Slashdot Mirror
How to Hack the Vote and Steal the Election
divisionbyzero writes "Many people have asked for it so that the government will have to deal with it. So here it is: a guide to stealing an election that uses electronic voting machines written by Jon Stokes over at Arstechnica.
From the article:
"In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.""
I agree that this is perhaps THE most pressing issue right now for Americans, but is it really ethical to distribute this kind of information? At what point do you take responsibility for what you post, and NOT diseminate information that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Anyone using this to aid H.R. Clinton will be granted a one way ticket to Iraq to stand out in the middle of a city street wearing a Bush t-shirt.
-- pupkick
1. Make sure head of company that supplies voting machines is a vociferous supporter of your party ...
2. There is no step two
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
All germans, please sign this petition:
_ petition.asp?PetitionID=294
http://itc.napier.ac.uk/e-Petition/bundestag/view
It currently has 13748 votes.
Thanks!
Are you the RIAA, going on about "stealing" intangible concepts that cannot be stolen? You can't steal an election, any more than you can steal music.
-- The Diebold P2P Network Team
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's the only way to be sure...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Can we use this to create a CowboyNeal option in the next election.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
In other news, the Bush administration has filed a lawsuit against Arstechnica, stating that releasing this information is a "danger to national security". Meanwhile, GOP officials are scrambling to determine who 'leaked' their 2006 Election Strategy to the press.
Since you cannot validate the correctness of the election either way, I'd opt for the path which fixes the situation.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
But people aren't listening because they don't understand the problem.
Explaining how easy it is might help people understand this is a serious problem.
Can you think of a better way to explain how easy it is? and how much of a problem it is?
Its already been done.
From the referenced url: '"Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004."'
'Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find any flaw in the results. "You can't break it - I've tried," he told The Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."'
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
the fact that this gives more bad guys the tools they need than might have had them before?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Seems like some 3rd party candidates need to read this guide, rise to the challenge, and get 70% of the vote.
Now that would be a mandate for change!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How to steal an election in seven easy steps:
1) Put the word Linux on your website.
2) Add copious amounts of Microsoft bashing.
3) Add Socialist blurbs to the website.
4) Call the current astate of affairs evil.
5) Advocating lowering the voting age to 10.
6) Ask KDawson to post a link to your website.
7) Have everyone on slashdot believe you are the |37357 |]()()|] @®0|\||}
Well, it may not work, but most kids here think it will.
Have you read my journal today?
Folks, if there's gonna be wholesale election fraud, a smart fraudster is going to do it where nobody is looking. Don't expect it to take place in the precincts that make the news for irregularities.
Expect it to take place in places where Candidate X carries 70-75% of the vote.
That is, expect it to take place in places where Candidate X carries 75-80% of the vote.
If you don't want anyone to notice you're doing it, do it where nobody will notice; if the election is close enough (which so many of them are,) your candidate will carry the day.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
(libertarian party coming out as first) and get the system fixed subsequently"
If you really want election reform you have to make it in the best interest of the the Dem/Rep party. The best way to do that would be to have a third party victory. As long as someone in the Professional Politicians Club get's elected, the powers that be don't care about voting accuracy. They have no reason to.
We are all just people.
Yes, you are missing something. The entire article is available. You just have to click through it page by page. The PDF is a convenience for subscribers. You can make your own PDF with just a little work if that's what you need.
1. Get extra ballots.
2. Fill them out for your employer/candidate.
3. Stuff them into ballot box.
4. ???
5. Profit!
And if you don't think that this is actually done, well I'll just point out that here the "Profit!" line actually works as long as you can get away with it.
//TODO: signature
Remember Andorra? Of course you do! How did you get elected as governor every two years?
1) First year i denied all requests and printed tons of money. Everyone was angry, and inflation was high. But noone could do anything because it wasn't an election year.
2) Second year i printed no money, and gave everyone everything they wanted. Everyone was happy, and inflation was low. Everyone re-elected me because it was an election year.
3) Rinse, wash, repeat.
Back thewn, i though it was a game, and had no relevance to real life.
Have you read my journal today?
``He wants to make a political statement but his PDF is not free to download, you have to be premium member of Ars Technica ? Am I missing something here ?''
Yes. This means you have to authenticate before you can download the information. So they know who is interested...and send some agents over for a friendly talk.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I would not trust my country's election with Windows CE! If they try to bring them into the UK then I will blockade the ballot box, anyone with me?
My little Linux and tech blog
Ideally technology should be used to enhance the existing voting process, not replace it entirely. How about this: have the voter complete a standard voting card, then place it in a template and press a button. This action takes a digital photograph of the voting card. Later on, if any voting card is questioned the digital photograph can be used as a reference to help resolve the confusion. Punch cards with their hanging chads, for all their faults, can at least be subjected to a system of checks and balances comprised of non-technical individuals. They should be made better though. Heck, I don't see why Scantron-type #2 pencil bubbles wouldn't be better than chads.
To ban all voting machine employees from voting.
just get this posted on Drudge maybe more non-technical people will see it!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
The best thing that can possibly happen for this country and secure elections would be for Buggs Bunny to win 100% of the vote in at least one, preferably multiple districts. Until people see these results come in on election night, they'll never believe that it can really happen.
Hotels across the United States reported an alarming shortage of hotel bar keys.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
In an article that exposes flaw after flaw in the electronic voting system, the one thing that really made my jaw drop is that the master vote tabulation is stored in an Access database. To my mind, Access is crippleware designed for quick-n-dirty solutions on small data sets for people that don't know any better. Putting it into a production application is madness. Madness!
