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More Voting Shenanigans in Florida
stewwy writes "It looks like the the shenanigans have started already, the Register is running a story about the difficulty early voters are having with casting votes for Democrats." From the article: "The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist."
Our evil plan is working perfectly.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
I don't want to sound like a Mel-Gibson-style conspiracy nut, but it's hard not to reach for the tinfoil when you read anecdotal reports like this. It would take such a small shift of votes to change an election ... I dunno, can the party in power resist that temptation? Given that they can't resist any other temptations?
I couldn't vote Democrat either much less Republican. They are both virtually the same. Besides I was poor, I worked very hard to get where I am without big government help, so now why would I want to be taxed out the ass to help a bunch of lazy people on social programs.
As someone who talks to teachers all day in software support, you'd be surprised how hard it is for people to simply click on the right button.
Plus, considering that it's Florida, User Error is a good bet.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Serious question for those familiar with the technology:
Is this similar to the electronic credit card signature systems that display my signature half an inch below where I put the stylus?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Shenanigans or not, these touch screen machines are worn from heavy use?
Excuse me, but I've been to some stores where I use touch sensitive screens for signing or just punching in my PIN, etc. What kind of shoddy materials were these made of? Or is it that Broward County voters are usually pounding their votes in with both fists?
"I did not pick Jeb, damn you machine!" whack pound smek
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.boomchicago.nl/en/news-and-images/video s/index.cfm?i=1121
Now what if it was rigged by those who are against eletronic voting.... Or someone who had access to it wanting to push the "only the EVIL Republicans would rig stuff to steal an election" route....
Why would they be hacking these ballot machines? If they are smart enough to hack ballot machines, they would be smart enough to get a well paying job that allows them post in slashdot all day in a working day using his employer's machine ;-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hanging chads will be electronic.. save paper
Two wrongs don't make a right - but two do's make a dodo
Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen.
I haven't used the new touch screen voting machines, but if you went Democrat "across the board", isn't that a single check box? I seem to remember paper ballots just having one box to strike if you wanted to vote a single party for the entire ballot. How would so called screen calibration errors randomly select republicans then?
.....Third Party Verification
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Or does the difference matter?
If one "follows the money" it's pretty obvious that Deibold has an incentive to make republicans win, but aren't most of these problems just awful engineering? Crappy programming, bad design, lazy execution.
Still inexcusable, but I just wonder if Deibold et al just suck, and aren't malicious.
Matt
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Can anyone point me to an article that has the reverse happening? That is to say, someone tries to vote Republican and the machines flip them all to Democrat... I'm looking, but I can't seem to locate one. Can someone help?
I'm no statistician, but if the problems with electronic voting machines were simply crap software, and not intentional election rigging, wouldn't there be more evidence of errors in favor of Democratic candidates? Seeing everything always thrown to the GOP seems to be good signs of a conspiracy, factored with the CEOs of the voting machine companies promising to deliver votes to the GOP or getting elected by their machines.
Maybe the machines know that nobody would vote against Christ.
Oh, it's Crist? Hmm... well, it's still 84% of our savior.
is this not just a case of "if you look hard enough for something, you'll find it"? i'm sure, if they fancied it, they could find a suitable amount of republican supporters who also had similar problems and the article could be twisted that way. don't get me wrong, i'm all in favour of a bit of republican bashing, but i think it's best if we stick to the provable and not resort to Fox News style "some say...".
The article summary is misleading in ways that would give CNN a hardon.
/. hordes into a raging frenzy.
It says nothing about why the terminals were malfunctioning, which had everything to do with touch screen calibration (and the need to recalibrate from time to time) and nothing to do with some right-wing conspiracy. In fact, the article implies that it was one machine in particular, not all of them.
Way to spin it to work the
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Incidentally, Florida's Senate race this year is between Democratic incumbent Ben Nelson and Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris. Harris is of course the former Florida Secretary of State under the President's brother (Governor Jeb Bush), who knocked tens of thousands of African American names off the voter rolls in 2000.
Harris, who has been very vocal in her view that only Christians should be elected to higher office and that anybody who is not a Christian will "legislate sin", however is down by 25 points in the polls behind Nelson (according to an average of the last 5 polls in the race), and doesn't have a shot in hell of winning... Unless....
In 2008 Presidential Elections the machines will read
Please cast your ballot for
1. George W. Bush
2. George W. Bush
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
1. COUNT (they lose)
2. RECOUNT (they still lose)
3. RECOUNT EVERY SPOILED BALLOT AS DEMOCRAT (they still lose)
4. THROW OUT MILITARY BALLOTS (they still lose)
5. RECOUNT ONLY DEMOCRAT COUNTIES (they still lose)
6. SUE IN COURT (they still lose)
7. DECLARE ELECTION A FRAUD
At any stage where they don't lose, claim victory and declare the election over.
And then the Greens or Libertarians sweep it with 113% of the vote.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Having worked with a few touch-screens I have to admit that problems with the calibration are frequent, and often amplified if the user isn't that technically savvy. When the screen is a little out of synch it's usually easy to tell how (ie: registering a little low), but even when people can clearly see that what's registering is about an inch off of what they're pointing at, they still won't adjust their pointing.
On a side note: what, something built under a government contract having cheap parts? No wai!
...will we hear cries of "stolen" elections or will all the hullabaloo suddenly die down.
Unfortunately, from the sound of things, their role will only be involved in voter intimidation or access to polling places.
But wait, good news everybody! Wan Kim, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said that people shouldn't be concerned about electronic voting machines. Why? Because many groups have reviewed the machines, including the National Assocation of Secretaries of State.
"Regardless of what machine a voter votes on Election Day -- and there will be dozens and dozens of different type of machines across the country that are being used -- they have confidence that once the results of those elections are certified, you can bet on those results as being correct, because of the safeguards in place."
Hey Kim, why don't you send a few folks down to Florida to see what's going on then come back and say those words with a straight face. It doesn't matter if the votes are certified if the machines didn't record the proper votes in the first place.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Florida voters using electronic ballot machines are having persistent problems choosing Democrats in early elections, the Miami Herald reports."
:-)
I have trouble voting for Democrats too.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist.
Well, if that's true, then why aren't Republicans having trouble voting for Republican... oh... never mind.
--
I think I misunderstood the assignment.
Slashdot alone has run numerous stories that make it clear that U.S. elections are regularly stolen. We will never have a real presidental election again. Because of human nature, people are oblivous to this and will deny the problem until it is too late.
I don't have time to put up all the stories about election fraud now, but I'll give you my favorite: Gore's negative vote tally in one county. What are your favorite voter fraud stories?
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
I see this is gonna be another election that'll be decided by the courts (even moreso than the 2000 one)...
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
If you think Voting machines are hackable.
/see ya in gitmo
Try hacking one on election day.
Once they bar the door to Dan Rather, who is trying to get in to show everyone the touch-screen result archives from the 1972 election for comparison, the anchors will watch as the big map of the US goes all blue. They'll quickly get Howard Dean, all screaming with joy, on the video feed for his comments. Then someone looks up at the blue screen and asks "Guys, didn't we just convert this system to Windows?".
Where were you when the voynix came?
from what I hear hacking the machines doesn't really take much thinking. . . (unless you hack it to play chess http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/06/dutch-voting-ma chines-hacked-to-play-chess/)
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
The Register read an article at the Miami Herald saying people were having trouble voting. The Miami Herald reported the experience of some (one or two users) and some hearsay about poll workers saying it happens all the time. How about the journalist at the Miami Herald trying to get more information. Both Democrat and Republican reps are at every polling station. Election officials are known people. Other people are voting early. Put some meat on the story.
The U.S. government will make every attempt to maintain power in the upcoming election, and they are fully aware that these faulty voting machines are their ticket to remaining in office. If you really think you live in a free country, you need to join the fight against these black-box approaches.
These machines were actually refurberished from old ones used by Sheetz (Or some other gas station with make-your-own-sandwich consoles). They keep selecting bologna for you and end up giving everyone a big pickle...
Why would anyone steal the elections by miscalibrating the touchscreen? It shows, it produces news reports, it's messy. The elections can be stolen, it's been demonstrated pretty convincingly, without anyone registering anything. Oh, and this.
Message: Please cast your vote for
1. Hillary Clinton
2. Dick Cheney
3. Ralph Nader.
(Voter goes in, selects 'Hillary Clinton')
Message: Thank you for voting for Hillary Clinton
(Voter turns away - goes out of the booth)
Message: Sorry, I'm changing your vote to 'Dick Cheney'. That should be the right choice. Thank you for voting!
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
I've pretty much given up reading /. lately because it's no longer about news for nerds but a bunch of stupid partisan political crap. I thought I'd give it another chance and this is the first article in the list. It's sad to see another site go to major suckage over this childish junk. I guess another case of Internet entropy slowly reducing the volume of intelligence a site to nothing.
For some reason this reminds me of the movie Office Space. You know the part where he intended to hack the system to put all the little tiny sub-cent transactions into a savings account, but he fucked up and put the decimal point in the wrong place and suddenly they were transferrings hundreds of dollars instead of cents..?
This "changing the votes" thing is just too obvious to have been done on purpose. I bet there was a hack in place to change some of the votes, but someone fucked up and it starting changing WAY too many of the votes and it's become blarringly obvious that there's a something wrong...
at the Miami herald, without two layers of spam: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/editoria l/15889697.htm
I'm not American, and yes like a lot of people I'm not George W. fan, but of course once again the conspiracy theories are back in the full swing.
The funny thing is, I wonder how many times the machines have tried to vote the otherway? and of course this has gone unreported because it doesn't fit the bill of being 'good news' and is political scaremongering more than anything else
That I live in Florida, you insensitive clods.
