Slashdot Mirror
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
jZnat writes, "In June Rolling Stone ran an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delving into the statistical improbability that Bush won the 2004 election based on massive amounts of evidence that support a Republican-sponsored election fraud across the country, particularly in Ohio. The GOP used a number of tactics in its fraudulent campaign including ballot-stuffing, denying newly registered voters (particularly in urban and minority precincts) their voting privileges via illegal mailings known as caging lists, inane voter registration requirements, preventing thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots, under-providing Democrat-majority precincts with voting machines thus creating enormous queues of voters, faulty machines (particularly from Diebold) that skewed results in the GOP's favor, mostly unnoticed ballot-stuffing and fraud in rural areas, and a fixed recount that was paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties that essentially supported the initial fraudulent numbers." From the article: "'Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me."
Quick look, wow lots of sources. So, i checked one. Number 6.
Um, this is a bogus story. Sorry.
Have you read my journal today?
There has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time. (And, might I add, consider the source.)
This hasn't change since Bush took office, and won't be any different in 2008. It's not just Republicans that do it, nor is is just Democrats. (Witness the decades-old joke from Democratic stronghold cities: "Why did the Democrat walk into the cemetery? To thank his voters.")
As dirty and reeking of conflict-of-interest as it is, when Diebold's CEO said he was committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush, he meant it as a Republican corporate leader and campaigner; not in the context of "rigging" an election.
No, the disenfranchisement that happens now and will continue to happen is the same disenfranchisement and dirty tricks that always happens: the rise of the internet for the general population, particularly since the last pre-Bush presidential election, has enabled the kinds of incredible information exchange on all manner of topics that we've seen in the last two elections. That will only increase, and it cuts both ways: as much as it allows the exchange of legitimate information, it acts as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, some wacky, some not-so-wacky, some with elements of truth, but still serving to subvert any faith we ever had in our system.
The worst part is so many people believe that not one, but two, elections were actively and intentionally "stolen"/rigged exclusively by Republicans, that anytime any Republican/conservative candidate ever wins an election from this point forward, it will always be doubted. Even recounts will be doubted. People want to believe, well, what they want to believe.
All of the political, governmental, financial, famous and otherwise, and other powerhouse figures in the United States on the anti-Republican/conservative side(s) didn't just stand idly by while not one, but *two* elections were stolen.
Nothing new has happened on either side in 2000 or 2004 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life. These are the same county election entities that have run elections in locales for generations. Yes, things change a bit, especially with the introduction of electronic voting machines (which, ironically, were the result of various Democratic and bipartisan initiatives designed to allow more equal and consistent management of and access to polling places). But all e-voting vendors offer permament voter-verified receipt options on current and some previous models of machines - but these additions cost even more money; money that many municipalities weren't willing to spend.
Worse still, we're talking about it two (or six, depending) years later. Not only do we have people who believe firmly that both elections were stolen, but we have people who literally believe something will cause a suspension of the 2008 elections, allowing Bush to remain in power. To me, the growing ranks of people who believe that with all their heart - growing mostly because of the internet, and sources of information that reinforce what they want to believe - are actually more of a threat to our system of government than anything else.
Rehashing a Rolling Stone article from June, that was already covered on /. at the time? Running a dupe a few days or a week later is one thing, but it's been 3 months!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
In June Rolling Stone ran an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yep, there's two bastions of unbiased opinion.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
We are talking about a Rolling Stone article... a half-gossip magazine. The "entertainment industry's" take on politics... why is this even on Slashdot? Of course the election was rigged! This would explain why the disjointed, disorganized, and divided Democratic party lost an election to an incumbent. Lets just keep making excuses if it makes us feel better.
If you want to see what a real stolen election looks like, take a close look at what happened in Washingon State when they tried to elect the last governor. They kept recounting until they got the result they desired, and then told everyone to stop.
THAT'S a stolen election.
Democrats versus Republicans
Creationism versus evolution
Open software versus proprietary
These are all sure to create vicious back-and-forth arguments that'll put the responses over that magical 300 number.
all i had to do was see the name Robert Kennedy and know this story wouldnt be biased AT ALL!
Like this is different from any other election? Look up what happened in 1960 in Texas and Illinois if you think 2000 or 2006 were the most crooked. The only difference was that Nixon refused to demand a recout because it would hurt the country and the last two don't care how much damage they do!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Seriously, Let it go
Bush won the election. Get over it. I don't care how much you don't like him or how much you don't agree with him; that doesn't matter, but he won the election. Move on. Just because the person you voted for didn't win doesn't mean the whole thing is a sham.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
So now slashdot is reduced to pandering political gossip?
Any particular POLITICAL reason Slashdot waited until mid september to post a story about a JUNE Rolling Stone article?
C'mon Slashdot. This isn't news relevant to nerds or stuff that matters.
*grabs popcorn*
Seriously though, Diebold machines are a joke. What I don't understand is why widespread vandalism of these machines hasn't been done.
The exploits are, from what I understand, incredibly simple.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that even if Osama bin Laden won the 2008 presidential election based on votes from machines, it would just be blamed on "terrorist hackers" and no actual accountability would be implemented.
Then, 2 years later, the American public would go back to voting on the same buggy machines, as oblivious as usual. Nothing would of have changed.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
From Andrew Gumbel, "Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America"e mocracy/dp/1560256761
http://www.amazon.com/Steal-This-Vote-Elections-D
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If Bush couldn't be ousted in '04 and if the Dems can't take control of Congress maybe its something they're doing wrong, cause Bush isn't doing anything right.
Yeah, I heard Bush is in league with Robot Jesus too!
I am not a fan of our current president and I have never voted for him (but I did vote) But the democrats were stupid enough to put a Northern Liberal Democrat against a South Western Republican. So what it did was create a polarized nation during the election, it forced people to be deadly afraid of the other side. So they all voted for one side or the other. So being that bush won, all the people who got all hyped up the Bush will be the end of the world are now going on conspiracies and trying to find any thing to make them seem like they were cheated. While it was a fair fight and they lost. If the democrats were more willing to get a more middle of the road candidate they could have one. But they were betting on that GWB wouldn't win because he didn't win the last election with a majority vote so they were betting that if they get a Full to the left Democrat then they would win hands down. But guess what it didn't work. Next time I hope they get a more middle of the road democrat and perhaps I may vote for them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sad, but I think that it will happen again.
To me, it seems inconceivable that very wealthy republicans would conspire to do such a thing - I can not even relate to that much greed.
And greed is what this is about: the super rich and multi-national corporations save so much money with Bush tax cuts - that is their motivation.
I call Bush's fiscal policies "cut and run economics" - give tax cuts to the super rich, run up the deficits, and run away like cowards letting future generations suffer (I am a grandpa of two young kids - this is something I really care about).
Snivelling cut and run fiscal cowards.
On top of it, they never mention how US military overseas from Florida specifically (that overwhelmingly vote republican) didn't get their absentee ballots
I CLE_ID=15597l 1 1/20/military.ballots/index.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/News/20001128-1.htm
http://www.cwv.org/milvote/milvote.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/
http://www.uhuh.com/laws/milivote.htm
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A2901_0_2_0_C/
http://www.mcsm.org/vetsvote.html
You have the guy running Ohio's Bush campaign as the Secretary of State. This is the guy who make sure the election is "fair and balanced".
Btw-- Salon had a guy write a rebuttle, which was in turn rebutted a few times.
Slashdot is now blatantly ripping off Salon.com, which also had an article headline about Kennedy's Rolling Stone piece staring with Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" Too bad Slashdot, in its ridiculous slanting, removed the final word of Salon's headline: "No." Even Mother Jones and NPR repudiated Kennedy's claims. Mother Jones, fer Christ's sake! What's next, Slashdot? How about some articles about World Trade Center demolition conspiracies! And Was Paul Wellstone's Plane Shot Down?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
There's nothing wrong with ohio...except the snow, rain, and fraudulent voting of course.
Because one or the other party did it in the distant past does not make it okay. Technology gave the current ruling party the ability to subvert our election process in a broad and coordinated fashion not available historically.
The bottom line is a lot of good people fought and died to uphold the ideal of one person, one vote and take pride that we run honest elections. The current administration tramples on the Constitution and stacks government agencies with unqualified partisans. They've looted our national treasury and gotten three thousand of our people killed in an ideological war in Iraq. Not only should they be impeached, but if evidence of rigging elections come to light it should undo all that Bush has done in office, including his Supreme Court appointments.
I think Bush lost 2000 and 2004 and that represents a greater threat to our country than terrorism. If the right wing wasn't so shamelessly hypocritical they'd be rioting in the streets for Bush's impeachment. The fact they're lending tacit support to this fraud only demonstrates their lack of character.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." - Robert Hanlon (disputed)
We had a fun 2004 election up here in Washington state. At the end of polling, the Republican Dino Rosse had defeated Democrat Gregoire by ~200 votes - so close that a recount was mandated. After one recount, Rossi was still ahead by about 60 votes. The Dems paid for a second recount, during which multiple small groups of uncounted ballots from highly-Democratic King County kept turning up. Gregoire won that recount, and is now our (rather uninspiring) governor.
Thing is, this really looked like a rigged election; and a lot of Republicans still think it was. But looking at the various pieces, my personal conclusion is just that the King County Elections department is largely incompetent, and has been for a while - it just hasn't come up because we've never had this close an election. Ballots left uncounted inside of voting machines; absentee ballots that get stored away, uncounted; ballots from overseas military people that were wrongly disqualified... it's all easily covered by incompetence.
I have no doubt that fraud occurs; but I also don't doubt it runs both ways.
Another other issue that everyone conveniently ignores, of course, is counting error. Simply put, the likely error in any given count of N random items (as long as N is sufficiently large) is 1/sqrt(N). With a really close election, you simply can't know who the true winner is.
#DeleteChrome
(Just my two cents)
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
All I see is the whining of a poor loser. Get a backbone and vote to change things next election!
Well, really, is there ever any true unbiased opinion? by its nature, it has to be biased, even in subtle ways. Its impossible to approach
exactly 50%, because how do you measure bias truely accurately like electron charge?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It seems kind of ironic that RFK Jr is talking about voting irregularities, considering that his uncle got into office under the same cloud of suspicion (precincts in Illinois and Texas where there were more votes for the candidate than there were registered voters).
Excuses excuses excuses. We see smoke and mirrors from the democratic party that doesn't want to admit that they have been unable the last two presidential elections to present a legitimate contender for president. Trust me if the Democrats could put forward a candidate that was even halfway decent he would win the election in a landslide. Instead we get candidates that are wanted by the leftist fringe that has started to infest the democratic party. Just like the republicans have their anti-science, pro-war, pro-israel right wing idealogues. The democrats have their anti-religion, pro-appeasement, anti-israel etc left wing idealogues. Both of the parties are slowly starting to become controlled by these people. Hopefully it will result in a legitimate third political party with moderate policies (which is what I would like).
i res-slashed_x.htm). Also as another voter said democrats nation wide are famous for having dead people vote for them.
Fraud happens, there were several legitimate cases of Democrats committing election fraud such as the son of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. and some of his friends being arrested for slashing the tires of 25 cars and vans rented by republicans to help get people without transportation to voter sites (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-24-t
It truly depresses me as I see slashdot.org politically becoming like http://dailykos.com/ when really you should be focusing on things besides crying about how the democrats lost the elections and republicans must be evil because (insert celebrity) said so.
Karl Rove teamed up with the Romulans from sector 7384.2 in the Omega quadrant to build a magical vote canceling machine. Using the same technology that Bush used to steet Katrina right into New Orleans and blow up the levvies to flood the black parts of town, the Republicans voided millions of Kerry votes using microwave PDA gamma rays. We were going to target Florida, but they were too busy canceling out their own votes because of their inability to punch holes in a ballot, so we just chose Ohio. This combined with our MS Word 1972 edition documents planted on Dan Blather secured a GOP victory.
The programmer who was paid to actually write the code (not that this is hard to do) for a politician in florida. His affidavit can be found here http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Af fidavit_120604.pdf
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
It's not like we can get rid of the bastard anyway.
It's a girl!
there has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time.
My, aren't we feeling patriotic today. Who cares that you failed history.
At least it seems like it.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The US is in deep dung when it comes to its democratic system. The voting process itself is kinda questionable. It was fine and very understandable when it was created but, hell, 200 years have passed since! There are amendments to the constitution that don't even make sense anymore in a system where only two parties remain. I kinda doubt that this was what the founding fathers had in mind when they created it.
Of course it's prone to ballot stuffing and other dodgy tactics to "win" this or that state. It all starts that your vote only counts if you're in a certain state. You're in Alabama? You're a Democrat? Don't bother going to the booth, don't waste your time. Your vote is wasted! Move to Florida or Ohio!
I'm wondering why there ain't more people moving "officially" to another state.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A big -5 flamebait for the rediculous article about a rediculous topic that a majority of the people in the US have moved past a rediculously long time ago.
Now theres redundant for you. Stop rehashing uninteresting garbage, and if you really want to go all out I hear there is a new "docu-drama" on a 9/11 conspiracy floating around.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
I'm affraid I have to disagree with your point of view. In a democracy, accurate polls are essential and an ideal that always deserves effort. Specific controls to reduce fraud and disenfranchisement (denial of a vote) weather explicit or though increased opportinity costs is always a worthy cause. Because the very foundation of the law, of the constituion, of the form of government is that there is no method of keeping government honest and representative of the people than to allow them to pick their leaders in a fair and honest way.
"Do you ever get the feeling that the people posting these stories do so just cause they like to rattle people's cages?"
Vi vs Emacs.
KDE vs Gnome.
GPL vs BSD.
Dupes vs no dupes.
Taco vs CowboyNeal (death match).
"These are all sure to create vicious back-and-forth arguments that'll put the responses over that magical 300 number."
Religion vs Atheists.
I know you guys have to be tossed your daily ration of red meat nowadays so you can all post about how evil Chimpy McBushHitler is and how cheating is the only way an idiot like Bush could have won.... but I got the karma to burn tossing a clue by four at yer heads once in awhile.
There really are millions of people who did indeed vote for Bush, twice. The first time the Bush didn't quite have the absolute numbers of popular votes to win, but they did win the electoral college. And yes this is a perfectly 'legitimate' way to win since our system of government is a representive republic instead of some daft direct democracy. In 2004 Bush won both the electoral college, and although not relevant, the popular vote as well. Deal with it and stop chasing black helecopters.
No, Florida was not 'stolen'. Bush was ELECTED, not SELECTED. The press did do their own recount.... and when they were finished announced that by the election laws in effect on election day 2000, Bush won. If enough rules are bent regarding counting misvotes in select counties when the totals are already known, it is possible to get totals that give FL to Gore, but that isn't the way the game is played. So shut the hell up about 2000, if you can't get the Miami Herald on your side you don't really have a case.
As for 2004, only crackpot conspiracy theorists think enough irregularities exist to shift any state from one side to the other. Were there some suspicious events? Yup, just like in every other election. Enough to tip the result? Nope.
If you ask me it sounds like projection anyway because the only cases of election fraud in the 20th century were all cases of Democratic machines stealing elections for their side. Kennedy's win over Tricky Dick is nwo widely thought to be due to the dead in Chicago voting early and often. I'm in Louisiana and I can't count the frauds committed, all by Democrats, most recently when the dead in New Orleans put Sen Landrieu into office. Personally I, and probably most Republicans, just assume at least 1% of any national election and 5% here in Louisiana will be Democratic machine generated phantom votes and we get on with winning anyway.
Try coming up with reasons for people to vote for you and ya might be able to win some elections fair and square, with enough margin you won't have to worry about irregularities.
Democrat delenda est
Journal written by jZnat (793348) and posted by kdawson on Sunday September 17, @03:40PM
Uh...who is jZnat, who is kdawson, and why is Slashdot now posting journals to the front page? How does one get their journal posted? Does jZnat know kdawson in some way?
What's going on?
"Sufferin' succotash."
So far, we've got posts bashing the slashdot article for not being current, bashing the Rolling Stone article for being by Rolling Stone, and a few posts of "it's not that bad, get over it". We remember the Florida 2000 fiasco, which was much ado about nothing, and assume this is the same.
It's not.
Seriously, read the article. This isn't just about a few dirty tricks, although there are plenty of those. It isn't about a few thousand votes, like Florida was. It's about outright, large-scale ballot stuffing, hundreds of thousands of votes, fraudulent manipulation of voter rolls, and deliberate sabotage by the Republican secretary of state (who was also the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee).
It's an extraordinary claim, which does indeed require extraordinary evidence, but the evidence IS there. But no one's willing to look at the naked emperor. Everyone made up their mind about whether Bush was good or bad a long time ago, but now the Bush-supporters have no defense but to close their eyes and plug their ears. And for the most part, they're doing exactly that.
If a liberal "loses" it's ALWAYS because of voter fraud from Darth Rove and his cohorts.
I live in Ohio, I voted, and I'm a member of the ohio green party and vote for the national party, I was also involved physically with overviewing the recount. It took me 12 hours to vote, I live in a small area with a very very LIBERAL college (Kenyon) in it. Which by the way if you've ever been here is hilleriously placed because it's surrounded by small farming communities of people who disagree with it. But that's beside the point, the point is that we do have evidence that the election was fraudulant. And who cares?? No one. Until private money is taken out of the electoral system, no one wins. Until the rules are changed from bi-partisian rule, no one wins. It's simple. No one listens until the people who are listening to us change.
Sadly most Americans simply don't care. If we did, we would have been out in the streets like what is going on in Mexico, especially after 2000 when Gore won the popular vote, but lost the presidency because the supreme court said so.
Apparently Bush's administration isn't bad enough to get us off our couches in any significant numbers.
It's indisputable that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Quit worrying about your political party affiliation and look at the damn information. YES the election results were ALL skewed for the GOP where it counted. That is why the bad-bush is in office. Quit bitching about the dems and the reps and go check out the damn facts. The voting system is a complete joke and if you think we are not getting screwed by it then you aren't paying attention or you're just ignorant about the facts. Maybe you just haven't noticed that the currnet administration transparently lies about shit all the time. The voting machines have been *simple* to tamper with and there wasn't a way to verify the votes from the e-voting either. If the system is tampered with they have NO LOG or AUDIT TRAIL on the machines either. Would you let you bank do this? Maybe they should just send you bills without a log and you can pay those as well. WAKE UP ALREADY! Diebold is a corrupt influence and is in the President's pocket. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm
There is one indusputable fact and that is that the statistical proabibility that the exit-polls could have contradicted the actual results by such a huge margin are vanishingly small (on the order of 1 in a million). And further, that specific contradictions have an even more impossible probability.
You can trash this article all you want, but if you are a math-fearing geek (as you should be to have a slashdot membership card), then you simply cannot argue with the conclusion of this article. Being a republican or a democrat does not allow you to magically modify mathematical certainties. Personally, I am appalled at the number of people trashing this article because it is written by JFK Jr or published in the Rolling Stones. Use your geek sense! Geeks dont think like that... So who are you guys?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
No serious discussion of "stolen elections" in the last 75 years would omit the quite apparent stealing of the 1960 election by John F. Kennedy, via the "Chicago machine" that turned the tide in Illinois and shifted the electoral college vote against Nixon.
Did the Big Dick "challenge the election" and insist we "count every vote" yada yada yada at the height of the Cold War, when indeed, the survival of the nation would be tested in less than two years with the Cuban Missile Crisis?
No, Nixon put the nation first. If only the Democrats would have done so since 2000.
No mention of Katherine Harris and the Great Florida Voter Purge of 2000?
Had those thousands of voters been able to vote in either election, the results may have been drastically different.
You know, the one in charge of elections in Florida. The same Katherine that believes that she can do whatever she wants in life because Jesus died for her sins so she is forgiven. The same Harris that believes God chooses our politicians.
Quickest solution to fix the US political system: Instant Runoff Voting.
You mention Hitler in your argument, you automatically lose. You mention Diebold in Ohio for 2004 and you also automatically lose.
Diebold machines were only used in two counties in Ohio - Hardin and Lucas - and in both counties, these were optical scan machines. The total population of these two counties is less than 500,000, or about 1.5x the vote margin in the entire state. Couple that with the fact that Lucas County went heavily in favor of Kerry in that election, and we see that implicating Diebold in improprieties in Ohio's 2004 election is a load of crap. Most left-wing noisemakers have the good sense not to implicate Diebold directly, instead trying to make a tenuous connection to the former Diebold CEO's comments about winning the election for Bush, and letting suspicion and paranoia take care of the rest. But never let the truth stand in the way of political propaganda on Slashdot!
Diebold machines were used in about half the state's counties in 2005, so if you want to rail about that, go right ahead.
Today in scanning the BBC headlines many of Bush's like minded are winning in Europe. The far right has picked up in Germany (even farther right than the current government) and in Sweden the conservatives have been elected removing the socialists than have ruled the last 10 years....Interesting....
It is amazing that people get so worked up about one corrupt, incompetent politician getting elected over yet another corrupt, incompetent politician. The people in power has an awful lot of say about the results, so it's no surprise what will happen with that. I'm not even sure why this is surprising anyone, and the only way I can see it would is for someone who is wearing rose colored glasses. That what happens when one person has power over another. They will obviously do whatever they can to maintain that power, and they have quite an advantage to do so. Democracy is nothing more than a wolf and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
We can say anything if we just ask!
As much as I was disappointed by the 2004 election results, my desire for impartial truth outweighs my personal affinity for party-bashing, conspiracy theories, and groupthink. More informed investigation and reporting, less rabble rousing, please, fellow liberals! Hopefully we can earn an impeachment if it is deserved, and not just the ire of our GOP counterparts.
is it just me, or was there almost no discussion of the possiblity of election fraud (which, unless you can refute all the evidence, seems pretty damn likely). Isn't it kinda f'd up when we've got to turn to a "gosip rag" for debate on one of the most crucial elections in American history?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They are who decides who wins. Not even one vote by yous. But you will never wake up. and this post will be moderated as troll but the truth is the truth.
