagine the scumware guys are looking at CONTROLLING THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT by OWNING that computer.
How much is that worth? Really, how much motivation is there to control TRILLIONS of dollars, not thousands, TRILLIONS and the largest war machine on the planet? Do you see any incentive there, or is all this just another series of "coincidences"? Coups don't happen around the world all the time? Where's the magic document from the truth fairies that says the US can never fall to coup plotters?
Now look at the track record so far of what we have found out these folks, how many lies have been drug out of them? How many people have perished based on the lies, how may large corporate insiders connected to the government have profitted immensely?
You can't do the math on this? What's it going to take, them coming on TV and just announcing it? You fail to be able to take into account all the other information out there? This latest is just another large chunk of evidence, look at ALL of it together, what do you see? I see some serious crimes right up into treason,and the probable perps with the clear motive and the clear opportunity.
Well, of course any type of election system can be rigged. The question here is, which system is more transparent. This just in: electronic voting systems, which are made by companies led by Republicans who "would do anything" to get Bush re-elected (look that up on Google), which can be hacked by Howard Dean on a TV show (well, almost, look that one up, too) and which leave no paper trail, are as transparent as Dick Cheney's politics.
The Pen, Paper and Box combo is the most transparent system there is. America, ditch those stupid machines and quit being a high-tech banana republic.
Well, the People's Republic of California used those dumb punchcards for YEARS and nobody every whined about hanging or dimpled chads there. Oh and while we're on the subject, Clinton didn't win the popular vote but happened to win enough electoral votes to get elected. Can we have a do-over for that too?
Let me just adjust my tinfoil hat, ahhhhh there we go.
"nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election"
Try telling that to the QA people for an air traffic control systems or something more serious than life and death, somethinggggg, something like a stock exchange. We have systems across a large chunk of the planet that do a very good job at preventing planes and stockmarkets from crashing. People would also get pretty fucked off if the gazzillion dollar lotteries or even the local bookie had "disconnected anomolies".
Maybe it was "fool play" rather than "foul play" but whoever is in charge of running the election should, at a minimum, step aside until the negligence (or otherwise) is investigated with the rigor a technological disaster desrves.
Even if the GP is making heavy use of a "conclusion mat", nobody has "stolen the thunder", it's just can't be heard over the noise of the media steamtrain as it endlessly wizzes past.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And someone who has physical access to the old paper systems can't make votes disappear almost as easily?
I dunno, how exactly would you make 65,000 pieces of paper disappear without anyone noticing? I think you could probably hide a few in your pockets, but what about the next few thousand pounds of votes? You certainly couldn't do it in a few seconds or without a lot of accomplices.
I appreciate you trying to put things in perspective -- but the entire point of electronic voting is that it was supposed to be MORE secure and MORE fraud-resistant than paper. What we have right now is, if anything, the worst of both worlds -- just as tamper-able as old voting machines, with the added bonus of being able to magically change thousands or millions of votes with no more skill than it takes to do a basic card trick.
When an entire city's electorate is represented on a chip the size of a postage stamp, the requirements for physical secrity are much greater than they ever were for what was literally truckloads of paper. And the requirements for auditing and athenticity verification are that much higher.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Consider that the chairman of Diebold is a key fundraiser for Bush and publically promised to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush". Diebold is known to have a deep conservative culture. If this isnt an obvious conflict of interest, then I'm not sure what is. In this light, the number of voting machine irregularities and ease of hacking the machines raise a lot of questions.
No one is argueing that these sort of discrepencies are new or that they are harder to uncover. But when we're relying on computers to tally our votes and we discover that the computers are not operating the way they should and the last two elections have been decided by a relatively few number of votes, maybe we should look into it. At the very least, paper ballots have SOME sort of method for verification. And while I agree that this could also be tampered with, at least it's another safeguard. Computer voting offers no such protection. We might as well just have some volunteer memorize each person's vote since we have a) no assurance that a computer will tally our vote correctly or even that it won't purposefully tally our vote incorrectly due to tampering and b) no way to check to see that our vote was counted correctly because of the lack of a paper trail.