Seriously though, these reports have been around locally for a couple of days. What I find interesting though, is that they invariably are from Democrats saying their votes were changed when they checked the summary prior to submitting. There's not one report of a Republican having the same problem that I've heard of yet. So should I take my tin foil hat with me to the polls this year, or not? I'm really, really hoping we're not going to be the laughing stock of the entire world again this year, but I have serious doubts. This used to be a great place to live.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
The same thing is happening in texas. News Report
The article (and summary) makes it sound like a huge conspiracy... until you read deeper and find that the touch screens are getting out of alignment.
I swear to God I'm going to pistol whip the next guy who says, "Shenanigans."
Hey Farva what's the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy shit on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
This is why George Bush and Carl Rove are confident that they will keep the House and Senate.
because it's not about jobs or money .. it's about ideology ..
.. ie. pay taxes is an money issue ..
although for republicans being selfish/greedy by nature and not wanting to share with their neighbor
VM: "You have selected: Democrat!"
You: "No, I didn't!!"
"I'm almost positive, you did!"
Aikon-
Shenanigans?
I'll be grabbin' my shillelagh, sure and begorrah!
*Dances a jig*
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I'm not sure if you were just kidding or not, but if this is actually the Republicans' doing, I'd debate whether you could call such a miserable job "smart enough to hack voting machines" :P
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
This is a conspiracy BY the Democrats. Think about it, any vote rigging this obvious would (and did) get caught, so it makes no sense that the Republicans would be this blatant. This is a perfect way for the Democrats to claim they've been defrauded and attempt to nullify any vote where they don't win. Follow the "money" - this is an attempt to discredit and/or question any Republican win by making it appear the vote is rigged against them.
Maybe the Diebold's keep bringing up Republicans but I'll bet that the Sequoia
electronic voting machines keep showing 'H. Chavez' for every
choice.
1. Redraw democratic districts at the last minute in districts where you're worst off so people won't know where to vote. Poor people don't watch as much TV or drive as much. This'll weed them out.
2. Promise favors to voting machine manufacturers to 'help' them program voting machines.
3. Count votes - notice you lost anyway, in spite of cheating.
4. Make up results so you win.
5. Accuse anyone who calls for a recount a sore loser.
6. If they persist, call them monkeys.
7. If they persist, call them cut-and-run cowards.
8. If they persist, call them liberals.
9. Get some teenage page to suck your dick, and declare the elections over, and that its time to 'move on'.
10. Goto 1.
Here is an article in a local Texas newspaper discussing the same thing happening in a small town in Texas. Texas, being mostly republican, might have been a 'test' case. Texan article
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Given how much that we still hear bitching about the validity JFK's election, it's likely that we will hear those cries loud and long.
Three words to stop stuff like this from happening
"Move to Canada"
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I still don't understand why there's a push to go to an electronic voting system. Why not use touch screen voting machines to print paper voting records. You can then verify your vote and you have a physical document for recounts. No fucking chads, no conspiracy theories, handicap friendly, and it encourages the voter to double-check their entries. It's an effort to go from the horse drawn carraige to teleportation. Let's not try to make the quantum leap and stick with a god damn car.
Assume that these, and other machines, are being deliberately hacked to give one party or another the victory.
Presumably someone will eventually spill the beans and say what has been done, by whom and for how much money. What will American voters, judiciary and legislature do then?
it's all lies I tell ya, all lies put about by left-wing liberal, pro al-Qa'ida communists ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
Hey, you know, a few PCs crashed today too. Must be a new virus out there trying to bring every PC down! Oh, the humanity!
.23 pounds of apples that I never bought! It must be the farmers! They're trying to rip me off!
The last time I bought apples at the grocery store the scale was off and I got charged for
A single machine that was miscalibrated is not a news item let alone a conspiracy.
The headline on the Miami Herald piece? Only minor glitches reported in early voting
Read the full article. You have one woman in Florida who had a problem (or made a mistake), realized the problem, and had it corrected. This is HARDLY voting "shenannigans."
Excerpting from the article:
You want to ensure that your hack shows the voter that he/she voted wrong to "validate" the results...
Sure this has its problems but on the BRIGHT SIDE... How many people voted wrong with the punched cards, didn't check their work and NEVER REALIZED they voted for Pat Buchanan?
A technical explanation of the problem is given. The article is slanted almost vertically, you could just as easily find a voing machine with the screen mis-aligned in the other direction that favors democrats and write a seething insane conspiracy story about "the underdog that is so desperate to regain control that...."
If you wanted to cheat why not just tamper with the voting machine to register false votes that are not verified by the user? Or do what both sides have been doing for decades, just have dead people vote.
Smart enough to hack voting machines, but stupid enough to have it show on the voting summary screen. I don't think so.
I don't think that the Canaliens want us either...
"But this one goes to 11!"
woooof!
I for one welcome this advance in voting technology.
Our constituents have complained about feeling compelled to vote for Democrats as a matter of intellectual honesty - even conscience. In recent elections some have even reported unwittingly voting for Democrats. We must not allow our system of government to be subverted by the will of the ignorant masses.
The introduction of self-correcting voting machines will see to it that this doesn't happen again. Voters who mistakenly vote for Democrats will have their vote automatically changed to a vote for the correct candidate: the Republican.
This advancement will usher in a new age of democracy. Scientists tell me that in the future we may even be able to limit the need to involve voters: we'll just have the machines vote for the correct candidate in the first place!
Touch screens are used routinely in computer assisted surgery, control of fluoroscopy systems and any number of other mission-critical applications.
Only an application developed with an absolutely staggering degree of incompetence and ignorance of basic touchscreen design constraints would be subject to anything like the issues described here. This is particularly true given that, unlike the medical applications of touchscreens, virtually 100% of the screen real estate in e-voting applications is available for BUTTONS. A 1 cm apparent shift on a touchscreen is a HUGE miscalibration, and any resonable e-voting design should have buttons that are on the order of 10 cm on a side to accomodate the full range of voter motor control and perceptual limitations.
Far worse than the gross incompetence of the second raters who designed these machines, is the complacency so clearly evident in the responses seen here.
Basically people are saying, "Yeah, touchscreens are lousy technology and we have to expect this kind of problem with them and that's ok."
Why, exactly is that ok? Because voting doesn't matter? Is it just some kind of bizzare ritual to you people, passively engaged in, like voting in the old Soviet Union?
Even if this is just an example of criminally poor software design, all that it proves is that no jurisdiction should ever use electronic voting because it is demonstrably impossible for the losers who are implementing it to get even the most rudimentary aspects of user interface design adequately robust.
And the American people should be up in arms, perhaps literally, rather than making excuses for the liars and cheats who are leading them into oblivion.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I saw a pre-release version of this documentary not long ago: Stealing America: Vote by Vote that talks about large numbers of reports of this vote-switching behavior from the 2004 election. All of the complaints were about Democrat votes being switched to Republican, none went the other way.
And speaking of documentaries there's another one making the rounds of HBO right now: Hacking Democracy.
http://www.kfdm.com/engine.pl?station=kfdm&id=1734 3&template=breakout_dayportvideo.shtml&dateformat= %25M+%25e,%25Y
This story is from Texas and reports the same thing.
Seriously, let them steal it. Here's a metaphor. If you steal enough from a store the store shuts down and there's nothing left to steal. If they keep stealing elections the democracy will shut down. Then we can put the filthy bastards up against the wall.
Keep stealing and manipulating shit assholes. Eventually the levels of discontent that you are generating will be unstoppable and small pockets of violence and rebellion will break out all across the nation. Police will stop taking orders, military units will stop taking orders, the stolen government will have no support, revolutionaries will free prisoners just to overtax your system. It'll be like the unwinnable war on drugs but far, far worse. IN that scenario your only hope will be to find SOME governing group (similar to Sinn Fein, or the PLO) and beg them for mercy. Don't count on their promises because the memories of the oppressed are long and harsh. It might become a long and bloody experience to re-establish democracy in America, and the blood of the thieves who are committing the crimes will be the currency we use to pay for the renovation. It's gonna look like Latin America up in here before it's over.
So keep your powder dry people. Those of you who oppose the tyranny that is descending over our great nation must learn how to handle and maintain weapons, must learn how to build weapons. And you must strike when the iron is HOT, when the military is exhausted and the government is unpopular.
And now, a quick song
---sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's Hard Travelling
Diebold's stealing elections, I thought you knowed.
Diebold's stealing elections on machines with unknown code.
We dont need no double dealing, electronic vote stealing.
Diebold's stealing elections, Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, the right that makes us free.
Diebold's stealing our votes, oh cant you see.
How can they say I'm free if their machines can choose for me?
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, I thoought you knowed.
They've been shredding the paper trail at the end of the road.
It doesn't matter who you choose, when you're sure you're gonna lose.
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper I thought you knowed.
I'm gonna see it counted at the end of the road.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper so I know that there's a record.
And I'm gonna go vote my conscience Lord.
We've been having some hard voting I thought you knowed
In California, in Florida, and in O-hi-o
Voting can sure be scary when the counting's done binary
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
The 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' has worked so well that maybe we need the French and the Canadians to invade the United States for an 'Operation American Freedom' to bring democracy to the United States and depose the evil dictator. Then there would be pictures of cheering Americans dancing in the streets and showing off their purple fingers dipped in the purple inkwells when they voted in an actual honest election.
original story via this journal entry
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Because, Mr. Colbert, sometimes voting machines have a conservative bias. :)
HOW TO MAKE SURE YOU WIN AN ELECTION EVEN IF YOU LOSE
It's easy enough, with the media and "tech" companies being in cahoots with the Left, to make the case that "the EVIL Dieboldbushalliburtoncheneysatan" war-machine is out to "take over" - but why is it that so many otherwise intelligent people fail to see when the wool is being pulled over their eyes? This is just more leftist FUD. I'm no Republican, but given that the alternative is a Democratic party that's been suborned by the anti-American far Left or ineffective and inconsistant 3rd-Party groups I don't know what choices are left for Independent voters who believe in a strong America... sad, really.