The conservative coalition just won in Sweden... there must be voter fraud. Lets all go picket them and demand a recount.
The sour grapes just keep on comming. Some people really seem to want to prove that they don't believe in democratic processes. I do wish though that these kinds if crazies were limited to just one side of the political devide.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Gotta be lies. We won fare... Didn't we???
"These are not the droids you are looking for..."
ELECTION VOTES decide elections. If you want to know how Kerry won the exit polls yet lost the election the explanation is simple. There are millions of conservative voters out there who rightly or wrongly feel betrayed by the mainstream media. If some lib from Reuters outside the polling place asks them how they voted they will tell them to shove it up their ass.
I forgot to add, I notice you (and others like you) are attacking the source of the evidence, not the evidence itself. That's a classic debate technique. Bravo sir. And sorry for replying to my own post.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a second
In fact, this has me thinking now... We may constitute a particularly difficult demographic to brainwash for exactly that reason - geeks don't take anyone but other geeks seriously and that means if you don't bow to geek religious beliefs (such as science and her language), you have very little chance of adjusting our opinions. If there are enough of you and you push buttons fast enough, you might be able to sling your comments around and mod-up the memes of your cohorts, but you will have little chance of making any difference to the thought process of the readership here.
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
A Kennedy complaining about Election fraud?
Irony.
"Show me any human on this planet who is not biased."
Check the cemeterys.
Please check your objectivity, nuance, and common sense at the door.
Now, we all get to read the political rantings in journal form of a slashdotter who finds himself/herself on a political extreme but, by chance, likely happens to coincide with an editor's own position. Oh joy. Particularly when the author of this journal is also the author of gems such as his own take on the Declaration of Independence.
SlashKos. Really old opinion pieces from music/culture magazines spun by random journal writers for far-left geeks. Stuff that really, truly doesn't matter, but hopefully will stir up some controversy and ad clicks.
I find myself on the right politically, but I'm not one to complain about stories that show the left's point of view, even the more extreme left. This however screams to me of "slow news day" and "must do something to get site traffic up" nonsense.
I realize my post is likely redundant, but some things simply must be said over and over. Why on earth was this posted here, now?
I come to Slashdot expecting Slashdot. Not SlashKos. For that matter, I'd also be unhappy to see SlashLGF, as well.
Surely that's a great way to continue to sound totally unappealing to the American electorate. Lose the 2000 election, claim it was stolen because you apparently didn't pay attention in sixth grade civics class -- and continue whining about it to this very day. Lose the 2004 election in a contest that no one at the time had any qualms about, and invent charges after the fact that it was stolen from you too -- just in time for the 2006 midterms. Surely Americans won't see through this one, right?
NO - It's quite amazing how all these geeks can be so fucking gullible with tin foil hat theories.
What would this achieve?, nothing.
In 2008 go out and vote with sense. Punish or cheer what this government has done with EVERYTHING.
Government regulation is neccessary to curb abuses. They enhance our freedoms by breaking monopolies, limiting the scope and depth of corporate fraud and malfescence and providing us with many different forms of consumer rights.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I'm sorry, but I have serious trouble believing that Bush is capable of even aspiring to become such a fascist monster. The man is a moron. Now, I don't have any problem accepting that he is simply a figurehead for more influential people (lurking in the shadows, if you will).
As was posted earlier, if the Democrats can manage to find a half-decent candidate, they'll win the next one in a landslide.
Now ask me if I care. For the most part, not at all.
Not that I don't think it affects me, but I don't believe it will affect me any less to have another empty shirt pushing the polar opposite agenda.
Call me unamerican, but until I see a candidate worthy of office, I'm staying out of the voting booth.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Why is this even on Slashdot!??! Come on! Bush haters simply can't accept that the majority of voters voted FOR George W and not against him. Get over it! If you don't like it then run for office or get your own candidate elected, but don't overrule the will of the people because you disagree personally. Enough is enough!
I think the url is: http://www.freedomtofascism.com/
Hi, I worked that election for my precinct in TX. As alternate election judge. NO PROBLEMS beyond the usual two or three regular people who said they lived there but were not listed on the rolls adn thus voted a challenge/provisional ballot.
But my information is inductive knowledge (applying particular to the general). So it cannot apply everywhere. Far away Ohio or Florida may have had problems.
This shows one of the key problems with the Internet--a story comes out almost six months ago (the June issue comes out in April or May, and this story got previewed even before the issue came out). Then a bunch of Democrats explain why this story is bogus, and not helpful. Then, after all the criticism has died down, someone posts the old story, and starts it all again--of course, now without the attention of responsible Democrats, so the moonbats get the floor.
This happens on both sides of the political spectrum.
Did you hear that Louisiana sold its old set of voting machines to Mexico?
They had an election down there, and Edwin Edwards got 50% of the vote!
The elections are a charade. Elections and politicians are in place in order to give Americans the illusion that they have freedom of choice. - George Carlin
The current US political system is not much of a democracy anyway. It is a choice between right and further right.
The power is increasingly shifting from the hands of the US population to those of the establishment - institutions like media, government, religion and business - and will only continue to do so because of the effects of the corporate media over pubic opinion and from the effects of big money on the political agenda of both parties. Not to mention how malleable an entire population can be when it is constantly being bombarded with messages of fear.
Elections will continue to be stolen.
1 voice in a sea of voices
While I don't know about ballot stuffing - I do know in Wisconsin (which was another tight state) there was tire slashing of volunteers who drove people to the poles, sign theft and vandelism of lawns that had signs up. Although all of this was pro-democrat so there was lots of blame to go around.
In 1996 I personally had a couple of union members threaten to slash my tires for have a pro-life bumper sticker - I lied and told them I borrowed the vehicle - so they let me into the building to go vote.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
...not because it's not important for the democratic process and our election system in the U.S., but because trying to thoroughly investigate will be impossible. Both political parties have their own political agendas, and the manufacturers of voting machines have their own self-preservation agendas. Now, I'm not posting this because I believe the election was or wasn't stolen; it's just an issue that rears its ugly head every so often without results. The answer to the question "Was the 2004 election stolen?" will be at best an educated guess, IMO.
I love how poeple mod other people down just because they don't agree. Grow up. Everyone has a right to speak
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Who modded this redundant or offtopic?
:-)
:-)
He's discussing voting systems here! (Well, not for governments, but anyway
.
.
.
How about a system where this data is encoded into the post (like your -1, flamebait) in a defined way and a firefox plugin which hides the corresponding stories? Anybody?
The vote for the story could be weighted with the moderation score of your post. Also, this would be complete independent of slashdots staff and could induce some changes which support such a moderation style.
This idea is somewhat heretical, I know. But I'm reading with the Slashdotter firefox extension script so this idea came to my mind.
Sour grapes are even worse when they've been in storage for three years.
Most people cannot even take a poll in the office to see where to have the "Holiday Party," yet they think a state and national election should be easy. I have seen election fraud. It is an equal opportunity employer. So let's pretend that each party steals 100 votes per district you know what it's a wash in the end. Election fraud isn't a republican tactic only. Part of democracy is living with a bit of fraud, unlike an old school Iraq which was all fraud.
"You seem to have misspelled "ad impressions"."
You seemed to have ignored "Adblock".
Whether or not the elections in 2000 and 2004 were stolen does not change the fact that we are witnessing an unprecedented attempt to consolidate power in the hands of a very wealthy, very few. And they are mostly Republicans.
You say that people believing that the Bush Administration is capable of the most egregious types of illegal activities is more of a threat to our system of government than those illegal activities themselves. This is known as baloney.
Yesterday, we saw a President declare that a law must be passed that will have the effect of absolving him and his administration from any war crimes that may have been committed since 2001, retroactively. He is afraid that as the 14 prisoners that he's transferring from secret prisons (just the thought of secret prisons is anti-American) are interviewed by the Red Cross when they get to Guantanamo (Guantanamo is anti-American) we will learn that they were tortured in ways that violate a Convention that has served us well for more than half a century, and this will expose Mssrs Bush and Cheney to quite valid charges of War Crimes.
So, in a classic cover-your-butt move, this despicable man is going to pardon himself and his friends, in advance. I hope those of you who voted Republican are proud.
All this to protect his sudden need to try people with secret evidence. Let that sink in for a second. You are arrested and not told why. You are held for 3 years without any charges being brought against you. You are brought to court and a judge tells you that you are found guilty, based on evidence that you and your lawyer will not be allowed to see. Who wants to try to argue that any of this is the "American Way"?
And this entire charade, 2 wars and untold suffering is done because 19 guys in dirty nightshirts were able to commandeer a couple of planes and kill 3000 people. We're told not to worry about the guy who masterminded this crime because after all we can't find him anyway, and there's a much more important thing we have to do because of this massive crime and that's fight a war thousands of miles away from where this criminal is hiding. And it just so happens that this war that's so urgent is in a place that has a huge supply of oil. And, it just so happens that the President got into politics with the help of the oil industry, but that's all just a coincidence. And it's a further coincidence that the one corporation that has profited the most from this war was run by the Vice President until a short time before the election. And, by the way, that Vice President's income tax return last year showed income of tens of millions of dollars even though his salary is only about 250 thousand bucks. But ignore all of that because THIS PRESIDENT IS A-GONNA KEEP US SAFE. Safe from terrorists. Forget that you're more likely to die of toenail fungus than from terrorism.
One great thing about this country is that although it's possible to scare Americans, they don't stay scared for long. If there's a God in heaven, the Bush Administration and his Republican lickspittles are going to pay dearly for what they've done to a country that not too long ago was held in regard by the world as being a beacon of freedom, but is now known for secret prisons, torture, domestic spying and stupid, destructive wars.
To Hell with George W. Bush. And Dave Schroeder, regardless of whatever it is that would make you try to defend him, to Hell with you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Look, bantering back and forth that both the Democrats and Republicans have fixed elections is pointless.
If we, as Americans, aren't will to vote for someone other than the two major political parties then we deserve what we get.
If we, as Americans, condone election fraud/fixing by overt actions or our inaction by doing nothing to fix the problem then we are guilty of aiding and abetting a federal crime.
Until we stand up to our "elected" officials and force them to play by the rules, we'll all continue getting screwed.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Your guy lost, suck it.
Bigfoot, the head of the Aluminum Foil industry, is now being paid off by James Casorio for the purpose of implanting nanobots into the aluminum foil as so that anyone wrapping it around their head is infected by republican mind control. At that point, the Representative will turn control over to president bush who will then use the entire army of mind-controlled minons to drill for oil in the Arizona Desert. Once the oil is found, the mind controlled minons will turn over their first child for sacrifice to the pixie queen.
[/sarcasm]
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
That was blatant election rigging.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Neocons? Weren't those those little transformers that turned into the heads of bigger transformers or something?
They chose a disproportionate number of young females to poll/hit on.
The bias was predictable.
The data is there. Females were overrepresented in the sample. It's just ignored by those that want to believe, like the parent.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Liars one and all. Slauhter them, and let Charon ferry them as he will.
If there is that much evidence... then prove it, in a court of law with cross examination.
'nuff said.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I don't think the 2004 election was stolen, in the sense that Republicans manipulated the numbers and that's why they won. I think, at the time, Bush and his government really were very popular, and they legitimately won the elections.
However, with a government that spread lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks to get people to support an unprovoked attack on Iraq, nothing is unthinkable...
For example, the government was certainly painting a brighter picture of itself than the facts would have justified, and probably also vilifying the opposition more than they deserved. Contrary to the Democrats, we will protect you from the terrorists! The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are pretty successful. Bush has done a lot to improve the environment. Education and unemployment are better, especially for the lower classes. Things like budget deficits and large scale spying on American citizens hadn't really mounted up to the levels they are at now.
All that the Democrats had to say was mostly that the Bush government is doing bad things, so you should vote for us (the Bush campaign also cleverly robbed the Democrats of their ammunition, by accusing Kerry of some of the main faults of Bush). In such an environment, it's not too strange that people massively supported the Republicans, and weren't really open to criticism.
Of course, now we know that Osama _still_ hasn't been caught, Iraq didn't have WMD, much less posed a threat to the USA, the Iraqis didn't receive the US soldiers as heroes, but rather plunged the country into chaos and civil war (and the same seems to be happening in Afghanistan), the Bush government really is massively invading the privacy of innocent citizens, and probably holding innocent people without due process, as well as torturing. It could even be argued that the US' aggressive policy makes more enemies than friends, making Americans less safe than the more moderate policies the Democrats were proposing would have been.
All of this was obvious to many, many people even before the 2004 elections. So why did Bush get re-elected? Did they manipulate the vote counts? I don't think so. Did they manipulate people's minds? I think they did. Does that equate stealing the election? You be the judge.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
..backed by good or by bad evidence. That the earth isn't the center of the universe once was a conspiracy theory spread by those 'unbelieving heathons who "think" too much'.
Anyway, I'll do my part spreading the evidence; just found this clip a few days ago. I posted the link already, but I think it's worth reposting it for anyone who's interested. It's about a programmer who had been hired (by a politician) to write code to manipulate voting machines.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Democrats think they can get you there quicker, in a special handbasket.
The handbasket is union-made. The road was built with a no-bid contract.
Pick one.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Did you miss the introduction of blackbox voting, and now how all the polls always seem "off", and always in the big R favor? Have you not the read the myriad of reports about how those machines are designed to be hackable? This is a company that makes ATM machines, so when they put out a voting machine and we get all these weird results, and the owner is a diehard R, and insiders from the company have let loose with some interesting facts about the election, and evidence of it got leaked from an insecure website, we are supposed to ignore it? That's nothing new, when before you needed thousands of people on the inside to stuff ballot boxes, and now you only need a couple to influence the outcome of thousands of precincts?
How much is ownership of the US government really worth, trillions of dollars and ultimate "decider" power, all the way to freaking life and death decisions over people? You don't think that is incentive enough to steal elections?
We need a mass roundup and beyond joke do nothing impeachment, this is treasonus stuff we are talking about,*treason*, and it has the potential to invoke a civil war if it isn't fixed. This isn't a joke, and you saying it is nothing new is not helping matters at all, it's making it worse by promoting a big fat lie, of course computerised voting is new, it's not even fully deployed yet and we have had any number of screwy elections from it, and EVERY time there's a new revelation about the black box voting it clearly points to those machines being designed on purpose to make it easier to hack the vote and hide the evidence of it.
I'm an old classical conservative, a paleocon is the term used now, and we'll be seeing old nick bolting skis to his segway before I EVER vote capital R fascist party again. And the Ds are no different, just the Rs have taken it to an entirely new level, above and beyond any old fashioned ballot box stuffing. This is third world dictator action we are looking at, and they sure have a lot of muscle with guns out there to enforce their "decisions". It is no different at all from any other tinpot dictatorship, only the scale is huge. The same lies, the same royal guards, the same above the law idiots in charge, the same phony wars and vague internal "enemies", the same style slogans trying to drum up phony patriotism and support for the dictator, the same institution of command/control/surveillence tactics, etc. And now with the vote hijacked..what's left??? Really, practically speaking, what's left? Just saay "oh well, nothing new, it has always happened" and just eat it raw, that's what you suggest?
Thankfully there are millions who don't see it that way and are deciding to make issues of this and some other key facts with 'the deciders".
And you feds reading this, and I know you do..shame on you! Just shame on you, you can read, too, you know what is going on and what has happened and what the trends are, and you support those dictators? Shame!
Condoleeza Rice: "I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons." [responding to Kean]
FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, "U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner" into the summit, prompting officials to "close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city's airport." [Sources: Los Angeles Times, 9/27/01; White House release, 7/22/01]
Rhetoric? You cite Rice's reassurance that her gang won't postpone elections as reason to "cool the rhetoric"? Why wouldn't she lie, especially if it got people off our guard?
--
make install -not war
Did you read this article? I know it was a bit long and it's so much easier to keep talking rather than listen, but seriously you haven't responded to anything that JFK jr. is talking about.
The stuff with Diebold is a minor note in a long list of much worse and more obvious tactics. Try reading it. If you still think it's not true, check the sources and refute it based on that. Frankly, I never suspected this election until I read this article but there are just too many examples in the article for me to be as sure as I was.
The most damning evidence, in my opinion, was the discrepency between exit polls and the results of the election, which almost always were swayed toward Bush. There's also the fact that not enough voting machines were allocated in areas with large black populations.
Seeing as this is a 4-month-old political opinion piece of a speculative, conspiratorial nature that doesn't even pretend to promote an unbiased or nonpartisan viewpoint, what business does it have on Slashdot?
If Slashdot is going to be linking to Robert Kennedy, Jr's writings, it better also link to those of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Bill O'Reilly. Frankly, I'd rather Slashdot stay away from all of them.
I wish the article itself could be modded down to -1 Flamebait.
THANK YOU.
Geez...
I lean to the right politically, but I would love - LOVE - to have an alternative party. The Democrats have largely set themselves as simple contrarians with one plank on their platform - "vote for us, we're not the Republican party!"
Yes, I can see that. I saw that little "D" instead of the "R" which seems to be so dominant amongst elected officials these days.
But why on earth should I vote for a party which wants to get into power before stating a platform?
Economically speaking, the U.S. is doing quite well, so economics aren't much of the issue and elected officials have an often overstated effect on the economy as is. That's not much of a reason to vote for the Democrats. The present deficit level is high, to be sure, but that's not the sort of concern that really gets the voters out.
Iraq's a bit of a mess, but the Democrats haven't really stated what they're going to do with it beyond "we shouldn't have gone in". Great, we shouldn't have gone in, that's lovely and all, but guess what, we're there now - what do we do? They won't say. They don't have a plan at all... granted, the Bush administration's own plans are not particularly well-defined, but they are committed to staying for some time, which isn't the road map I'd like to see but it's heading in the right direction. Democrats can't decide to stay, go... or do anything else. Give me your party's POSITION on the matter! Do you have a position? Oh, that's right, I forgot, your position is, "we're not Bush!"
Then there's the "cultural issues". Democrats and their supporters alike can't seem to wrap their heads around this, but every time they lose an election they blame it on people who vote on "cultural issues". Perhaps if they learned that these cultural issues were really, truly important to many voters they could win votes, but noooo... instead, we hear the same mantra of, "stupid rednecks only care about x!" each election cycle. These stupid rednecks are voters, you know, and cultural issues are important to people, no matter how much the Democrats want to deny it. Responding to elections lost due to cultural issues by reaffirming your stance on these issues will NOT somehow magically bring people to your point of view.
I'm not entirely pleased with the Republican party at the moment, and would love to see some new ideas pop up on the hill. But the U.S. lacks an opposition party, and only has a band of contrarians without ideas.
It's like the Cola wars all over again, except instead of 'Coke' and 'Pepsi', I have 'Coke' and 'we're not Coke and we think Coke sucks!'
Please, SELL me some ideas and I might BUY THEM!
</rant>
It is far clearer that the Democrats steal elections in my home State of Washington....It is not statistics but actual votes that were fraudent. Dead people, people voting twice etc...The more people counted and recounted the more the Democrats "found" new votes in Democratic districts won by Democrats. This wasn't the opposition finding new votes or uncounted ones to over turn things for the real winner ( ie Gore) after the winner was declared ( Bush in Flordia and Ohio) but it is a clearly a manufactered election by one party. Ohio, maybe tactics were used, but this was a stolen election in WA in black and white .
This is like the Democrats of the Chicago era.
Not "Joe Lieberman" bipartisan. Certainly not W bipartisan, which means, "Do exactly as I say, and I'll make sure to Swift Boat you even harder next time."
Let's talk about actual corruption today, not back in the Big City Democratic Boss days-- which are gone. Besides, any honest observer knows that "everybody does it" is a foolish argument you don't even accept from your kids. The Rove era is much more subtle. First of all, there's monkeying with the voter's lists, as was done, massively, in Florida. Whatever you think of felons being barred from voting for life, the fact is that the lists were cleansed by Choicepoint, misidentifying people all over the place. if you last name was, you know, black, and it sounded like a felon's, you were off. Similar tactics are going on all the time. In three states, Republican voter registration efforts were caught throwing out Democratic registrations. There were very high-ranking GOP members caught tying up the phone banks of the Democrats in New Hampshire, and people have gone to federal prison for that. Never explained was, who did the criminals call in the White House in the days leading up to this? And we haven't even talked about the I.D. card movement in many Republican states that amounts to a poll tax, and is bound to disenfranchise the poor and black, as certainly as an evacuation of New Orleans left those without cars of their own. Or, the big one, the easily-hackable voting machines. One of the first things that Schwarzenegger did was get the Democratic Secretary of State out of there, with his anti-Diebold, pro-paper trail attitude, and put in a guy for whom that's just fine with it. When the voting machine thing actually blows, it will be the biggest scandal in decades.
Now, on the other hand, there are always Republican accusations that Dems use the graveyard, and pay illegals to vote. About the graveyard, that might exist in Chicago, but I'd say it's a dying method. Records are too good today.
Paying people to vote your way has been a problem for a long time. One of my mother's first memories as a child was riding around in a truck at Christmas with her uncle, and handing out turkeys and booze to the Republican homes in Philly. Early '20s. True story. Her uncle was a Republican ward boss. Was it bribery, or just the party looking after its own?
But that kind of corruption requires people paying the bribes, and that's traceable. When Loretta Sanchez beat B-1 Bob Dornan in Orange County by about 1,000 votes, he contested the election, and gave many statements to the effect that some massive number of illegals must have voted. The inquiry found that there were, at most, 300 "questionable" votes. Some of these just couldn't be tracked down. There were a dozen or so, I believe, who had passed all the tests for citizenship, and the instructor said they could vote, even though they couldn't until the actual day of swearing-in. So the degree of "corruption," if that's what it was, was miniscule.
Any politician who paid illegals to vote for him would need his head examined, and he would belong in jail.