Not only that, but you would have to physically look at each vote to make sure that you were disappearing the *right* votes to accomplish your goal. Just making them disappear at random shouldn't, statistically, change the outcome of the race. I don't know about you, but it would be pretty hard to 1) hide 65,000 cards, 2) sort the cards into keep/throw away piles (9 hours if you can consistently do 2/second), and 3) Sneak the "keep" cards back in without anyone noticing. At the very least you are going to have to conspire with several people. Compare that to 1) Look at rolls to see how many votes we need, 2) Run program on laptop that spits out votes onto a card that makes them look plausible, but in your favor 3) Replace card in machine before it gets tallied.
I don't know about you, but I'm going for paper as being more 'secure' from a practical standpoint (compared to the current machines).
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
You know as well as I do that this isn't so.
I don't know it at all, and I posit that you don't, either. Everything I've read from Black Box has been focused entirely on the machines, without respect to which race or who won. They've published as much about congressional and even city council races as they have about the presidential election. If you have some evidence that they have a political agenda beyond making sure the voting is honest, cought it up. Innuendo is just a waste of time.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It amazes me how often the term 'conspiracy theorist' is used to dismiss people. The fact is that conspiracies big and small happen all the time. They are uncovered and proven on a regular basis. Whethter it is Richard Nixon, Enron, Arther Anderson, or p2p copyright violators. To think that having a theory on a conspiracy makes you a nut is silly at best. The question is whether there is enough evidence to warrent the theory, and whether the suspected crime makes any sense to have commited.
By definition, to not believe in conspiracies would mean that you don't believe illegal p2p filesharing takes place. So, lets see who seems more logical.
Person A: Believes that a machine who's design should be extreamly simple consistantly makes errors in favor of the group who is most adament about using them indicates likely fraud.
Person B: Believes that illegal p2p fileshareing does not happen.
(Now, if your going to argue that you DO believe that p2p filesharing exists, then you too are a 'conspiracy theorist', and your post becomes totally nonsensical.)
Bush is an idiot, and couldn't personally hack a Diebold voting box even though a chimpanzee could.
But he has powerful backers who don't give a shit about what will happen 50 years from now because they are rich enough to protect their own families and ride out anything bad that happens. Saudi family, "I'll give you Ohio" Diebold, evil Cheney, evil Rove. BushCo has a strong record of cronyism, both as a recipient (those companies he was gifted and failed, the national guard schitt), and as a giver (Energy company meetings, Pharma-friendly health care reform, FEMA's Brown, Harriet Myers, and way too many to mention).
Starting the Iraq war took a single-mindedness to invade Iraq. It took a lot of propoganda, funded by the taxpayers and thought up by Rove et al. It required hammering the CIA for shreds of evidence to support their wish, and ignoring all the analysis that Iraq was NOT a threat to the US. Outing Valerie Plame, lieing to the UN, more propoganda to frenzy Americans into a war fever, lieing about the costs, lieing about the insurgency and the possibility of civil war. More propoganda. Politically based classification and leaks.
This was idiotic. Iraq is worse off than before, and America is worse for the change. We have 17,000 dead and wounded soldiers, the Army is seriously weakened, our great-grand-children will have to pay back the debt for this war. There are now MORE terrorists, with better reasons to hate America and Christians.
Does any of this affect Bush? Rove? Cheney? Fox News? Only if they cared about Americans. Their own families will be fine. Their own families will always have roofs over their heads, excellent health care, and very rich contacts.
Yes, they are idiots, and also crafty. It doesn't take James Bond skills to stage an "elaborate" take over of a US election when the voting machines don't have paper records. Just knowledge of which few precincts to do it in, getting your political contacts to approve the machines, and enough money to the right hands. Which are they missing?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Most Republicans would rather have a hopefully salvageable Republican administration in charge than a neo-socialist Democratic one. ...the Democrats have become a new socialist party...
The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.
The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.
I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day.
$8.95/mo web hosting