I'll be picking this book up on my next trip to the bookstore:
Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
From the Author:
I know this is just a silly mod-parent-up post, but parent is dead right. It would be cheaper, more reliable and more intuitive than touchscreens because touchscreens lack tactile feedback. It also means that you don't have your display screen getting smudged.
The tactile feedback thing is important. I operate ATMs much more quickly and confidently when the buttons have a nice keyboard-like "click" feeling to them. The ones with those cheap non-reliefed buttons that barely push in suck, and often make loud beeping noises to compensate for the poor tactile feedback. Touchscreens are the worst; during the delay before the action happens there's always a moment of unsureness.
You'd just have to make sure to build it right, of course. Definitely an LCD flat panel, and make sure it's not set back from the plane of the buttons, or else risk a butterfly-ballot style problem, where the user's position relative to the machine could affect the way the choices line up (that can be a problem with ATMs, both of the touchscreen and non-touchscreen variety, because they have cheap, tiny CRT screens that are set back from the buttons/touch sensors). And probably some other design considerations for legibility; I personally don't think it's too much to ask to have voters read a number next to a candidate's name and push the button corresponding with that number (numbers not directly on the buttons where they could wear off), but some people would probably complain. And you'd still have to test the machines for sticky, non-debounced or simply broken buttons. Nothing that an arcade manager couldn't handle.
http://www.kfdm.com/engine.pl?station=kfdm&id=1734 3&template=breakout_dayportvideo.shtml&dateformat= %25M+%25e,%25Y
This story is from Texas and reports the same thing.
Seriously, let them steal it. Here's a metaphor. If you steal enough from a store the store shuts down and there's nothing left to steal. If they keep stealing elections the democracy will shut down. Then we can put the filthy bastards up against the wall.
Keep stealing and manipulating shit assholes. Eventually the levels of discontent that you are generating will be unstoppable and small pockets of violence and rebellion will break out all across the nation. Police will stop taking orders, military units will stop taking orders, the stolen government will have no support, revolutionaries will free prisoners just to overtax your system. It'll be like the unwinnable war on drugs but far, far worse. IN that scenario your only hope will be to find SOME governing group (similar to Sinn Fein, or the PLO) and beg them for mercy. Don't count on their promises because the memories of the oppressed are long and harsh. It might become a long and bloody experience to re-establish democracy in America, and the blood of the thieves who are committing the crimes will be the currency we use to pay for the renovation. It's gonna look like Latin America up in here before it's over.
So keep your powder dry people. Those of you who oppose the tyranny that is descending over our great nation must learn how to handle and maintain weapons, must learn how to build weapons. And you must strike when the iron is HOT, when the military is exhausted and the government is unpopular.
And now, a quick song
---sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's Hard Travelling
Diebold's stealing elections, I thought you knowed.
Diebold's stealing elections on machines with unknown code.
We dont need no double dealing, electronic vote stealing.
Diebold's stealing elections, Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, the right that makes us free.
Diebold's stealing our votes, oh cant you see.
How can they say I'm free if their machines can choose for me?
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, I thoought you knowed.
They've been shredding the paper trail at the end of the road.
It doesn't matter who you choose, when you're sure you're gonna lose.
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper I thought you knowed.
I'm gonna see it counted at the end of the road.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper so I know that there's a record.
And I'm gonna go vote my conscience Lord.
We've been having some hard voting I thought you knowed
In California, in Florida, and in O-hi-o
Voting can sure be scary when the counting's done binary
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
"Having worked with a few touch-screens I have to admit that problems with the calibration are frequent", eserteric
It's always nice to have an expert opinion but according to the article the machine kept listing Republicans only, making it difficult to delect a democrat. How does going out if sync influence the summary of candidates. I too have used touchscreens for over two years and *never* seen de-syncing.
"Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen."
"often amplified if the user isn't that technically savvy.", eserteric
"One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis"
was Re:Not *too* shocking
davecb5620@gmail.com
Charlie Crist is a big gay. Gay gay gay gay.
And, The Register mentions an article in the Miami Herald that it doesn't reference at all. The Register has stories that are about as bad quality as the articles on Slashd... oh wait.
Great article.
No one was talking about the JFK election until the Republicans felt the need to blow some smoke about the RFK articles in Rolling Stone. "The Democrats do it too!" is one of their talking points... or it was before it became clear how lame that sounds.
The only way I see to make voting fair and accurate is to be able to access, or "view" your vote as it was counted during and post election. With just one simple requirement per vote: a living, registered voter.
Sure, say someone hacks the DB. So what? People go back and check how their vote was counted, tabulate the results on their own home PC if they wanted (heck we can recount so fast your head will spin), and if it's different... well then you've got a problem. Deal with it. At this point it'd probably pay to have good logs and receipts. Nothing impossible.
Heck, with all the money being spent on voting machines, why not spend it on bringing the internet to everyone, buying computers for libraries and generally Making the World a Better Place(tm)? Inevitably some Republicans (and Dell) will get rich, but on the whole it's probably worth the price for true democracy. What gives?
The article in no way implies that only one machine was problematic. Machines at different locations (e.g. "African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale" and "Lemon City Library in Miami") and on different days exhibited problems.
Moreover, none of these calibration problems seem to have favored Republican candidates. Considering the small sample size, it's certainly possible that this is random, but I don't blame people for being suspicious.
So, "hardons" notwithstanding, there are definitely problems. Even if there is, indeed, no "right-wing conspiracy" involved, it's a serious issue that people are having so much trouble voting for the correct candidates. If these problems occur merely between steps during on-screen voting, imagine how many other problem must also be occurring at these and other locations between on-screen voting and actual vote tallying, especially when there is no voter-verified paper trail!
I'm a big fan of the Internets; like the President and most of you, I use the Google, shop online, etc. However, this certainly doesn't encourage me to support electronic voting.
I think the real solution to this mess is to nationalize the voting system. In the US every state and even every county has its own voting system, with different machines, voting dates, ballot fonts, software, etc. Either a large number of these areas need to voluntarily work together to get some large-scale, robust voting protocols (electronic or not), control of setting election protocols should be shifted to the national government, or the national government needs to step in and a) set some standards, and b) pony up some money to help finance the establishment of solid voting protocols that can be used nationwide.
I knew it! Damn Canadians are just too peaceful to be human!
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
This is a conspiracy BY the Republics. Think about it, by rigging the vote this obviously they know it would (and did) get caught, so it makes sense that the Republics would be this blatant. This is a perfect way for the Republics to make it appear that the Democrats are just claiming they've been defrauded and to make it appear they're just attempting to nullify any vote where they don't win. Follow the "money" - this is an attempt to discredit and/or question any Democrat win by making it appear they attempted to rig the vote against themselves.
Not have networked voting machines, have them with integrated printers that spit out a scan friendly sheet, and then the user can review the printout, and feed it to the scannning vote counting machine (that people already are stuck trusting).
Or, alternatively, stop wasting tax money on voting machines instead of sharpies.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I heard a news report (on NPR - so take it with a dose of healthy skepticism if you wish) that in 2004 and in this years primaries, in states with Diebold electronic voting machines there was not a single report of votes intended for Republicans being recorded for Democrats. The researcher being interviewed stated that if it was a programming glitch or mistake, it should have been random and affect both parties equally...
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
"You seem to have never used a touch screen in your life. Allow me to explain: They are always poorly calibrated peices of shit due to the seperation between the display and the sensors"
Like how, it's all electronic. At first boot you perform a calibration. After that it stays that way. I have *never* seen the de-syncing problem. How does the de-syncing problem alter the order of the candidates.
was Re:Where is my tinfoil hat?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Nice retort, but if your theory is true why do we ever only hear of votes being shifted from D to R, not the other way around?
While I agree that people have a hard time knowing what to push I wouldn't blame the screens. If someone can't cobble together a reliable touch interface that doesn't need to be calibrated in the field, for a system will run only one application, they are either incompetent or purposely screwing up. The latter would be my guess.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
That the machines are just poorly-thought-out, poorly-engineered, poorly-constructed, poorly-maintained piles of shit, seems far more likely than such an obvious conspiracy.
I suspect that people cutting corners and generally being lazy or careless results in the deaths of more people every year than intentional, thoughtful acts of evil do. Probably a lot more.
There is a finite amount of evil in the world, but an infinite amount of stupidity.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
To stick to the damn paper, sharpies, and scanning machines we use in our region today.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
He actually RTFA.
(Part of the following assumes the position of the candidates is chosen by officials, rather than being prescribed by law. I don't know Florida's law on the subject - but some of the coverage of the "butterfly ballot" controversey seemed to indicate that ballot design is the choice of local election officials.)
If a misalignment of the touch sensor with the screen (which would systematically move the touch point in a particular direction) systematically transfers votes for Democrats to Republicans, and not the other way around, it means the ballot was constructed with the Democrats systematically above, or systematically below, the Republicans in balot position. Since moving the touchpoint up would tend to move it to a different, already voted, race, the implication is that they were moved down - which would mean the Ds are systematically above the Rs on the ballot.
That amounts to a systematic bias in the balot design.
Higher ballot position gives the candidate a preference. So such a ballot would be biased toward Democrats when the machines are operating correctly.
So perhaps THAT should be investigated.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Repubwicans are coming! Theys going to eats my cat and send my grandma to Iraq!
Ah, Slashdot. My daily dose of Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt.
I think people are looking for a conspiracy in all this, particularly a Republican conspiracy. Therefore if an equal number of errors happen from Democrat to Republican as Republican to Democrat, the ones that would be reported are the ones that make it seem most like a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
That just makes for a better news story.