But let's not get into the partisan thing about elections. They should be straight and honest. Isn't that bipartisan?
How non-Americans get this oft times more than Americans do.
Thank you for your comments.
into a political discussion, like most other slashdot topics do.
I'm not republican, nor am I democrat. In the last election I wanted a democractic candidate I could vote for, but frankly Kerry sucks. Leave it up to new hampshire to vote for an ass with no chance of winning. For the next election, I could give a crap which party the person is from as long as they're qualified. voting the party line is retarded and stupid. It's just brain dead. voting for kerry is like choosing an asshole of two huge asses. You loose either way.
It was Birchibald T. Barlow!
Don't Tread on Me
The bias problem isn't tampering with the math, it is selectively reporting the numbers in order to emphasize his position. I don't really know or care if he is, but that's the issue with bias in this case, not the validity of the numbers he reports, but the completeness.
As far as slashdot and geekdom go, the demographics of slashdot probably aren't quite as homogeneous as you seem to be assuming. Two slashdotters are going to be as different and alike each other as they are compared to people who are more likely to frequent a gym. Despite all the time that we spend doing it, people just don't sort into convenient little groups.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I have to wonder about the 2000 election....When ABC (or was it NBC) was making their first prediction that Gore had won Florida (about 08:00 pm CST on election night), GW Bush said like "that's not possible, it can't be" instead of "we'll wait for all the votes to be counted" or " our polls find differently"....
I didn't think anything of it at the time...but what has ensued since, I wish I had a recording of the broadcast, and have experts review it.
Compló!!!
You start off by saying that "there has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time", which seems to be a plausible statement to me, but then you dismiss the whole idea by saying that "people want to believe, well, what they want to believe".
So what's your point? Did you read the article? And what did you mean when you said "and, might I add, consider the source"? Do you mean Rolling Stone? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr? Good job getting a 5, Insightful on a post that didn't even attempt to refute a single one of the 208 references in the article, yet still managed to cast doubt.
We should be ashamed here. This is news for nerds and we're nerds, right? So we should be smart enough to mod this guy down as a Troll, and then go ahead, read the fucking article, and look up the references ourselves. What hypocrites we are. We deride religious fundamentalists for pushing intelligent design into school curricula ("Ha, ha, what ignorance-- here's a spaghetti monster!") and then we turn around and do the same thing by modding up a post that contains NO FACTUAL INFORMATION in its rebuttal.
I'm going to finish reading the article. Then I'm going to look up some of the more brazen references (not all of them, of course-- I do have a life after all), probably more than the two or three the mainstream media is going to latch on and harp on until this article is "discredited". You should all do the same.
WTF? Hey Slashdot editors-- maybe you should have a quiz on the article before you're allowed to post. 'Cuz we all just got F's.
As this very thread proves it, yes we are.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The exit pollers in Ohio where young men.
They polled/hit on young women way more then random. It's there in the gender/age data. Next question.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Mob rule is not a goal. The constitution is there to moderate the weather vane nature of the mob and to control it's reach.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Very different indeed. I agree. But all geeks love math. Some might not really understand it, but all will respect it more than any particular source. You can't discredit math. Even if you discredit the person providing the math, it still doesn't discredit the math. This is one place the hypothetical propagandizers can't really go. They can't discredit math to a population of mathematicians. It will only serve to discredit them, instead. And my position stands. bye!
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Actually, the quickest fix would be Approval Voting. It's as accurate (in terms of game theory / the 5 criteria of Arrow's Paradox) as IRV is, and is a hell of a lot easier both in implementation (the method of counting the votes is almost identical to how we do it now), and in explaining to people how it works (i.e. "Put a check next to anyone you think would do a good job. You are not limited to one choice.")
As for the best solution overall, one of the Condorcet methods would be the best — preferrably one of the clone-proof methods, such as CSSD.
They certainly do by my read.
Your ISP is restricting your right to operate an open mail relay. Bastards.
Do you really trust congress to get it right enough to not force ISPs to open mail/windows share ports etc back up.
An unregulated 'neutral net' has been maintained by market forces for decades. Why do we need government to 'help' us now?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Bush *is* an illegitimately elected aspirant dictator, a large scale mass murderer, and a war criminal.
This is why you guys are going to keep losing. As a conservative who actually believes in limited government and individual freedom, I strongly disagree with the current Republican leadership on many issues. But when the opposition is this unhinged, all I can do is either leave my ballot blank or "waste" it on a third party.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Once you have bothered to read the (rather long) article, how about you argue with the evidence presented in the article. I'd still find the evidence disturbing if it were published in Penthorse. The article is well footnoted and you can easily check the primary sources.
The story was posted at 5:40 and your reply was at 5:45. I'll bet dollars to donuts that you are just spouting.
That's OK, it looks like you're in good company.
As an Ohioan that voted in 2005, I have to say that the machine I used did indeed have a paper trail. Before the vote was affirmed, a paper tape was displayed inside a locked compartment with a glass window. Each and every choice I made was printed on that paper. I was given an opportunuity to review the entire tape before I affrimed my vote. The paper was then moved into another nonviewable locked compartment. I never had the opportunity to actually touch the paper.
That sounds very much like an audit trail to me...
However, ISPs are already starting to block torrent traffic and other ports, throttle traffic and do other nasty stuff. So, what is the right approach? Probably the best thing is to keep it out of Congress until after the party changes and then run it through. But YMMV on that idea.
You sir are an idiot. You dismiss agruements without thought because they disagree with your prejudices.
It was'nt two young men polling mostly women. It was a work force made up of mostly college aged men (strange how that turned out almost like one side was putting their low level people into the exit polling process intending to skew the process, er, keep them honest after 2000).
The exit polling companys could just release a % female polled number. They refuse. Why? (They know their poll was bad, it was designed to supress Republican voter turnout in the western states.)
I can live with some idiot calling me not a geek. I'm so hurt though. Asshat.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Midterns are in 2 months. Can't have any Republicans win, now can we?
Because the Dims are ramping up their FUD machine.
Between statistics and math.
If you argue with a fool...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We are not bitching that we lost. We are asking if he really won.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
70% anti-republican propaganda. I've been a subscriber for about a year and every time I read one of their propaganda articles I feel sorry for the brainless potheads absorbing this stuff.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I'm just waiting to loose karma for this one but here it goes... Have you ever thought of the possibility that you lost a fair election (well, as fair as any other)? Have you ever thought that perhaps you weren't right? That the majority of the country doesn't agree with you? Its shocking, I know. But in between self righteous rants about how no one in their right mind would vote for the other side try thinking - just once - is your side right? Does your side really represent the majority of the population? (Now that you're all riled up ---> This post is directed at both parties)
RFK Jr's allegations also illustrate just how lacking in character today's Democratic party politicians are with their protests about the elections of 2000 and 2004. Take a look back. Evidence of fraud was so clear in 1960 Illinois, the federal government wanted to investigate without any prompting by Republicans. They were blocked by Nixon himself, who concluded that it wasn't in the interest of the nation to have a President of either party taking office under a cloud. Today's Democrats are so self-absorbed, they want every Republican President to be under a cloud of suspicion, but notice that they never want any real investigation, because that would prove that their claims are unfounded. They simply want to slander and hurt.
And while neither party is perfect, those who want to sort this out need only look at which party puts roadblocks in the way when legislation is suggested that would make it harder for the dead and felons to vote or for some to vote more than once. Suggest that sort of legistation, and it's the Democrats who try to block it. They don't want honest elections. They don't even want the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 to actually be investigated. (The chads in Florida were investigated by a press consordium, and Bush won, yet I've had a Democratic party operative still tell me it was fixed.) They simply want to slander Republicans and to hurt this country.
Am I saying that Democratic politicians are not "patriotic." No, nothing that mild. I think they would screw this country ten times over to win elections. That's far beyond a lack of patriotism. I wish open, honest fair elections on every country on this planet, elections unhampered by slander and lies afterward, but I'm patriotic only for one. Today's Democratic party, or more accurately, the Democratic party that's existed since 1960, doesn't give a rip about fair and credible elections, here or anywhere. They just want to lie and slander. The party that kills babies is the party that steals elections and slanders opponents. It really is that simple.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, Editor: Dachau Liberated
...as many times as they want, without having to be a US citizen or even a resident of any of the precinct(s) they decide to vote in.
Anything else is Republican intimidation and fraud.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Why is America lost? Have you seen what happens in other countries throughout history when their government is high-jacked? Rioting. Civil war. Revolution. Guillotienes are rolled out and used. What happens here? Nobody cares except a few Internet users and the most we do about it is whine in our blogs.
I was done whining in 1984. Now I ignore. When it gets too bad to ignore, I'll emmigrate. And nowhere, no matter where I go, will ever get more that a mocking laugh from me when the concept of 'patriotism' is brought up.
It boils down to target marketing.
X% of people will vote D
Y% of people will vote R
Z% are undecided
Each side wants to win, but they need to spend as little money as possible to do so, so that they have money for other elections.
So they each try to get just over 50% of the vote, using targeted ads, are spending the money in just the right places to get that 50% with as little excess as needed.
That used to be very difficult, but now with improvements in information technology, they can develop computer models to very presicely choose where to spend exactly the right amount of money to get 51%
The problem is, that both sides are doing it. I think, that because R's currently are associated with big businesses, they have on their side the advantage of highly trained and talented marketing people; which give them enough of an edge to beat the D's predictions.
In the future, elections will get closer and closer, as the marketing of canditates becomes more focused. Many people will make informed decisions, but the election will be decided by the guy who chooses what time slot to stick campaign ads in.
Personally, I not too disappointed that Bush won; even if there was a small percentage of fraud/manipulation, it's not like he only got 20% of the 'real' votes; if the differance is between 49% and 51%; I really don't think it's particularly awful for the 49%'er to get the job. In the end, it's like Coke vs. Pepsi, you're better off drinking tap water.
The way electronic voting is now set up there is really no way to audit or check the results of what's recorded against what the voter actually entered. because no independent record is kept of what the voter entered. So, no one can say one way or the other conclusively whether or not the votes were recorded accurately. I had a personal encounter with a fellow from one of the auditing companies who claimed to have set up a vote audit procedure for one of the states. He said, they did a black box audit, by setting up dummy voting machines, running votes through them, and seeing if the count was accurate. Of course, it was. His position was that this conclusively showed the machines were accurate. I very strongly disagree. Without any audit at all of the real-time voting process, not even spot-checking, there is no way anyone can validate these systems in operation. The problems found by the Princeton team (see other comments) are only examples. One simply cannot trust any system to be accurate without auditing it in my view. Computer systems have all kinds of design and input-output issues that require monitoring, testing, and controls. Would you put your money in a bank that was never audited (well, I hope not much!) You're putting your votes in a system that's not audited, so don't expect the counts to be accurate. This is especially disturbing when the CEO of the machine that makes the most voting machines (Wally Odell, CEO of Diebold) stated during the last election, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." It has widely been reported that Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel has an interest in another voting machine company. (Hagel did not disclose this until it was reported by others. See http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) In this context, reliable auditing of the systems seems all the more important to me. I do not understand why there is not a strong consensus behind a program for at least doing an audit that would confirm the accuracy of these systems in real time.
> Sounds like what Al Gore and the Democrats tried to do in Florida. AlGoreithm, n. (al'-gor-ith'-m) : Any method of calculation performed endlessly until a predetermined desired result is produced.
Off-year primary this week in Milwaukee (very blue city...in more ways than one) had the city reporting 80,000 ballots cast. A three-day recount of ballots shows 46,500 votes tallied. The recount was asked for by officials after the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newpaper raised some pointed questions. Even in 2004, there were big issues here. I think that whenever a magnifying glass is put on every election from here on out, there will be issues found and the extremists on all sides of the political spectrum will try to milk it for all its worth. This is especially true as voting becomes more complex. Maybe it is time for the voting process to have some form of double-blind setup as scientists use that can't be politicized. As long as there is some way a loophole can be milked or inserted into the process for fodder, this will keep going on. Me, I am just amused.
look on video google. look up voting machines. people stating before congress that the voting machiens were built to flip votes.
Pay very careful attention to the Conyers report/links to it. Also, there is a lot of info in the online version that was not in the issue that was sold. (I read this the day it was posted, and really dug into it over the course of a few weeks, and it convinced me.) I don't feel like getting into a flame war about this. However I will say there is a hell of a lot that has not come out yet--one reason is the technology and the posibilities of how it happenned is not easily understood by most. (In that respect, it is similar to Net Neutrality.)
Look.. i've been in close contact with personal family friends who are in these watchdog groups.
There are reports of certain "technicians" connected with the republican party fiddling with the machines in ohio.
There have been reports of partisan clerks at designated points of voter registration tossing huge bundles of democratic registrant's applications.
There have been numerous incidents where complete amatures have publically demonstrated hacking of diebold machines.
Finally, the exit polls, which have been accurate for the ENTIRE PAST HISTORY of the american electoral process, now deviate heavily from the actual results.
That's just the knowledge of someone who is only mildly interested because he knows damn well nothing will ever come of an "investigation".
The evidence is overwealming, blatant, plain to even a 3 year old child, and anyone who believes otherwise is simply blinded by either propaganda or partisanship.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
and everyone that bitches about exit polls being lopsided, get a CLUE! I LIE everytime a pollster asks me about who I'm gonna vote for! because it is none of their F'n business! I've a number of friends that also did that.. Trust me, I never bitched all those years my guys lost... (Not always Republican either, so don't jump to that conclusion!)
How many people thought Pero Should have Won? Was it stolen from him? no... Thats just life.
Again, Get over it... It's the Wah-Wah-Wah and inability to support a secured america that will be their downfall again unless they come up with some REAL plans instead of just "Bush did this and it suxs. Don't you hate him too?" type of mentaility that I currently see being offered by the Dems.
But, I warned you, so don't come crying again in 2008...
By the way, if you are afraid of the "Machines" being hacked, do like my plan this year... Vote Absentee... it's 100% papertrail. But you may need to register soon for Primaries... (Oct. 10 hear in Ohio I think.)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Ignoring the question of whether the election was or wasn't stolen, I think it's fair to say that the last two elections in the USA have been very close, as has the latest one in Mexico. This leads to the interesting question: how valid is a system where the outcome goes against the wishes of up to half the voters?
In a parliamentary democracy, what would happen is probably that the largest few parties would form a coalition that held a majority in parliament. They would be in power, but the parliament would still have a say. This way, there's a much closer representation of the various wishes of the voting public.
"Democracy is the mistaken belief that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." It's a nice quote, and especially applicable to systems in where there's only one winner (e.g. the winner-take-all system in the US).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
- only if the republican candidate lags behind on the polls.
Bush would never interfere with a winning republican candidate.
Bush may be evil, but he is NOT stupid.
He never cheats just for the fun of it.
I notice this about America. They don't seem to care about the information if the source can be discredited...
Take for example Michael Moore - now I don't live in America so I cannot comment if he is indeed accurate or not - who every few years comes out with some thing which to the average viewer/reader (eg me) appears to be well researched and portrayed yet due to the simple reply by those who dislike his work of "But it was made by Michael Moore" instantly drops it out of concern. Personally in my country if even a few of the claims made in any of the documentaries had been suggested about our government/way of life there would be a huge group of people calling for action and some thing would most likely be done about it. For example the health system in my state seems to be breaking at sides with corruption; the people who brought it to light were completely destroyed publicly by the system and the state government though the general population caught on and now there are inquiries every where and the state government are under huge pressure to fix it. So why do Americans dismiss it without second thought as the bias is blatant (and you are clearly able to see his bias, it is not hidden) and the facts appear supported and open?
This is more of a general question on the topic though Michael Moore is the best example of what I'm trying to ask that I know of, feel free to ignore him completely in any answers.
I ate your fish.
All these arguments about who's more biased or who has "sour grapes" are anti-intellectual clap-trap that serve only to stiffle open discussion of vitally important issues.
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
Why do people keep doing that? countering accusations of fraud with counter-accusations of fraud? It does not follow from that argument that the election result was an accurate tally of voter intentions, quite the contrary. Are people seriously suggesting that we make an assumption that the level of fraud was "probably about even repub/dem" so we don't need to recount?
I also don't understand why there is any opposition to counting ballots.
If results are very close and/or if anyone doubts the validity of the results I can think of no legitimate reason to refuse to count the paper ballots.
Except one: cost. I have a hard time believing that americans are willing to forgo double-checking their election results because it would cost too much.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
I'm in your Ohio, stealing your election.
particular points worth expending mod points for:
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
eom
1845248 ref unperson, unevent, rewrite fullwise.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Whether or not this election was tampered with or whether the outcome would have been different, we still need to get more people to the polls. Instead of generating yet more apathy, an article like this should goad more people to get out and vote. It may seem counter intuitive, but more people in the booth will actually create fewer opportunities for manipulation.
+1, The Truth Hurts, Doesn't It, Dave?
Have you read this article?
e dy/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kenn
It does a good job of picking apart pretty much everything Kennedy said. Basically, Kennedy spouts a bunch of numbers, and makes conclusions about what those numbers mean. The Salon article establishes that many of his conclusions are not particularly sound. The process by which Kennedy reached his conclusions didn't really involve math.
By the way, here is some math(or something that looks substantially like math anyway): 2+2=5. If I claim that is true, I am an idiot, it simply isn't credible. To discredit my math, one simple has to count to four.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
well ok, but as a control, i'd like to see some analysis on dewey v. truman.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Votes?
We don't want votes.
We don't need no stinking votes!
Ha Ha Ha Ha!
for him. That's the same logic these democrats are using today.
How? The Wraith and the Ori can actually run a war. The neo-cons, not so much. Truly sad from the party I always percieved as anal retentive perfectionists. Oh well, Mission Accomplished!
-those people who tell you not to take chances, they are all missing what lifes' all about-
Maybe he has a point. After all, who knows more about stealing elections than the Kennedys?
http://www.cambridgenow.ca/spps/sitepage.cfm?catID =119
The same guy created Penthorse, Cowsmopolitan, Playboar and Vague. He, of course, was not intending to be taken seriously.
If simple people are forced to vote, they'll undoubtedly vote for whoever had the better campaign advertisements. Compulsory voting = even more private money-dependent campaigns. End of story.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Does it really matter anymore ? The truth, and the lies. The propaganda and manipulation before, during and after ? WHoever may or may not be doing this has already succeeded. The American people are more and more polarized everyday. As long as I can have you arguing among yourselves about Christians, Moslems and Jews, 911, the Election and The "War on Terror (what a joke...like terrorism is new), I have won. I will raise your taxes and lower your standard of living and you'll be blaming the Terrorists, the Moslems and Gas prices... It's a game people, and we are merely pawns... Even if we knew the truth no one would want to hear it either way.... Go ahead and vote...and pray...and trust. We all have our own ways... PS (Just my opinion, not a troll)
End of Line.
At least in the states, mandatory voting would be bad. "Mandatory caring" (not possible) would be decent though...
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The truth is the democrats didn't do themselves any favours. Bush how ever bad he was and is, is at least consistent. John Kerry on the other hand had difficulty trying to keep his point of view. The major issue was he couldn't decide whether he was for or against the US in being in Iraq, simply because he was trying to win everyone over, therefore winning few over.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They don't exist.
When do I get the mod points so that I can mod the submitter/article as troll?
Rolling Stone is crap and has been for years.
The New York Times Book Review - Fiction / Sci-Fi,Fantasy
Their platform as it stands now:
-withdraw from iraq, try to do so gracefully since were damned if we stay and damned if we go.
-undo the damage to our civil liberties done by the patriot act
-reform social security by removing the blatant privatization bush put in which basically amounts to abolshment (but with the added benefit of commissions to brokers before your stock tanks)
-Universal health care (which responds to the increasing 10s of millions of people without healthcare, and which they make a damned good economic case for!)
-Investigation into bush's illegal activites, followed hopefully by impeachment
-Investigation into oil companies among others for gouging.
Among others.. it's all laid out..
Big media is owned by republicans so you don't see it.. listen to air america and they spend each and every day spelling out those exact same points.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I tried to do a little fact-checking, but was unsuccessful. The reference for fraud allegations in Ohio takes you to 12) See "Ohio's missing votes." I searched around the article for another reference to it and found one in the article itself saying the same thing: See Ohio's missing votes." Well what the hell is that? No link to a report or story or rumor or mudsling or anything.
From Wikipedia:
/. is waiting till NOW to publish this story? I mean, this was A) A Rolling Stone story and B) A June Article. Something that was published THREE MONTHS ago IS NOT NEWS. Secondly, when did Rolling Stone become a reliable news source that was fair and balanced? When did they suddenly become political experts?
"Election of President of the United States and Vice President of the United States is indirect. Presidential Electors are chosen by the popular vote every four years on Election Day. Although ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50 states and the District of Columbia are actually choosing Electors when they vote for President and Vice President. These Presidential Electors in turn cast the official (electoral) votes for those two offices."
(emphasis added)
I find it amazing the sheer number of americans who find time to bitch about the government and don't take the time to understand it. Maybe 1 out of every 5 people I'll talk to know that you aren't voting for the president when it comes time to vote. Having moved from canada just 6 years ago, and knowing more about american government than most americans do, I find this very sad.
It's a few months before the congressional election, and
(I am neither Democrat nor Republican, I am for which is actually making sense, and who I happen to agree with at the time, unlike some who are fanatically and unwaveringly either on the right or left)
In a democracy, accurate polls are essential ...
Ah but you see we've managed to spin that one too. The US "is not a democracy," no, no, it is "a Republic founded on democratic principles." Being non-core, these democratic principles can (and should) be overridden if it is necessary to keep the government in safe hands during times like these when the US is threatened with imminent destruction from the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
They should send UN observers at the election to make sure that there's no cheating.
you people are retards
'There are lies, damn lies - and statistics.' - Disreali
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"Arguing with fraudsters is like arguing with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist."
http://linux.coconia.net/gr/523.htm
Nobody's been able to argue against the above evidence. Not even RMS.