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Wow! After nearly a decade on Slashdot I have a "first post". But, I didn't come here to write about that. I came here to write about the story, which is not only believable, but presents a scenario which I suspect that we will see played out this year. That's right, the Republicans, with a little help from their good friends at Diebold, will make sure that they maintain control of both the House and the Senate. Given the Bush Administration's coordinated and continuous assault on our civil liberties this is not only the next logical step in the restriction of same, but will also ensure that no one, especially those nasty Democrats, will ever be able to prove that such a thing has happened. The scary thing is that, in state-wide races, it is not necesaary to manipulate large numbers of votes. All one needs to do is identify the "swing" districts in a given state and infect the machines there with vote-stealing code. This not only limits the number of people who need to be involved in the scheme, it has the additional benefit of producing entirely plausible results as the chosen "stolen districts" are historically unpredictable. I doubt that even sophisticated statistical analysis procedures would be able to detect vote fraud of this type. The implications for the future of this country are dire indeed. We may very well see the end of American democracy with this election.
Just my $.02,
Ron
Impeach Barack Obama for violating the Constitutional requirement to be a "natural born" citizen to hold the office of P
The incorrect presumption here is that voting matters. Does it really matter if you vote for a Demopublican or a Republicrat? Either way they're going to pick your pocket and line their own. No matter who you vote for, the government always gets elected. Funny how that works.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Get rid of the complex rules about who is allowed to vote. That stops officials arbirarily omitting names from the electorial role. So long as you are over 16 and not in jail you should be able to vote (even crazy people.)
It's better that many bad guys know of a "hack" that doesn't work anymore, than that a few know of one that still does.
FRA: STFU GTFO
*holding an empty bag in his hands*
:(){
I voted for Kodos.
--David
In this case, having one bad guy with the directions really isn't any better than 10 bad guys with it.
In fact, the more bad guys that have it, the more likely the problem will get fixed, thus it's actually better that the most 'bad guys' possible get it. If only one person knows how to rig the election, chances are higher they'll be able to get away with it. If 100 people know and all try to rig the election, chances are none of them will get away with it, because the tampering will be too obvious.
Frankly I think the best thing to happen would be for someone to utterly steal the next election; make "Mickey Mouse" or "Elvis" get 100 seats in Congress or something. The cost of having to repeat a single election is certainly much smaller than continuing for decades with a flawed process, where nobody can tell whether the vote is being rigged or not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
the Democrats have perfected stealing elections to an art
oppose proof of identification at voting places.
Ventura, California, Buena High School, 1988 Class President election:
It was the first year of electronic voting, done on a room full of Apple IIe's.
Some kind of voting program was running. I simply made a break in the program, figured it which variables belong to which candidate and bumped the variable count up for my favorite. After that, i simply continued the program and then logged my official vote.
My favorite was Todd Turner. I hear he won by a landslide. No one contested the results. Lucky Todd.
And Todd, if you happen to read this, don't get mad at me, ok? I mean, you probably would have won anyway, right?
Since people in jail are the ones most effected by the law, why exactly shouldn't they be allowed to vote? Do we with to disenfranchise them more?
If someone feels that they are in jail for political reasons, should we at least let them vote to change it?
Ideally, for the layperson you would simply explain that each pricinct's votes are stored in a small database, and that it can simply be edited with a piece of software commonly included in Microsoft's popular Office suite. Then, show a screenshot of access with the GEMS database opened, highlight the vote tally for some candidate, and explain that you simply click in the box and change the number. Then explain how it would be impossible to know what the vote count could be due to the lack of paper...relate it back to punched ballots (just save the ballots and recount em if necessary), optical scanners (again you have the ballots and usually there is a paper log that prints each vote as it is scanned), etc.
All of that is understandable to even the layperson. Most people understand what Microsoft Office is. Most people have heard of a database and understand thats how businesses store all their information. Most people have seen a spreadsheet and a screenshot of someone editing an access database looks almost the same.
Just be like most people and don't bother voting.
The other side will be happy to steal it for you. And they can do it the old fashioned way.
Since the implicit acceptance of statism and socialism in America, it really doesn't matter if Democrats or Republicans run the show. We're all screwed. This just eliminates the paper waste, so we're less screwed in the short term.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Repeat this process for http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information
After about a thousand folks do this, a staffer might actually go print out the story and hand it to their congresscritter in a brief.
I'd also like to ask the Ars Technica people to make an exception for this story and make the PDF available to non-subscribers, as it would really help to disseminate this story to the right people. I'm not really sure how to go about contacting them.
Here's my letter (slightly munged of course by slashdot):
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I bet if the founding fathers looked at this issue they would suggest that a few slashdotters hack some of these machines and (anonymously) completely fudge the elections in a few districts, just to prove that it can be done. You know, give some 3rd party guy 100 percent of the vote. This would prompt change pretty darn quick.
The quickest way to get the system changed is to create a scandal by actually stealing an election. I would suggest making a Libertarian, Green, or other 3rd party win the govenor's race. That should make it pretty obvious. Then the person who hacked the election should send letters detailing what they did to a major newspaper and the state election board. I would also suggest backing up the real results so that no real harm is done. That should get us secure voting machines by the 2008 presidential elections.
what sig?
The premium PDF is an identical copy of the actual article. You aren't missing anything.
Here's my prediction. The control of the House of Representatives in the coming election (which is after all, the most important thing, considering it would give Bush's opponents subpoena power to investigate all the sleazy crap he's pulled), will come down to one extremely close race. This close race will be decided, after a recount, and the Republican candidate will win by less than .01% of the votes.
It will be a virtual repeat of the 2002 and 2004 elections. You see, all this nail-biting, down to the wire, razor-thin margin bullshit gives the idiots who watch TV the feeling that, well "it MUST be legit because it was so darn close" and "if there was anything crooked going on, they'd win decisively".
Wednesday, the 8th of November, we will hear how the "values voters" pulled together at the last minute and despite the fact that all the exit polls showed the Dems winning by a huge margin, the Republicans yet again pulled a miracle out of the hat and retained power. Rush Limbaugh will explain that all the prayers of the good Christian Conservatives is what turned the tide.