In the end it shouldn't really matter; if the machines aren't working, then they need to be replaced ASAP, whether they're causing erroneous votes for Reds or Blues or Greens or the Elmo For President party.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If the voting machine is only capable of sending traffic and blocks all in-bound connection attempts, the risk of compromise of the voting box drops. More worrying is the problems of sniffing the traffic leaving the voting machine and injecting extra packets into the stream (to boost or reduce certain vote counts). Such issues could be mitigated by a secure tunnel set up by the voting machine to its target server.
If a voting machine is shipped with a unique cryptographic signature hardwired into the system, then such a signature could be used to sign all voting returns. Done properly, it should be uncrackable in the time period from the election beginning to the close of polling.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Either you're confusing ATM's with bank drive-in teller windows, or every ATM location in the late 1940's had an ENIAC with 10,000 vacuum tubes sitting next to the ATM! Of course, they wouldn't have proved very popular since the user instructions would have had to be written in binary, and you would have had to input your withdrawal or deposit amount via toggle switches... CRTs and TTY terminals weren't interfaced to computers til much later. FYI - both the drive-in teller window and the ATM were conceived in Dallas, Texas.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
This happens constantly with the SkyTrain ticket machines here in Vancouver Canada - I press the "2 zone" button on the touch screen but it thinks I chose 3 zones because the touch screen is not properly in line with what's actually on the display...
/. article describing how unbelievably simple it would be for someone to "hack the vote" and manipulate poll results on electronic voting machines.
The fact that the US is using the same technology for an election really bothers me... It makes me feel embarassed for these people that they aren't able to realize pen & paper is the only reasonable way to properly do an election of such significance. Although, now that I think about it, I just feel angry because it seems much more likely that they know damn well how inaccurate the machines are, and are using it to their advantage.
This article comes just a few days after a
There's a very easy fix to all these Electronic Voting Machine situations. First, each machine should PRINT out a CLEARLY labeled receipt showing exactly who you voted for.
This would be dropped into a box on your way out. The machine would still keep an internal tally of votes to compare to the final vote count in that county. So why hasn't anyone thought of this yet?
how many others just blindly voted and didn't check the review screen??? probably just enough for this "manipulation" to tip the balance.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Is your terror cell living in terror? Is your safe-house not so safe? If so, read the New York Times, the jihad journal.
You probably won't find one, because without the conspiracy-theory angle, it's just not as good a story. Then it just becomes some boring discussion about touch-screen calibration; no mainstream press outlet is going to run that, and thus no journalist is going to write it.
The political climate right now basically guarantees a huge response to any story that involves Republicans stealing Democrats' votes. Thus, those are the stories that are going to get written.
Asking for election stories that don't get people riled up and angry, is like asking for news stories about a plane that didn't crash. It's a non-story, thus it never got written; but that doesn't mean it never happened. It's not a "liberal media" thing, it's just a "media" thing. TV news exists to make ratings, newspaper columns exist to sell papers, online articles exist to create page-views and sell ads. You could be a totally apolitical robot and you'd probably still write sensationalistic, bombastic, heavily biased news -- because that's what makes money.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Nice trick how you re-named your system to make it look like mine. And how you're running the same OS as mine. And you have the same userids as mine. Wow - this is just too much to be coincidence! You must have hacked into mine first! I'm calling the FBI! ;-)
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
From what I read in this article, several users encountered a miscalibrated touchscreen so that a press on the screen registered in the wrong place. Several voters only caught the error when reviewing their votes on the final page.
It sounds like a small, correctable problem, and pretty damn far from "sheannigans."
From the article:
No, nationalizing the voting system will only make things worse. If I don't feel my vote is being counted, it's easier for me to hold local officals accountable, than national ones.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The USA continues to exhibit itself as a Banana Republic when it comes to the simplest chore in any Real Democracy - the voting process! The USA Rederal elections in the past decade has exposed all of the warts of the USA downward spiral. People outside the USA just fall down; because, of laughing for so loud, and for so long:
A] The Elite/Republicans led by Rove and others, use every crooked trick in The Book to stop people from registering to vote. Makes the Mafia look like a kid's club
B] The Elite/Republicans led by Rove and others, use every crooked trick in the book to make sure that voters will have difficulties in voting for Democrat candidates when they vote or have their vote counted. Even worse, one would have expected during the Gore/Bush so-called presidential vote - that USA voters would have taken to the streets. But, Instead, nothing happened - no balls!
Canada as well as many other countries in Europe get everyone registered to vote and then everyone who wants to vote is easily able to cast their vote without all of the tricks used by the USA Elite/Republicans to steal elections. Will USA voters ever smarten up and take some action?
Such as this
Do you have ESP?
I live in Florida. I have yet to use these screens (my voting system are coloring in bubbles like I was in high school). I was here for the CHAD incident. I am not entirely convinced things are fair during the elections but it's quite possible that the issues are mostly with the older retirees down here and they are just freaked out because they don't know what the hell is going on with these machines. Technically uneducated people are naturally going to have issues when something new is introduced like Touch Screen voting, even if it does sound "fool proof"
I'll work with self-interest; at least self-interest is rational and predictable. Laziness coupled with stupidity is not.
I'd take self-interested amorality any day of the week, over arational stupidity. The self-interested person is easy to predict and work with; the idiot is just dangerous.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm Libertarian (see: likes taxes less than Republicans, though understands the fact that expenses have to be decreased accordingly), and I frequently give money to charities and the homeless. I would be willing to bet that republicans and deocrats give about equal amounts of money, on average, to charities. I know my republican family gives a very high percentage of their income to charities. It's not about not wanting to share. It's about me not wanting the government to decide where my money goes, largely because the government is very bad at that. I understand that some taxes are necessary to sustain services that no one other than the government can perform. That's all good and well. But if I want to give money to the poor, I'd much rather do it through an avenue that isn't run by incompetents who have a history of being incredibly wasteful, thanks.
Isn't it crazy when things don't fit into your convenient black and white views? Maybe that's a sign.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
A computer science professor from Maryland has researched the issue and has not found a single instance where a Democratic vote was recorded when a Republican was selected on screen. Random chance would say the error would swing both ways...
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Errors can be common on voting machines - they are, in fact, machines and therefore are prone to malfunction. It's rather irresponsible of the Miami Herald to only report on errors that favored Republicans over Democrats when the rate of failure for the opposite circumstance is likely the same.
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
...find it challenging to make an "X" on the signature line of the purchase contract for their IROC Camaros (with T top!). I wouldn't trust them to use a computer touchscreen.
Well okay, so maybe it's not "great" exactly...
Just a wild guess, but exactly what is total control of the US federal government, and some states governments worth? What is control of the executive branch or either house worth? In terms of access to cash, discretionary order giving power, etc, command of vast numbers of heavily armed folks who will do your bidding without much question,etc, etc I would say it is worth trillions of dollars and power simply unparalleled in history.
I call this evoting situation the largest incentive and easiest to get away with opportunity ever for a potential crime in the history of the planet, and when you combine the reality that any large scale investigations would have to be run by the same people who might have done the crime......and we have on going overlapping smoke signals that are showing that crimes sure might have been committed.. I call shenanigans then. Too many coincidences, too much evidence that this is way beyond accidental or slopping coding or just random chance due to normal business practices.
I like occams beard remover, it looks like a crime, the motive is huge, the opportunity is there, and the potential perps have a verified track record now of chronic serial lying over very important issues involving billions of dollars and actual huge numbers of human beings getting wasted.
This is not a "oops! little glitch" level situation any more.
If this was just joe schmo doing some little petty crime, with this amount of outstanding evidence, his butt would have been in jail a long time ago.
``One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist.''
Only terrorists vote against Christ, anyway.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Poster 1: But there's no evidence of tampering.
Poster 2: Exactly! If you were tampering, you wouldn't leave evidence! The lack of evidence is all the evidence I need!
If you want to believe that some massive right-wing conspiracy has all voting machines wired to somehow vote republican, be my guest, but even the most tinfoiled crazies must know how ridiculous that sounds. Is there voter fraud with voting machines? Yes. Was there more voter fraud back in the days of paper ballots hand delivered by men on horses (and hand counted by the people who weren't smart/skilled enough to have real jobs)? Of course.
If I wanted to read biased FUD all day long, I would watch network news, or the latest Michael Moore movie. Get real.
I do work as an IT guy for a franchise day care that uses cheap 14 inch touch screens to check kids in and out. These get used day in and out by harried teachers and parents. Neither one of them has needed recalibrating in over a year. I check them about once a month and they are dead on, this is running on a cheap dell running windows XP.
Voting in some VA districts is screwy too...
3 58.shtml
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1
"What is being called a "glitch" by Hart InterCivic spokespersons, three cities in Virginia -- Alexandria (poster's note: population 7,078,515 in 2000), Falls Church (pop. 10,377 in 2000) and Charlottesville (pop. 45,049 in 2000)-- will not properly display (Democrat) Jim Webb's name on the November ballot summary screen. Voters will only see 'James H. "Jim"' on the ballot, instead of 'James H. "Jim" Webb'.
To make matters worse, the candidates will have "their party affiliations . . . cut off" even after navigating through the summary screen nearly blind. To put some perspective and clarity to this, in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville, Virginia, voters will not be able to recognize Jim Webb by his full name OR by his party's affiliation!"
The link you cite for Don Wetzel as the inventor of the ATM, has in its first paragraph:
So it would seem that the parent poster is right: ATMs have been around since the 1940s. Of course, that doesn't mean they were in wide-spread use.
In Soviet Russia Republicans vote YOU.
Signature has left the building.
Agreed.
