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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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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.
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 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.
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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.
You need to do a bit more research before making your claim.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-20 00Nov16?language=printer
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.
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.
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.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It would seem that seem that RFK Jr and many in the public have a rather myopic memory when it comes to allegations of vote fraud. One would expect that Mr Kennedy would certainly be aware of the controversy surrounding the outcome of the 1960 Presdential election especially since his uncle John F. Kennedy was elected.
Or was he? Rather than Ohio and Florida, that election came down to narrow wins in Illinois and Texas. Both states were Democrat-controlled and rife with allegations of fraud. Did Mayor Daley of Chicago arrange for the dead to vote? Did Johnson's own political machine throw Texas? Like 2004, the answers depend on who you ask.
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.
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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?
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!
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.
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.
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.