Not to dispute your theory because I do believe what you said is correct in ways.
:)
Numbers and maths can be manipulated though. So a lot of geeks won't trust the maths unless they come from a source they trust.. hence we're going round in circles again. Some geeks are also hardcore zealots and you can throw any numbers at them and they will find some way to distort them to ehrie bidding (the old "Security fixs debate" comes to mind).
Also I think we're just as easy to control as anyone else. It just takes the right triggers and you can make any puppet dance. If you found a geek's buttons they could be pressed as easy as anyone else, and the ego most of us have would only make us more likely to keep being fooled rather than seeing we're wrong.
Just a thought
I like muppets.
You can have a secret ballot, or you can have a (mostly) fraud-proof ballotting system. If anyone knows a way to have both, I'd love to hear the details.
Ohio in 2004 had some dirty stuff going on with a bad secretary of state. Florida in 2000 had some dirty stuff going on in 2000 with a bad secretary of state. As others have mentioned the US has a long history of serious problems in presidential elections, 1960 being a notable instance. At the municipal level things have been very bad too at times. Determining just how corrupt an election is, is difficult. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have taken a longterm interest in clean elections.
There are other problems too. One of the big problems is the statistical tie. This is basically what happened in the Washington state race for governor and the Florida presidential election. The voting technology in use isn't that great and there is in practice a margin of error due to hanging chads, butterfly ballots, faulty computer hardware or software etc. With votes numbering in the millions the margin of error due to votes that aren't clear or properly recorded is hundreds at minimum. The result is if Bob leads Joe in Michigan by 300 votes that really doesn't mean anything because the margin of error is say at least 800 votes. To use the legal phrase the will of the voters is not determinable. There is no winner. It is a tie. Of course the US system has no provision for ties so things get really messy. This explains the Washington state governor's race I think, but it does not account for all of corruption, disenfranchisement and dead people voting elsewhere.
Please remember how long it took for the 19th Amendment to get through. (which gave women the right to vote in the US, approximately 50 years after Blacks were given the right to vote)
_ to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
the dems and libs suck it up and face the fact they lost again? Stop the mud flinging and start saying what you will do better. I would have considered voting the other way if kerry would have said more then "i have a plan for this and that". yeah ok what is that plan? But i never saw one... oh well.. flame me if you wish.. will just back-up my thinking that dems and libs always throw mud.
I guess the Demopubs need to find something to say since they don't seem to be organized enough to have a platform for the next election. Sort of funny, the Dems complaining about a "stolen" election when Mayor Richard Daley was caught stuffing the ballot boxes during JFK's election (wonder why folks never mention that while they're complaining about losing an election). JFK even joked that his father Joe (who made his money as a bootlegger during Prohibition) told him to only buy the votes needed to win because he wasn't paying for a landslide". Oh well, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
(And I, for one, ignore our new overlords)
Look at the video on this page.
Rep Peter King (R-NY) spills thebeans
A quote from the page:
Alex Pelosi's new film "Diary of a Political Tourist" catches a tipsy Congressman Peter King making a comment at a White House function before the election had been finished that, "It's already over. The Election's over. We Won."
When Pelosi asks, "How do you know that?" King replies, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
~~~~~~~~~~~~end quote
James Baker III bragged to Russian businessmen after the 2000 election about fixing the election for Bush in Florida.
"I fixed the election in Florida for George Bush." James Baker, Bush family lawyer speaking before a crowd of Russian businessmen.
photosMy Photostream
So, who's responsible? Is this considered "treason", Or just "fraud". If such a scam gets wholly exposed (which is unlikely in this day and age, but we'll just cross our fingers here), what happens? Is the election overturned, or the current president just impeached? Does someone hang, or just get a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to?
Without a truly impartial review board with limited power over the presidency exists, and a system of accountability is established, there's almost no point in voting at all. At this point, it'd almost take another civil war, or revolution to fix things.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
You are a whackjob. Yeah, and Bush planned 9/11 too.
First off, I live in Louisiana, while we may not have invented scummy politicians, we did perfect them. The following are in jail or have been in jail, a former Governor, a former State Rep, three Insurance Comissioners in a row, and that is the short list. Then there is Congressman Jefferson and his cold hard cash. Here the Democrats use race amongst all of their tools to win office. Jessie Jackson among others were saying that they were going to challenge the results of the elections in New Orleans, when it looked like Nagin was going to lose. They weren't saying "if", they were saying, "we will challenge the election." When Nagin won, that all went away...interesting... We have all of these people who aren't living in Louisiana anymore after Katrina and Rita, but they'll be able to vote for who knows how long in our elections. This is a dream come true for so many politicians, they don't live here, so they don't know how bad the politicians are, and all the politicians have to do is send them a ballot every election. And people wonder why I am so eager to leave when I graduate, but at least I'll be able to vote.
Now that I've established that, I wouldn't be shocked about problems in Ohio, or anywhere else for that matter. The Democrats are most upset that the red-neck Republicians out played them at their own game. I am surpised at how many people actually voted for Kerry, or did they first vote for him and then against him? In Louisiana politics I have to sometimes vote for a Democrat, as he/she is the best one for the job. With the presidential election I did the same thing, and it was a no brainer to pick between Bush and flip-flop Kerry. Kerry just didn't have anything to offer, he tried to please everyone, which I've seen too often down here to fall for that trick. The Democrats shot themselves in the foot with that one. I could go on, Blanco Nagin , but I have things to do....
I wasn't going to post in this thread, but "The Man" probably already has a file on me, so I'll go ahead and excercise my first amendment rights and comment.
My comment is this: so what? The president cheated. It seems pretty clear that something fishy was going on in the 2004 election. I am from Ohio, I saw as our shameful Secretary of State (possibly our future governor) stood by his man and took 3rd party candidates off the ballot to make it easier for his master to get re-elected. As much as I didn't want Bush re-elected, I accepted the "truth" like everyone else did. I was even suspiscious. But what's going to happen? Is the Republican controlled Congress going to investigate? Is the Republican appointed Supreme Court going to invalidate the election two years after the fact? Is an armed militia going to march down to the White House and give control back to the people?
No. None of this is going to happen. As much as our commander in chief goes around waving his flag and talking about how we are "spreading freedom" across the globe, we have lost our freedom in this country. Even if this article is 100% true, nothing will ever come of it. You know why? There are two ways of dealing with those who dissent. One way is to kill them all. Stalin did this, and it worked for a while, but he tends to be frowned upon by history. The other way is to just ignore them. What are they going to do? Post an angry article in their blogs? Write a letter to their congressman? Write and host a satirical fake news show? Even worse, are they going to show the fat cats in Washington and run for office themselves? At the end of the day, nothing will happen. Don't think that the Democrats are any better. The illusion of politics is that you actually have a choice. You don't. All the people in power just take turns passing it around to each other. They pretend to disagree about the issues, but they all have one thing in common. They all want to wear the crown and carry the sceptre. The most devious ones make it to the top, and the others end up getting jobs as high paid lobbyists or fade out of existance.
So here is what I'm choosing to do. I'm not stupid enough to fight the system. It's like swimming against a rip tide. You swim and swim against the current, and you never get anywhere. Eventually it takes you out to sea, and you die. Instead, I'm going to make the best life I can for myself and my family. I stand up for my rights where I can. I write my congressman, and read about the issues, but I don't fool myself into thinking I can make a difference. Most importantly, I put blind faith in the idea that what goes around comes around. I am not a member of an organized religion, but I'm not arrogant enough to think I know how the universe works. I think there are other facets to our existance that we can't even begin to comprehend. I believe that in some way, in some form, the people who do evil in this world face subsequent consequences in the next. I strive to be the best person I can in this one, and hopefully I will be rewarded. If not, hey, at least I didn't waste my whole life on this Earth stressed out about something I can't do anything about. Sometimes, the blue pill isn't all that bad.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
You're a perfect illustration of why I won't vote for Democrats for the time being.
Thanks for the refresher.
Now, if a candidate will show me that he will have the courage to exercise his owth to protect us against all enemies -- bot foriegn and domestic, then heck, I'll vote for him! To me this means:
He will actively actively engage terrorism throughout the world with military force.
He will secure the borders of the US from foriegn invasion (read: illegal immigration).
He will commit to actively fight the drug trade.
He will commit to personally uphold and protect the standards and faith (not "values") of the American People.
We had Republican gubernatorial administrations for a quarter century until the most recent. So if, as you claim, there are no legitimate elections here, the Democrats apparently have been cheating for the purpose of bringing in Republican administrations for decades. So you have to admit that they at least are evenhanded in cheating on behalf of everyone.
As to Democratic corruption, the last Republican governor, George Ryan, was just sentenced to six years in Federal prison for...corruption. The point is not that both sides engage in this type of behavior, but that it can't be condoned or excused because "everybody does it". It needs to be exposed wherever it occurs by whoever engages in it.
(If you replace "Illinois" with "Chicago" in your post, I think i might be inclined to agree with you, though).
sounds like a bunch of whiny liberals doing what they do best: make up senseless shit.
I feel like the Republican party is not necessarily to blame. All I see in my state (Utah, WAY Republican) is new Diebold machines with the voter-verified paper that you get to check after you vote.
Maybe I'm missing something, though. If so, please enlighten me.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
And Dave Schroeder, regardless of whatever it is that would make you try to defend him, to Hell with you.
The above comment epitomize what, in part, I believe is wrong with political discourse in this country (USA). We can't disagree in a civil manner. No, no, no... We have to turn around and name call and tell people to "rot in hell" among other things. Our debates turn into the fights small children have:
Child 1 to Child 2: "you're a poop poop head"
Child 2 to Child 1: "You're a ca-ca face"
Except replace the names with nastier ones.
You don't have to agree with your oppenent, but remember they're a human being too. Be civil.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I'm not an American. I am gob-smacked at the head-in-the-sand attitude being displayed by Republican supporters on Slashdot.
From the article:
"According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion."
This is something to be VERY concerned about, not to be brushed aside with some facile quip.
The article also mentions the fact that the Democrats don't seem to be pushing the issue of electorial fraud, which rather puts the lie to all the posters claiming that this is about Democrats not accepting defeat. The reality is, that had this election been held in a third world country, we would all be decrying it as a case of clear electorial tampering and demanding a fresh election with neutral observers in place.
When you fail to care whether the electorial process was tampered with, you fail to care about democracy at all. What's more important? GW winning or democracy itself? To me, that's a no brainer, but clearly that's not the case for many of the Republican supporters here and as a member of TheRestOfTheWorld, that's a real worry for me. You need to sort your priorities out.
India is known for all such dirty tricks. Did Bush hire India's most corrupt politician, Lalu Yadav ?
I'm surprised that some citizen in good standing (No tickets, no misdemeanors, no felonies, makes good money, is well respected in their neighborhood,) hasn't legally issued a citizen's arrest against the President for Treason. Our citizen's arrest powers, from what I'm reading, are not limited to other citizens, they can go all the way up the chain if one has the backing and evidence to support it. We've already 'witnessed' the crimes, everyday on Television, and Rumsfeld last week came out with the excuse that we invaded Iraq, crying "Think of the oil prices!" Which tells me we did start a war over another nation's oil. These morons are confessing right in front of our faces and we're damned-near blind to it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
From a political perspective, this is huge for both parties, expect the dirt to be knee deep.
Obviously he's never been to Illinois, Wisconsin, or New Jersey. Or Louisiana
To elect a guy who "..actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Kerry's top Ten Flip-Flops
Compared to Kerry, I'll take Bush anyday. At least he doesn't flipflop on issues. I can't imagine how
Kerry in office would have handled Iraq (total withdrawal??), Katrina (yeah, save the people), the economy
(raise taxe$) and other issues.
Bush may not be perfect, but he's no John Kerry...
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
-withdraw from iraq, try to do so gracefully since were damned if we stay and damned if we go.
So, the Democrats' official position is that Iraq's hopeless? Wow, I'm inspired with confidence. The solution of "no solution". Great.
-undo the damage to our civil liberties done by the patriot act
Yes, because the majority of the U.S. population is so pissed off that you can look at library records. Forgive me, but the PATRIOT Act is by far the least of my concerns. As someone who has done more than his fair share of studying national security issues, I recognize the need for something that goes well beyond FISA, which was designed to operate against different kinds of threats.
-reform social security by removing the blatant privatization bush put in which basically amounts to abolshment (but with the added benefit of commissions to brokers before your stock tanks)
Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...
-Universal health care (which responds to the increasing 10s of millions of people without healthcare, and which they make a damned good economic case for!)
Because it's worked oh so well for Europe and Canada! Quick, let's all jump on that bandwagon! And where do you plan on getting the funding for all of this?
-Investigation into bush's illegal activites, followed hopefully by impeachment
DOWN WITH BUSHITLER! Please, did you bother to read the post above?
-Investigation into oil companies among others for gouging.
Because there could only be one source for all the world's problems - rich people.
Among others.. it's all laid out..
I sincerely hope this isn't a serious party platform. Please, please tell me that your post is some kind of sick joke. No serious group could put this forward and expect people to vote for them.
Big media is owned by republicans so you don't see it.. listen to air america and they spend each and every day spelling out those exact same points.
And, of course, the big time media conspiracy theory which I don't buy from the right wing and find particularly fatuous when coming from the left. Yes, I must listen to the great Air America and exorcise the right wing demons like Ted Turner! Save me! Why, I've been wasting all of this time reading ridiculous publications like Foreign Affairs, Policy Review, and the Christian Science Monitor when I could've been listening to some idiot and paid political actor with a BA in Government tell me what to think in the form of nice, compact bumper sticker slogans! Oh, the fool I must be! I must throw away my entire library of books written by influential political thinkers and replace it with Al Franken and Noam Chomsky ravings!
If you're looking to convince me your party has anything resembling a platform, you've failed miserably.
should be labeled... -1, Hates a good discussion... thanks dude. Might not totally agree, but you see the issues here.
Too bad that popular vote still doesn't matter in whether there was election fraud or not since the we still have the electorial college. And as far as I've heard, those votes have yet to be "fradulent".
However, local areas for things like judges, mayors, council members, State Senate and the like are prone to fraud because the numbers and precincts are low.
Perhaps even to the Govenor level in the smaller states.
Voting area's are typicaly challenged for historical reasons ... such as a large number of dead or non-existent people voting.
Knowing human nature, Vote fraud certainly exists.
Also knowing human nature, claimes of vote fraud where none exist is a certainty too. It's done to challenge the victor and to steal validity. It's the deamonization process to undermine the other side.
Poll fraud also exists and is done in several ways. Poll fraud is done to discourage the voters on the other side. Just like west coast/east coast thing, where if they show the other side is likely to lose, discourages the supports of the other party to show up and vote.
The voting process should be simple. To register to vote, you establish your identity, and you get a voters registration card. When you go vote, you show them your registration card and they mark you as voted.
The only problem is, certain areas have some advantages to *not* making the voting process simple, to not make voters establish Identity or citizenship, and they always fight these vote/registration changes tooth and nail.
The article presented here has too many half truths, too many urban legends/myths, and too many instances where doubters have to prove a negative.
It's always intresting in slashdot reading the politics part as there are alot of comments witch most are worthless reading and thus get stripped away by the threshold :)
I got fed up with all the political articles and blatant left leaning of the site so I changed my homepage and used other technical news sites for keeping up on current TECH news. I was bored tonight so I figured I would check out Slashdot and I was immediately reminded why I stopped reading the website. I used to read this site for technical news, not political opinions and typical party line rambling. I get plenty of political crap from every other news medium. In fact I remember seeing an interview with Kennedy on a major news network months ago talking about his book. So in reality this can't even be counted as "news." Therefore I'm left with the possibility it was only posted for political purposes which really bothers me. I'm officially writing off this site after 7 years of reading it every day. So long. I hope one day you'll return to your roots of reporting technical news for us "nerds."
"I agree that the polarization is getting worse, but I don't think the Internet is to blame."
Here's the cause (IMO): Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, Harpers, September 2004
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Would somebody with points mind modding the parent as flamebait?
Hey! The neocons can run a war just fine! They're making plenty of money!
In related news, we've apparently completely lost the Anbar province, the entire western third of Iraqi, to 'al-Qaeda in Iraq'.(1) We no longer are bothering to even try to control Anbar, and apparently can't according to some recently leaked classified reports, so no longer have to drive across that damn desert anymore, and, hell, they didn't even have any oil.
And the north, of course, is happily in the hands of the Kurds, where they're having lots of fun advertising on TV and infiltrating across to Turkey and blowing up them up. I'm hoping it will be Turkey/Kurdistan trying for a 1980 Lebanon/Israel, where Turkey invades(2) and controls them for a few decades, and experiences even more and more terrorist working with native Turkey Kurds. They'll have their work cut out for them, because Lebanon is back in the game, baby, and they're not about to let their title get taken away sitting down!
And Iran is stepping in to control the remainer of the country. Luckily, they have experience at running oil wells, so that should work out nicely. Perhaps in a few years, they could remain themselves Iranq or Ira? The Kurds, of course, are 'Kurdistan', leaving 'Iraq' for the west, if they want it.
See, we should be entirely out of Iraq really soon, because soon the Iraqis will be able to fight the war all by themselves. Is it a civil war if there are three sides? Maybe a trivil war?
1) You know, the organization that didn't even exist until two years ago. Luckily, right now they're just killing us over there, and I'm sure they won't come over here, because...well..I forget, but I'm sure there's a good reason they won't. Probably they're scared of flying, what with all those airplanes flying into buildings. (And most soldiers are poor, anyway, so does it really matter if they die?)
2) We could complain, but seem to recall us invading a country just a few years ago because they supported terrorists, although I forget the name.(3) Starts with an A. Man am I glad that war was over, although it sucks we lost and the Taliban are back in charge. It probably wasn't that important, though. I mean, what did the Taliban ever do to anyone? They did blow up those giant Buddhas, but, frankly, those statues didn't look anything like Buddha anyway.
3) Not that we could complain if they just invaded for no reason at all. They could always assert that Kurdistan is hiding, for example, a black hole and a slingshot to launch it at them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Only on Slashdot could a rant that ends with "to Hell with you" be considered insightful. There may be something true in there, but hardly insightful or even on topic. This is another examply of why Slashdot was so much better before they added the "politics" catagory. The transformation to a rant-infested forum is reminiscent of that of the Jerry Springer show.
If there was something wrong with the election, the NY Times would have found it. Just read the editorials, There is no love for George Bush. They expose the NSA wiretapping and they would love to expose this. Rolling Stones breaking this has the same value as Playboy or Vanity Fair doing it. I am democrat and I absolutely loathe the current administration. But, the past is the past and I am looking forward to 2006. If Republicans take both Houses, the illegals can have this country because I am moving to China. One of two facts will be apparent- Americans are truly idiotic or someone has a stranglehold on power and it ain't I.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Any time there's a story on wrong-doing, it all comes down to "everybody does it." That's the worst position I've ever heard.
Not everyone does it, and if they do, they should be investigated, convicted or if that fails, they should be exposed to the point where there is such public outrage that they're thrown out of office.
My politics are left-wing and I support the movement to purge the DLC and corporate democrats. The only reason I am part of that movement is because of the internet, something you say is a threat to "our system." Well maybe, but I think it is actually a threat to THEIR SYSTEM, because one day my right-wing counterparts will wake up and realize their party is also over-run with corporate puppets, and start voting Libertarian or someone else in who isn't bought off by lobbyists. People will stop getting their news from the corporate press, and will go to places like opensecrets.org to get facts about who actually pays for legislation.
I got off-topic from the vote-rigging, but I was making a point that your apathy and defeatist attitude is not helping the cause to expose corruption. Vote-rigging is the worst crime against our democracy, but you'd rather attack a democratic medium such as the internet for bringing up the issue. In your world, democracy is dangerous, ignorance is strength, down is the new up.
You know how newly modernizing third world countries skipped all the legacy technology and went straight to state of the art phone networks in the last 5-10 years, while older rich countries kept adding incrementally to their old systems?
The US has a very old democracy. It started way over 200 years ago, and the traditions are from that era. By 1770's standards, their current electoral system is a miracle of fairness and accuracy.
But by the standards of European countries who only fully accepted democracy in the last 100 years, and instituted modern state of the art systems when they did, it's a bizarre medieval mess.
Hope that helped!
Take a look at the pic of "the average guy" railing at the courthouse in 2000. They're all GOP operatives who swapped their suits for blue-collar costumes. They're power-mad liars, and we live in a banana republic. George will nuke Iran based on God's will, i.e. the voices in his head. God help us all.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Without forgetting the possibility that an election was or in the future could be easily rigged, let's take some of the time we're spending throwing around wild accusations and conspiracy theories and spend it seeking out candidates that will pull the US out of its current spiral. If we have candidates available to us that are not as dumb/evil/corrupt/ignorant, we'll all be better off. The disenfranchisement, bickering and schoolyard 'my-team's-better-than-yours' mentality are ruining America faster than Bush can.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
If someone was to post a comment like this, it would be marked as flamebait. This story has nothing to do with science, technology, or any of the other things slashdot talks about. You might be able to argue relevance with electronic voting hacking or something. Truthfully, people need to stop pulling stories that are two years old out of the trash and trying to rehash them.
As a long time Ohio resident I have no doubt what-so-ever that the election here was stolen.
If you're hard right, everything looks left-leaning.
Has anyone ever been polled after voting? If so, did you answer honestly? Or answer in a way to help your canidate? Most smart voters know the purpose of the exit poll is to keep voters at home. What other purpose would releasing expected vote counts before the polls are closed serve? Let the folks that haven't voted watch a little TV, see their canidate is ahead, and stay at home. For that reason, anyone that tells the truth to an exit pollster is hurting their canidate.