Far too many things in our Country are nationalized already. While it is nice to have a single standard for many things (Web standards, document standards, etc.) The importance of a single standard diminishes when placed in the political arena. It is far more important to be able to readily hold politicians accountable for irregularities. The last thing we need is another faceless beurocracy pulling strings from behind the scenes.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
FTFA:
Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen. He made repeated attempts until, finally, the machine registered his votes correctly, and he cast his ballot.
Allow me to trot out a Paul Kruman quote (from the yet-another article "The Smoke Machine", collected in The Great Unraveling): "In a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: That the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby."
No, no, not all. Just the DRE (direct recording electronic) machines pushed into use over the objections of anyone who understands them (e.g. some absurd percentage of the ACM... 90%?).You know, that "tinfoil" line has really jumped the shark. Almost as badly as the "jumped the shark" line.
One more time: the trouble with the electronic voting machines in use is that they allow wholesale fraud. Back in the good old days fraud was a much more labor-intensive business.
Don't forget HBO!Hacking Democracy
takes your digital / cell / whatever cameras with you when you vote. take pix of the machines flipping votes and post them. it will be hard to ignore millions of pix of screwed up votes. but with no exit polling, they are trying.
don't let this be another screwed up election!
-.no
Just as a FYI, On Oct 28th, Writing for a three-judge panel, District Judge James Wolf said Florida law allows poll workers to display informational notices, so long as they are impartial and do not favor a specific candidate. The unanimous ruling reversed an Oct. 18 decision barring the signs. However the court ruled that *All* Candidates must be listed on the signs to prevent any appearance of endorsement for a single candidate. The Democrat party said the ruling was reasonable and have not appealed. (Information from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
The question really is, do we want to be able to audit a voting total, or would we rather hope nothing went wrong with the electronic voting machines?
Cost benefit analysis:
Money saved with unauditable system, for each voter:
sheet of paper: $0.005
portion of printer to print vote receipt: $50 / 200 voters, $0.25
Unauditable voting systems to save $0.13 per voter?
Sounds like a bad bargain. I'd be willing to have a $0.13 tax increase to be more sure everyone's vote was properly tallied.
What's the point of all this political debate if in the end it come down to which party has more clever voting machine hackers?
There are a zillion touchscreen ATMs out there and I've never had a problem with one of them. The companies making these voting machines are either inept or corrupt and possibly both.
This isn't news, it's just sensationalist FUD that deserves to be ignored.
florida uncertainty and doubt?
why is this one so blase?
Ah, it's just an error in the counting of votes...
???
for people in Florida, hell they cant poke a hole in a piece of paper with a tool that is designed to poke that hole. what makes you think they can put their finger on the right spot on a touch screen.
--
Stupid people should not breed
Ignorant people should not vote
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
I'm sure we all remember the Diebold exposé back in September?
[sarcasm]So nice to see that Florida is so on-top of things.[/sarcasm]
Seems like all they do is say, "that's just the way it is." All the while, Jebbie is racking-up the GOP vote in a pathetic attempt to regain his brother's favor after debacles in both 2000 and 2004.
Let's take back our right to a fair election!
They can only take it away if we let them.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
It is just payback for all those years Democrats rigged elections in Chicago, New York, and Georgia.
I see no mention of a paper trail. Yet they claim there are no problems counting yet. Well they can't possibly know this if there isn't paper verified by each voter.
I don't care at all if a screen displays the name of the person I voted for. I want to see it printed on a piece of paper and then drop it into a lock box. Without any way to verify electronic votes it's a failure.
Developers: We can use your help.
Now how did I miss that? Simjian's was unsuccessful, but I'll admit it was first!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
From TFA
Apparently, this happens all the time. According to the Herald, "Broward County Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot - essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside.
I'm sorry, but WHAT? How exactly does the display "slip of out sync" with the electronics inside?
And why does the American public seem to accept this and not care that yet another election is being stolen?
Hello? Where's the outrage that your all-powerful system of freedom and democracy is being abused?
Dagnabbit! The votes was supposed to get changed AFTER the confirmation thingy. Shifty foreign programmers just had to go and screw this up, didn't they? Hey Hayden! What do we have that can link 9-11 to Outsourceistan? We'll show THEM how to be democratistic!
These machines suck. They need to be lampooned, and paraded as the farce they are.
Unless your such a geek that you think touch screens make voting cool. then,
may the Farce be With You!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
We are talking about calibrating touch screens. I have never used or even seen an ATM machine that had a touch screen. Next obvious question is: why do voting machines have touch screens?
I have used atm touch screens a few tymes and never had trouble using them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm going to pistol whip the next person who says 'shenanigans'.
I think that the problem with the signature screens is that the sensitive part is far from the display itself. So depending on where your head is when you look at it, you get a pronounced parallax effect. On most "regular" touchscreens, the distance is small so you don't get that effect in such a noticeable way.
For the signature screens, I would not be surprised that the increased distance is on purpose. Seeing how some screens are scratched, some people are real brutes with the stylus so the developers increased the distance to avoid breaking/scratching the display itself.
We use a piece of paper, a golf pencil, an 'X' and a whole whack of people (volunteers) doing the counting. Results are generally in before bedtime, and official in the morning. Sometimes we just over engineer the solution.
1. The elections haven't taken place yet. So how could this story be correct?
2. A search of the Miami Herald site -- the cited source -- does not turn up a similar story.
Am I missing something here?
Both myself and my grandmother are registered Republicans. Both of us get loads of mailings (and calls) from them. Both of us got sent the forms to request early ballots (two each, in fact...). While she's told them on the phone "I was born Republican, I'll die Republican, don't confuse me with the facts, I've mentioned that I have serious problems with a lot of the crap they've been pulling lately. Enough that I'd *shudder* vote for _Hillary_ if faced with the choice of her or Jeb (they'd both probably screw the country up, but I'd rather hear about Hillary getting a blow job or whatever than Jeb invading some random country). Anyhow, we both sent in the early ballot requests. I personally dropped both in the mail box.
Only grandma got hers, I never got one. Conspiracy? I don't know. But you can be damn sure that I'll still cast a provisional ballot after explaining myself to the poll workers, and you can be damn sure that it's unlikely to contain many votes for Republican party members. I can't prove they did anything wrong here, but frankly I still wouldn't vote for 'em if I knew for a fact they were innocent of any wrongdoing.
And I say that as someone who has never been anything but a registered Republican. Guess I'll have to get around to changing that designation to independent or something one of these days...
The as of yet unexplained discrepancies between exit polling and results in 2004 (BTW, the given explanation that exit polls are always wrong was addressed as being incorrect by a researcher for the Pew Charitable Trusts on NPR last week).
Wiki has a pretty good article on exit polls.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This article has no merit unless the author can either A) Prove that the devices have been tampered with or B) Link all poorly designed computer technology to political conspiracy.
But if the errors disproportionately benefit one political party, then that alone is evidence of malfeasance. If all the "random" numbers benefit my candidate, then the numbers aren't random.
One of these things involve technology/computers and one does not.
Guess which would probably make it on slashdot.
Way to misrepresent the UCLA/Stanford study. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it showed that reporters are more liberal than the average reader, but that editors and owners (you know, the guys who decide what goes in the media?) are decidedly more conservative than their readers. Actual media coverage of events shows a marked conservative bias because the people who control the media are rich and therefore far more likely to be conservative.
You complain about bias, but show an amazing amount of it yourself. You are one of those children you mention, in a single post both throwing spitwads (Dead people vote for Democrats!!11one!1) and tattling to the teachers (Reid's Real Estate!1one!1! Slashed GOP Tires!!eleventyone!!)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...will they still make these claims if Democrats WIN the elections?
It always seems if Republicans win then there's voter fraud, but if Democrats win it's a fair election. I guess if you can't win on ideads or smear tactics, blame the voting process. Honestly, what else is left?
What's worse is that this actually makes the Demo's chances worse for winning. If a lot of Democrats think the election is going to be stolen, it will keep them at home.
Hey, whatever works.
I work on large printers all the time (IBM 3900's and 4000's), many of them have touch screens. Often when you try to press a button on the screen the pointer will not land under your finger and it may even click the button above or below the selection (or off to one side even) that I am trying to make. It sounds to me that this is a similar problem the Vote Machines are having. When I am repairing the printers I have to run a calibration to fix this problem. It is quite easy... the screen shows 2 boxes (upper left and lower right corner of the screen) you have to touch the screen in each box for 5 seconds to recalibrate the screen video to the "touch" part of the screen. I think this is the same thing that the touch screens are doing in FL. I would not blame the Bush admin first... (if I hacked a vote machine I would show the voter that they voted for who they thought they did but update the database with the person I wanted to win some % of the time and not show them that they voted for the wrong person) So before everyone goes and puts their foil hats on and hide from the black helicopters why don't you use that stuff that holds your ears apart and think about it logically first... or you can freak out call the ACLU, the press and claim "They stole Florida again!!!!"
didn't you get the memo? The voting machines now get their say in elections too, lol. Looks like they picked Republican (cuz they sure aren't voting for the Green party!)
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
It seems awfully strange that two heavily Democratic counties like Broward and Miami Dade County would have voting problems since the election officials are all Democratic. Or did the evil Republicans hypnotize the local officials some how...
Ditto Palm Beach County - you have to remember that Palm Beach County Democrats designed the infamous butterfly ballot. But I guess hype is more important than fact.
Wish the touchscreen on my local ATM machine would 'go out of calibration' and spit out a few extra 20s.
you are talking like there is no fishy goings-on around.
Like the 2000 election was not fishy, leave aside that, like in the 2004 election there werent abundant haywire-going election machines with NO paper trails that were manufactured by the surprisingly republican supporter corporations (and tightly knit with the 'boys' in fact) widely used and even after that were tried to be made a standard all over u.s., and only havent been made so because so many suspicious vulnerabilities have popped up in their design.
