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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.)
the process is over. It doesn't matter who votes for who, it only matters who counts the votes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
By the time this crowd is done we'll be eating our tinfoil, not wearing it.
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?
Maybe we should take Fidel Castro up on his offer to monitor U.S. Elections.
Or bring the United Nations in on it.
It seems like the main difference between a certain 1st world country and many 3rd world ones is the scale of election fraud, not the type or quality.
International monitors anyone?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, a Republican, ran into stiff opposition after (Diebold?) voting machines caused major problems in the state's primary elections this year. Ehrlich wanted to switch to paper-based methods that were known to be reliable. The opposition was NOT from his own party, but from the state's Democratic majority and career bureaucrats.
Take a quick peak at the url. Oh! politics.slashdot.org! What kinda dumbfuck wouldda guessed that this particular section would contain politics?
FFS, even the motto is different.
Don't like seeing it on the FP?
Uncheck the option. Some of you fuckers are too dumb to even be here, and that's saying a lot.
Absoutely. There will be wide margins in exit polls for Democrats and the Republicans will win anyway. They'll blatantly steal it and dare us to say it was stolen.
See, they've already tested the waters on the "will anyone believe an election is stolen" question. (Whether the 2004 election was stolen or not.) They know the general public will not believe it to be stolen, no matter how compelling the evidence.
So 2006 is a wash.
The last two presidential elections were hacked. Remember the "infamous" butterfly ballot, made by a Democrat. Bzzzt. Wrong. The Democrat who made the confusing ballot for a high elderly population in a swing area of the state of Florida was a recently converted Republican. Within months of succeeding with her confusing ballot design, she went right on back to the Republicans and even ran for Congress. Of course, it helped to have Bush's brother as governor of the state and the Supreme Court intervening to stop the mandated (under the law of Florida) counting of the vote.
In 2004, we have Diebold getting plum government contracts around the country to make "voting machine". Look it up and see what the President of Diebold, a die-hard Republican, said about using his machine to deliver the election to George Bush. Then do a little investigation of Ohio and its secretary of state's successful attempts to disenfranchise the voters there (read up on his suddenly-required abnormally thick paper be used for submission of absentee votes).
If anyone thinks a future election is in danger of being hacked, they haven't looked very close at the last two presidential elections.
Since Diebold has a crappy track record with electronic voting, why should we as consumers have any confidence in their ATMs? Even if you don't buy that elections have been stolen, there's enough evidence that Diebold is at best sloppy with their design, implementation and support of their voting machines. With a corporate attitude this lax, how can any banking customer feel good about how Diebold treats money transactions? I've noticed Diebold rolling out more complex ATMs with a lot of useless features. It's not a positive trend.
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.
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
American exit polls have never been that accurate. Their margins of error have come down somewhat, but statistically speaking they have never been "accurate to a very slim margin".
When Edison first made an vote counting machine, the patent office rejected his invention citing concerns that could lead to vote tampering and yet, over a hundred years later, we have all of these problems...Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.
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!
2 left biased politcal stories on the frontpage, I wonder how much karma conservatives are gonna lose today. By modding conservative posts as a troll, you admit that you are afraid of the truth.
Considering there is no unbiased proof (yes, speculation and people pushing an overly biased agenda don't count) that the 2006 election was stolen, I doubt there is any point to discussing whether the next one will be. No system is perfect and there is always room for improvement, but there is a line between constructive comments and conspiracy theories.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
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
Only a nonpartisan, centrist voice like Robert F. Kennedy is unbiased enough to announce that only the Republicans engage in voter fraud, trickery, and manipulation. There's no corruption in the Democratic party - hasn't Air America Radio taught us anything?
:/
Another great article, kdawson.
The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.
Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
We have a paper trail.
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.
I find it really ironic that a Kennedy, of all people, should be warning people about election fraud.
Especially with what happened in Chicago when "John F" was "elected".
And I find it particularly sad that the people who are warning about election fraud don't want to do a damn thing to prevent people from voting twice (or more....Just witness what happens in Wisconsin).
Don't want fraud? Simple: Give people free state-issued id cards, and make them prove who they are when they vote. Do it by paper ballot. And enforce the election fraud laws when someone is caught tampering with ballots.
Other countries at least make you dip your finger in ink that lasts a few days when they vote. They should at least do that here.
Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.