Because of the clear crookedness of our electoral system (and did you notice that the regions that the Republicans pulled their upsets in during the last elections were the ones that had Diebold machines?), it is probably too late to expect elections, op-ed columns or clever blogs to make a damn bit of difference.
No, I'm afraid it's going to take people, lots of people, in the streets, being decidedly ill-behaved if we're going to keep this nation anything like the beautiful experiment that the Founding Fathers produced. If the principles of the Enlightenment are going to survive, we're going to have to act the way the heroes who created this country acted: badly. Civil disobedience and mass demonstrations, general strikes and boycotts. There's going to be some fighting before this power-grab by the Authoritarian Right who have masked themselves as "Conservatives" will end.
Despite my general laziness and particular enjoyment of online games like Eve-Online, I am prepared to fight, and if necessary, die, for my country. Even if it means that it will be other Americans that I will have to fight to protect the United States of America.
It's going to take a tamper-proof margin of victory in 11 days if this sleazy little tin-pot dictator in the White House and the crooked pricks who are pulling his strings are going to be stopped. It's the only chance we have to put a little oversight on these bad actors.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, you know the old rule: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"...
Stallman wouldn't want to execute Raymond too early; it would just precipitate a civil war. You know, BSDers blowing themselves up in LUG meetings, contamination of the Cheetos supply, and caffeinated-beverage shortages. You know, basically all the worst parts of the Bible.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Come on now. Is it really that hard to get a printed card (read: scantron) that I can look over and say: Yep, that's what I voted! Have that card read into a repository (which keeps the card) and at the end of the day have the booths match up with the repository. If the numbers don't match it raises a red flag and they then do some digging? Or better yet just use the repository to send the votes?
I remember election night in 2000, I was watching CBS I believe. They called Florida for Gore.
The influence of the provably biased media on elections as they are occurring should be a shameful thing to us and disallowed. I know people who were standing in (a long) line in Florida and heard it'd been called for Gore and so didn't bother to vote (for either candidate) after that - talk about sanctioned disenfranchising.
Personally I'd like to see a trojan installed that privately monitors the results for tampering, catching manipulation of votes, with sufficient evidence for proof, at any level of the election process.
Some people were laughing at us because we did ban the electronic vote. I'm not sure that our decision was so ridiculous.
That's what blogs are for.
It needs to have enough supporting evidence that someone can blog it as fact. When blogged, it will inevitably get taken out of context and dumbed down to the level that the average Joe will understand, with the substance behind TFA's link.
Give this a few days to make it around the Internet. I can see this becoming a big stink.
:(){
maybe that will wake the n00bz up.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Final vote tally:
:)
0% Republican
0% Democrat
25% Libertarian
25% Reform
25% Green
25% Independent
I'd really like to see this happen in some state somewhere in this union... It would cause wonderful chaos.
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
(c/o Matt Blaze)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I agree with the general consensus among slashdoters that voting machine schematics and source code must be open to the public for inspection. I also think that we can improve election security, while still retaining an anonymous ballot, by allowing voters to check to make sure that their own vote was properly counted. Here's my plan:
To begin with, the regular voter verification process happens at the door. You go into the polling booth, select all your options, and a confirmation screen comes up for you to check and make sure you selected everything properly. When you confirm, a small piece of paper is printed out that has a serial number and a dynamically generated decryption key on it. Your vote is then sent along to a tabulation server. Your unencrypted vote is added up with the other votes, and the pair of your serial number and your encrypted vote is stored at the same time.
Later in the day, you can go home, and log onto a special government website. You enter your serial number, along with your decryption key, and the verification server shows your vote back to you. The only identifier attached to each vote is a serial number, and it requires the proper decryption key to view the vote. Nevertheless, it allows individual voters to check to make sure that their vote was counted. As long as source-code can be publicly inspected, we can verify that counting is not being "faked" by saving an individual user's vote for verification purposes but not actually adding it to the overall tabulation, thus preventing fraud by under-voting.
To prevent fraud by over-voting, the tabulation server will keep track of the total number of votes it receives from each machine. Local election officials will keep a hand-tally of the number of voters who visit each poll. At the end of the day, the hand tally is checked against the server's tally to make sure there is no discrepancy.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
You have to pay for a premium membership to get the pdf, but you can read the html version of the article for free. That's the way Ars Technica articles have worked for the past few years. They do have to make money, afterall... I fail to see the problem.
God forbid that they want their constituents to be able to vote on election day, and that pretty much every state Supreme Court in the country has declared voter ID laws unconstitutional.
"Vote early and vote often!"
Is that your motto?
So if I am able to vote in 500 precincts in one day, my 500 votes should count over your 200, or the "honest person's" 1 vote?
Or can I and 10,000 of my friends from Utah go to California and all vote in the primary there, changing the voting tally for the mayor's race in a city that has only 4,000 people living in it?
How about I bring in 3 million Mexican nationals to vote for the next California Governor's race, paying them a paltry $100 each to do nothing but simply vote that day (presumably for the candidate I have suggested). Do you think it would have an impact?
The reason for the complex rules about who is able to vote has a very legitimate reason for existing. There has been substantial voting fraud in the past, and there continues to be such fraud right now (and likely to continue), precisely because people who shouldn't be voting are, or are voting more than once.
Much of the voting fraud with the punch card ballots in Florida was because voting managers of some precincts would take a stack of ballots after they had been cast and stick a wire down the "chosen" candidate. This is where many of the "chad" issues came up, not from any problem with the paper ballot itself in the first place.
As far as ommitting names from the lists of eligible voters, there are legitimate reasons for doing so. Just ask how JFK was elected with the 10,000 dead people in Illinois who ended up voting anyway, giving the electorial votes of Illinois to JFK instead of Nixon.