Man. you fail to see one single point that have always been true way back in world history :
In politics there are no intended mistakes. If something a political entity produces or does (a plan, a deal, a law) is TOO fishy, then it is meant to be fishy. And in a situation like this election machine vulnerabilities, only the overly stupid people do phletora of mistakes in just only one topic - but overly stupid people cant get elected and hold office for that long in the first place. so it is certain that it was planned to be so, but the abundant talks that are being made in talk shows, media, expert circles about the vulnerabilities of voting machines were not.
A company can have a bad or flawed design without malicious intent.
No company squeezes that much amount of flaws into one single box without intent. And this is no local area small business type machine, it is a nationally serving machine, and in a very delicate matter too - deadly for a company's, yet leave aside that, programmers' reputation. however, curiously, there are innumerable flaws in ELECTION machines that are produced in u.s.
if there isnt something fishy here, i am a bunch of bananas on a banana tree.
Read radical news here
There aren't many around, probably due to issues just like this. I do know that Bank of America uses them in some locations in New Jersey.
A personal experience: I was using a Fleet ATM with a touch screen, and wanted to withdraw $40 via "Fast Cash" (press the amount, no confirmation). By simply passing my hand too close to the $100 at least two inches above the screen, the machine registered the $100 selection and spit that amount out. I hadn't even touched the screen.
Touch screens are error prone, though they've gotten a lot better. Why in the hell they're using them for national elections, I'll never know, but due to my own experience with them, I'm not calling conspiracy just yet.
If this was the local division of elections launching a conspiracy, this would have to be the dumbest conspiracy since the "butterfly" ballot, where the local Democratic party created a ballot that MAY have cost the national party the election... Broward and Palm Beach county (Broward is where the article is, the county around Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach county is home to West Palm Beach & Boca Raton) are huge bastions of Democrats. A democrat that gets less than 2/3s the vote countywide is a pretty mediocre candidate... Any detection of Broward and Palm Beach "shifting rightward" over the past 20 years isn't the voters changing, its the Democratic party engaging in one-upsmanship to run less and less competent candidates, the counties are getting more liberal by voter affiliation).
Broward County is dominated by Democrats, they control all the machinery of local politics. Occaisionally they over-reach a bit too far and get slapped by the state, but that is rare... (the one "slap" I recall was the school board, then requiring candidates to run for the district they live in, but elected by a county-wide vote, where everyone voted for all districts, had been consistently all Democratic. A very involved Parent chose to run on the GOP ticket, and lost easily, but the School Board threw her off all parent committees as punishment, and the politicians and county chairmen were talking to the press about how they had to, for that poor member had to run a race and it wasn't nice to her... that's the level of corruption required to endanger democratic power in Broward County).
There is NO Broward County conspiracy to elect republicans. The only possible conspiracy is the Democrats not only nominating a pathetic candidate like Jim Davis, and the party throwing him to the wolves instead of giving him the resources to fight the GOP's equally unimpressive candidate. OTOH, the GOP once again rejected Gallagher, the most useless and perpetually campaigning Republican in the state, but ran the equally unimpressive Crist.
Expect low turn-out, lots of whining, by a state party Democratic party that is SO inept that despite MASSIVE population growth in its Strongholds (the urban areas in South Florida, Tampa, and Orlando) by increasingly Democratic transplants from the northeastern blue states, they can't win elections because they look for their most inept campaigner and give them nominations.
Bill Nelson will only win re-election to the Senate (like he won it the last time) because the GOP has decided that the Senate nomination goes to unimpressive candidates too. While he's a good man and has done a lot for Florida in his years of public service, he must be the LEAST telegenic or charismatic candidate I've ever seen.
Years of machine politics in the Democratic strongholds has decimated the party, because they don't have ANY strong candidates because the election process is designed to guarantee a Democratic win, so all that matters is the primary which is dominated by retirees bussed in from the retirement communities and told how to vote, so the party apparatus has never HAD to develop quality candidates.
Compare the Florida democrats to any other southern state, and you'll notice how much stronger they are in states where campaigning is touch, and the process requires them to learn how to do it. Until the Florida Democratic party stops is policy of massive suckage, expect the GOP to dominate the state legislature and tilt the field there way. Control of the legislature has got to be worth 3-5%, as it has the ability to manipulate the system enough that close races go their way... the only exception being needing to keep Foley on the ballot, which was because of a short-sighted law passed by the legislature, not good luck on the democrats part.
A Florida conservative that would like to have TWO parties in his state, not two groups of clowns.
Indeed, the votes which have been corrected to vote Republican are just making up for reality's well known liberal bias.
I didn't know you could spell Hugo Chavez as "reality"...
In other words, the corrections are to offset the pre-programmed pro-liberal "glitches" from Smartmatic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
this is a TWO PARTY system.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Close, but you screwed it up slightly:
"One of these things involve alleged wrongdoing by Republicans, and one does not.
Guess which would probably make it on slashdot."
There you go....
Do you have ESP?
If you are going to play the "Follow the money" game, look first at this Wired article which states:
"Both Broward and Miami-Dade counties use machines made by Election Systems & Software, while Palm Beach county uses machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems. No Florida counties used touch-screen machines made by Diebold Election Systems, the company whose machines have received the most scrutiny over the last year."
Huh, no Diebold. But they do use Sequoia... now where have I heard that name before?
Oh yeah, they are owned by Smartmatic, a Venezuelan company under examination for rigging the Chavez election!
Do you think Chavez is out to help Bush? Is it possible he "likes the smell of sulfur in the morning", so to speak? Using good old Occam's Razor, I say that's pretty damn unlikely.
I miss the time when crackpot theories were based on bits of actual truth instead of being dead in the water out of the gate due to the most basic lack of research. You'd never make it in the anti-gravity field, my friend.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen."
Doesn't sound like the touch screen was at fault to me....
Not quite in the US, but in Venezuela you had an election machine manufacturer so under question that "the European Union (EU) refused to play an observer's role".
As that story indicates that very company now owns Sequoia Voting Systems, which supplies some of the voting systems Florida uses.
So basically you had a past vote swung in a very liberal direction, the makers of said system now own some US voting computers. Makes you wonder if the miscalibration was miscalibrated, if you must look at crazy theories along those lines...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Only minor glitches reported in early voting
You know -16,000 votes for a candidate was also "only a minor glitch" as well.
I have total control of the voting machines, and I'm going to fix the election. I need some help though...I have a hard decision to make...
Should I a) let the voter choose whatever he or she wants, and then assign all the votes to my candidate? or b) randomly have the machine reassign input to choose my candidate, giving them a chance to verify and correct their vote?
I just don't know...this is such a tough decision...I must not be cut out for this election stealing business.
Then we can put the filthy bastards up against the wall.
And then what - impose UN sanctions on them?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My Nintendo DS Lite has a better touchscreen than that.
Maybe Nintendo should get into the voting machine biz.
:(){
What's really funny is you went to all the trouble to type that, when Florida doesn't even use Diebold voting systems!
Instead they use systems from a company now controlled from Venezuela. Wrap your head around that if you think votes are being stolen...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A thin acetate sheet would be sturdy and no parallax. Plus, you can roll it up for storage or transport.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I don't know why Bush and his cronies bother with all this subtle stuff. Why not just get it over with, burn down the Reichstag (Capitol) and declare unilaterally all other parties illegal? Don't worry, we'll come and save your asses once he annexes Mexico.
The guy was going to vote democrat, how did you expect him to operate a voting machine? Sarcasm aside, Florida's news have been slow lately, the press has nothing to bitch about besides the Miami Heats getting their rear end kicked. I guess that under those circumstances, some moron having problems with a voting machine qualifies as news, or better yet, as a republican conspiracy.
2) There is no documented evidence of votes for republicans going to democrats.
This is in Broward county. You can't find evidence of republican votes switching to democratic ones if everyone is voting democratic in the first place.
paintball
Keep telling yourself that, maybe you'll feel better...
Took 5 seconds to google the appropriate page:r s.shtml
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/votemeth/sysvendo
Looks like 3 companies:
Diebold Election Systems
Elections Systems and Software, Inc. &
Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Couple choices...
Stupid democrats.
Shakey fingers from all the "medicinal" pot.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
that some of the reasoning for using electronic voting in the first place was to prevent all those problems people where having with punch cards.
I don't agree with that logic, but if that is the argument, doesn't this demonstrate that these machines are at least no better - if not worse off than paper ballots/punch cards?
I just don't get why some people still think that these machines are an improvement in any way.
`Our ability to process voters accurately and at a faster rate really has improved.''
Interesting. Here in Utah, where we are using e-voting machines for the first time this election, there's a great deal of concern over them being _slower_ than the old machines--and since they are more expensive, many polling places only have half as many machines as they used to. I wonder why Florida is having the opposite experience?
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/2F02.html
"Oh my God...the dead have risen and they're voting Republican!"
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If they are smart enough to hack the machine, why didn't they hack the summary page as well? In the end this "scheme" was foiled by the summary page review system. It sounds like this has more to do with who is listed first and the touch screen getting out of sync than whether there is an R or D after the candidate's name.
... it's best to be alert for it.
Have we become so cynical that we believe the absolute worst of everyone?
In politics? It's not hard. This has nothing to do with political philosophy, and everything to do with actions that look shady, both circumstantially and concretely. Perhaps you've heard about the recent campaign letter in Orange County discouraging immigrants? Perhaps you've heard about the groups threatening individuals with arrest if they show up at the pools, or telling that 'Democrats vote on Wednesday'? Blackwell's management of voter registration in Ohio 2004?