DRM has no place in an election. DRM is about restricting the rights of a computer owner. WiMP, for example, has DRM but the OS that uses it is still unfit for network use. DRM is not what the local election commission needs to keep elections honest.
What they need is free and secure software. If the software is free, it can be inspected by anyone with any doubt. If it's secure, inspections won't harm the vote. The problem is that Dibold and M$ own the software used in voting machines and anyone using them has to take the machine's honesty as a mater of faith rather than knowledge. That kind of centralized power is easy to abuse. When election commissions use free software, they own the equipment and can verify it's honesty. This increases the number of people overseeing the process, which makes it exponentially more difficult to rig. The public should accept nothing less.
Only a free election will be an honest election.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I lived in Atlanta, Georgia from 1998-2004, and moved to Augusta, GA a couple months ago. To say that the Georgia election was "stolen" neglects that Georgia has heeled way to the right politically over the last 5 years or so, to the point where the teachers' union did not endorse the Democrats in 2002 (I do not think they went so far as to endorse Republican candidates, but the damage was done). To say that Democrats should always win traditionally Democratic districts (or groups, e.g. teachers) neglects harsh reality: as long as they rest on their laurels, thinking they will always win the traditional districts (e.g., downtown Atlanta), they will be very vulnerable to the intense Republican smear machine that is grinding away here. This, more than anything, is why Republicans are gaining ground. To blame election rigging smacks of desparation: we used punch cards in 1998 and 2000, and look how well those worked in Florida! It's just as easy to rig punch cards as electronic voting machines, just the former is slightly more labor intensive. Plus, gas prices are down again, and there have been few military casualties in Iraq lately, so unless the Democratic party starts hammering on their traditional domestic issues (labor, education, health care), they will lose again, at least in Georgia.
Still, several Georgia counties were experimenting with ScanTron ballots prior to the statewide Diebold deal. This system has several advantages; notbaly, there is a paper trail. On the whole, I'd feel a little better if that is the system they had gone with for statewide electronic voting.
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.
If you have a tracking number, there is the possibility that voters can be bought or threatened into voting a certain way.
I tell you that unless you vote for Mr. X, I will break your legs. You go vote and I demand your tracking number (or I break your legs anyway). I can verify that you voted how I wanted you to.
The best paper trail is for the voting machine to spit out a form/card/whatever with the name of the person you voted for printed/punched on it. Then you drop that into a locked box. Later, that locked box is opened in front of anyone who wants to watch and the votes are sorted and counted.
We have the technology to do that already.
But it seems that having an easily verifiable paper trail is not something that our politicians are interested in.
It may well be that elections, op-ed columns and snarky blogs won't make a damn bit of difference any more. It may well be that as a nation we have lost all ability to rein in an out-of-control government intent on consolidating absolute power over our lives.
It may well be that it will take an uprising of unprecedented proportions if we can ever again expect to have a free United States of America.
This breaks my heart, because as the son and grandson of immigrants, of veterans, of union members who spent their lives working in support of a nation of free people. I was taught that as an American we have a blessed status as people who actually control their government, not the other way around.
But with the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 and the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, we have entered a period where those that are in power have decided that their constituents live and work only at their pleasure, and that real power flows from their government down to us, instead of the other way around, which was the belief of the Founding Fathers.
We have lived through a decade when the people who are entrusted with our government have brazenly grabbed power and wealth and DON'T EVEN CARE THAT WE KNOW IT.
I'm afraid it's going to take people, citizens, lots of them in the streets. Angry and willing to break the social contract to take back their rightful position as the source of the government's power. "Of the people, by the people and for the people" was the way the great men of the Enlightenment expressed it. "For the rich and on the people's necks" is the way the emergent Right-Wing in America have twisted it. And the worst of it is the decent working people of middle America have had their vision twisted by a Public Relations machine so powerful that they will willingly vote against their own interests. I have a home in Rolla, Missouri, and I've seen it with my own eyes. Mothers whose children have given their lives in Iraq shedding tears and proud in the belief that their children avenged 9/11 by invading Iraq - because Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh told them it was so.
It breaks my heart but it might just take people, a lot of people, in the streets and willing to disobey the law to express their unwillingness to allow their nation to descend into an authoritarian nightmare. It might take general strikes, civil unrest and maybe a few bombs being thrown for us to once again see the light of freedom burning in this Land.