It's a SECRET vote. That means nobody has the right to know how you voted. INCLUDING the mobsters and union bosses you are so sure are stealing the election. That's why you should never expect a receipt with the vote you cast on it (though you should, IMHO, be shown evidence that your vote has been recorded correctly before you leave the polling place, such as a paper tape with a print out of your vote on it rolling past a window on its way to a lockbox, where it should later be tallied and compared with the computer record to ensure that they are consistent).
People just do not understand how vulnerable electronic voting machines are to tampering. Maybe the author's dubious guide will help more to understand...but I doubt it. Bright, technically-minded, republican or democrat, people give you the same kind of glassy-eyed look when you say something about voting machine fraud as they do if you talk about a shooter on the grassy knoll. They just will not believe it, whatever the facts are. The electronic voting machines look so high-tech and cool, they must be okay. Everything else is done electronically, why not voting, might go their thinking. My county hadn't moved away from its optical scanning system...until the election in September when the poll-worker invited me to try the new, shiny, electronic voting machine (ostensibly provided for handicapped voters) rather than take my optical-scan ballot to one of the flimsy voting booths to mark with an old-fashioned pen. The electronic voting machines and their associated fraud potential just seem inevitable, now.
Give me a fucking break.
Put up a torrent of that PDF if everybody should know it and you don't want to pay for the bandwidth.
"Feature for Premium Subscribers" for the download makes the writer look like a hypocritcial fool.
Make the law require the design of every voting machine in the US include a verifiable and separate voting record (such as a paper tape).
Then the president of the voting machine company can do whatever he likes, because we'll know it won't affect the outcome of the race in Ohio^H^H^H^Hany election.
There wouldn't be such a crisis if the brains of voters had not already been severely hacked.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Unbelieveably, Diebold actually has an ecommerce site where you can buy all their electronic voting machine products online, including memory cards, security tape, and access keys. I'm really hoping they verify that you're an elections official before they actually ship the stuff to you:
http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9
Here you go - buy a dozen keys, for you and your friends:
http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9&id=163
On a funny/sad note, the front page of their election products site as a glaring coding error (%=rs("newsdate")%):
http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/
What would legally happen if a fictional write-in such as "scooby doo" wins? That would indicate obvious fraud. Would the runner up win? Would we stick with the current administration until another election could be arranged? Would we end up with Hillary and Condi dressed in a large 2 person dog suit?
Such stories have already been circulated. Many people are dismissive. Of course, most of those who were dismissive then will still be dismissive now. I'm not advocating actually hacking the election, but I believe hacking in a very obvious way might be the only way to get the attention of *most* Americans.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
the Forces of Evil have already stolen the article!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
And every office in the land!! This way he'll be able to re-write the constitution in the Daily Show's image! Huzzah!!
Well, there's an argument to be made that whether it was the Republicans or Iranian intelligence, the result would still be the Republicans in power. After all, the current administration has been a boon to recruitment. According to our own intelligence estimates, more terrorists are being recruited than are being killed. It does seem that Osama shows up on TV at just the right time to help the Republicans get elected. So, either he's totally clueless about how we react (admittedly, a possibility), or he *wants* Republicans in power (also a real possibility for the reasons just mentioned).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
remove the extraneous space to get them to work:
Catalog
access keys
Which is that we don't have an independent media anymore. Rupert Murdoch is as likely to be a whistle blower as Karl Rove is.
Unless we have a real free press, with real media outlets (read: TV, radio, internet, magazine, newspaper, etc.), then we don't have a democracy.
Personally, after watching 911mysteries and other films on related topics, and reviewing the scientific facts for myself, I'm convinced that we already live in 1984, and the only solution is the bloody ugly one that Thomas Jefferson and most of our other founding fathers completely supported.
You did mention the "liberal" media, so you touched on it, but really, when 3 channels are quoting each other with created facts by obvious pundits who are clearly party members.....
You don't have freedom of the press anymore, and it's game over for democracy.
It's been that way since Kennedy got whacked, and on a related issue, that was also our last real election.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It opens some card reader doors, think I'll try it when I vote.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Where were you voting? If you were in Florida, the polls were still open and you didn't vote based on CBS's projections, that makes you sound a bit dense.
I agree completely. An error was just reported in our voting machines in Charlottesville. However, they can't fix the problem before the elections because changes are not allowed this close to the elections. In this case, the (reported) error is relatively small: last names are truncated on the summary page (but not on the voting page). Hopefully, if it was a more serious error there would be other avenues. On the other hand, perhaps the only other avenue (and the one the author desires) is non-electronic voting.
So, by that reasoning, now is the best time.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Satire is not trolling. Mod Parent Up.
It is even harder for the would-be perp, who not only has to describe such a scenario in theory (to herself and co-conspirators), but also implement it in practice...
As particular models (such as the writer-picked Diebold AccuVote TS) get more popular, the diversity diminishes, though.
For once, I find myself against standartization.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
pretty much every state Supreme Court in the country has declared voter ID laws unconstitutional.
24 states and the District of Columbia currently have the minimum HAVA ID requirements - first-time voters who register by mail and do not provide ID verification with their registration must show ID before voting.
19 states require ID for all voters.
2 states require all voters show photo ID
3 states request all voters show photo ID
2 states require ID of all first-time voters
source
Meanwhile (September 21, 2006)... "The House yesterday passed legislation that would require voters to show a valid photo identification in federal elections over the overwhelming objections of Democrats who compared the bill to segregation-era measures aimed at disenfranchising Southern blacks. The Federal Election Integrity Act was approved on a nearly party-line 228-196 vote. Republicans backed the bill 224-3, with three nonvoters; Democrats opposed it 192-4, with five nonvoters. They were joined in opposition by the House's one independent member."
The article makes useful distinctions between retail and wholesale fraud, and between detectable and undetectable fraud. A requirement to present identification at the polling place would make one kind of retail fraud more detectable, and maybe preventable. That's a good thing, to be sure.