I'm not about to argue the Democrats have a clean history in this regard. Evidence of machines making it difficult to vote for Republicans is equally worthy of investigation. However, there's ample evidence there are people in both parties -- *Republicans Included* -- who are willing to cheat. The motive's there. The means and opportunity are documented. That makes it nearly inevitable, so when some voting trouble comes up that looks and quacks like a duck....
The Democrats offer no real solutions than to say they would do "better" than the Republicans
First of all, even *assuming* all the Democrats have to offer over the Republicans is that they're not the current crop of Republicans, that's still a virtue. Expressing disapproval is a real form of feedback. Turning over ineffective officials may not get you who you want immediately, but it's absolutely necessary if you want change, and it tells politicians who NOT to be.
Second of all, while the statement 'Democrats offer no real solutions' may be true of a given candidate, and while it's more largely true in terms of campaign tactics (which value rhetoric over substance), I'd say that phrase far more commonly means "I'm unfamiliar with the Democratic candidate's policy positions." I can't count the number of times that people said that about Kerry during 2004, but when I'd follow up with something like "So, you don't like Kerry's plan for shaping tax incentives to hire domestically?", 90% of them had no idea what I was talking about.
And the Democratic candidate for Senate I'm supporting this election (Pete Ashdown) has been genuinely expressive about many of his positions and views.
It's also true, of course, that not every Democrat is a good candidate, nor does every Republican need to be turned out. I simply find that phrases like "the Democrats are just as bad" or "the Democrats have no ideas" to be false.
Why can't we just focus on the problems with electronic voting rather than turning it into a political debate?
It's an excellent idea, but for whatever reason, talking ourselves blue on the technical merits of the issue seems to have done nothing to get the population up in arms and our elected officials to do anything.
I think in the end, the problem isn't that there's partisan accusations of cheating. It's that we seem to have no significant social equipment for investigating the issues without invoking partisan ire.
Tweet, tweet.
this is why im doing absentee. i moved here from LA, scared to death they wont want to count my vote since its a 3rd world country down here. i may be the only white guy in homestead.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
for something as important as this.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
that zillions of Floridians voted for Pat Buchanan
mostly up in the panhandle.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
The screens were imported from some far left country where social loafing reigns supreme due to lack of incentives and obscene taxes on making money.
Now that we have established that these touch screens are ineffective, lets examine the complaint:
Maybe the people that complain the most are the Dems? Maybe the screens work just as bad for republicans? Did these complainers try the republican option too in order to see if the problem is universal? Seriously, why is this on slashdot? Why isn't there something about John Kerry's recent attempt to kill the democratic party through his linguistic excellence and great sense of humor?
Touchscreens? What's wrong with big buttons? Maybe they would be better with a Whack-a-mole machine?
Task Mangler
this is fucking pissing me off
i mailed in the form for absentee and they said they didnt have me on file
i cant fill out a paper ballot either
i have to do that hackable computer shit
In the aftermath of the November 2000 Presidential Election, the Florida Legislature voted to decertify punch card voting systems. Beginning with the September 10, 2002 Primary Election, the Miami-Dade Elections Department is now utilizing a new voting system. A Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting System with "Touchscreen" technology is now being used at the Polling Places and an Optical Scan Voting System is now being used for mail-in absentee ballot voting.
wow. computers both ways??
this scares the fucking shit out of me
http://elections.miamidade.gov/voting_how_to.asp
THIS IS BULLSHIT
THIS IS NOT THE FUCKING UNITED STATES
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
At least we don't need to wait until election night to find out if the Republicans have won.
Bush likes parties too much for that. It reminds him of college.
moved here from los angeles
this is fucking pissing me off
i mailed in the form for absentee and they said they didnt have me on file
i cant fill out a paper ballot either
i have to do that hackable computer shit
In the aftermath of the November 2000 Presidential Election, the Florida Legislature voted to decertify punch card voting systems. Beginning with the September 10, 2002 Primary Election, the Miami-Dade Elections Department is now utilizing a new voting system. A Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting System with "Touchscreen" technology is now being used at the Polling Places and an Optical Scan Voting System is now being used for mail-in absentee ballot voting.
wow. computers both ways??
this scares the fucking shit out of me
http://elections.miamidade.gov/voting_how_to.asp
THIS IS BULLSHIT
THIS IS NOT THE FUCKING UNITED STATES
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
the poll workers claim that it's not common for a machine that gets used so much to get out of sync.
the machine gets used once a year. In the eight years I've done work with kiosk systems, I've never once seen a heavily used touch screen get out of sync
apparently, that's why republicans are always listed first on the florida ballot.
we all got it wrong. the easiest way to steal an election is to shift the touch screen sync to make the votes for democrats appear as a vote for the republican.
the only thing I don't get is, how to they make the sync shift in only that part of the screen? why can you still click the forward button just fine?
another thing, wouldn't such a flaw in the touchscreen hardware and/or software make the whole machine unreliable for such a purpose?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Troll?! C'mon this is funny!
I agree; it is important that idiots be able to vote because there are so many of us. We should be able to get the government we want without having to hang an aristocrat from every lamppost.
It's voting against both halves of the Republicrats.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The only way you're going to get real elections back in this country is the tried and true path:
Give me Liberty or Give me Death.
Sadly, that means that a whole lot of people are going to have to receive a helping of item B so that the rest of us can have some of item A later on.
As soon as they whacked Kennedy the writing was on the wall. We haven't had a democracy since then, and the current chicanery in our elections (though highly visible and fairly blunt and obvious) aren't going to go away until somebody dies. Hopefully it's the unlawfully "elected" officials first, and in particular Katherine Harris, but more than likely it will be some college kids with guns and a firm belief in our original bill of rights, which sadly, a lot of us will probably have to die to re-instate at this point.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Ahh, but if there were indeed only 3 reported instances, would this constitute a statistically valid sample? or is it just coincidental?
I ask as a totally disinterested third party - I'm not American and don't plan on trying to become one.
First off, I'm Australian so I can only view the political crisis in the former USA from an external viewpoint.
When will the USA cease calling itself a democracy? Is it truly the will of the people and their "democratically elected" power base to invade sovereign nations and depose their leaders? Will GWB renounce the title of President for something more appropriate like Czar or King or Father? What's the new name for this new north american empire?
Seriously, from outside, the transition from democracy to authoritarian autocracy looks like a kind of funny joke, although funny in the same way you might laugh at a train wreck victim to try and break the gutwrenching horror you're feeling.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
When Republicans add voter ID requirements.
They call the modified bill racist.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How often do you use an ATM and have the touch-screen read you selection incorrectly? How about never?
>The Democrats offer no real solutions
The Democratic agenda includes cutting health care costs by targeting research at curing chronic diseases rather than treating them, training the whole population intensively in emergency response (imagine Katrina with every citizen having disaster training), simplifying the tax code to where low-income families can actually claim the EITC, and so on.
>Why can't we just focus on the problems with electronic voting rather than turning it into a political debate? Why can't we just say that the design is flawed and should not be used?
Because one of the problems is a conflict of interest. Some voting machine vendors are political activists. They need to be neutral unless they can be audited.
>A company can have a bad or flawed design without malicious intent.
Can, and probably will without great care. Secure design is tough work. On the other hand we've seen so many bizarre decisions in voting machine design that our faith in incompetence is being tested. Making it possible for the operator of the tabulating machine to change the totals is insane, not just incompetent. Not fixing that design when it's pointed out, well, draw your own conclusions.
This particular incident is boring. Touch screens do go out of calibration, it's too detectable an error to be a good way to commit fraud, and only an excellent design could avoid it.
Seems to me a simple solution to this would be to have the software do an automatic calibration each time someone steps up to vote.
Put a small "Touch Here to Start" button on the center of the screen and use that for calibration. Put some error-checking in place if the person "clicks" way outside the button.
Couple that with extra large voting buttons and I doubt you'll have any calibration issues.
-David
If the errors were due to undirected incompetence in engineering, would it not be logical to expect a random distribution of errors? Instead we seem to be seeing the opposite: The errors are not random, but are instead favoring one party's candidates.
Broward County is a Democratic stronghold. Suppose 2 out of 3 people in Broward intend to vote for a Democrat, and 1 out of 3 people means to vote for a Republican.
If errors happen at the people at the same rate, then for every three errors, there will be two spurious votes for a Republican and one spurious vote for a Democrat.
So if the errors are random, you should expect them to favor Republicans, by simple arithmetic.
Man, I hope you never wind up like I am. My liver is failing and I'm unable to work due to complication ie:hepatic encephalopathy (nerve and brain damage due to high ammonia levels in the blood) extreme limb and joint pain and I could go on. And if it weren't for Medicaid and SSI I'd probably be in my grave, but I'd much rather go back to building the roofs over peoples heads if I could. NSA: The most organized, well funded group of terrorists in the world.
Of course it was operator error. Computer's don't make mistakes.
The people are just voting for the wrong party. The advanced error correction system is working very well!
97 Reasons Democrats Are Weak On Defense And Can't Be Trusted To Govern In Wartime
n t.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=244423511626964
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialconte
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
From the Miami Herald article:
"As for a conspiracy, election officials say that the machines can get out of sync if a particular spot is overused..."
So too many people are voting for Democrats?
It don't take a conspiricy to make idiots screw up . I spend a lot of time fixing the results of people who can't ( or wont) follow SIMPLE instructions . RTFM yeah right.
It says nothing about why the terminals were malfunctioning, which had everything to do with touch screen calibration (and the need to recalibrate from time to time)
Uh, no. Touchscreen technology has been around since the late 70's, and I remember using some circa-late-80's touchscreens that needed calibration, but only within an inch or less.
Touchscreens are in wide, wide use, including many applications where "regular" miscalibration problems would be completely unacceptable. Ie, medical systems, industrial (milling) equipment, ATMs, etc. Even self-checkout stations at stores have touchscreens, and I've never hit one that didn't register the correct button-push.