Bottom line is a win is a win. If the ref doesn't see the foul before the game is over--there is no foul! Conspiracy theorist are going to love seeing the price of gas shoot back up to $3.00 a gallon after the mid-term elections. Amercians tend to have a very short memory. Come election tim, expect to pay $1.25 a gallon and see a bunch of ads linking our successful War on Terror to the decrease in prices. The sucker play will be when gas prices plummet a few months before the 2008 elections.
This is just like the Democrats in every other aspect in life - someone cheated them, they never fail. Its like they do to kids these days - every one of 100 contestants gets a trophy even though 99 lost.
As always, thanks for the laughs.
Most of your post is simply too absurd to bother with responding to, but I'll have some fun while I'm here:
First, naom chomsky and Al Franken are influential political thinkers.. or maybe lies and lying liars didnt make it to the the top 10 best sellers list?
So, I should read Ann Coulter as well? Great! She's influential! Stupid, but influential! She's on a top 10 list!
By influential, I mean people that write things policy makers read and have some hope of being implemented: Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Scott Sagan, John Mueller, Thomas Friedman, et al. People with doctorates in relevant fields, people who have worked on this. People who have done analysis or worked in the field. Not op/ed page dwellers that make a quick buck off of political rantings. Not linguistics professors who have made a living writing rants that find a home amongst Marxists.
Finally.. that whole rant just pegged you as an extreme neofascist right wing nutter.
Help, mommy, he's calling me names! Oooh... fascist. The left's favorite word! I'm so scared by it, ooooooh!
Those publications you seem to sarcastically laud in your shameless frothing rant have been thoroughly debunked as extreme right, and it's been shown from first hand witnesses that anything opposed to the right wing agenda since '01 has been kept out of the main stream by zealous editors, corporate chiefs, etc because it would be "bad for america"...
The Council on Foreign Relations has been "debunked as extreme right"? Are you really so stupid as to say something like that? No, seriously, if you post in response, I'd like you to type exactly those words - "The CFR has been debunked as an extreme right organization". They'll make a great sig for me. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I mean at all? Have you heard of these publications? Read them? Or is anything other than The Nation simply a right-wing rag? Who, precisely, has debunked these publications? Where is your evidence? Oh wait... you don't need any... BUSH SUCKS, FASCIST!
Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...
better than making it "nonexistant".. by the way making it actually worth something to people by reforming it and undoing bush's rediculous privatization does not necessarily mean making it insoluble.. it may however mean that corporate executives will have to get 3 solid gold hum-v's this year instead of 4.
Yes, we should really stick with the present social security system, which is bound for failure in the next few decades, just to make sure no one gets "solid gold hum-v's" (which should be HMMWV, but hey, it's not like you're concerned with accuracy). Riiiiight...
Social Security will, effectively, become "nonexistent" unless massive reforms are made. Personally, since you're so concerned about rights and freedoms (vis-a-vis your position on the PATRIOT act), if the government wants to invest money in a retirement account for me, I'd like the choice of where that money goes rather than trusting the government (something you obviously have issues with) to put it into a system which depends on birth rates the U.S. is highly unlikely to sustain in the long-term.
Take a look at similar programs in countries whose present birth rate reflects what the U.S. birth rate will be in a few decades - here's a hint, it's not pretty. For someone who's supposedly so concerned about government intervention in our lives, working against a program that would allow people to exercise some freedom over how THEIR money is spent for THEIR retirement rather than just placing it all in a system that will not be able to provide for them in a few decades would seem to make sense. But your positions aren't based on personal consistency - simply arguing the contrary of what someone you don't like says.
As to the rest... heh, thanks for the laughs. It was a boring boring BORING (as you seem to like to type it) repeat of the gibberish found throughout the left and about as enlightening as reading a Franken/Chomsky/Coulter/Limbaugh debate.
"illiterate people have just as much right to choose who represents them as literate people do." ...but how the hell are they going to read the ballot?
Are we currently discriminating against brain-dead people? Doesn't seem like most voting booths are very accessable to the brain-dead. From the representation we end up with, it sure looks like they are getting the job done somehow. Maybe they wheel them in at the end of the night or something....
I've heard this meme (that "the Democrats also steal a lot of elections") a lot lately but I have not seen anyone substantiate it. I don't recall anyone getting up in arms about the process of the Clinton elections, though certainly there were people upset that he won.
Does anyone have anything other than innuendo on this talking point? It sounds a little too much like a Rove snowjob to me -- I hear the talking point a lot from different sources but never any deeply resourced, specific complaints such as RFK aired.
W ran on the platform of being a uniter who would work hard to bring everyone together. Am I the only person who remembers those campaign speeches? We appear to be about as divided as we've ever been, as a nation.
I'm a Bush-voting Republican. I'm sooo tired of this crap. Ok, we stole the election in 2000. We stole it again in 2004. Guess what? We're going to steal it again in 2008, and there's not a god d@mn thing any of you can do about it. So shut your pie holes and get used to it.
Or better yet, vote. There will always be mistakes, errors, dishonesty, cheating, etc... I can't help but think that there are more people complaining about it than actually voting and off-setting it.
Maybe campaign finance reform and a viable 3rd party to bring some health back to your so-called democracy?
How does an editorial hitpiece and a link to a poorly-written Wikipedia entry wind up on the front page of Slashdot? I wish Pudge were around to put out the smackdown.
I had to use it a few months ago because i went and nuked my ankle playing sports. I thought it might have been broken. I was in there for about 15 minutes before receiving attention. I was assessed, x-rayed, and out of there in less than an hour (no break, but 3rd degree sprain). Cost: None. I even had a second visit the next day including re-x-raying being i was in a great deal of pain (severe sprains hurt a lot apparently). Cost: nothing aside from prescription costs for T3s and crutches.
I don't suppose anybody from the US could let me know what that kind of trip would cost there? I'm just curious what my visits were worth.
I'm off to bed, so no time to even bother. Great way to lighten up the evening, though. Thanks once again for the laughs, especially this nugget:
Since the left speaks clearly, but with great complexity, I can only assume you simply don't understand the complexity theyre trying to convey to you.. you insult yourself wrongly here.. because I honestly think you're more competent than that.
Allow me to assure you that I hold no similar opinion of your intellect.
Also... people with Ph.D's in fields like those you are speaking about also tend to be in the elite echelons of the upper class, because those degrees tend to cost you more money than you make from them (without the right connections, of course.. wink wink).. and you wander why they espouse elitist right wing values and are listened to by elitist right wing leaders?
Ah, the left's distrust for science...
I've got to go sleep so I can wake up with all the energy I need to keep down the teeming masses yearning to be free. Toddle back along to Kos and post away where your views won't be challenged, and you'll feel much better, I promise!
Oh man... great times, great times.
Putting aside any lawyerly evasions, it's ludicrous to compare a lie about a blowjob with a lie used in the leadup to a wasteful and unjustified war, with all the suffering, death, and costs (both societal and financial) that it entails. So far, over 2,000 good men have died more or less in vain for the sake of a repeated lie (that there was a clear and present reason to invade Iraq, rather than finishing the job in Afghanistan).
Yes, and it's perhaps the most effective and insidious type of lie. Deliberately denying the evidence of one's own senses (in this case, one's own cabinet and intelligence wings) is self-deception. Wilfully doing so is lying. It's much easier to lie to others if you first convince yourself.
Yes, if you have good reason to believe otherwise but choose not to heed those reasons.
When actions and rhetoric disagree so strongly, it is indeed hard to conclue otherwise. Rather than turn this into a lengthy rant, I'll follow one example: If the Iraqi conflict were genuinely as important to our safety as the neocons imply, we should have a draft and a mobilized military-industrial complex, as we did during WWII (which, recall, lasted just 3.5 years). The neocons know that would be political suicide, because Iraq just isn't that important -- so they tried to do the job half-assed, with the same result they had 35 years earlier in Viet Nam -- an unhappy population, a growing insurgency, and no exit strategy. They knew (or at least ha seen reports saying) that Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, that they had no WMDs, and that they were no current threat, but they still pushed that rhetoric and spent over $40,000 of your money (and another $40k from every man, woman, and child in the nation) on a pig in a poke.
Yeah! What he said ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I don't know what "level" of visit, i had, but taking the lowest amount puts me at $160. The only x-ray labeled is chest at another $160, so i did a good $640 (plus whatever a physician costs) of hospital visitation that week.
My girlfriend (i know, geek license revoked) had a visit a few months ago because she temporarily lost vision in one eye and got a nasty headache (apparently an "occular migrane"). They did a vision test and a CT scan. Looking at those prices, she did about $1000 that night.
I have posted this before, but I will post it again. Election theft is easy. However, beware of the 'obvious' targets. People like to yell about the voting machines. This is a distractor. The machines have a bunch of problems, but cheating at that level is simply inefficient. What works better is to go for the tabulators. Take a look at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/. There I have run and photographed some studies on tabulator software and found out things that were beyond scarey. Sure, suppress the vote, initimidate voters, but if the ultimate counter cannot be trusted, neither can the outcome of the election. Should there be an election 'surprise' in November, this could well be the reason why. When will it be time for that armed insurrection? Dr_Ish [Just asking questions and causing trouble, as usual -- see you all in the Cuban 'holiday camp']
The linked article goes through a bunch of Kennedy's claims and casts them into doubt.
Sure does, until you read the rebuttal that puts the smackdown on Manjoo.
for helping to secure yet another Republican victory. Every time I hear some democrat whining about the 2000 and 2004 elections it makes me want to vote Republican no matter who the candidate is because at least the Republican will have clear values and have a high chance of doing something about them.
Here's a crazy idea. Stop bitching about what Bush is alledgedly doing wrong and start promoting what the Democrats are going to do right. What are the Democrats doing to help ensure an accurate vote?
Considering "Bush is an idiot" failed to secure a victory twice, it might be a good idea to switch gears and try a new approach. Why not try talking about what the democrates are doing right?
Let's assume for a second that a Democrat gets into office. What are they going to do? If their entire message was just to get rid of Bush then they've completed the objective of their entire term in a single day and are now I have no idea what they're going to try to do.
At least with Bush we know what he's going to do.
Work Safe Porn
The majority of South Americans like democratic socialism, hate America for assassinating their elected leaders and organizing dictatorial military coups in their nations, and aren't moronic enough to wage war against plants that let people enjoy life slightly more than they would otherwise. Deal with it. Americans are never quite as stupd as when they express their ridiculous delusions about South America. Actually, maybe America's behaviour at election time is stupider. After all, voting for a "conservative" who doesn't repeal gun control laws, doesn't lower taxes, doesn't promote state power, and instigates massive government oversight of every aspect of American life, is so dumb that it is literally staggering. As is voting for a "liberal" who bombs aspirin factories, encourages pork-barrel healthcare programs that don't actually provide healthcare to anyone, and wages the war on drugs with more fervor than any other government in recent memory. Goddam Americans are fucking stupid!
Oh give me a break. This could be said by either party at any time. Get over it... 2004 is in the past and Bush won. Not for, not against; just pointing out the obvious. This is nothing but political garbage being heaped on the political fire to stoke another bunch of rumors. Let's focus on what good can be done by either party, not how they cheated or stole or somehow took what was "yours". That is what is wrong with America politically these days. Take responsibility and show us what YOU have to offer instead of crying that you deserve more than someone else. Prove your value and let that speak for you. If someone cheated, fine. Don't lower yourself to that level. Rise above the rest so you can show that that kind of blubbering doesn't matter. Show us how YOU can do better or just sit it out and let someone stronger run. Just my two cents...
An enlightening article, but I agree that both sides fudge/tamper/whatever you want to name it. It amazes me that people would use slashdot to argue politics rather than FIND AN EFFECTIVE SOLUTION!!!! I consider the slashdotters some of the most intelligent based upon reading their posts....we need a better system! If the some of the top minds in the country get caught up in politics, what hope do the majority of the country have? We are bought and sold on advertising, we lay over our control to a minority of people(who ultimately go where the money is), and as long as we get our way we could hardly care. I, for one, will take the road less travelled. Disenfranchised by paritisan voting and frustrated by the lack of an efficient design of systems, I will do what I can. To say I dream one day of becoming a politician is a dirty word nowadays, but I refuse to deal with the corruption and greed of those we hire to do the job. Yeah, I know, your still wondering if its a joke! I say to the people smart and capable enough, don't get dragged down into partisan thinking, rise and do something helpful. We could argue in the computer world whether the icon should be blue or red, but until we actually make it, we aren't doing anything! cyrus
Um...I think he was being facetious.
I didn't vote for Bush either time, but enough already. We're not going to build a time machine and change the results. Statiistical analysis? You mean the statistics where they write whole books on how to lie with them? I haven't seen a statistical analysis involving politics in 25 years that was worth a pile of pig shit. At least the pig shit can fertilize a field.
This divisiveness is going to fucking destroy us. You dumb fucks out there have to let go of all these extreme ideologies and conspiray bullshit. Let go of the fucking politics. There is no magical one solution to fit all cases. The government is not always the answer. The private sector is not always the answer. Stop being so intellectually rigid. I swear we could replace everyone in the world with robots running tape loops in their heads, and there'd be no noticable difference.
It's OK to change your mind. It's OK to not toe a Party line. It's OK to think for yourself. If you can label yourself "liberal" or "conservative" or "Left" or "Right" or "Republican" or "Democrat" you are not using even a fraction of the mental process required to think clearly. You have fallen into the trap where politics has just become another mind warping religion, and to deviate from the dogma is heresy. Get out of those ideological comfort zones.
Ah, what's the point. Humanity is fucked in the head, and nothing is going to fix it. It's some degeneration of the evolutionary process or something. I dunno.
:-(
So when does Battlestar start the new season?
The fact is, the situation is neither better, nor worse than it was in previous eras.
It's just BETTER PUBLICIZED.
End of story.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I have to say that I think the situation is even worse than I thought it was... after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legit at least had some wiggle room, because it seemed like there was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found a discrepancy, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe?
The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they screwed up: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never reported that development, and I missed it myself...
Freeman and Bleifuss do a very thorough analysis of the various theories that have been presented to cover the discrepancy, and none of them seem to hold up. It's difficult to see how anyone could read this book and not conclude that phrasing the title as a question was excessively polite...
And it's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system -- a paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? Even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be?
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
Sorry, but your "debunking" was counter-debunked, on Salon as well. Turns out Manjoo was just using the right-wing's classic tricks of distraction and red herrings.
The Electronic Voting Machines can be easily fixed by adding a printer that prints two copies of the vote with a "carbon sheet" like in a cash register the voter gets a copy and one is left on the machine. This will allow the voter to verify his/her vote and there is a paper copy of the vote to verify the machine vote count is accurate in case of dispute of inaccuracy of the machine.
Without paper copy of the vote, the electronic machines can be easily hacked and elections conducted using machines that don't keep verifiable copy of the vote are null and void!
If two of the largest Democracies in the world USA and India are using Electronic Voting Machines without paper copy of the vote we can as well say that age of real democracy is over...... unless we restore democracy by attaching a printer to voting machines....
17% of the population voted Bush into office in 2000, 18% in 2004.
This is taking into account total U.S. population, eligible voter turnout, and popular vote results.
So think of it this way: there is less than a 20% chance that a person you meet walking down the street actually cast a ballot for our current president.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I totally trust your descriptions of recent events even w/o a reference to a single news piece. But then again I doubt you read any yourself, probably just got some excerpts from Kos. Try peeking out of your echo chamber once in a while.
Oh, and the bold really sells it. Try ALL CAPS too, after all if you can't present a well thought out argument, bashing it in is really the only alternative.
Slashdot: Propaganda for nerds. Stuff that's irrelevant.
I have been visiting this site since the beginning (prior to UIDs - back when twenty posts was unheard of). This site used to have all sorts of cool stuff that you couldn't find anywhere else; it's sad to see that it has come to this. There is an interesting story on occasion, but the reposts, the days-old and even months-old news stories that you could have easily discovered on the front page of cnn.com, the thinly veiled advertisements posted as news and the political propaganda have generated more noise than I have time for.
Goodbye slashdot.
Two factors here, caused by one major factor - college kids.
- Exit polls are to a large degree conducted by young college kids. This introduces several forms of potential systemic bias into the equation.
- There is usually some leeway for the interviewer to pick interview subjects. Studies (you will have to Google, but check out Mystery Pollster) show that the less leeway the interviewer is given when picking interview subjects, the higher the Bush vote. Not surprisingly, the Lib college kid is going to have an inclination to pick "friendlier" subjects if given a choice.
- Also, the subjects who voted for Bush might not like to say so to the college kid in the RATM T-shirt, and thus might lie/avoid the interviewer if given leeway.
If error is sqrt(n) then percent error is 1/sqrt(n)
Play Command HQ online
-
Situation
Called Dire in West Iraq Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
-
Iraq?s Anbar province a lost cause?
Intelligence report pessimistic about controlling western province
-
Iraqi insurgents launch wave of sectarian attacks in Kirkuk
-
US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'
Let us know any time you need some help with google news searches.I mean, when you point out that there was chicanery in the 2004 election, why is it that the first question on everyone's minds is "was the fraud large enough to throw the election?" It doesn't bother you at all that there are people trying to rig elections? I mean, if the election wasn't stolen last time, wouldn't you be concerned that it might be stolen next time?
No, not an idiot, just not paying very close attention. The major media hasn't exactly done a great job of covering the issues involved, you know? Check. Essentially. Yeah, essentially. True, but this isn't really the strongest point. It helps establish motive, but not really intent, if you know what I mean.I think a better point is that Diebold and ESS are both run by two brothers, and between the two of them they controlled a huge slice of the vote in 2004. That makes it start to look much less like some whacky theory of an insanely wide-spread conspiracy...
Here we get down to another interesting point... how widespread a "conspiracy" do you need to presume to explain the media's behavior in recent years? The mainstream media has been looking like it's in the government's pocket, but that could easily be a sincere rallying-around-the-flag after the 9-11 attack.The real U.S. voter fraud has been going on for 200 hundred years and in plain sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
This guy is like the Rush Limbaugh of the left. He also thinks autism comes from vaccination, a viewpoint which has been disproven for half a decade.
How about Redundant since every time someone mentiones the word democracy we see someone going on a tirade how the USA is a republic. Well, guess what, there is no difference between a republic and a representative democracy, those are just different words for the same thing.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
hmmm... dumb...
Whoever modded the parent down is a fascist.
Assume, for a moment, that this story is found to be true ('by the DOJ'). Then what? Would Bush get impeached? Will all his (arguably quite insane) calls be reversed?
Proof that the world would be a better place if some people had just been blowjobs.
if indeed the republicans did steal the election the only reason the demacratics are complaining is that they were beaten with there own tactics. ballot stuffing? come on,ohio is'nt chicago.
A second problem, though I'm not sure that the parties themselves are to blame, is the meme that says voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. Apparently because they can't win.
I thought Slashdot was about technology and other geek things. NOT about digging up some random political news article that's 2 YEARS OLD!!! that has no basis in fact. If any of it were true don't you think that the democrats in power would have pushed for some special investigation. OR is it that the Democrats are doing the SAME THING!!! (eg - Illinios) and if they exposed the Republicans they would risk exposing themselves. It's easy to see that Slashdot slightly leans to the left, but if I wanted to read about some vast-Right/Left-wing-conspiracy (which I don't) I would go to some other website.
Welfare : I strongly suspect most slashdot readers over the age of 22 are paying rather more in tax than receiving on welfare. I know I certainly am
No war : I think there's plenty of support for war. Unfortunately there's also critical thought and a strong desire for logical outcomes. Terrorist attacks WTC does not logically lead to invasion of Iraq. Lack of evidence of WMDs does not logically lead to "lets invade because of the WMDs".
No warrant-less surveillance : Not everyone in my private collection is 18. In fact, all of them are considerably older. You also appear to have disregarded the recent article about UK CCTV gaining loudspeakers, in which several slashdot posters welcomed the imposition of warrantless surveillance.
Anti-trust legislation : As with so many topics on Slashdot, this has many people with strong views both for and against. However, you are correct: Microsoft needs to die.
Abortion : I haven't actually seen any great discussions on Slashdot on this particular topic. My assumption is that the anti-religious bias of the site's contributors will mean that most religious arguments against abortion would be disregarded, and a decision made on ethics, morality and logic. Is that a bad thing?
Gay marriage : See above re: religious arguments.
Yes, do go on. You haven't explained why this site is left-leaning at all, if indeed it is. I perceive it as being more centralist than left-leaning, and there are contributors with views across the spectrum.
Of course both elections were *stolen*, and if you think I shuold shut up, then I suppose you think that the Germans who objected in 1932 and 1936 should have shut up and "supported their government", too.
Yes, it *is* almost that bad, though perhaps fascist Italy under Mussolini is a more appropriate comparison (and no, Mussolini didn't make the trains to run on time).
Oh, and while we're at it, those who want me to shut up can arrange for the public repudiation by everyone on the right of ever snide comment, "joke", and attack on FREELY ELECTED President Bill Clinton for the last six years, and a vow to never make them again.
No? Then *YOU* *SHUT* *UP*.
mark
Why are you judging all liberals by a vocal minority's opinion? Has any Democrat leader, like Gore or Kerry, claimed that Bush is a dictator or war criminal? Take a second look at who is actually on the ballot and what they stand for rather than making the incredibly shortsighted assumption that all people are the same.
PS: I'm a registered Democrat. Mod me +1 Ironic
I think a better mod option for you would be "+1 Not a goddamn hypocrite." While your post would strike many people as ironic, and I suppose it is, it just strikes me as honest.
*Sigh*
I'm really sick of the Republicrats. However, I'm too politically center to support, say, the Libertarians or the Greens. If the Republicrats were at least *honest*, we'd be much better off, and could comfortably continue with our pathetic two party politics for some time to come. As it stands... IMNSHO, we're pretty much fucked.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
and invented the Internet, and dead Democrats vote in Georgia and Ohio hence no photo voter ID cards, don't want to disenfranchise Dead People they may hire an attorney and sue for equal rights.
