Slashdot Mirror
Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)
exit polls.
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004. think about it - oh wait sorry, the apathy, i forgot.
You'd think with the evidence and coincidences that are showing up, that people may actually think these guys have something it say. Instead, some of you just dismiss it as BS. I'm a card carrying libertarian, and I'm siding with the liberals on this one. There's something fishy going on here, and I think it should be investigated.
I wonder, if the positions were reversed and you felt you were losing your country, would you:
A. Still give a fuck?
B. Be outraged that fellow citizens don't listen to you, just because they have a different stance on abortion?
It also doesn't matter who wins. The losing side will claim the winners stole the election. I fail to see how electronic voting has changed this. It is being going on for a long time.
Actually, a few weeks back, Slashdot covered how Maryland Governor Ehrlich (R) was trying to seek an injunction on the use of Diebold machines.
The reality of the situation is that it's not a Democrat/Republican thing.....it's a power thing. If a Democrat were in office, the Republicans would be shouting vote fraud, etc.
I don't mind the idea of electronic voting, just be sure to give me a printout of my vote in plain english with a tracking number so that I can validate it later on. We cannot just take them at their word on this. This is one of the few cases where I think a paper trail is a must!
The slant is so obvious.
Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.
Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
We just don't give a fuck. The Prime Minister of Hungary is caught admitting to lying to the public about the economy on tape and Hungarians are out RIOTING (including tear gas!) in the streets. Our President has all but been caught lying about everything, royally fucking up everthing he's touched in the process, and the best we can muster is Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, and Cindy Sheehan.
Electronic voting removes what semblance of vote verifiability existed with paper votes (real recounts) while enabling easy, broad tampering.
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
I'm not saying the Democrats commit election fraud. I'm not saying the Republicans commit election fraud. What I am saying is that at no presidential election before 2000 was election fraud even brought up.
Not in 1996, 1992...1976, 1972, 1968 etc.
So, why is it that accusing someone of election fraud is now automatically a Democratic trait? The Democrats didn't accuse anyone of election fraud when Reagan or Bush Mk.I took office, not when Nixon destroyed McGovern. Just as the Republicans didn't call shenaigans when Clinton, Carter, and Johnson won.
Maybe there's evidence this time? Something that wasn't there every other election.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
I don't care what political party you are in (or which party you hate).
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.
I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.
Yea, because polling places have NEVER "lost" ballot boxes. Pffft.
sarcasm start:
let's see.. which one is easier to do and harder to detect:
1 - coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to drag off huge ballot boxes across the entire nation
2 - someone in some central location makes a virus which they have a friend smuggle in and install on all ballot boxes.. or they just press a button in the central office and BAM.. all votes swap from bush to kerry!..
yep.. it's soo much less difficult to do the former than the latter..
end sarcasm..
begin WoW.. oops sorry.. you didnt need to know that.. lol
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They work fine for you, and I'm sure the exit polls match the results(go lula), but in the first world of the USA, electronic voting just makes it easier to cheat. The CEO of the electronic voting company(Diebold) actually guaranteed a republican win, it's that bad. They have manipulated the people via the press so we now think that exit polling is inaccurate. This ensures there is no oversight over electronic voting - exit polls are the only oversight we have. We use exit polls to determine fraudulant elections in places like Ukraine, but in the United States, we're worse off than Ukraine.
In many ways it's shameful, but politics in the U.S. is fierce and divided moreso than most other countries. The arrogant international attitude you see also applies to domestic politics. It's anything goes here and it's very machiavellian - whatever it takes to win will be done.
Not even talking about gerrymandering. Even if the democrats make significant gains, they will need 57% of popular vote to take the lower house. This should be 50% but due to gerrymandering, democrats have almost insurmountable odds. The U.S. is a banana republic.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Electronic voting machines without a printer attached make it impossible to have a proper recount if claims of ballot tampering are substantiated.
Electronic voting isn't prima facie more vulnerable than previous voting methods; rather it's the current crop of voting machines that are poorly engineered that's the problem.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Things to consider:
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Nice troll moderation there. At least argue the point.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
Its a faux democracy, just like the all the african dicatorships that call themselves 'democratic republic of foobaristan', those ones where armed militia force citizens to 'vote' at gunpoint. And the suburbs with voters belonging to the opposition parties mysteriously catch fire on polling day.
In the last week George Bush had both houses pass laws giving him the authority to order the abduction and torture of american citizens indefinately, based on his word alone. He also had laws passed that retroactively exempt him from being charged with war crimes and terrorist offenses from 2001 onward.
When any citizen can be abducted by the state and tortured to death 'legally', then that state is a defacto dictatorship regardless of how elections are held, or if they're even held at all. In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians. Whats it going to be like 5 years from now?
This is the perfect answer to the "paper voting can be tampered with anyway" point. The current political landscape is a testbed for unfounded moral equivalency. A lie about a blowjob is not the same as a lie about a war, and in the same vein, paper ballot box stuffing is not the same as electronic vote tampering. The latter has far more potential to improperly influence important elections and to undermine the democratic process than its paper counterpart ever did. If you believe at all in the ability of computer technology to make most other tasks simpler and easier, then you have to at least consider the possibility that fixing elections has just become simpler and easier with the advent of the Diebold machines.
Well here is my take. If there was fraud and a US Presidential election was thrown, then people should go to jail. This isn't about how wins the next election. This is about who really one the last two elections. If voting "doesn't count" in the US anymore, that is about as serious an issue as can be raised. If you want to cast it as a partisan debate, then you just don't get it.