Not to mention: these machines are brand spanking new and in many cases made by companies which should be thoroughly familiar with the issues of touchscreen technology (example, Diebold, an ATM maker.)
I just don't "get" all of these problems. Here in MA, you fill in the bubble with a pencil, and stick your ballot in a machine in front of a poll worker. Moreover, you mark your ballot in complete privacy- you step into a booth and close a curtain...
Please help metamoderate.
Scene: A screen with the question: "
- Do you trust computers to count your vote?
- Yes
- No
As the first 9 voters vote, a text over (or even voice over) appears:"8 out of 10 hackers surveyed don't trust computer companies to count their vote"
As each voter casts their vote, the on-screen tally counts.... It ends up with 8 "No"s and 1 "Yes"
The 10th voter comes in and executes an 'easter-egg' a three-finger touch at the top and bottom edges of the right hand side of the screen, and the middle of the left side.......
a happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and this 'voter' touches just to the right of it... The happy face turns green.
Then he touches the "yes" button, and the on screen count quickly rolls back to 6 "Yes" and 4 "No".
The text-over gets' appended to.
Two do.
Now, while I'm at this, can somebody point me to the article (I think it was a slashdot article) where they ran the poll that I'm referring to?? I do remember a poll being done that found that about 80% of the "hackers" at a convention said that they didn't trust computerized voting, but there is so much noise about diebold et al, that I haven't been able to find it again.
Can anybody give me a pointer?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I can BET my monthly salary that this sweet election will be won by Republicans "fair" and "square".
Of course there will be "occassional glitches", that Dems will shout about, but nothing out of ordinary.
And we, citizens will go back to watching Lost and Desperate Housewives....
And once Reps win both houses, they will go to enact two Golden Rules: "Allow the president to seek office more than 2 times." , "Allow a simple majority to override Fundamental rights without SCOTUS oversight."
Of course with the SCOTUS now in Bushco hands, am sure they will not raise their finger...
I for one, welcome our new whitehouse overlords...wait there's the new season of BSG...
Gotta go..
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The summary is a bit misleading. Yes, the voting machines are flawed. Yes, the idea of closed box voting machines is flawed. Yes, the concept that a computer user interface is more conceptually clear than a pen and paper user interface is flawed. But, no, this is not a story about a Republican conspiracy, it is a story about touch screens needing calibration. It happens that both of the anecdotes relayed in the story are of Democrats needing assistance because of the miscalibration. If anything, this shows the bias of the author.
I wish the government would just do away with the electronic voting machines, the strong partisans don't need any extra excuse to complain when their candidate looses.
Also, Slashdot doesn't have to report this as a Republican versus Democrat issue, but it did. Slashdot is News for Nerds, not News for Democrats.
We could at least randomize the order of the candidates so that idiots voting for the first name on the list won't affect the results.
Any yes/no questions should be written both ways, with each voter randomly getting it one way or the other.
Like with other undemocratic countries that are unable to hold fair elections, the Free World[TM] needs to send observers and troops to monitor this farce.
The problem is that the errors being seen in Florida aren't random in the sense being ascribed to them; ie they aren't a case of the system getting data but assigning votes by polling random(). If the errors occurred as you describe, with the system having a probability p of making a mistake independent of intended choice, we would be seeing (for example) pQ/3 republicans and 2pQ/3 democrats in every Q voters who get a screwup. However, currently the mistake patterns indicate that P and intended choice are not independent, because significantly more than 2pQ/3 democrats (and since the sum of Qi must add up to Q, significantly less than pQ/3 republicans) are reporting problems in a 2/3 democratic district as TFA describes. And not only are the democrats getting the errors once, they're getting them repeatedly.
.5 for k and q and see what the probability of these problems occurring as recorded if they are truly random is. And even more interested to see what k and q result in an answer of 1/2.
Interestingly enough, we just did something relevant to this in my statistics class, binomial probability. If an event has a probability k of outcome A and probability q (= 1-k) of outcome B for each of N trials, then the probability of A happening X times is: N cr X k^X q^(N-X). Let N represent the number of errors, X the number in favor of Republicans, k the chance of an error in favor of the Republican, q the chance of an error favoring the Democrat. After all is said and done, I would be most interested to put in
If you're willing to concede that the probability of what's happenning occurring by chance is small if the errors are assumed random, then think about it. A vote counting machine that can't count right indicates that it's designer was an idiot. A vote counting machine that most likely counts wrong by design is cause for it's designer to be charged, tried and executed for high treason.
[Seriously, Diebold, this isn't a fucking rocket science: if(choiceA) { candidateA ++; } else if(choiceB) { candidateB ++; }. Personally, I suspect that the fraud code is unlikely to be something as blatant as "choiceA += 1000; choiceB -= 1000;" or "if(choiceA) { if((random() % 5000) 2500) { candidateB++; } else { candidateA++; } }". More likely, it will be something slightly more subtle; A switch with Republican as the default instead of just another case: label, perhaps? Or something very subtle, like declaring first demCounter and then errorCounter[], and having an integrity check routine that decrements errorCounter[-1] in an edge circumstance that could quite legitimately have been missed? You can never trust a machine if you can't trust at least one of it's makers, it's operators, or it's users not to be malicious.]
Normally when a touchscreen goes out of sync, it means that the start of your scanning cycle moves either positive or negative. This will result in your touches actually ending up shifted opposed to what's on the screen.
Simply put: If you have 500 columns on your screen and a button in column 50-150 and one in 350-450, with a shift of 200-300 positive your pushing the 50-150 button will actually end up in 350-450 (and for that matter, your 350-450 should en up in the other one with a 100-200 positive shift)
Depending on where the buttons are located and how the touchscreen overlay is configured, out of sync might actually end up favouring one specific 'button'..
Splut.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Seriously, who cares if a pres sleeps and has 50 girls.
Id rather have an honest pres thats loves whores than one
who would rather take over earth with his neocon nazi friends.
I love being monitored just like how Adolf did in the 40s with IBMS help mind you.
Ok you can go back to work at Rumsfelds office and kiss ass until they dump you in the river.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Living as I do in the one Florida county that actually got its 2000 recount done on time, I'll be voting the same way I did last year and the year before, filling out bubbles on a piece of paper with a magic marker.
I guess the old butterfly ballots were also biased against the dems in their primary districts. Maybe they shoulda tried the #2 pencil approach instead of going higher tech.
I would imagine if there were shenanigans going on in a democrat controlled area that some idiot changed the adjustment the wrong way.
Then again, maybe there is a problem inherent in the machines. It might be that all the preplanned leftist dem complaints about voting in florida last time may have backfired. It might just be that using an intellegent machine to try to vote a nonintellegent choice may have created biases. But, never fear, the left doesn't believe in popular elections for other than their candidates so they'll fix the problem when they get in power.
Oh, that's easy: greed.
I don't know if it's true, but elsewhere in this thread, people have said that Diebold's voting machines aren't even of their own design; they're something they acquired from another company, and were originally designed for non-critical applications (American Idol, pick-your-favorite-cookie-brand in a supermarket, etc.), and thus are ridiculously unsuited for use in an actual political election.
That Diebold pushed for these machines to be used in elections (and worse, that the government allowed them) certainly makes them at least criminally negligent. Don't think that I'm in any way absolving them from that. But the motives that would lead them to try to put some chintzy piece of crap into an election is obvious. A real voting-machine would cost more money to manufacture, yet municipalities have a basically fixed budget for paying for these things (basically the cost of replacing their existing punchcard/lever/pen-and-paper system). By using crap machines, yet still charging the municipalities whatever they can possibly afford, Diebold makes much more money than if they made a good system. Also, it leaves them room in their profit margins to undercut a 'good' system, should anyone actually make one. As other people have pointed out, they do a fine job of engineering ATMs, because banks wouldn't put up with the crap they foist on the public. But since state and local governments have bent over and accepted shitty voting machines, they're not going to do any better. The economics of mediocrity are obvious.
If there is a political conspiracy in all of this Diebold stuff, it's in how Diebold got so many places to buy it's shoddy equipment and put it into use. (And for this, I have no doubt that they leveraged their 'contributions,' 'lobbyists,' and other forms of what we used to call bribery.) You don't need a political conspiracy to explain their motivations, you need only look right here.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I do not think that attributing it to greed is at all obvious. I do not think that a politician, especially an incumbent, would want the outcome of the election to be random. Who will hack these machines? What will be their inclination? A Republican would not want a Democrat altering the machine; a Democrat would not want a Republican altering the machine. That is obvious and, I would think, sufficient motive to keep these machines out of an election - especially if the budget to cover the replacement of current machines is already available.
Diebold's only purpose may be to sell machines at the highest profit, but we have elected representatives deciding to use their shoddy merchandise. It is a stupid decision unless one can guarantee who has access to the machine. It could also be that the machine does not matter. Regardless, there is something more than incompetence and more than greed behind the decision. Whether it is a conspiracy or complete apathy it is dangerous.
Buzz! Thank you for playing. Florida is very nearly evenly split (remember 2000?), even "South Florida" (considering that the U. of South Florida is 'way up here in Tampa, "South Florida" is a pretty big place).
Dade County (Miami) is strongly conservative (primarily due to a large Cuban population), but Palm Beach County is certainly not (possibly due to a large New York retiree population), and no matter whether you consider Tampa part of South Florida, Palm Beach surely is.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
I'm a voing system technician. It's a calibration issue or it could possibly be a deliberate " miscalibration." It is not standard operating procedure to calibrate the machines in the moring when we run our zero tapes and perform other tasks to get the machines ready (doesn't make a whole lot of sense.) That's what I think is probably behind these kinds of stories. Mistakes are a non issue. We all know that errors are random and do not benefit one particular party over the other.