But it's really small potatoes compared to the undetectable wholesale fraud that the article outlines. If undetectable wholesale fraud is this easy and there's no audit trail behind the votes, it really doesn't matter if the people voting presented ID or not.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Maybe after October 29 we can borrow you guys our voting machines so that you can use them. I mean, those are not the same, are they? Heck, maybe we can even switch machines BEFORE October 29 and change our election result, becouse re-electing that idiot that Lula is really is something we CANNOT handle!
I'll be accepting resumes for all cabinet level positions immediately....federal judges, too.
...had nothing to do with electronic voting machines.
The Florica recount involved a butterfly ballot designed by a Democrat election commissioner, dimpled chads and a pivotal state election where the margin of victory was smaller than the margin of error.
Al Gore had already conceded defeat when Democrats decided that all they had to do was manufacture a few Democrat votes and invalidate a few Republican votes and they had the Presidency.
HOW GEORGE W. BUSH STOLE ELECTION 2000
"Al, this is David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, America's richest trial lawyers. I apologize for calling so late, but this won't wait."
"Look, I know you've already conceded, but I've been talking to some folks in Florida and they think they can find enough extra votes down there to give you the state in a recount."
"Just a recount in Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties, though."
"If it goes statewide our people will be spread too thin to keep things under control."
"Do you want to give it a try? At this point you've got nothing to lose."
"That's great, Al. I'll give 'em a call and we'll get this show on the road."
"Call Bush right away to let him know you've changed your mind."
"On second thought, call a press conference first."
"Talk to you later, Mr. President."
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
The news shows high profile breeches? Wow... I must be watching the wrong news. I thought people stopped wearing those ages ago.
~ Leilah
Yup. You missed the fact his online articles are free to access.
As if it wouldn't be patently obvious it was hacked if something suspicious happened.
Yeah, you're right. If that were to happen, it would come out in other ways, like exit polls would show the other guy winning.
Oh, wait...
Now if only Dukakis and his army helmet were running!
Here is the simplest way:
Hi, I am running for president. If I win, I promise to do one single thing. I will create and sign an executive order to split the gold in fort knox equally among the workers, friends and families of those those work at the companies that make the voting machines. Included in the order will be a clause that gives them complete immunity from ALL prosecution for any crimes they ever commit, and also they get first in line for heart/liver transplants, etc.
As they said, the damage HAS to be complete -- backups would just be found and restored, and the public faith in the broken machines would continue.
Seriously, CBS should have been kicked off the air for that stunt. Talk about wholesale voter fraud.
That's not obscurity, that's security through irrelevance.
Bite the hand.
Diebold makes ATMs too, but their division that makes voting machines was an acquisition of Global Election Systems. There's nothing in common.
If we only ran the vote machines on Linux we wouldn't have this problem.... P.S. Im sry I had to make a Linux comment here ... I just couldn't help myself
(Troll)
Right to privacy and anonymous ballots and all that are great, but if we're going to insist to use these highly hackable electronic voting machines, then it may be time to think about forgoing this whole annonymous ballot thing. The quick and easy solution: have a real person standing in the booth with you.
This guy will see thousands of votes during his shift. What is the likelihood that he is going to a) remember any of them, b) care about what you're voting on, c) do something if he does care?
Having an individual there who could call you out if you're trying to tamper with a machine could alleviate this problem. Knowing that this offers some minor amount of remedy, how do we feel about this?
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
it should later be tallied and compared with the computer record to ensure that they are consistent
What do you do if they are not?
Whenever you consider ethics, you can never take any event out of its context. Take murder, for example. Obviously sticking a knife in someone and letting their life's blood flow all over the pavement is an unethical (perhaps even immoral, but that's another story), thing to do. However, if same said person is getting ready to bash someone's head in with a hammer, and that's the only effective method of stopping them, then we refer to it as self defense.
The same argument applies here. This has been a danger for a significant time. There is evidence that, not only is it likely that this kind of thing will happen, but it's likely that it already has happened. If the exit polls were as skewed as they were in the 2004 election for any other nation, the U.N. would have been calling for a default on the election process. Too many people are running on autopilot, accepting on faith that our government is capable of watching itself when all evidence points towards that viewpoint being dangerously flawed.
In essence, those who can see the problem have been backed into a corner by the rest of the population's willingness to take away their right to make their votes count. We have tried the nice approach, we have tried the angry approach. I fully believe that this is a rational and responsible step for escalating the issue, made necessary by the irresponsibility of our legislature and the apathy of the average voting age adult.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
You all keep worrying about the republicans stealing an election, but all the people I know with the skill to do it are democrats.
Riiight, because a 3rd party will never win an election.
That is, unless he has action figures....
Please mod parent up: he's right if there is a way for a voter to check their vote at home (including a self-made photo of the vote!), there can be vote buying.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Someone after voting yell out "I just hacked this machine!" Hell, enough people do this, and the election results will be suspect, even if nobody did anything. We wouldn't have a way of checking if you had hacked it, which is the scariest part. Un believeable
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Who's going to fall on that sword? And, why would they set themselves up for defeat?
/.ers would understand, but this would be the first time that many non-/.ers will even think about voting authentication systems - and the activity they'd witness is overtly criminal.
The suggestion involves committing at least one felony to expose potential fraud, which is neither ethical nor protected by 'whistle-blowing' laws. Actually, even people that qualify for whistle-blowing protection routinely suffer serious hardship anyway, so good luck finding any support after-the-fact here. Basically, exposing fraud so visibly is very risky business, even if done legally.
Also, the purpose of the suggestion is to teach others about a fragile/broken system. I can guarantee that the reaction will be completely different from what you'd expect. Do you expect the Avg(Joe) will think, "Thank that guy for showing us the light."? A lot of
For those directly affected: Do you think the politicians are going to appreciate these antics, or will they work hard at setting an example. For most of them, their day job is to vilify others and they practice a lot (especially in election-mode). Who would want to dig themselves into such a deep hole willingly?
