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Maryland Governor Wants Paper Ballots
supabeast! writes, "Fed up with all the problems in the state's electronic voting system, Maryland Governor Robert Erlich wants the state to scrap the entire system and return to paper ballots. He's threatened to call a special session of the legislature to change the law to allow paper ballots. What makes this particularly interesting is that Erlich is a Republican — the party often maligned for exploiting flaws in electronic systems — and his attempts to clean up Maryland's voting problems are being opposed by Democrats, the party that is usually complaining about electronic voting!"
What does it matter which party the politicians are in? They're the same party. You think Democrats wouldn't steal an election given the chance? You think a Republican won't pull a stunt like this to appear honest to get those last few votes to get him in office?
ResidntGeek
At the very least each polling site should
have enough paper provisional ballots at the ready to complete the election in case of complete machine failure. One of many problems in the recent primaries was an inadequate supply of provisional ballots to cover all the cases that led to their use.
Next step beyond that would be to permit any voter who wants it, to use one of the paper provisional ballots instead of using the voting machine.
IMHO, Ehrlich (how it's actually spelled) is only trying to setup a platform for challenging the results if the election ends up being close. It is pretty much impossible to replace the entire voting system with paper ballots in time before the election, and since Ehrlich knows this, the only reason he'd state such a position is to seed FUD prior to the election date. If a recount or court challenge is needed by the GOP in Maryland, the public might be more receptive to his position (which will likely be "voter fraud") if they've been "educated" that the electronic system in Maryland is broken.
"What's the first thing Clinton did when he got in office? While pretending to deal with gays in the military (Lots of discussion), he quietly used all his might to push NAFTA through."
"Bill Clinton was the best Republican President we ever had."
--Michael Moore
The idea that the Clintons were these wild-eyed radical lefties never ceases to amuse me.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
> It's not like they are controlled by different people.
Hey Ralph Nader, you got your guy into office, you can stop this line now. Yes, the Democrats attract the same venal and base scum as the Republicans, but let's talk about what's going on now, and that's that the GOP is controlled by folks like PNAC, who are some seriously scary Amerika Uber Alles folks. To say nothing of the religious right. Both of these overtly fascist movements operate with the blessing and these days, funding of the GOP.
So yeah, goddamn skippy there is a difference. Don't talk to me about theoreticals, the ones who have the power have to go, and if I have to vote a straight blue ticket to do it, so be it.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
But then, I'm a Conservative.
And it shows. Ehrlich was the major force behind converting MD voting to Diebold.
Being a non-U.S. citizen, I've heard this joke a couple of times now. What I wonder is: Is your voting system really that flawed, that dead people can be registered as voters? Or is it just an old joke?
I'm curious, really. Is this a problem in other countries as well?
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
Historically, democrats have been backed by big unions... which for a long time (maybe still) were pretty much run by and for the mafia. So the Mafia found ways to get people to register their dead relatives as voters, and vote for them by mail... or at least sign their 'signature' on petitions. In exchange for helping the Democratic Machine, I'm sure the Mafia got some leeway...
I'm sure the Republicans have done some things equally as dirty to throw elections in their favor... Recently saw this theory for instance: Was the 2004 Election stolen?
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
> I think the original poster was referring to the democratic party's 'machine' style politics of the 20's-40's.
> intimidation, registering dead people, graft, ballot stuffing... all that stuff. wikipedia has an acceptable
> article on the chicago democratic machine here.
Whitewash all ya want, truth is every case of actual vote fraud that changed the outcome of an election has been Democrats doing what comes natural to em; cheating.
You would be hard pressed these days to find a historian who would argue the case that Kennedy's win over Nixon was fair. The dead in Chicago tipped IL and don't even look into what went on in TX unless you have a very strong constituition.
Sen. Mary Landrieu of LA owes her seat to the dead in New Orleans, who were assisted to the polls by the Democratic machine. That was in the 1990s by the way.
Several recent elections in WA have been widely suspected of taint. Boxes of ballots 'appear' weeks after the election yet get counted despite zero audit trail or even pamper seals, and even worse abuse. But since Democrats ended up being elected nobody in the media cared to keep beating the drum until an investigation was conducted.
Remember also that even in the Democratic paranoid's wet dream case,the 2000 presidential election, while the press was obsessing over FL, buried on the back pages were much more damming cases of vote fraud in several other states, all involving Democrats. Bussing homeless people from one state (where victory was assured) to neighboring ones where every vote was needed, buying their votes with free smokes. Only a footnote in the history books. The Miami Herald along with all of the other major media outlets in FL recount the ballots and declare Bush won but Bush's coup in Florida is accepted fact in leftwing circles to this day.
Democrat delenda est
A well... guess I picked a bad example... but I honestly can't believe that one party does crooked things and the other doesn't. Frankly, I distrust both sides... and that was my point. Nice debunking... I admit I got bored reading that insanely long article and was struggling to finish it, let alone fact check it.
*sigh* ... it would be nice if you could just depend on stuff printed at a fairly popular outlet to actually be fact checked. But I guess that would be too much to ask...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Let me ask this statistically logical question: How often have their been two consecutive presidential elections were the 'popular' vote was greate for the losing party.
Not sure offhand. It happens occasionally. Not sure if it has ever happened two elections in a row. You seem to be implying that it happened recently; but Bush won the so-called "popular vote" in 2004. Had Kerry managed to win Ohio, and nothing else changed, Bush would have won the "popular vote" and lost the election, but that's not what happened. Bush actually won the "popular vote" in 2004 by a fairly wide margin (3 million votes). For contrast, Gore "beat" Bush by about 500,000.
(Oddly, the same Democrats who complained about the difference between the "popular vote" and the electoral college in 2000 raised no such issue in 2004 as they complained about Ohio.)
Here's a follow up question based on the frequency of that event occuring in the past does it not suggest a statistical likelyhood that the results in one of those two elections were baked?
No, it does not. Flip a coin; it lands on heads. Flip again; lands on heads. Is there a problem with the coin?
In a very close "popular" election, the chance of the loser "winning" the "popular vote" is practically a coinflip, because there is no strong correlation between the "popular vote" and the electoral college vote when you get the "popular vote" close enough. It depends too much on in which states those votes are concentrated and to what degree.
Last statisticaly logical question: Is it more or less likely that the victor in an election wins by a margin of thousands or hundreds when they win?
Predictively speaking, neither. Looking at the past, elections are usually won by fairly large margins, generally speaking. But that says nothing about what the next election might look like.
My main point here is it is very likely there was cheating going on and likely rampant cheating at that.
No past statistics suggest this. It is just as likely, statistically speaking, that the country is simply split down the middle on these issues, as it is that there is any cheating going on. Statistics don't suggest either way, as best I can tell. I do not hold to the school of thought that we can determine levels of cheating from how much something deviates from past experience. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in four straight games after being down three-to-zero in the 2004 playoffs. It had never happened before in the history of baseball. That doesn't suggest the Sox or Yankees cheated (although the Yankees did cheat in one game, but that was a game the Sox won, and they got caught anyway).
Now, anomalies can be a cause to dig deeper to find out if cheating happened. As I noted in my debunking of RFK Jr.'s article about cheating in Ohio in 2004, there were certainly anomalies there, but you can't just jump to "therefore there was cheating." You need to then actually find actual evidence of cheating, or else it remains a mere anomaly.