On a typical forum/community we would tend to call this kind of a post a 'troll'. How is this news? It's fricken almost 4 years old!
I'll place a ten spot on it, that the author of this 'article' just wanted to see how many liberals and conspiracy theorists he could get all fired up.
Enough already, we know Bush isnt popular on the web... Good lord...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2006/0 90106torturechildren.htm
As a resident of Ohio and an active registered voter I can say that what this article suggests is more true than you would think. Just in my little city of about 25,000 people we had issues with Republicans "fixing the vote". Posting people outside of polling locations, harassing minorities, voting locations which previously had several machines being under staffed and not having as many machines as in the past. All of this stuff did happen, I was there, I witnessed it. It is pathetic to me that a man that lost the election in both 2000 and 2004 has persisted to be allowed to hold the presidency and screw up this country.
There was a motive to shoot down or sabatoge his aircraft. After all didn't he die a few years ago in an airplane wreck?
That's one for the conspiracy books. Lately I don't particularly like or trust any political party. They are all out for one thing, power. The United States isn't a true democracy, feel free to look it up, we are a Federal Republic. I'd like to see a true democracy emerge. And that's not a Democrat statement, in my opinion I look at the Democratic Party and view them as socialists.
The republicans are total opposite but still you can't trust them as ar as you can throw them. Every month we loose more and more
of our Rights in the name of Homeland Security. More Americans die in auto accidents than due to terrorist bombings, give me a break.
Yeah he 'stole' it... I mean, this map right here just proves that Bush had no support!
t e2004/countymap.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vo
Doesn't really help the Dems that they cry that the election was stolen every election year now. Especially given that there's at least as much conspiracy surrounding the Dems actively registering illegal immigrants to sway the vote in their direction.
I'm no fan of Bush, but this election stealing conspiracy is getting almost as tired as the 9/11 'inside job' stuff. Oops I probably sturred up the Slashdot believers.
Do you mean that the country that is liberating opressed countries and bringing Democracy to the world had two presidential elections stoled in a row?!?!? I'm SHOCKED!!!
Go ahead, mod me troll or flame-bait. I don't care for karma.
So say we all
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
- Stephen Colbert
Democrats lost. Get over it. Move along... Move along...
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
I'd mod you informative, insightful, or whatever else if I could.
My parser is a grammar nazi.
Yes, sore losers, nevermind that there seems to be a lot of proof (that is, its much more than a conspiracy theory) that the election results were tampered with, or other illegal methods were used to keep people from voting.
Call me a 'sore loser' if you will (I personally didn't like either choice), but concern of increased corruption in our election process is warranted. Governments have been overthrown for such things.
My kneejerk reaction: What an incredibly stupid idea!
However, with a little thought, I believe you may not have considered a few things when proposing your solution. Firstly, is the beer issue. I'd say you're fairly spot-on that a goodly number of Americans are chuggin' down a couple of brewskis in the sunshine as part of our modern 4th tradition. Perhaps that isn't exactly the best time to be making governing decisions. "Okie, whish onnuva ya's gonna hold my hefe while I figger out how to vote for the funniest lookin' dweeb?"
Plus, I'm not especially enamored with visions of folks voting while ransacking the local quickie-mart for Kraft singles and 99cent hot dog buns. "Alright, honey, while you boys watch the meat cook itself, I'm going to rush over to the corner store for a bag of ice and some lottery tickets. If I have time, I'll stop long enough to vote, too." Fact is, you're right that many of us will be out doing those exact things which means we may not be too careful in executing our pre-determined voting choices when it comes to process. That or the meat'll burn.
Then we get to the idea that the 4th of July is a celebration of our past liberties and freedom-oriented heritage. Hot sun, cold beer. Grilled meat, flip flops. Little missles that make big noises and create shiny colors in the sky. Friends and family. Hell, man, we're out having fun! Who really wants to ruin such debauchery with an endless, media-hyped, ratings-gathering tirade of arbitrary pundits overanalyzing pushbutton issues to create fear and divisiveness during what used to be a moment of unity? Not I.
And, aren't there a lot folks travelling outside their voting areas during the largest vacation weekend of the year? Seems I've heard the distant drone of talking heads blathering about that recurring factoid as if this particular year had any significance to it.
I think you had a good idea at the core. Some sort of national holiday, either a new one that replaces some lamer one or else an existing holiday like President's Day which might make a better choice than the 4th of July. But don't mess with the one weekend I get to flex my barbecue skills while tipping back a few and oogling bikini-clad college babes.
I perceive it as being more centralist than left-leaning
Spoken like a true left-wing extremist. Did you happen to catch that episode of The Daily Show, around Thanksgiving a few years ago when Jon Stewart was listing all the things the Republicans had gained that year and the punchline was "and the Moderates gain was... the turkey was pardoned" Whaaa? o.0 I couldn't believe what I just heard-- did he just say Moderates? Can Jon Stewart not even say "Democrat"? Or is he (and you) such an extremer that all democrats are modertates and only socialists are democrats?
and there are contributors with views across the spectrum.
OK, seriously now, try this: submit a story to slashdot where the source is foxnews.com. I dare ya. Keep at it till you get one thru. I'll be over here not holding my breath. Good luck
One of their agenda items is to remove any means for an individual to defend or arm themselves.
I can imagine the possibility of numerous people voting differently, in the pattern you lay out. Locally? Give me some folks who say they want fewer prisons, promise better education, and offer extended healthcare programs. Nationally? I'll talk those people who have traditionally claimed to favor a less-powerful federal government based on lower tax rates.
Yes and George Bush blew up the Trade Center. The last thing the Dems need is to try and drag out conspiracy theories. Take your lumps and move on (true or not) kind of like Nixon did with Kennedy with Chicago. Politics are ok as long as you realize both sides suck. I know better people living on my block then the vanilla flavors that I am given to choose from come Nov 08. Id rather be reading about an internet enabled didlo then politics right now :)
We are capable of providing a system where voters have a national voting ID. We are also technologically capable of providing a system whereby everybody can vote from home. Republicans favor efforts in this direction and Democrats oppose them. This makes no sense if truly, Republicans are the ones defrauding the process.
There are two types of 'wasted' votes. The first is the vote that doesn't happen. The second, is the vote for someone because you think they can (or will) win, rather than because you think they *should* win.
Vote for the person you think should win. Vote your concience. Don't vote for the 'lesser of two evils' when you see a candidate you think is better than both of them.
Part of the reason we're in such a mess now is that people are taking the stance of voting *against* a certain candidate, rather than voting *for* a certain candidate. If you want to vote against someone, you do it by voting for the most popular opposition, and that seems to be what is happening. (If I had $1 for every person I've talked to who has said, I'd have voted for [insert 3rd party candidate here] except I didn't want [insert Republican/Democrat candidate here] to win, I'd be able to pay off a couple credit cards. I suspect that most people could say the same, and that points to a real problem with the current voting environment.
My suggestion for a fix to this problem is to allow a 'for' vote and an 'against' vote. For example, I want X to win, and really don't want Y to win, so I vote for X, and against Y, instead of the current situation where I want X to win, and don't want Y to win, so I vote for Z because he's not X, but he's the candidate for the other big party. This system takes all those people who vote Democrat because they don't want the Republican candidate (and vice versa) and lets them actually vote for the candidate they want to win, because they can cast a 'please don't let it by that idiot' vote as well.
If you've got an election where 45% of people don't want each of the two main candidates to win, you get those candidates each with 45% of the against votes, and some smaller portion of the 'for' votes, while the various candidates that people currently view as 'wasted votes' because there's no real possibility of them winning in the current environment, will pick up votes, and only have 10% of the 'against' votes spread between them. Suddenly you've got D=35-45(-10); R=35-45(-10); G=8-3(5); I=6-3(3); X=16-3(13), and X wins the race, because while they weren't the most wanted candidate, they also weren't the *least* wanted candidate. (What good is it to elect the guy with the most votes if 49% of the people who voted really didn't want him.)
Elections are simple and relatively clean in Canada because...
- We elect a dictator for 5 years. The winning party (if it gets a majority of seats) has no other accountability except to itself. Backbench revolts (a la Blair in UK) happen only if the party is already sinking so fast that it is better to be infighting in public than following the leader; and typically bribes and mostly threats (you won't run as a Liberal Party candiate next election) suffice to keep the rubber stamps in line.
-there is only 1 vote. It's a paper ballot, you vote 1 vote for 1 member of parliament. The one with the most votes in the riding wins - no run-offs. No voting for Judges, dog-catchers, sheriffs, attorney-general, president, etc. 1 vote. How hard is that to count? We have a separate election for Provincial member of parliament, and about every 2 or 3 years another election for Mayor, Council and school board. That's about it.
-the ballots are first counted at each polling station (about the area covered by a school, since they tend to be in the school). Scrutineers from each party are present. It is difficult to fix this, because unless the system is so loaded that you also own the opposition party scrutineers, how can you fix the vote? Those scrutineers have been watching the boxes all day, too. All accreddited parties get scrutineer rights.
- Approximately a few hundred votes per polling station, but a hundred or 200 polling stations - you would have to co-opt quite a regiment of people to steal even 1 riding. 1 vote per ballot, so they can be sorted into piles and counted very easily. Paper printed ballots, signed by the poll clerk when handed out at time of voting.
- All paper ballots are kept and sealed in a central spot. If there's a recount, a judge checks all 20,000+ ballots for that riding with scrutineers (and lawyers!) from each side watching, and all the numbers are tallied and reconciled, poll by poll. I don't recall an instance where the process was considered so tainted that a new election was held. There have been several cases where someone won by 1 or 2 votes out of 20,000.
The winner of the most members of parliament wins. So, you have to fudge quite a few separate ridings all over the country to steal the overall election. After all, if you control a region so well that you can coopt all the opposition party's scrutineers, you probably already have a lock on that seat. Notice that nobody has ever claimed that control of the American Congress had been stolen through vote manipulation...? Same idea.
The PQ (Parti Quebecois) tried to steal the referendum on Quebec independence about 12 years ago. They tried to reject every ballot not specifically marked right, if the vote was against independence. If the X in the circle went outside the line, or if it was not an "X", they rejected it. It eventually became public (because of scrutineers), but even then it made a difference of about 2% in the anti-independence Montreal ridings. The only reason it mattered because the vote in the whole province was within 1% - and they still lost.
We've had the complaints that people are voting when they shouldn't, and complaints about failure to register. All voters are resgistered by a door-to-door campaign a month before the election (with pre-registration thru income tax returns allowed). You then receive a registration card in the mail, and have several weeks to complain and get on the list. Nowadays, the tax department shares their registration list with provinces and municipalities. You have to be pretty nomadic to not get registered, or the electoral canvasser has to be pretty negligent. (It happens).
It is illegal to deny entrance to the voter registration individuals or registered candidates' official election campaigners of any party to a common area (I.e. locked apartment building, condo premises...)
All in all, a pretty good system, but we still don't get very good governments.
That map certainly proves that the vast majority of empty land supported Bush. >Especially given that there's at least as much conspiracy surrounding the Dems actively >registering illegal immigrants to sway the vote in their direction. The difference is that Republicans don't have proof of this, they just use it as a scare tactic. This article lays out clear and documented instances of illegal activity. Look at the whole Republican agenda, it is scare you with "Gays are gonna ruin my marriage." Scare you with "If we don't torture people, we cant keep you safe." Scare you with "Immigrants are gonna take over soon."
Hey all you political this and that (two party) cyber warriors.
Electronic Election Fraud is a non-partisan issue!
We are all *fucked* if this doesn't stop!
It's already cost lives, rights, and trillions of dollars.
bradblog.com (The #1 Real Journalistic News source on Electronic Voting.)
blackboxvoting.org (The First Technical Front line in the war agaist your right to vote)
I would have liked to see a comparison with the Presidential Election of 1960...
Mama, I got 'dem ole cosmic blues again.
I appreciate the debunking reference. Thanks!
I've also been thinking lately about the terribly poor quality of political debate in the US. I believe that one major factor in all this is our simplistic voting system, believe it or not!
I would content that our current voting system actually ensures having a two-party system. A popular third party candidate would steal votes from their more closely-aligned major party candidate, and thus voting for such a candidate would be a poor voting strategy. In this way independant parties frequently work against their own objectives.
This would not be the case for a voting system like instant runoff voting. In that case, independant parties can have an entirely positive influence on politics they endorse even if they don't make it into office, because any genuine public support that they have could be made known without causing their nearest major-party candidate to suffer.
Because we have this two-party system, political discussion becomes necessarily polarized on every issue, whether or not it should be. Also individual issues become colored by whatever political party supports it. People don't think in terms of individual issues so much anymore, and when they do, they are largely influenced by the propoganda from their favorite party. For example I would think there should be fiscal conservatives that are religious liberals, torn between the two parties, and the opposite as well. But it seems there are not. Total political alignment is a comforting thing that keeps us from having to think rationally about political issues.
It amazes me how the Bush administration can spout rhetoric in total opposition to its actions, and people will still buy in.
In case you haven't noticed, there have been several "State's Rights" issues during the Bush Interregnum. In all these cases, the Bush administration has come down solidly in favor of increased federal authority.
In one of the more egregious cases, the Federal Government is in favor of redrawing the boundaries of the state of Delaware so that a large foreign-owned oil company can construct a LNG pier serving the state of New Jersey. In that case, the Bush administration is actually championing the "rights" of British Petroleum, with collusion from corrupt New Jersey authorities, to override the demonstrated will of the citizenry of the US state of Delaware.
When will US conservatives realize they've been betrayed by a pack of radical facists, who favor any corporation from any nation over the rights of any individual anywhere?
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
Shh, there you go telling our secret weakness.
"Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"
Yes. So was 2000. So, also, will 2008 be stolen.
Get rid of those damned voting machines, now. If the Republicans didn't know for th most part that the voting machines were being manipulated, they know now, after so many studies have shown how to do it. Even if you think no one stole an election using those damned things before, they will be stolen now. They've step-by-step instructions. How can they possibly stop themselves? You think a little vote change is going to present moral problems to the party that gave us an Iraqi invasion, an executive who claims he has authority to cancel the constitution, 14,000 people kidnapped into secret prisons, that gave us Swift-boating and Ken Starr?
Why just the Republicans? I've noodled it for years now (soapbox time) and I've narrowed it down to this: business morality. All seem to be profoundly religious, seem to anyway, and profess godly morality and all that. BUT. It's a party of businessmen, whereas Democrats tend to be a populist party. Businessmen, have you ever noticed, no matter their private morality, shut off the Ten Commandments as soon as they're on the clock? Lying, cheating, and stealing, even killing, is okay if you do it in the name of winning. This businessman's exemption to common ideas of morality is overwhelmingly present in the Republican party's situational ethics. Lying isn't just a necessity, it's practically a sport with them. There's so much BS pouring forth per second on Fox News that the heads are strangling, trying not to break out laughing in wonder at how much crap they can say without losing any professional credibilty.
Unfortunately, business's preocupation with fibbing and ignoring reality to make short-term gains inevitably butts up with reality. Cognitive dissonance, big time. Even a country that watches "Lost" instead of the news -- and who can blame it, considering how "balanced" and useless the news is now -- is noticing that the buggers are lying to them.
Clinton was the benificiary of a system of legal theory holding that he had the power to ignore the law when he saw fit, for as long as he saw fit? Clinton had his Office of Legal Counsel tell him that he could, if he thought it necessary, crush some kid's testicles for magical reasons known only to him? Or that the President doesn't have to deal with those inconvenient checks and balances when he's involved in a conveniently open-ended war?
Or perhaps you're referring to the scads of Clinton administration officials convicted for malfeasance or corruption in the performance of their official duties. Or even indicted? You should be able to rattle off a half-dozen or so. Go ahead.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is it really democracy if the only real choice is between "democrats" or "republicans", which do not differ that much if you look at the differences in parties in other countries. Most countries have at least 10 choices. I think America is close to a one-party-system, so don't care about some more votes for one or the other, it's just like "The Party" in russia, not that much difference.
The problem isn't so much that election fraud has occured, or is thought to have occured but that election margins are so razor thin that any of it really matters. The Republicans have given us divisive politics where elections aren't even won by enough of a margin to be considered meaningful as an opinion poll. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem too frightened of offending people to actually say much of anything meaningful.
Both major parties are letting us down even more than usual and the system won't readily allow for replacements.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This was known over five years ago. Have you honestly gone five years without paying attention? Are you going to pretend that you never saw this report, and spout this tired crap again next week? Magic 8-ball says "signs point to yes"...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If you think it is possible for anyone to "unknowingly lie" then we are speaking different languages. To me, lying is a serious thing that indicates dishonesty. When you accuse someone of lying, you're not saying anything about their character at all.
Take back the verb "to lie" and let it mean something. Then, when you say the administration has lied, people will care because you'll be accusing them of doing something bad.
I've been seeing a lot of the "we'd kick their ass in a civil war!" talk coming from the right. What's up with that? Worried you won't win an election, so you're pretending we're in middle school again, and "I'll kick your ass!" is a cogent and meaningful form of debate?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wow, that would be really, really impressive.
If land voted.
This may be hard for you to understand, so I'll go over it slowly.
People living in sparsely populated areas tend to vote Republican, while urbanites lean Democrat. Because of this, vast tracts of farmland look red on the map, while dense hives of citizens look like small blue dots. Consider the 2000 election map, helpfully linked to from that page. While the blue team won the popular vote, the map is still overwhelmingly red. This is because maps show land, not people, which, as you know, does not vote. If the map is scaled so that areas with equal population cover equal area, it looks more like this.
I've seen that map on t-shirts, and it looks real impressive until you give it a bit of thought. Does it still seem impressive to you? Do you manage to suppress critical thought, or do you convince yourself that the map's apparent implications are "fake but accurate"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
To all the Republican apologists here on /. telling us Dems and liberals to "just get over it," why don't you put yourselves in our shoes for just one second, and ask yourselves how YOU would react--given the VERY same exit-poll contradictions and other voting discrepancies throughout the country--if a President Hillary Clinton were now sitting in the White House.
/., which I'm assuming you are, then turn off Sean Hannity for just a second and see what the opposition has to offer--you'll find it really isn't all that frightening, but instead empowering.
If Hillary had run, and had bigwig friends at Diebold and ES&S bankrolling her campaign, you'd bet YOU'D put a stink up about it, too--and believe it or not, so would I. Election tampering is very wrong on BOTH sides of the aisle, and should NOT be tolerated in what we purport to be the "freest" country in the world.
In addition, I am sick to death of hearing the meme from the Faux "News" viewers that Dems have no plan and no ideas. If you'd actually *listened* for 30 minutes to a Democrat's point of view--or even gone to the party's Web site and read its platform, you'd learn that the Democrats DO have positive ideas for change AND for national security. Thing is, you'd never know that by the way Republicans have infiltrated mainstream media and stolen the collective megaphone all for their own narrow "ideas," like banning same-sex marriage, torturing unconvicted prisoners, and violating other human rights.
OTOH, Democrats right at this moment are working their asses off for universal healthcare, a fair minimum wage, workers' protections, empowerment of the working classes, and equal rights for not only all Americans, but for all people.
Re: terrorist threats and the best way to handle them: law enforcement--along with special intelligence and border/port security--is and always will be the BEST way to imprison and punish these terrorist CRIMINALS, as evidenced with the most recent British terrorist attacks and threats. Democrats realize that terrorist thugs will always threaten us, and military solutions are not the answer. If the British can use law enforcement and a sane foreign policy to stop not only the IRA terrorism that has been plaguing their nation for decades--but now also al-Qaeda attacks--why can't we? Democrats realize, like the British, that TRUE homeland security begins AT HOME.
The mass media--and by virtue of it, American collective thought--has been hijacked by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations who aim to influence American opinion and poison minds (like yours) with conservative drivel. If you're intelligent enough to be posting at
One more reason to keep honest bipartisan humans counting our ballots rather than pre-programmed easily corruptable voting machines doing it. What is wrong with keeping human's in the loop, are we trying to end up with no voice at all? Is that the reason we all go to work every day and work our asses off? So these people can steal our voices and keep the sheep working for them for almost nothing?
It's time we TAKE ACTION!
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Some years back a group of Republicans sick of the dirty machine
politics in Cincinnati tried to clean up the Hamilton County party, forming the
Platform Republicans. They probably
won too---but various dirty tricks (including tampering public documents)
were used by the incumbants to deny them their victory.
The Democrat judge refused to do anything about it, however. The
Democratic machine in Cincinnati was just a corrupt---and they didn't
want to be forced to clean up themself.
This "we hate honest people more than we hate each other" may have come
back to bite the Democrats some years later.
The current system is shot through with corruption. We need real alternatives
to the bi-partisan kleptocrats. Give me Buchannan on the right or Nadar on
the left---people who care about ordinary Americans---over current batch of
scoundrels.
So work to change the system.
Vote for instant run-off ballots and instant run off voting. Some states have instant run off bills that show up on the ballots, if yours doesnt work to get one moving.
Its not easy, but it can be done.
Just the crazy ones.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hell why keep it restricted to one day? Why keep it at polling places instead of allowing vote-by-mail?
Why not change up some other aspects (like instant runoff or Condorcet)? Why not tabulate the votes of those that are not allowed to legally vote (minors, the mentally insane, felons) simply for the informational purpose of knowing who they would vote for? At least in the case of minors it would get some of them thinking about the government and get them used to the idea of voting.
And of course, the why is the same as why we don't make a lot of other positive changes (and is the source of the article we are commenting on): power.
Those in the driver's seat have no interest in making any change that would possibly remove them from the driver's seat. Those that fund them and profit by their deeds have no interest in it either. They are all making far too much money and have far too much control for any major change to take place as is.
The best we can try to do is vote them out. Of course that won't work if this article is accurate. Then the options get a little more complicated.