Oh, and a lot of good your backup will do: who will trust that those aren't also tampered results?
All in all, it's really a no-win proposal for the perpetrator.
The most innocuous tampering would be to target a popular candidate running unopposed for a given office. But even that is crossing too many lines, since all the other votes will necessarily be affected.
BTW, nothing personal (honest). Sadly, I expect someone will try something like it (like the Anti-Santy worm) and the best I can do is to dissuade anyone that may have been inspired by your post (or similar ones) in this discussion.
This is not my sig.
If the republicans won every single vote in the country, then it would be clear that the election was rigged and they'd pretty much be forced to acknowledge that the system was flawed.
Now you're talking. Am I to assume you're a fellow alumnus? (Phys '90, here.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Using the internet and its almost unlimited capacity to copy data around, I'm designing a system that aims to be simple and trustable.
It's easy yet disturbing. We can obtain a secure system if we remove anonymity. Then it's almost simple, distribute around the vote database and allow anybody to check the results.
In that kind of context, verification is mostly a technicality and could rely on consensus.
To regain some bit of anonymity, there can be a system of reinscription on the electoral list using a pseudo. Simple too, and while the person/pseudo relationship is private, everything else remains public and verifiable.
There are three basic stones in such a system:
* P2P servers
* electoral list
* PGP signatures
Simple, basic, strong.
I'm trying to construct such a system using Ruby on Rails, here is my project: http://leparlement.org/
You can also come discuss security here: http://leparlement.org/security
It's a moderated forum *and* a mailing list. Please, come and test it!
Well, lets make an analogy. At one point, there was a major problem with kids abusing stimulants (it's still pretty bad). As long as people just sat around moralizing about it like assholes, nothing changed. Once it was pointed out that if you drop by the local health food store and ask for a "weight-loss aid", they'd hand you a bottle of pseudoephedrine, people actually got serious about making a change -- banning the sale of pure pseudoephedrine. And now that it has been pointed out that all you need is some red phosphorous, iodine, cold medication, and a few other things, and you can make crystal meth, legislation is on the way to regulate those things more strongly.
Sometimes, pointing out exactly how easy it is to commit some crime is what's needed to get authorities to start taking that crime seriously. Perhaps, when -- on election night -- thousands of dumb people get arrested trying to tamper with voting machines after reading this and the elections end up being completely botched and the nation on the verge of civil war over the results, the public will finally have the sense to resolve this issue.There were lots before OS-X, Not sure how easy it is to find info about them, since they were pre-internet, but they exist, passed mostly by floppies.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
1. Citizens as a whole can stop watching Survivor long enough to get involved in their local government.
2. Hell freezes.
3. Slashdot AC trolls are gathered up and given a one way paid vacation via CIA air to an undisclosed location.
That last one was just wishful thinking.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
What kind of HOWTO is this??!
;-)
Give 'em a break... they started off with a MythTV HOWTO.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
....but in a rather inept manner that gets the perpetrators caught with their hands in the cybercookie jar. It will take a major scandal, on the order of Watergate -- one in which a number of people are caught and charged with defrauding the vote and linked with high GOP administration officials -- to wake up the American cattle to the subversion of democracy that is taking place right under their noses. Theory (like this article) means diddly-squat to folks -- a few odd anomalies in a few isolated precincts isn't going to impress anyone -- statistical analyses might as well be written in Swahili or Klingon given the mathematical illiteracy of most Americans. No, ironically, most folks will not believe the vote can be hacked and stolen until the vote IS hacked and stolen -- but in a big way that can be proven in a court of law and not just theorized in a web article. Given the poll numbers, I think it will take a lot of major screwing around in a lot of places for the GOP to be assured of retaining Congress. And the more hacking that has to be done, the greater the liklihood that someone, somewhere will either screw-up big time or get caught by someone who blows the whistle.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Have you ever hear of Occam's Razor? It's a very useful tool.
Exit polls are not a good means of tracking election outcomes, for a number of easily understood reasons:
- They suffer from bad sampling, because the voters can opt out, and only those willing to participate do so
- The pollers themselves have a bias, which may be expressed in any number of ways they may not be able to control
- Exit polls influence turnout in unpredictable ways
- There are time-of-day differences among voting blocs
- Exit polls by their nature lack the stringent controls that the voting booths have
But the main reason exit polls are useless at best is that in an uncorrupt system they are unneeded, while in a corrupt system they will be ignored. As there is no way to tell the two apart, and no logical room between them, exit polls fail to be anything but a waste of time.Our elections are not rigged.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Pick the easy targets first. Stallman knows Ballmer is just going to shout and throw chairs at him. ESR, on the other hand, would shoot back.
Eisenhower called it.
OTOH, socialism, more specifically market socialism will bring about a more equitable distribution of property and income, thus benefitting those in society w/limited financial means. Actually was applied (limitedly) in Yugoslavia under Tito.
There is another issue though, which is how emotionally connected people feel to the victims.
Due to a lot of reasons, which we can blame on media coverage, as well as cultural differences and perhaps even plain-old entrenched racism, there's not a whole lot of demand in America to intervene in Darfur. Yeah, people think it's bad, but it's not "send in the Marines" bad. When push comes to shove, and people are asked whether it would be worth spending a lot of money, resources, and potentially American lives to stop it, they say 'no.'
You can see this pattern repeat over and over. Darfur is just its latest incarnation. We let it happen in Rwanda in the early 1990s, too, and afterwards there was a lot of "never again" chatter, but it was just that -- chatter. Now it's happening again, and the public will to intervene isn't there.