It's happened before.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've seen enough evidence to never vote electronically again.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
And here I am, in Brazil. Just voted this afternoon and we already have 87% of the votes (about 124 million people voted) processed and in a few hours we will know the results. Sure, less than 1% of the voting machines had problems, and were they had we used paper voting. Electronic voting works just fine :)
The current results (ipdated every 5 minutes):
http://eleicoes.folha.uol.com.br/folha/especial/20 06/eleicoes/apuracao1.html
I just wanted to point out an interesting method of creating a secure paper trail that came out recently (September 28th 2006) by Ronald L. Rivest of M.I.T's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It's called the ThreeBallot Voting System (.pdf format).
The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
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.
newsflash: republicans see democrats destroying the moral foundation of the country, selling us out to international law via the court system, pandering for votes from illegals, wanting to destroy any successful corporation, etc.
The difference is that you see the things you disagree with, while the things you agree with you tend to gloss over. Most right wingers see CNN, NPR, BBC, etc as liberal (while most leftists call them neutral) and most liberals call Fox conservative (while most rightists call it neutral). It's all about hearing what you agree with MOST of the time and letting it reinforce your ideas.
Frankly, Slashdot is going further and further to the left... and while my post count is up lately from trying to point out the lunacy, it's growing very tiring and is pushing me away from wanting to even participate here. It's to the point where the Bush bashing and conspiracy theories creep into non-political stories. I haven't been to kuroshin in years for the same reason. If slashdot wants to turn into the next DU, that's fine... but don't be too surprised when all you have left is a bunch of people preaching to the choir and another bunch trolling.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I hope one of you jokers does rig the election. Give 100% to somebody, I don't even care who. Then there will be no choice but to deal with the Diebold issue.
No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.
Finkployd
Why hack the election when you can just steal it the old fashioned way?
* Give poor voting precincts ancient machines and very few of them so that people have to wait hours and hours in line to vote. Isn't that what we saw in 2004?
* Dream up a system of "provisional ballots" to placate voters when a voter is "challenged" -- and then never count those provisional ballots.
These tactics are the way the past 2 elections were stolen, and they're profusely documented. Even the huge exit poll discrepancies of the 2004 elections were ignored by the US corporate mass media.
And don't forget the way BBC reporter Greg Palast clearly documented that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris eliminated more than 90,000 Florida voters in 2000 as "suspected felons" -- with over 90% of those voters being Democrats. But you're read about that scandal in the US corporate mass media, right?! (Not!)
Sorry, the elections are already being "hacked" and it doesn't take an electronic voting machine to do 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
I have... and our results were off by a quite a bit.
Why? I can think of a few reasons:
1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.
2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.
3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.
4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.
As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.
In any case, though, the CNN exit poll data from 2004 should make the case for a Bush win, if you go by exit poll data alone.
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.
2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.
Shouldn't have left this point so quickly without going for a deeper explanation. My mistake.
People like to show their support for a candidate they feel very strongly about more than once. Those who vote for Incumbents/members of the dominant party are, generally speaking of course, less passionate about the matter - they're happy with how things are. Those who vote for the opposition are more likely (although certainly not always) to feel strongly about the matter and want their opinion registered as much as possible.
"the idea of voting twice" was a misstatement on my part.
It sounds like you're more neoconservative than conservative. If that's the case, there's no stopping you from embarking on your journey to find the bible infested, immigrant free, raise the deficit like it's going out of style, grass is greener forums.
Since when should a conservative care what a citizens sexual preference is? Since when should a conservative spend considerable amounts of money on it? Since when should a conservative care where the citizens of its nation come from? Since when *shouldn't* a (fiscal) conservative care about the ungodly amounts of money the nation gives out as 100% uncooked bacon to gigantic, inefficient and incompetent organizations?
By modding conservative posts as a troll, you admit that you are afraid of the truth.
NO, what they are admitting is they don't believe in open discourse. Just because someone mods you down for your opinion, doesn't mean your opinion is the truth.
considering there is no unbiased proof (yes, speculation and people pushing an overly biased agenda don't count) that the 2006 election was stolen
Since when have "conservatives" been concerned about having unbiased proof and been against people pushing an overly biased agenda? Need you be reminded about the WMDs in Iraq, believed with no unbiased proof because people with an overly biased agenda simply claimed it?