The good news about this article is the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It states unequivocally that in cases of disenfranchisement, the state where it occurs shall lose their representation proportionately. So if half the people were disenfranchised, the state loses half its representation.
Sadly, it will only be enforced if there is enough of a public outcry against fraud.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
A few problems with Diebold:
1. Non-transparency. It's the tech equivalent of bringing ballot boxes from all over to a room only Diebold employees are allowed, in which they open the boxes, "count" the votes, burn them and then come out and give you vote tallies.
2. Easily hackable. Flaws have been found before, but check the latest from the Princeton guys. So we're not only relying on the good faith of the Diebold people, but everyone that comes into contact with the machines. In CA, machines were sent home with poll workers for days before a special election.
3. What problem does it solve? Hanging chads? I don't believe electronic voting is the only way around that.
And for anyone that thinks Reps and Dems are just as guilty at election fraud, here's an idea. Why not support the Dems but put pressure on them to fix the things they've complained about. Ride that backlash against recent fraud and turn it into sensible voting practices and redistricting rules. Eventually we may even get clean money campaigning and instant runoff voting. If you think each side has been taking turns stealing elections and one side's willing to end it even if they miss their turn, take them up on it.
What the conspiracy loons never mention of course is that in many places the elections are in the hands of local election boards who design the ballot, arrange for polling places, workers, etc. In 2000 for instance the overwhelming majority of districts in Florida where problems occurred had election boards controlled by guess who? Thats right the Democrats. The most famous artifact from that period, the Butterfly Ballot, was designed by Democrats and approved by both parties.
The aged father of a friend of mine voted with that ballot. He was a man of limited education who'd driven a truck his entire life. My friend reported that his father, a Democrat, had no trouble with the ballot at all. Butterfly ballots were not that uncommon by the way. What was significant was who the Democrats chose to manage their attempts to crowbar the election their way. The Chicago Daleys for Bog's sake. If the presence of those folks anywhere near a ballot process doesn't make you see red you haven't been paying attention.
The shrieking and feces flinging over the 2004 elections merely represent the tertiary stages of
Anti-Bush Derangement Syndrome. Maybe I should start a website MoveOnandGetOverItYouMorons.org
Sheesh.
IBM
Your first point isn't a problem of the system it is a problem of the two parties running. Pero was in the debates and he took a good majority of the vote from Bush senior who would have won if it wasn't for Ross Pero. Clinton won by very few actual popular votes. But one day the people who host the debates (and no it isn't a government office like the name implies and is now prety much run by the two parties) decided not to include third parties that don't have a chance to win. This was because not only did clinton win because Pero stole some votes from Bush senior, he took votes from clinton too. Then Ralf Nader poped his head around and it all the sudden was a threat to democrates too. The womans legue who originaly held the debates saw this comming and decided to wash thier hands of it when the parties started demanding control over the debates. As for television coverage fo the conventions, well that as easy as ratings.
Your second point thouhg, I'm sure some one has explained this before bu
t i will touch on the reasons why the vote is waisted. First, the two parties have aligned themselves as far to the center to attract as many people as possible. This means that most third party candidates not pulling a lieberman are going to be somewhere to a fringe on at least one topic therby alienating some voters. In a presidential race, voting for a candidante because of one reason means the candidate that agrees with you 90% of the rest of the postition won't be elected. Also in large bodied governemnt (like senate and congress) you need people willing to support your ideas in order to make then laws. A third party candidate won't have the support one of the two original parties have. They will be shown as inefective or just ridding the wave trying to vote how thier morals dictate on what is thrown at them. This seems to happen the more removed from the local constuance an office gets. Now in state and local races, were the third parties tend to ignore more often, the party affiliation plays lessor of a role and a third party candidate could be more effective.
RFK Jr.'s article is utter bullshit.
If you actually examine his claims, they simply do not hold up.
Here's the executive summary: "[RFK Jr.] claims 357,000 legal voters were denied the right to vote, or did not have their legal vote counted. He has no actual data to justify the inclusion of at least 347,000 of the 357,000, and his claim that this is mostly the fault -- let alone the intent -- of Republicans is, to be kind, specious."
The problem with the BUSH STOLE OHIO argument is that there were a lot of other elections -- such as Wisconsin -- that were a lot closer, and would thus have been easier to "steal" and would have given Bush his electoral victory margin. Ohio wasn't a Bush squeaker, it was a clear victory, so it seems incredulous to think that that election was stolen. Also, Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s family isn't itself immune from election stealing accusations, and it's generally hard to consider him an unbiased source. Thus, this story doesn't ring true to me.
Take that hippy! Four more years!
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
This doesn't belong on Slashdot. Take the argument somewhere else - there are plenty of places appropriate for it. This ain't news for nerds. This is blue vs. red. And red vs. blue stories are just as inapropos.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Please explain to me which of the following Geneva Convention categories applies to captured terrorists:
The Genevea Conventions apply only to those who respect and follow the Conventions' rules regarding war and the treatment of prisoners. Combatants disguising themselves as civilians and violating the rules of war are afforded no protection whatsoever by the Geneva Conventions. I'd argue if anything is undermining international law and threatening to "break" Geneva it's applying it to only one side of the conflict without regard for the blatantly illegal behavior of the other side. Please explain to me the incentive for obeying the Conventions if you can reap the benefits without even paying lip service to its requirements?
And the president doing illegal and unconstitional things and never being challenged isn't something we can recover from, that sets a very very scary precedent. That must be challenged and stopped.
Oh yes, you're SO right, Bush never gets challenged over anything he says or does.. /me rolls his eyes in disbelief..
And it's the Republicans who are playing the emotional politics. They're the ones painting people as traitors for opposing them, they're the ones with public figures who can call for the execution of Surpreme Court judges, they're the ones ramping up the fear at every election.
True, I mean, no one opposing the Republicans would use fear for political purposes.. unless the fear was of the BushHitler KKKabal and how they're destroying the country. Let me find of an example of that.. Oh yes, how about the post you JUST WROTE. Hypocrisy, thy name is DavidTC.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
That was really a cheesy question. Fat and easy, pitched right over the plate. It was there to let John Yoo look good. And he waffles, and hedges, and says that our sweet, sweet gonads persist in an uncrushed state at the sufferance of our Dear Leader.
Gets me every time.
I wish someone would ask these people what they would consider going too far. What's something the President can't do? What's something that you'd say, "whoa, whoa, going too far now" about?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
IMO, there are a few problems with your assessment here.
First of all, a factual error: Mandatory voting as implemented in Brazil does not affect your freedom of expression. Even with electronic voting, the voter has the option of anulling their vote, by selecting the "Annul Vote" option. So, if you refuse to vote for any of the candidates, you still have that option. That clearly indicates a protest vote. The one thing the electronic voting system did away with was the possbility of mistakenly annulling your vote (see Florida elections, 2000).
Second, I disagree that not being forced by law to vote generates better informed voters, necessarily. Again, using GWB as a case study, it seems to me that a lot of his voters were lured by vague things like "Values", or "Tough on Terror". I don't have especific references to that last statement, but it is the impression I have from following political news for the last few years. It seems to me that ellective voting tends to favor well-organized minorities, which simply by voting as one block may outnumber the votes on certain issues, even if the majority of Citizens have a different view on said issues. E.g.: A president is elected in singnificant part based on his positions on issues like Stem Cell Research and Abortion, while polls show that the majority of Americans disagrees with him.
Voting as a legal duty solves the issue above since most people are likely to have an opinion on most things, so vote counts are more likely to reflect the collective mind of the Citizens. And even if they don't have an opinion, they can still abstain by actively annulling their vote. The amount of annulled votes is a valuable statistic that reflects the fraction of the population that thinks the system has failed them. No such assessment can be made from the fraction of the Citizens that just didn't feel like voting that day.
In summary, we disagree on this: the right not to vote because you can't be bothered to do it doesn't mean much to me. But the right to actively abstain from voting by indicating so on a ballot, that to me is as important as voting.
Really, calling one political party better than the other in term of morality or integrity is like trying to decide which 10lb rock you'd rather get hit in the face with.
Freedom of speech is worth much more to a democracy than some political party. Political parties will come and go, but FOS needs to stay for the democracy to be vital.
"When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit."
-- Lao Tzu, 500 BCE
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Yeah he 'stole' it... I mean, this map right here just proves that Bush had no support!
t e2004/countymap.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vo
Way to read the article dude!
The whole point of the article was the count was wrong, and the scale of fraud was such that such a map as that is utterly meaningless.
Keep in mind also that that nice flat distribution there says NOTHING about population density.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
A bitterly-contested election totally excuses six years of poorly-planned, incompetently-run war, insane deficits, tax cuts for his buddies and claims to kingly power. Oh, and some bloggers talked smack about him. How terrible. My heart, it bleeds.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here is Missouri, the Democrats kept the polls open in 2000 past the designated close time in Democrat centric areas of the state, while the polls were closed at the correct time everywhere else. Most of the state is Republican with St. Louis and Kansas City being mostly Democrat. The state was leaning very heavy towards Bush until results from these countys that stayed open late came in. They brought the percentage from about 80% Bush closer to 50%. Bush still won Missouri, but locally Republicans lost due to this.
This gave the Democrats extra time to vote, which a Democrat judge ruled legal. So both sides do this crap.
So, even though we have better means of verifying, ascertaining, and finding out new information, we should not act on that because those who came before us did not have that information to act on? I think that, with better tools, it is reasonable to demand a higher standard of quality.
My other body is also not wearing any.
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is. How could they have been so wrong twice in a row? The compelling paragraph for me was:
?'"Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. "I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats," [emphasis mine] he says. "I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong." In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling."'
not an American, just a neighbour and a confused one at that...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
First, this is three months old.
Second, his claims were debunking shortly after he published them, in Slate:
Was the 2004 election stolen? No.
All this crap does is further alienate voters by convincing them that their votes don't matter.
Clear, Dark Skies
That the 2004 election was stolen was blatently obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention to the facts, which are nicely listed at the start of the story. As was the election of 2000. But the majority of the public prefers accepting comforting lies to protest so it's probably going to be stolen in 2008 too. President Select JEB (that's John Ellis Bush, not a name, by the way) most likely. The Bush dynasty will continue. At least until it's either bankrupted us or gotten us nuked by Russian, China, and/or North Korea, or both. :-| Pity so many people are such cowardly fools.
Why is it so hard to believe that people voted for Bush on security issues and against the anti-gay ammendment because they didn't like that level of interference in people's private lives?
This may come as a shock, but few people actually toe the party line - of either party. They vote on the issues they feel are most important.
Clear, Dark Skies
Keep in mind also that that nice flat distribution there says NOTHING about population density.
Did you miss the little numbers at the bottom that said that the population of counties who voted Repbulican out numbered the population of counties who voted Democrat? Then again, considering the popular vote results in 2000, this may suggest that the democrats were prevented from voting in Republican counties. Interesting.
The "facts" listed in that article are all exaggerated, selective or distorted.
I notice he didn't mention how the only actual convictions for interfering with the Ohio elections were Democrats charged with vandalizing Republican campaign sites and vehicles.
Clear, Dark Skies
know what a "citizen's arrest" is?
Clear, Dark Skies
Don't mean to troll but since I've read that article a few monthes ago, seeing that on the front page of Slashdot gives it a Digg-esque feel.
You just got troll'd!
And it may have a lot to do with why younger democracies seem to all be parlamentary systems - people have learned from the "founding fathers'" mistake.
One thing few people realize - the U.S. system was designed to have no political parties at all; such organizations were banned. Unfortunately, people noticed that this was unconstitutional and within a few decades the two-party system was more or less established.
Clear, Dark Skies
It does seem to me that, to nearly quote Shakespeare, there is something rotten in the state of Ohio.
/. stories could be cited) the problem runs deeper.
Looking deeper (i.e., following-up a few other sources), it seems to me that this is merely the latest manifestation of an endemic problem. Throughout American history, various forms of ballot fraud have been common (both parties) and that while many of the recent problems have centred around the use of voting machines (innumerable
Here in the UK voting has always been a purely manual affair, as well as being fully open and scrutible. Registration for voting is an annual (and compulsary) affair, with every household being required to list each member with an eligeability to vote. The resultant records are freely available to all. Counts are carried out openly with full media coverage. Counts can be (and usually are) scrutinised by representatives of all the candidates. Furthermore the rules are universal, not determined locally, so that (with the usual variations in Scotland (minor) and Northern Ireland (less minor)) everyone from Lands' End to John o' Groats follows the same procedures.
Because of this and other factors election fraud is a very minor problem here. I won't say that it never happens, or that there aren't loopholes (eg registration forms sent to tenement buildings, where this only one point of delivery for the post, being incorrectly completed by the landlord, thus disenfranchising some for the next year) but they are minor.
Perhaps there is a lesson here.
Did I mention anything about Nigerian Uranium? Let me re-read, no, I did not. Did I mention anything else? Yes I did. Are you interested in any real conversation given that you ignored what I actually said and then whipped some irrelevant factoid that I made no reference to out of your arse? No, you are not.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
I'll grant you that a lot of RFK's numbers may be a little inflated, artificial or puffed up.
... it remains at most a mere anomaly, representing nothing in particular about how the votes were counted.
... vote at all?
Well, no: most of them are complete bullshit with no basis in fact whatsoever.
But what about anomalies like rural voters in southern Ohio voting for Bush and against an anti-gay marriage-amendment ballot measure in the state?
What about it? I voted for Bush, and would be against such a constitutional amendment.
That doesn't make any sense at all on any criteria that I can figure out. Have you got any hypothesis to explain that?
I don't need one. I would vote that way.
That you cannot understand how someone would do that is not a basis for believing the votes have been manipulated. The only thing it may possibly be a basis for is doing further investigation: you see what you think is an anomaly, so you do more work to see if there is actual error or wrongdoing. If you find none, then
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is.
The central, and false, claim. Like most polls, they require the pollster to manipulate the results to get what he thinks is a representative sample of core demographics. But it's even harder to do right with exit polling than with normal polling. So Zogby does an exit poll in rural WA, and he gets a response of 150 self-identified Democrats, and 50 self-identified Republicans, all of whom voted for their party's candidate. Obviously, it would be silly to think that Kerry will win by a ratio of 3:1; so, how do they deal with that? One way is that they have pregenerated numbers representing Republican and Democratic voter ratios in the area, so if they know the area is 60 percent GOP and 40 percent Democrat, then they massage the actual results accordingly.
And there are many other problems that can be encountered, as well. How do you take absentee voters into account, since you do not touch them with exit polls? Are they more or less likely to vote for Kerry or Bush? More or less likely to vote party line? More or less likely to
The first, and primary, thing to look at for problems with exit polls is methodology as conducted and assumptions made. Are their democgraphic assumptions used to massage the data accurate? Did they ask good questions, from a wide variety of areas?
Once you start learning more about how exit polling is actually done, how prone to error it is, Occam's Razor will tell you (being that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one) that the error is probably in the polling itself.
But let's assume the exit polls were right, and the official count was wrong. You can't prove it, of course, by just assuming the exit polls SHOULD be right. There's a reason it's called the "official count." Unless you can prove it by showing HOW the official count was actually incorrect -- something RFK Jr. lied through his teeth to attempt -- it's meaningless supposition. Again, as with the "anomaly" you cite about people voting against the anti-gay-marriage amendment but for Bush, this is merely reason to investigate further, and not serious evidence of error or fraud by itself.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying this just because I voted for Bush. Here in WA, our governor's race in 2004 was far closer than the Presidential race in Ohio, or even Florida in 2000. A race with over three million votes for governor was decided by about 150 votes. The final count went against the candidate I voted, and campaigned, for, Dino Rossi. Many of my GOP colleagues say that the Democrats "stole" the election. Maybe they did, but I will not consider that a reasonable possibility without evidence that actually shows it. And the evidence in WA is similar: Democratic operatives vandalizing GOP offices, missing vo
Cool. Just asking questions. Thanks for the substantive response...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
There are no "allocations of voting machines". Each county purchases, pays for and maintains it's own. So, if a county or city doesn't have enough voting machines, whose fault is that?
Now, think about what it means that it was democrat-controlled areas that didn't have enough machines...
Most of these "coincidences and anomolies" are created by selective presentation of facts.
Clear, Dark Skies
I mentioned this possibility to an Israeli friend of mine who replied that election day was made a holiday in Israel and because of the time off, many people were travelling and thus didn't cast votes. I don't think he mentioned if it actually increased or decreased turnout. Anyone know?
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
He was farther left than he pretended. I liked the real Kerry better than the Kerry he was pretending to be. Of course, I hated that he was pretending to be someone he wasn't. Granted, I disliked Bush (and still do) even more, but still...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't think slashdot's politics are necessarily left-leaning.
Bush has a ~34% approval rating and is even less popular abroad. And even less popular among the college-educated (in the last election anyway). So when thinking about what's "centrist" among international, probably college-educated, internet users, it's going to be something that's considered left-wing radical among, say, Texans (I say this as someone living in Texas).
So slashdot's policies are centrist, where the center is defined via its audience.
In my personal opinion, if the right drops the hill-billy homophobic tripe and finds itself a better spokesperson than Cowboy Cronyism, it may find a message that plays in Paris as well as Peoria -- and center will move right.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
An unregulated 'neutral net' has been maintained by market forces for decades. Why do we need government to 'help' us now?
The players in that market (the Telcos) are colluding together against everybody else to undermine and avoid the results of the market forces in order to bill us all again for the same services we're already paying for.
Since they are in collusion, market forces don't work.
That is why we need something to address the issue.
Whether it's the government or not is certainly up for debate, but that market sector is fundamentally broken by collusion, so it ain't going to be market forces that act to fix it.
And read that carefully, everyone.
John Yoo, for those who don't know who that is, is one of the major architeches of the presidents 'Unified executive' gibberish. See here.
And he's not asserting the president has the right to crush terrorists or even suspected terrorists testicles. He's asserting the president has the right to crush the testicles of people we know are innocent if that will make other people reveal information.
People, like, oh, you. If a terrorist likes you, Bush has the right to torture and mutilate you to make him talk, even if you have absolutely no connection to said terrorist.
And people think I'm being partisan when I talk about this administration literally being insane. That's even past '24' ground, it's into 'Evil Overlord' ground, where the villian menaces the love interest to make the hero talk.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." [on Polish TV, 5/29/03]
"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents." [6/5/03]
"I have yet to hear from our commanders on the ground that they need more troops." [11/04/04]
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." [2004 election season]
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." [09/01/05]
"We do not torture." [Nov. 7, 2005]
"By the year 2042, the entire [Social Security] system would be exhausted and bankrupt." [2005 State of the Union]
There's plenty more where that came from.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And as for the uranium documents being "100% true"---the documents were forged. The Defense Intelligence Agency, back in 2002, considered the scenario unlikely. The Administration itself has called the use of the uranium claim a mistake.
This, by you, is "100% true"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
People say that the close votes in presidential elections are because "America is polarized" or "America is deeply divided". This is BS. Both canditates found the center line and walked as close to it as possible. As a result, half of the voters voted for one and half voted for the other. The sad fact is, let me emphasise this: THERE IS VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GEORGE W BUSH, JOHN KERRY, AND AL GORE. America is not deeply divided, America is straddling the centrist fence.
Both bush's were wackjob hard-right, reagan was between right and wackjob hard-right, clinton was centerist, and kerry was at best center-right.
So you are saying that the last election was between a center-right and a hard-right. This would mean that what 95% of the voting populace voted for the "right wing". This would be the same voting populace that voted fifty-fity for a then hard-righter (your assertion) and a hard-lefter Gore (my assertion). What does this say about the ideology of the "left half"?
At best that would make the non-hard-right devoid of something to vote for. It would make them a group that votes against rather than for. If this is true then they have lost. They will be stuck in a "make the other guy eeevil" type of war. To which the right-wingers can easily respond by pointing this out. They then lose any high ground as the other side posits eideas and the "left-wingers" propose none of their own.
Now, to a certain extent that is currently going on. But it is IMO part of a larger shift. The two parties have been merging for years: it is inevitable that they do so. As each side tries to get the "gooey middle" they incresinlgy find themselves alike. At some point the currently losing side will realize it and try to strike back out "to it's roots". Dependign on their success or apparent success, the other side will as well. But it won't change things. Eventually a third party will rise and capture those who are sick of the polarization.
What happens next is a toss up. Usually the two warring parties will try to co-opt the ideas of the younger third party. Historically prior to the implementation of the primary system and enacting of laws to solidify the two part system, they fail and the third party becomes a dominant part. At which point natural counterbalancing occurs and a new party formed of the remnants of the original two will rise to counter.
The single best change to the electoral process would be to remove partisan elections. You can still have parties, but no more primaries. Everyone who wants to run does so. This places significant barriers to a single group keeping a small subset as available to the public for voting. Everyone runs without utilizing party affiliation. Not perfect, but definitely better.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Dems didn't cry that the election was stolen because of the popular vote or the electoral college. Dems cried that the election was stolen because of Katherine Harris's involvement with the scrub list, and that the state-mandated manual recount wasn't carried out in several counties.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The thing is, most of the exit polls at the end of the day didn't show any discrepency. For example, CNN's exit polls of Ohio show Bush winning the male vote and dead even on the female vote:
a tes/OH/P/00/epolls.0.html
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/st
The only conspiracy here is a close race followed by losers who refuse to accept defeat and "move on". And just as in Mexico this year, their antics are actually damaging democracy instead of supporting it.
I mean, seriously - I can't think of a single thing that Bush has done right, but the Democrats insist on making themselves appear so insane that I still can't bring myself to support them.
Clear, Dark Skies
Google around for this (I did a few days ago), some statistician tore through Freeman's methodology, but ended up arriving at the same conclusion... that the discrepancies are enough to warrant further investigation. Where's the harm in that?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
So... a governor (not part of the administration), business partners (not part of the administration) and Webster Hubbell (not convicted of malfeasance in the course of his official duties).