I've just been watching the behavior of the U.S. electorate for a while, and there are forces at work that we just don't like to talk about in polite society. We prefer to think that we're above anything as crass as holding a white Christian child's life above that of a black Muslim's. However, regardless of what we say to each other, looking only at foreign-policy decisions, it's pretty clear that American interventionism follows a sort of "cultural closeness," in addition to the predictable realpolitik and Machievellian geopolitical advantage-building.
The closer a would-be exterminee population is to a theoretical "middle American" ideal, the greater chance it has of getting an intervention or support on its behalf. In some cases, such intervention is given even when it is arguably not in the United States' direct strategic interest -- I would argue that a great part of our continuing support of Israel is based on the fact that Americans in general feel a much greater kinship with Israel as an idea, their form of government, and the Israeli people than they do with any of the Arab countries in the region.
The American public has little tolerance for slaughter when it is a population that looks like themselves, but finds it remarkably easy to ignore when it is of people of a different skin color, language, culture, and religion. The fact that it is perceived as a hopeless, never-ending, tribal conflict also adds to both the sense of foreignness and the disinterest in involving ourselves.
If the killing in Darfur was happening in Sydney or Tel Aviv, regardless of the state of the U.S. military due to Iraq or anything else, we would respond. But when it's in Africa, happening to Africans, we let it go.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Japan is currently in the forefront of developed countries with declining population and a huge economic and social problem providing a safety net for its seniors. There are only three solutions, cut benefits to seniors and threaten their quality of life or survival, jack up taxes and bleed the young ever more which hammers economic growth or try to engineer the production of more children through things like tax incentives.
One town in Italy took that third choice. The town started taxing young adults who were single to convince them to marry. I don't know how many but it actually covinced some to move away.
In a massively overpopulated planet it would be extremely desirable if we actually did have a big population contraction. Unfortunately population IS contracting among the affluent and well educated and still exploding in the 3rd world among the poor and uneducated which is bad.
That's part of the "cure", increase education and equality which increases affluence. China and India, the two most populus countries in the world, had high population growth, but now that their economy has dramatically improved their birth rates are dropping. The new affluent don't feel the need to have children to either feel fulfilled or to take care of them when the get old. Though I'm not sure I even heard marriage rates are dropping in both.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Once all those electronic voting machines are in place, our fifth columnTechnocrats will swing into action and rise to power...
Muhahahahah
When the Governor of California isn't allowed to vote because of a voting machine cockup where 'test data' was still in the system and no one thinks, "Hey, what other bogus data is in there?" I pretty much give up hope...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
It's amazing how technology can be blamed for shifting votes in one direction or another. Wouldn't it be easier to shift the vote by using mis-informed ad campaigns and fake allegations against your opponents? Oh wait... they already use that. I'll wait for Bush to send in his super secret ninja task force of l33t hackers to shift the vote for another term.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
More likely, if Gore had won, Saddam would still be in control of Iraq, but we'd have captured Osama. There wouldn't have been a "War on Terror", but rather a "War on the Taliban/al Qaeda". Perhaps I'm giving Gore too much credit, but this much I'm sure of: it wouldn't be any worse than it is now.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The computers are general-purpose and run an off-the-shelf OS. If they are "generic PC workstations", they are x86. They have working network cards installed. They apparently connect to the Internet. This is the weakest link in the security chain.
1. They run a generic OS and they are connected to the Internet. 100% gaurantee that a virus can be written and will break into them. Release it en-masse.
2. The virus inserts itself into the system and hides by manipulating the system API. Authentication is useless because the virus controls the OS that starts and runs the authentication program. On E.D., it pulls down a vote-rigging program. At close-time, it writes incorrect but self-consistent data to all ports. Game over.
And voters absolutely cannot be allowed to take a proof of how they voted with them or vote-buying is opened up.
You are correct in that elections have always been manipulable. The only problem with voting via computer is that the entire function of a computer is to quickly and efficiently manipulate bits, and this can't be solved or it isn't a computer anymore. Plan B: Bribe an operator at the central vote aggregator.
And unfortunately, some states (*coughFloridacough*) are rendering a paper trail useless. It's perfectly logical, after all: After a big public FUBAR, the solution is not to address the cause of the disease but ban the recount to hide the symptoms.
Here's an idea: Why not modify the software in a common cash/bank ATM, and place it on a secure network to be a voting booth? Not an ATM currently in use, obviously.
Several of these could even dial into a secure center for processing, just like the ATMs we all frequently conduct banking transactions from daily. For the paper-trail that some people are asking for, the ATM is already designed to print receipts... not a large leap there.
I am making an assumption here, but isn't a large percentage of the voting population already familiar with these machines? And don't we all trust these machines to accurately handle our financial transactions?
I am not an ATM programmer, but I wouldn't think that it would take much to reprogram an ATM for this task... a new option set for the menus, right?
Ramen
Marriage is the very cornerstone of American civilization, and to allow same sex marriages would fundamentally damage the institution of marriage, and by extension fundamentally damage American civilization. By that reasoning, it must take priority over any external issue.
No it ain't, marriage is not the cornerstone of American Civilization, however "american" is defined. If it's means the USA then the cornerstone is Liberty, and liberty demands anyone who wants to to be allowed to marry as long as they aren't harming another. And if they are then they are charged with the harm and get to face their accuser. Nor does it damage the institution of marriage. Througout history different civilizations and societies have had homosexual marriages. Greeks, er Athenians, had it. It was excepted in Asia. And some American Indian tribes excepted homosexual relations. It was only after Christian missionaries showed up and Indian children were forcibly taken from parents and put into missionary boarding schools when homosexuality became frowned upon.
Oh, and I keep hearing how allowing homosexuals to marry will damage marriage. I have asked before and I again ask, how does allowing homosexuals to marry each other male/male or female/female damage or hurt marriage? Will anyone answer this for me?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Is there a site anywhere that has a database of which voting machines different counties use? How do I find out if my county is using a bad one before the election? If all I see are security warnings for Machine X or Machine Y every week or so, how do I know what to pay attention to?