No system is perfect and there is always room for improvement, but there is a line between constructive comments and conspiracy theories.
Do you consider the whole "Axis of Evil" claim constructive comments? Do you consider claims that liberals are trying to destroy the country constructive comments or conspiracy theories? Do you consider the implication that those who disagree with the ones pushing an overly biased agenda in washington are unpatriotic and/or traitors? Because even if you answer reasonably to any of these questions, so-called "conservatives have been very unreasonable with regards to these issues for the last several years.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
It really says something about Bush's charisma when he has to steal elections from both Gore and Kerry.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
First, the republicans do not see the democrats as destroying the moral foundations. It is the neo-cons that claim that. It is these neo-cons that have such representations as Foley, Abramhoff, Hassert, Delay, Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfield.
/. heading left, you have to be kidding. I am a very long time libertarian (and actually more conservative than those that are in my freaks lists), and I can tell you that it is NOT heading left. Not compared to what we had just 9-10 years ago, or even 6 years ago. I see shit loads of neo-cons here. In fact, I feel like I am on foxnews these days. and fox is not conservative; it is propaganda along the line of Pravda (news intermixed with what a group of ppl want to preach).
As to
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm going to go with the path of least resistence here and say, "Because there's nothing to report."
If it's really that easy to bribe someone on the inside and smuggle a virus in, someone should do it for real in the upcoming election. Produce an outcome for one state (say, that's fiercely Republican) which is 100% Democrat across all counties. Then someone might take notice.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
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
Rest of the Planet to Americans: Put down the nuclear weapons and step away from the maifest destiny.
You are no longer worthy.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
In his words:
Here in the UK we use old-fashioned paper ballots, hand counted. No tabulating machines, no hanging chads, no technology at all. In a General Election, the polls close at 10PM and the earliest constituencies usually declare their results around 1AM. By 8AM the next morning there are only a few left to declare and the result is known. This is in a country of some 60 million people - there is no reason why it couldn't scale up to the US population. Why complicate things and introduce more potential for fraud?
I like this:
Generally, I applaud your ability to see in perspective.
I hate printers.
There isn't going to be any more "elections".
If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. GWB. CNN.com, December 18, 2000
You americans are fucked now... the rest of us will be fucked later.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Exactly. In the 2004 Presidential election, exit poll numbers in key battleground states varied drastically from the actual results. That's extremely suspicious because people often have no reason to lie to unbiased pollsters about who they voted for. According to several statistical experts (who are far more knowledgeable about stats than the average Slashdot poster, and 7 out of 10 people would agree...) the discrepancies were statistically impossible. It was a big, red, flag that something was amiss in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Read this statement from Kennedy's first article:
If you have a rational, scientific mind, that's about as conclusive as it gets. It's certainly enough to pique the interest of people like Robert F. Kennedy, who then ask questions like "Was the last election fixed?" and "Will the next one be?" So Kennedy digs around and does some good old-fashioned investigative reporting, he follows the money trail, and lo and behold it leads to disgraced Republican influence peddler Jack Abramoff and several sleazy advocacy groups!
...of many, but just an example:
http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=4027
Oh, wait, sorry about believing what you want to believe, I forgot.
I actually hope a Republican DOESN'T win in 2008 so we can have a 4 year reprieve from the incessant bitching about people who thing Bush/Republicans stole the election(s). (I didn't vote for Bush.)
you can make Free software just as good by requiring specific builds with authorizations keys and what not to install on voting machines, but I am under the impression that would violate the GPL v3. Thanks Richard Stallman!
GPL V3 does not keep people from checking the version of their packages. It's only a GPL violation if you keep the user from modifying or changing their own software.
Yes, anyone can analyze the official source code, but not one can see the source code that was compiled and installed on any given machine by a [random] technician.
That's what package checks, like those used by Debian, are good for. A state or county can set up a package repository and be sure that any qualified technician can get and install it without trouble. Indeed, the process is fool proof enough that the local election commission can do it themselves. This is much better than having a single company do everything, especially a company with a shady record like Dibold.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
Liar. Social services are, indeed, the largest portion of the budget.
But once you disregard social security (And you have to disregard it, because it is taking in more than it is spending, so if you could magically get rid of it you'd lose money, unless you're planning on requiring people to pay into a non-existant program.), defense is about half a trillion, and social services are about a trillion.