I like how "investigated under Clinton" is subtly equivalent to "jailed in Teapot Dome". And how, for instance, Caspar Weinberger being indicted (then last-minute pardoned by Bush 41) is equivalent to investigations against Clinton cabinet members that went nowhere. Very clever. Congratulate your thinktank.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is why you guys are going to keep losing. As a conservative who actually believes in limited government and individual freedom, I strongly disagree with the current Republican leadership on many issues. But when the opposition is this unhinged, all I can do is either leave my ballot blank or "waste" it on a third party.
Or you could actually take the time to do your duty as a citizen and spend some time looking into who these people are and what they really have done.
I noticed that you totally failed to address any of the OPs accusations, instead falling back on the standard deeply dishonest Republican tactic of calling anybody who doesn't spout the same nonsense propaganda as the right wing hate squad "unhinged" or similar.
That would involve integrity though. Something you're quite clearly lacking.
Oh look, some neo-nazi just voted for Bush. I wanted to do the right thing, but that Bush supporter is just so crazy! I guess I can't vote for Republicans now... sigh.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
3) Lies
2) Damn lies
1) Statistics
You're not seriously equating the labeling of CDs with the war on drugs, are you? I don't know anyone who got his house taken away by the war on obscene lyrics...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Stop paying taxes (legally or illegally), or leave the country. It's the same way you fight a business... you boycott them. If the ballot presents you with two untenable choices and essentially no alternative, it's not a democracy. We don't have proportional representation, and that one flaw has been exploited beyond the point of no return. If you want a comfortable life (seemingly the predicate of your entire position), then the only viable form of tax protest is to renounce your American citizenship. Money is the only real power, and if you're paying the U.S. military to bomb and invade countries left and right (half of the discretionary budget goes the military, btw), then you're partially responsible for their actions.
Personally, I feel the United States' political system is far beyond repair. This would be less of an issue if the decisions made on my behalf with the money I give to the federal government weren't consistently... well, evil. But we're a global aggressor, we've been one for decades, and we'll continue to be. I hate to be the guy saying "if you don't like it, leave", but sometimes a lifeboat is preferable to a vain attempt to patch a cannon-hole with duct tape.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I don't mind posting a couple days late...
The fact that this JUST NOW made news on Slashdot (Slow week?) makes me as sad as I was when I read it in JUNE.
read the parent comment to my post. Talk about being literally insane.
I hate to use an ad hominem fallacy to respond to an ad hominem fallacy, but generally speaking, I've found conservatives unable to engage in honest, logical debate when it comes to Bush. So I'll give the charges above a try.
One can very easily argue that Bush is illegitimately elected, both in 2000 (when the Supreme Court ordered an end to the vote counting, ensuring that many votes were never tallied) and in 2004 (as claimed by the RFK and Salon rebuttal articles referenced above).
I've only heard Bush quip once about how much easier it would be if he were a dictator, but that was obviously intended as humor. As far as I know, there's no evidence of this that he genuinely wants this.
As commander in chief of U.S. forces, Bush has ordered troops to engage in two separate wars, resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention all the military (U.S., U.K., and all other countries) deaths. Doesn't this qualify as a mass murderer? Those Iraqis just got in the way, and they died for it? Did they deserve to die?
The highest court in the United States, from which there is no appeal, has already ruled that the military tribunals setup by Bush violate the Geneva Convention. This looks to me as if Bush is a de facto war criminal.
If we want honest government, and want to avoid another traitor in the White House, conservatives and Republicans need to logically and calmly argue their positions, no matter how indefensible they may be, and be willing to admit how many of their beliefs stem from elitism, bigotry, and hatred of those who are unlike them (not the right color, religion, social or economic strata). I don't have any problem with people of deplorable moral character, so long as they don't try to hide it from the rest of us.
Thank you Slashdot
for helping to secure yet another Nazi victory. Every time I hear some Sozi whining about the Reichstag getting burned down, it makes me want to vote Nazi no matter who the candidate is because at least the Nazi will have clear values and have a high chance of doing something about them.
Here's a crazy idea. Stop bitching about what Hitler is alledgedly doing wrong and start promoting what the Sozi are going to do right. What are the Sozi doing to help ensure an accurate vote?
Considering "Hitler is purposefully destabilizing our nation" failed to secure a victory twice, it might be a good idea to switch gears and try a new approach. Why not try talking about what the Sozi are doing right?
Let's assume for a second that a Sozi gets into office. What are they going to do? If their entire message was just to get rid of Hitler then they've completed the objective of their entire term in a single day and are now I have no idea what they're going to try to do.
At least with Hitler we know what he's going to do.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I think you've inadvertantly come up with a fantastic suggestion:
People who don't vote get mandatory jury duty that year!
Easy to enforce, and a terrific incentive to get out and vote.
(I'd like to advocate a testing section on the voting form too---you have to get some civics questions correct in order for your vote to count---but that's a different debate.)
Yeah, we can prove the election was fair by showing that Republicans control more land than Democrats. Since land ownership equals enfranchisement, this is a no brainer! How can the Democrats claim to have been cheated, when they have so little land?!
So there.
Since the dawn of a corporately-sponsored two-party system, every voter has been sheltered from the responsibility of having to make a meaningful choice.
--- To each of us a Truth is given.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
rebuts the facts as he lays them out?
I'd like to point out that Ohio's own Democratic party has a web page set up that pretty much debunks these theories. Don't you think that if 270,000 votes were suppressed, they would be the ones to scream about it?
Every Vote Will Be Counted.
Kennedy's claims are fundamentally wrong headed. No Republican could have interfered with the "allocation" of the voting machines because each county buys their own and, guess what, the counties in question were in Democratic control. The purge of the voter rolls was mandated by law and occurs before every election in order to prevent people from using the names of the dead to vote multiple times. And so on, and so on.
Oh and the big one: There was no vast conspiracy, simply because such a thing would have required the coordination of hundreds of operatives. Bush can't keep a cabinet of 12 people pointed in one direction, and you want me to believe he got hundreds of corrupt Republicans to manipulate the Ohio election without any Democrats noticing or any Republican accidentally - or deliberately - blabbing about what they were doing? I doubt it.
Clear, Dark Skies
That sentence fragment in the middle was supposed to be a link:
Every Vote Will Be CountedClear, Dark Skies
India uses far more secure voting systems that are tamper proof and far more affordable. Of course, many Americans couldn't stand the idea of importing a voting technology from India, assuming they could do a better job. Let's try using modified Indian EVMs to vote. Perhaps then we'll be able to identify the true winner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machine s
Correct me, if I am wrong, but...
Exit polls are not mandatory, and they are not necessarily accurate for those who do participate. They are not scientific. If I am some liberal, Michael Moore opertaive with an axe to grind, I might be more inclined to participate than if I am a sane person with a job and a family. Personally, I question why various MSM channels were pushing these alleged results early in the day, as if to influence voters. Remember how Florida was called for Gore and Florida residents were told the polls were closed an hour before the polls closed in Florida? Exhaustive recounts ad nauseum went to Bush. (By the way, Gore had lawyers in Jacksonville trying to deny absentee ballots from overseas servicemen.) Liberal reporters see what they want to see, and they report what they want to report.
Could it be the MSM is trying to influence elections with bogus numbers? You assume the exit polls were accurate and the actual numbers were reported, based upon your faith in liberal conspiracy theories. You worry about voter fraud using Diebold machines. (I oppose those machines because I work in IT.) What about fraud with sketchy exit poll numbers? Remember, the MSM was claiming a Kerry landslide in states that were obviously heavily red. Hell, they were calling most of the East Coast as a landslide for Kerry when I got home from work, based on those fabulous exit polls. I knew that sounded bogus, and it was.
When liberal socialists (like Gore, Kerry, and Obrador) lose, they whine for decades and threaten not to honor the election. Grow up, and get you head on straight, Truthers.
From Some Might Call It Treason by Mark Crispin Miller:
porkchop_d_clown (39923) wrote: At the moment, I'm more interested in Republican actions than Democratic psychology. One problem at a time.Well, guess what, there is no difference between a republic and a representative democracy, those are just different words for the same thing.
Yes exactly and have you noticed that the someone going into a tirade is invariably (well almost) a Republican? I'm sorry, but when I hear the words "The US is not a democracy but ..." coming from the mouths of people who want to argue away the evidence of electoral fraud, my cynicism switch gets thrown.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Are you really that stupid AND ignorant? The two do often go together, of course...
, not supposed "disciplines" cobbled together to put weight behind political dogma., not supposed "disciplines" cobbled together to put weight behind political dogma.
Wow, this would explain why there are no leftists in the political sciences! No, none at all! It must be due to all of those crazy, rich, elitist doctorate holders! Why, it's not as if there were leftists in my list several posts back about influential thinkers... no... none at all! And who are these "elite echelons" Ph.D professors you speak of? As someone who has been in the field for years now, I've yet to meet anyone with a Ph.D in the Political Sciences that comes from a particularly wealthy family, and I've met more than my share of people from across the political spectrum. Oh, but you know better.
If you are all the left has to offer - and for the sake of this country, I sincerely hope that's not the case - the Democrats will never regain power. Nor would they deserve it. My only hope is that you're not yet of voting age, which gives me little hope in the up and coming generation, but at least some hope for the present.
Way to disenfranchise religious Jews.
Very creative, another fake debunking, where you attack the messenger instead of the facts? I will admit one thing - I remembered incorrectly; the tires were slashed in wisconsin, not ohio. 4 convicted of tire slashing. Apparently the judge doesn't believe the "republican front" theory.
Clear, Dark Skies
Please explain where this gentleman provides a single cite, a single fact to back up his claims?
Apparently you believe "debunking" means "shouting down your opponents".
Clear, Dark Skies
I haven't voted for a Republicrat in the past 4 elections.
Clear, Dark Skies
I don't have to support either.. As any theory, you need a little faith to belive in it. I picked my side, it sounds like you picked yours... No argument necessary in my book. When I die, I'll find out who was right. :)
:( It's almost as crazy as the theory I heard once about apes and man being related.
I honestly don't understand what the arguments are about, if I want my kids to learn "intelligent design" then I'd teach it to them.. It doesn't have to be in a state OR church mandated book to be taught.
PS.. I also have a theory about the seasons and how everyone that starts to put on coats because of a little chilly weather, blocks the removal of body heat by the sun. thereby giving the sun less energy to shine back onto the earth and thus it gets colder... After a while we start to take the jackets and coats off to be brave and look forward to spring and that allows the sun to warm the earth back up... it seems to be a strange perpetual ritual with our species in general... But they won't teach it in my school system.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
And since there is no law requiring citizens to pay income tax.. Yes you can still vote (but no free room & board).
Remember - Hitler was elected before he stopped holding elections, and many of his other techniques are in use today.... I especially like how Bush used the word "Nazi" this past friday as a general term to describe people who are fighting him in congress. I've never seen a blacker pot or kettle.
Bush didn't describe his oppenents in Congress as Nazis. Rumsfeld did give a speech in which he touched on the rise of fascism and the danger of appeasement. It is clear that there are countries and groups in the world today who are trying to appease the extremists. Will it work any better than it did in the 1930s?
Starting wars under false pretense to keep the military growing at a rate that is able to sustain a police state.
I note the plural - wars. Apparently you include Afghanistan in that. Wow. A multinational Islamist extremist terrorist organization essentially takes over a country, forming a state within a state, trains tens of thousands of terrorists who spread death and destruction around the world, attacks the US multiple times leading up the 9/11, and it is a false pretense when the US strikes back?! The minority of people that belive that is pretty small.
And by the way, the the US military is hardly growing at all, it is a mere shadow of what it was 15 years ago. The army is only about 2/3 the size. The other services are also greatly reduced
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Also, when did disagreement automatically become "trolling"?
Oh yeah! It didn't.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid.
Please tell me where I said "this year alone"?
Well? I'm waiting!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Higher quality?
;-)
The problem is, there's only a limited amount real "news" in the world. And with near-instant communications, live feeds from anywhere, and the burgeoning multitude of huge news organizations, the pickings get slim REAL fast. Thus, the bar for "quality" gets kicked ever lower, as they have to report SOMETHING. Nobody's going to watch very long if the reporter just sits there on camera, saying nothing and looking dumb(er than usual).
And you can demand quality all you want. You must remember that you're a lone voice in a mob of idiots who simply want instant gratification and MORE MORE MORE!
Can you tell that I have an exceptionally high opinion of my fellow man?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The parent was flamebait if this was.
I don't know how many times at Slashdot that a story wasn't checked out and people jump on these replies that hold people's feet to the fire with a "Mod up" all the time.
Just because you don't like what somebody typed does not make it flamebait.
Grow up, people...
Whoop-dee-doo.
Wow, that's a pretty desperate defense of your made up numbers. I assumed you were quoting figures for some rational purpose; to support an argument perhaps. Obviously, spending levels are utterly meaningless without specifying a time period. I'm sure you disagree, but you're full of it in any case:
The United States has not spent trillions on foriegn aid in the course of it's entire history.
No doubt you'll now point out that you never said you meant dollars...
I am familiar with the definitions of facism that the people who invented the word used. Perhaps you are not.
But I'm really not interested in redefining terms until it somehow magically becomes OK for the Federal Government to steal the Delaware river from the state of Delaware and give it to New Jersey for the benefit of a foreign corporation. That just doesn't work for me, so I'm not going to argue with you about what you think a facist is. I'll just stop using the term if you don't like the way I use it (which is the way Mussolini used it).
Perhaps you'd care to address the issue, which is that Bush rhetoric and Bush administration actions are completely contradictory? Can you explain how a so-called "conservative" administration can toss aside hundreds of years of precedent in order to accomodate British Petroleum?
I'm not drinking the Kool-aid just because you have a snappy comeback line, sorry.
Care to provide any counter-examples, where the Bush administration has done something other than favor corporations and big government over the little guy?
You can't equate the two. It's like saying that Clinton lied (about getting head), and Bush lied (about a variety of things), so they're both bad. See, it doesn't really affect me if the President gets head. I mean, dick move on his part and all, but it doesn't get me in much of a lather, y'know?
It's kinda like saying that Israel kills civilians (by accident), and Hamas kills civilians (on purpose, and as many as possible), so they're both bad. It trivializes wrongdoing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The majority of you reading this blog are white males anyway. You voted for Bush in 2000 and likely in 2004 - because he promised you capital gains relief. Now, you're pissed about how much money GW and his friends make off gasoline.
Alot of you guys want to act like "oh - they both do it since the beginning of democracy" - but - you're biased in trying to be unbiased. It's like saying the troops in Haditha used restrained force in their infamous incident; or that "war makes one do crazy things". It's simply ignoring the facts; and doing a great injustice in trying to sound unbiased! The Republicans use the dirtiest and nastiest tricks and consistently do it more than any other party in American history.
Bottom line is: Republicans steal elections!
Read your political history books.
From Nixon to Ollie North. From Tom DeLay to K. Rove. Deceipt and political tricks are the name of the game for the Republican party. The 40's, the 50's, the 60's, 70's, 80's, and now in the 21st century!
Most recently the Republican majority in congress has put forth legislation to pardon Bush for breaking the law spying on Americans. They're doing this pre-emptively because judges and legal experts are coming to the conclusion: our President broke the law. But - this republican-controlled congress would rather impeach Clinton for sex-acts and pardon Bush for spying on Americans.
It is completely in character for the Republicans to change the law before somebody can be charged for breaking it. This party likes to change the rules of the game while it's being played. For them...who cares about ethics? All that matters is winning! Losers finish last!
The Republican party is a dishonest and dirty bunch. If you think popular support was 50.1 to 49.9 in 2000 & 2004 as Republicans would lead you to believe - be my guest. But to act like that's NOT a conspiracy theory exposes your bias!
A good referee calls a foul when they see it.
While all is good and dandy, calling 2004 just another typically rigged election is like calling Hurricane Katrina just another hurricane. No, never ever ever ever have exit polls differed so widely from results as they did in 2000 and again in 2004. None of the above comments addresses this issue with its proper weight. Not in JFK's win in Illinois back in the early 60's, never. To put it another way, Ukraine voters overthrew their elected leader via protests in the streets over much smaller statistical differences between exit polling and actual vote counts as their primary proof of fraud. Maybe that makes them the home of the brave. Not sure what it makes us...certainly neither brave nor free. To call 2000 and 2004 anything like election as usuall in the US is to call Hiroshima and Nagasaki just another couple bombing runs. For the statistically inept, this may make no sense. But rest assured, this was a whole new level of vote rigging--and it took electronic voting machines to bring it about. This issue trumps all others because if the present admin was fraudulently elected, that means the present government in the US is illigitimate.
Hmm. How about voting for the weaker party. That way you have the most checks and balances and the best chance at a smaller gov't.
But that aside, Let me ask you this: If you vote for a guy who wins overwhelmingly, isn't that a bigger waset of a vote than voting for a third-party?
Don't know if you've heard, and this doesn't have much to do with the GP poster per se, but Greg Palast has had some interesting things to say about ChoicePoint (which you may recall is widely implicated in shady dealings in Florida in 2000) being found stealing Mexican voter rosters and similar illegal activities in the run-up to the recent Mexican presidential election, with the FBI implicated (see here). That might count as having "interfered with Mexico in some monstrous way".
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That's got to be the perfect plan to wake America up to the idiocy of Diebold voting machines, a la Brewster's Millions. Campaign slogan: "We're all assholes!"
(Hint.)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Sigh ... at least it's no worse than what America does to its own people.
I don't think I did. Probely because I agree with him. Plus, he's not running for Illinois Govener . That will really make it hard for him to win. I'm just saying, I'm not voiting one of the two parties for Illinois Govener. For other elections, I will look at the cannadites and vote for the best one. I'm not telling anyone what to do that's a choice I have to make based upon the way I see things. I'm not going to vote for the lesser of two evils. Will I change anything,probely not. Will I ever spell probelbly correctly? Again, no chance.
Exit polls are not reliable enough. If an exit poll tells you 80% of a precint voted for Mr A, and the votes say only 40 % did, you might have a case of fraud. but if 53% said they voted Mr A and only 46% did there is less certanty. It would be interesting to investigate the discrepencies. Once cast, the votes are properly looked after. If it turns out they weren't, then you have proof of wrong doing. Or perhaps just an even more screwed up system. But its better than looking at exit poll discrepencies by themselves.
I think we both agree the sytem sucks and it should be improved. To learn about conspiracies, just take a look at the ones we already have JFK's assasination, Roswell, and the face in Mars, ect.. You can find all sorts of weird things about any complex event when looked at by a microscope. But you have to maintain scientific rigor. Its not that I don't think the republicans wanted to throw the results of the election, I think both parties ahve demonstrated a willingness to do that, but I don't think they are capable of doing it. They aren't the CIA, or the Navy Seals,each of which are imensly less capable than some conspiracy theorist would have you believe ( see 9/11 and the invasion of Panama). No one was capable of throwing the elections on a national scale. This isn't Ukraine. Every idiot has a video camera ( see youtube) and there were election officials every where and lawyers for both parties. I just don't think the Justice League PLUS the X-men were capable of it. Besides, if they were capable of it, then why wouldn't they have fixed the exit pols as well to make them coincide with the fake vote count? I would argue that would be equally difficult.
Be careful of wanting to remove the party form power,just because they deserve it. Wnating to remove the Democrats after LBJ gave us Nixon.
I realize I'm just complaining. We both think the system needs to be fixed. We don't really disagree about anything too important at this point. I don't have any plans to change anything, I'm just upset at not having a real choice. make up your own mind.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You're essentially just plain wrong about the statistical significance of the discrepancy. If it wasn't big enough to be meaningful, you wouldn't have had the big boys trying to explain it away with polling bias theories and so on.
It would be wonderful to have some other data to look at besides exit polls, but with electronic voting systems that leave no paper trail, we're left without any other indicator. Throwing out that one indicator is not justifiable. Excellent. So why do you keep arguing against this point? Listen: two companies between them (Diebold and ESS) are responsible for counting about 80% of the vote. They're run by two guys who are brothers. They have a history of hiring people with felony fraud convictions. Rarely does a week go by without another report of some Diebold vulnerability.You don't need to postulate some insanely large, flawless, conspiracy to explain away the Republicans ability to rig an election.
How do you use a video camera to examine what computer software is doing?And strangely enough, there were widespread reports of various irregularities... all of which are being shrugged off by people who don't want to believe that they're living in the world's largest bannana republic.
First you complain about theories about perfect conspiracies, then you complain about the evidence of a flawed conspiracy... Scum to the left of us, scum to the right of us, oh well, let's just give up and let the bastards get away with it.because if your grasp of most laws is on the order of your grasp of "treason" then your arrests were bogus.
Clear, Dark Skies
Perhaps I shouldn't, but I find it interesting how that whole ChoicePoint mess and the FBI's involvement has gotten *zero* play in the mainstream US media, with all the networks firmly behind purported winner Calderón, who is conveniently enough in the Bush camp. Meanwhile, the very real concerns of vote fraud voiced by Obrador and his supporters are completely ignored. Not too dissimilar from how the situation in Venezuela was misrepresented as some fringe group seizing power. I recall reading NYTimes articles about Venezuela and slowly realizing that all the people quoted as being against Chavez were suspiciously upper class and urban.
Things that make you go, "hmm..."
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I am not american, and I wish to make no claim on the validity of the facts. I seek only to say this: Any Opposition party sho sincerely believed that this kind of election tampering was occuring is left with only one option. Boycott the election and call in UN observers. If, at the end of monitored elections there was still dispute as to wether the election was fair, then they could again boycott the elections. If one was still unhappy with the result, and if one actually believed that some grave injustice took place, there are courses of action to be taken. The party that perpertrated the act, and its supporters are so unlikely to be swayed by claims of fraudulent behaviour that it becomes futile trying to convince them. Rigged elections take place frequently around the world, i suggest that Americans take note of the means of resolution.