In other words, I and others like me who aren't security experts are completely overwhelmed by this whole voting machine thing, and need some sort of clear-cut breakdown. Which machines are good and which are bad? Am I affected by the bad ones? Help!
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Diebold is somewhere between criminally negligent and treasonous.
Ditto for anyone who has signed off on Accuvote orders since '04
You did mention the "liberal" media, so you touched on it, but really, when 3 channels are quoting each other with created facts by obvious pundits who are clearly party members.....
When I hear or read of the liberal media I ask what liberal media. But nobody bothers to reply. ABC? Disney owns ABC. CBS? It used to be owned by Viacom but after the split it's owned by CBS Corporation. And National Amusements is the majority owner of CBS Corp. NBC? NBC is owned by GE. Fox is owned by Murdock's News Corp. Are Disney, National Amusements, News Corp, and GE liberal? Well there's PBS but as it's government it's controlled by government wich is currently run by Bush. There are others but these are the major media organizations that broadcast over the airwaves.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I wonder if anyone would notice or complain if Cowboy Neal suddenly won all the political races... Just a thought.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
CowboyNeal for president! CmdrTaco for VP!
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
The real question is where do we go from here? If you know that American elections are suspect, what do you do next?
The best answer I've got at the moment is to hope that the vote rigging machinery is not that perfect, and that it can only steal a relatively close election. Then there's at least a chance that we can vote the current bastards out, and try to fix the problems working "within the system" as it were. On the congressional level, we can push for the Paper Ballot Act of 2006, and on the state level we can try to elect people to the "Secretary of State" office who will push for sane proceedures.
Note: if you live in California, you've got to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State. History lesson: Democrat was Sos, he disallowed Diebold; Democrat chased out of office, Republican appointee then allows Diebold; now we have a Democratic candidate running for SoS, and strangely enough she understands the importances of paper trails for election integrity.
In 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead, and projected him as the winner!
Well, what do you think it would do to American politics and the respectability of the American president if the terrorists could cause the election to go to a Libertarian? First off, it would show the election to be a sham, secondly, if we honored the results, the Libertarian would probably leave them the hell alone, stop supporting the despots we love to hate, etc
Hey any terrorists who rig an election so libertarians win need to be supported.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Correct. So could we actually talk about it, instead of going off into odd digressions about whether it's okay to reveal the tricks the bad guys know already?
Yeah, that's how they won the last two presidential elections. Oh, wait.
Strangely enough, in 2004, everyone was overjoyed at the way exit polls were used to expose a corrupt election in the Ukraine. And in the same year, everyone ignored that the pattern of exit-poll discrepancies in Bush's rather dirty win. Pretty amazing. One might even say "Orwellian".
Speaking of dirt: have you seen any of the video of the the 2004 elections in Ohio? Democratic districts were shorted on voting machines so badly that people were lined up down the hall, up the stairs out the door and around the block, in the middle of a cold, rainey night. I've never seen or heard of anything like that in the United States before. Truly amazing.
Post election polls in 2004 showed that the people who actually voted for Bush were remarkably ignorant about his actual positions -- e.g. they figure he must be in favor of the Kyoto agreement, because it only makes sense that he'd be trying to work on the global warming problem.
We're not the only ones: This Time, It's Not the Economy
Ha, ha, ha. It's the liberal media again. Heh. Heh.
Hm, well maybe war really is good for the economy. Let's see, casualties this month are pushing 100, for how long can we continue to ritually sacrifice 100 servicemen every month? Maybe we should bring back the draft.
Ah, you mean the way they hit the ceiling to maintain the oil companies record profits, and then dive back down just in time for the election?
If the election officials were to require every, lets say, 10th voter to use an absentee ballot to record their vote. Now since the electronic machines without paper ballots cannot really be re-counted, the absentee ballots could be used to asses the validity of the election, providing an inexpensive method to at least try and provide some way to verify the results.
What do ya think?
You always point your finger at the bad guy, but what if the bad guy points his finger at you?
Of course the elections are going to be hacked/rigged, that is the only explanation that there can be for such a non-redundant and holy system. You can not tell me that all the engineers at these companies can not come up with a better way to do the electronic voting. All they need to make it secure is a checks and balance system with a PAPER record.
My idea, machines loaded up with a read only version of the voting software, and generate a checksum. Print the check sum on all the voter cards. Voter inserts card into machine, machine verifies checksum. If checksum dose not match alarm goes off or something. If checksum matches then user is allowed to vote. They mark there choices, get a chance to review there options then submits there vote. Computer prints out users vote on to the paper card. Once card is printed then the vote is electronically stored. End of the night the votes and activity/security log is burned onto some read only media then taken to be electronically counted. At the same time the paper ballets are also counted as a check. This way you have the speed of the electronic voting plus the paper audit trail of the paper ballets.
As for the over all software, open source v. closed source each pose there own sets of risks and rewards. My though is closed source, only so people can not get information on it; however, it should be reviled by a team of security experts who are both republican, democrat and maybe even some of those other parties as well. Having a bipartisan team of experts review the code should make things more secure and less likely to be influenced by out side politics.
While no voting system is perfect, there are things you can do to make it safer. I am sure my way is far from perfect but, I do think it is better than what is out there currently. And the only conclusion that I can come up with to why these systems were designed with no checks and balances is because they were designed to be able to be rigged.
I wish I had mod points. ;)
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Reread what I said. I never claimed, nor implied, that Osama was friends with the Iranians. All I said is exactly what you said - they're both "enemies" of the US. So if Osama benefits from having Bush in power, so might Iran. In no way does that imply those two enemies of ours are friends to each other. It does not even imply deliberate cooperation.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Shoot everyone involved in the fraud in the kneecaps and have the voters vote again.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...