Now, half a trillion is, of course, less than a trillion, so defense is smaller, but it's hardly 'a drop in the bucket', as you put it.
Of course, part of that trillion is because the Republican's heroic little 'Medicare reform' sucks money out of both the government and the people's pockets and deposits into 'insurers'.
You do realize that Clinton averaged a budget that was about 1.8 trillion, right? And Bush's have climbed to 2.8? Military spending has climbed from .3 billion to .5 billion, so there's where .2 went, but that means Bush has increased spending by .8 trillion in ways completely unconnected with the military. Yes, Bush has increased spending by slightly more than a third, and only 20% of that increase was for the military.
But go ahead blaming the evil Democrats for spending all the money. I guess they're the reason the debt went up .4 trillion a year under Bush Sr., .2 trillion a year under Clinton, and .5 trillion a year under Bush Jr.
P.S. Reducing the budget to half a trillion dollars would require reductions in military spending, as military spending is (slightly) above that amount, and obviously the rest of the government needs money also.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Warren Slocum, who is in charge of elections here in San Mateo county, is extremely critical of touch-screen voting machines. He liked the system we had here - big paper ballots marked with black markers, which the voter inserts into the scanner atop the ballot box. This gives a quick count when the polls close, and the ballots are locked in the box in case a recount is needed.
But we couldn't keep that system. It wasn't compliant with the "Help America Vote Act", which requires touch-screen machines for "accessability" by blind people. San Mateo had to go touch-screen, but it went with Hart InterCivic eSlate machines. They're still not high-security devices, but they're way better than the Diebold crap. Slocum pushed to get California to require printers for manual recounts on all California touch-screen machines, and that's now the law in California.
But Hart InterCivic has problems, too.
"Gail Fisher, manager of the county's Elections Division (for Travis, TX), theorizes that after selecting their straight party vote, some voters are going to the next page on the electronic ballot and pressing "enter," perhaps thinking they are pressing "cast ballot" or "next page." Since the Bush/ Cheney ticket is the first thing on the page, it is highlighted when the page comes up - and thus, pressing "enter" at that moment causes the Kerry/ Edwards vote to be changed to Bush/ Cheney."
Regardless, he was popular through a lot of his two terms.
Granted I didn't like him. But I did not like him because he expanded the power of the executive branch greatly through executive orders, he bombed a couple of countries for no good reason, he displayed absolutely no respect for privacy with the Clipper chip initiative, and his staff was mired in conflict of interest, incompetence, and other questionable activities.
Imagine how I feel about Bush...
Finkployd
Look up "signing statements," "torture and habeas bill," "nsa spying," and "unprecedented wartime powers" and then say that again with a straight face.
None of the abuses of power under the current Republican adminstration were given to them by anyone, nor were they in place when Bush took office. Bush and his cronies have SEIZED this power, either by BREAKING THE LAW or by CHANGING IT.
Short of putting a silver bullet or a wooden stake in to Bush and Cheney themselves, there is nothing anyone could have done under the LAW that was not ALREADY IN PLACE to stop them.
For Christ's sake, this is one of the most frustrating arguments that people make. What, exactly, were the Democracts supposed to do before 1994 to ensure that no president ever waltzed into office like Bush and decided to WRITE HIS OWN LAWS AND DISREGARD CONGRESS ENTIRELY? Do you think they should have passed a bill that said:
"House bill X.Y.Z(A.B.C.)
This bill hereby forbids the President from writing his own laws and disregarding Congress entirely. If Congress says it, sorry old boy, you gotta do it, and if Congress forbids it, sorry old boy, you can't do it. The President is not entitled to end the rule of law just becuz he wants to. Period."
One would have hoped it was self-evident. And even if they had passed such a law, what would stop Bush from taking office, sitting down with his pen, and doing exactly what he did anyway?
"My Response to House bill X.Y.Z.(A.B.C.) by George W. Bush
I'm gonna do what I want anyway, neener neener neener, because I'm the decider! Just try to stop me!"
What were the Democrats supposed to do pre-1994 to prevent such a power grab?
And don't let's forget that torture was illegal, prisoners were guaranteed trials, spying required a warrant, and international law prevented pre-emptive wars before this administration. This is not stuff that the Democrats "gave" to the president. This is stuff he "took."
They're lawmakers. All they can do is fucking MAKE THE LAW. If Bush and Cheney decide that law is not cool, they're gonna rule the skool, how is that the fault of everyone before them that FOLLOWED the law? How the HELL are these things the fault of the pre-1994 Democrats, for Christ's sake?
Disclaimer: I am not an American. Do not vote in US elections, and never will.
This is (hopefully!) where the US system actually STARTS to work. (Given that it is currently *not* working) The USA has a very good system of checks and balances - currently these are NOT being used and are not working correctly, but it is inevitable (I say) that they will start to work soon-ish.
While it IS true that US non-voters are the most apathetic bunch of losers possible, it will happen that they actually DO become concerned, but only when things get bad for them personally. Within a few (3-5) years from now, the average US worker will start to realise that they are working 10 hours a week more than they used to, but that their standard of living is not improving. This will be entirely due to crazy monetary policy, political mismanagement, Military stupidity, and excessive foreign borrowing.
THIS is when the corruption will be rooted out of the US system, and I predict many thousands of people will go to jail. Not hundreds, but MANY thousands. It might take years for those responsible to be foundout and imprisoned. (And, if the US court system isn't fixed in the meantime, most of the indicted will die of old age before they get a court date.)
Until things actually get worse for average voters (or actually, average non-voters, because they outnumber average voters IIRC) there will be no "political will" to root out the offenders. Sure, the losers of elections will protest loudly, but unless they are supported by a strong electorate, and strong evidence (combined! One by itself just isn't good enough) then the situation will continue as now: The worst democracy money can buy.
The absolute mystery to me, is how the normally sane people of America, have permitted a voting system which does not have a paper component to be implemented. I believe it is all to do with the "housing bubble" which has put so much money into US pcokets that you've all been far too busy buying Hummers, Plasma TVs, Satelite dishes and going out for dinner, to actually see what's been happening to your country.
Pretty soon though, the housing bubble is gonna burst, and that Hummer will cost $300 to fill the tank, and the Plasma TV will suffer burn-in and the Satelite dish will have 27 arab-speaking channels, and 99 Chinese speaking channels, (All you'll be left with in English) is FOX and 195 channels of Sports) and the restaurants will be closed, or feeding you heart-attack food.
THEN and ONLY THEN - will the shit start to hit the fan.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I'm going to go with the path of least resistence here and say, "Because there's nothing to report."
This is quoted from None dare call it stolen:
There's a lot more interesting reading (at the least) at that link.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
You're right! RFK is a rat so statistics are no longer meaningful!
Look at what's happening in Europe as the muslims are flooding in and reproducing faster than the natives. Pretty soon, you'll see them adopting Sharia there. If you want to see a country become destabilized as they lose the core values that binds them all together, good luck in the ensuing anarchy.
Way to sound like a bigot. More importantly, this is what societies do, you know? Things change. Demographics change. Some people reproduce quickly, others slowly. As populations shift, practices and policies shift. That's called (drumroll) democracy. Sorry to burst your bubble, I know you thought democracy was this violent, totalitarian stuff that Bush was promoting, but no, it's just policies more or less following the lead of changes in the population.
The "core values that bind them all together" that you refer to... You would preserve these, work to keep them, and if you had to manipulate the population demographics or reproduction a little, keep some people down in order to make sure that others others don't lose the singular culture that they already have, that would be okay, right? Of course, that would just be eugenics, but hey, we're all conservatives here. Sich heil and all that.
it ain't the military... the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
First off, the ratio is decidedly un-drop-in-the-bucket-like, more like 2:1, social services vs. military industry/expenditure. Next, realize that social services money isn't being taxed out of the economy, it's going right back into it when it pays for drugs, housing, food, and all the other things that constitute a social safety net. ON THE OTHER HAND, the resources portion of that military money goes out and get blown up and shot down with every pretty missile, smart-bomb, or fast-plane explosion and burned right out the tailpipe (or similar appendages on planes, tanks, jeeps, submarines, aircraft carriers, personnel carriers...) leaving dollars for non-American economies. Still more of it is multiplicative, i.e. spend $millions$ hitting an Iraqi village, and you get the privelege of spending $many more millions$ on medical care and resources to rebuild it, only this time the money doesn't go back into the general blue and white collars of the American economy, it goes to the few fat cats at the top of the multinational economy in specialized industries that can operate overseas.
And if you think we have a socialist political-economic system in the United States, then you have lost every bit as much perspective as people think you arch-conservatives have.
STOP . AMERICA . 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.
"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.(40)"
The problem with this claim is that the one in three billion number is calculated by assuming that the exit poll was taken by a completely random sampling of voters. Of course, exit polls are not collected at every polling station, and we expect to see different results at different stations. Even if they were taken at every polling station, certain voters might be more willing to take an exit poll than others. Random sampling is well understood, and it is possible to remove uncertainties about the "randomness" of a sample, but exit polls are not conducted this way because of the time and difficulty involved (it would not be possible to collect enough data in one day). To account for this, pollsters normalize their exit poll results to the real election results and use the data to say which groups of people voted for with candidates.
So no, that is nowhere near conclusive.
No, we're all so wrapped up in which club is the most popular that we don't actually really care how the country runs. Most of us are under the mistaken impression that our system can never go really wrong.
Take you, for instance. I bet you've managed to completely ignore the evidence mounting that Rumsfeld has personally authorized torture, that the war in Iraq was justified by supposed facts that the administration was well aware weren't true, that they leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain, that there was plenty enough evidence lying around to figure out 9/11 was giong to happen and stop it before it did, that the government has been engaged in illegal spying operations on the American people, and a whole host of other injustices. You cover your ears and close your eyes and shout "Na na, I can't hear you!" like a petulant child while out of the other side of your face you invent all kinds of justifications that you think somehow condone behavior that's blatantly illegal. Not to mention the less flashy corporate corruption inherent in giving all the Iraq reconstruction deals to Haliburton.
At least the Democrats had the decency to be quietly embarassed about Bill Clinton's use of his office for personal gain (Tyson chicken (while he was governer), Whitewater and interns) and his lying on the stand. Republicans get in my face and shout "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Criticism of the government is unpatriotic!" "Adultery is grounds for impeachment!". Lying on the stand is though, IMHO, but none of the Republicans seemed to be upset about that, perhaps because they didn't want to call attention to a behavior they seem to be so in love with themselves.
Not that I'm all that happy with the Democrats either. They want a nanny socialist state where everybody speaks very softly in order to avoid offending anyone. But I'd rather descend into that than the stick-up-your-ass facism the Republicans want, especially since they to a one seem to be in deep denial about it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Holy cow. You made some huge assumptions about what you think was assumed when the exit poll analysis was conducted. Members of The National Election Archive Project, the non-partisan watchdog group to whom the the one in 3 billion figure can be attributed, will be the first to tell you that every single factor you just described made its way into their analysis of the polling data. Yes, seriously.
If I were a ruder Slashdot poster, I would have responded with something like "Who the fuck are you? The woman who wrote the white paper on this graduated Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a master's in mathematics and has been analyzing poll data for 10 years..." and so on, but rather than resort to an ad hominem attack, I'll just assume that you replied without taking the time to check the sources that describe in vivid detail how the analysis was performed. Here is a link to the pdf that describes the process that was used. I know reading an 18 page document is not half as easy as just writing a paragraph where you just make random, uneducated guesses about what it contains, but you might want to give it a shot.
"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a
.). Of course, I could tell that she made this assumption without even reading the paper, because it is literally the only assumption you can make with the amount of data they have. She goes on to say:
5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selecting
voters as they leave the polling location."
No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. .
"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit poll
discrepancy are produced by
1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voter
response rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidential
discrepancies),
2. vote miscounts, and
3. random sampling error.
There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enough
data has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect an
analyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares.
Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we do
not know."
Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).
20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The USA
/03/03_200.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitraki s/031004fitrakis.html
/pfindex
by Angry Girl of Nightweed.com
Did you know....
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_comp any.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/m ain632436.shtml http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=26 http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.ph p
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.ht m http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel 27.html
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/ 042804landes.html
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates
A program or machine isn't hacked if it does exactly what it is designed and implemented to do. The these machines have been designed and implemented to cheat. There's no hacking involved.
The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it.
How the *fuck* did this get modded Insightful? Trying to rub it in our faces that Slashdot panders to the Liberal crowd? If somembody said "The Democrats are destroying the country." It'd get downmomdded into oblivion.
Just like this comment will get down modded into oblivion since it critizies liberals. Liberals are all about Free Speech, unless you disagree with them, then they try to keep you quiet.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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