Slashdot Mirror
HBO's Hacking Democracy Available Online
prostoalex writes "HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video." Covered earlier on Slashdot, the documentary seems to have gathered quite a bit of heat from Diebold in addition to the one that didn't air.
Countdown to Diebold biting off more than they can chew by suing Google.
Google Video, great. I actually wanted to see it. (Without having to buffer every ten seconds or download a proprietary player).
Alright people, there should be no talking for 1 hr 21 min 57 secs after the post, or else you didn't WTFM!
Which documentary didn't air? Why not, did HBO not air something because of diebold?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That neither of the 3 voting machine companies can make a system that counts 60 million votes every 2 years.
They do millions of ATM transactions FLAWLESSLY every day
But then again, it is flawless by design. Who am I kidding.
Watch an hour and 20 minute video on google? No thanksr acy
http://isohunt.com/torrents.php?ihq=Hacking+Democ
what rules prevent establishing an unofficial vollunteer run paper ballot ?f course it wouldn't be legally binding but It would make a damm good poll
Or is it something that HBO will remove in short order?
What's the legal status of that video being there?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Great documentary.
Despite the fact that I have very little faith in the electoral process in the USA, and no confidence at all in the election results - what I still retain faith in is the way that US citizens will not stand idly by, while democracy is stolen from them, whether it be by design, or by mistake (it's immaterial really, either way).
The important thing is that the US system of checks and balances permits citizens to kick up an almighty stick about the systems which count (or fail to count, or alter, even worse!) their votes.
The only question in my mind is this: can the citizens of the USA kick up a big enough stink, and fast enough, to produce a fair election in 2008. Somehow, I doubt it, sadly.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
from the pirate bay.
i have to say i see why they did not want it shown. it scratchs the surface of a whole bunch of problems.
ATM machines work for the same reason that none of the banks had any Y2K problems. Because once they have your money it is their money to make more money with and If they, those that run the banks, don't make money their sharholders will fire them.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Who's voting for another supreme court challenge?
So if I keep telling myself that my software I write needs to make me money, it'll automatically make itself bug-free?
Dammit! I have really been wasting a lot of time debugging software if all I needed was a little positive thinking!
The movie makes some great points but rarely does it go into enough detail for the viewer to be able to make any real conclusions. Also, most of the movie focuses on this really mouthy woman I don't really care for. She seems so much like a typical pain in the ass neighbor.
I loved seeing the places where the Closed Captioning did not match the Narration on the movie. I watched it on my TiVo, and I always have CC on since it makes it easier for me to follow at low volume levels.
In 2 places that I remember, the narrator completely diverged form what the CC said. Specifically, when discussing the elections officials in the county where the "Random" 3% sample was supposed to be recounted, the CC mentioned that 2 of the election officials were indicted for election fraud. However, the narrator skipped that part and rephrased the segue to the next section.
It's a conspiracy, I say!
You just go to your electronic voting machine and do a write-in vote for a candidate named:
:-)
'; UPDATE votes SET type='W', name='Electronic voting is not ready yet';
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Voting machines are much harder. See with ATMs there's trust on all parts except the final operator. The ATM trusts the bank fully and does whatever it says. The bank could lie to the ATM and say you had no money, or tell it you had money you didn't. However they have no reason to do that since the amount they could steal that way is peanuts and they'd be shut down over it. So what it comes down to is you can trust the owner of it, you just need to make sure the person using it can't break in and steal money.
Not the case with a voting machine. Here you can't really trust, well, anyone. The person who controls the machine might very well want to change the results so you have to have a system to keep them from doing that. It's a much harder problem.
It would be somewhat analogue to why encryption works for SSH but not for copy protection. With SSH you are trying to keep everyone out except for trusted parties. You trust the server, it trusts you (if you authenticate). All the people who should have keys. However for copy protection you want to keep everyone out, even the person who you are giving the software to in the end. You want them to have use but not access. Well it doesn't work like that, the key has to be there somewhere and thus the encryption is mostly just for show.
So that's actually part of the problem here. Diebold just kinda decided to apply their ATM design to voting machines, but that doesn't work because voting machines are a much harder problem.
I'm not a US citizen so I know little about US TV except movies and tv shows...
/. :
I though HBO was a decent channel given their "HBO Original Series" so I gave it a try and watched this "documentary".
My point is I was shocked at how unprofesionnal it looked, i though i was watching "Simple Life" or some sort of entertainment junk, everything from the content to the presentation was parodic at best.
I hope this is not the usual way serious national matter is reported to the masses in the US.
Oblig
when displaying images illustring "source code", the so called reporter can't do better than showing random code with notepad mangling the "/n"...i mean he didn't even get to understand that source code isn't just garbage text but has a human readable presentation, and thus lets the unaware-viewer thinks that way.
A few minutes into the movie you can see the camera zooming into some code (opened in Notepad it seems) .. to my shock, it looks like MFC!!
WE'RE DOOMED.
We will win
You will lose
You Socialist Sodomites can crawl back into the gutter
while decent people rule the greatest country on Earth
Have fun tomorrow losers your votes won't count
I live in a suburb of Toronto and we have our municipal elections tomorrow. I voted early on Saturday and I noticed my vote got counted on a Diebold machine. All previous elections we wrote an "X" in a circle and they were hand-counted - this time it was electronically counted.
1 324237&from=rss) really pissed me off.
I asked the elections official how did they know my vote was counted. Her response was, (as she pointed to a small LCD display), "this counter here says how many votes this machine processed." I asked her how does she know it was counted *CORRECTLY* she made the mistake of saying "we're pretty sure it's correct."
At this point I demanded to know how "pretty sure" she was. Her defense was "there's a paper trail incase of an error" - a fairly valid defense. I proceeded to point to two electronic Diebold machines, the 6" thick ones with an LCD screen, and asked her "what about those?" She told me in a very matter of fact way that there's a paper trail for those too.
I asked her where the printer was, and if she ever actually say a printer. It was at this point that she no longer wanted to talk to me and kinda laughed me off as some sort of conspiracy wackjob.
The fact that we used these machines after their utter failure in larger US elections pissed me off, but the fact that they FAILED in CANADA, just one province over (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/
I wanted to argue with her further but had no hard references memorized, essentially making my argument invalid. I did a bit of research from the usual sources (http://www.blackboxvoting.org), but I was really hoping to see this documentary before the elections tomorrow.
I encourage all Canadians voting in municipal elections tomorrow to make your feelings about e-voting (especially on Diebold machines) known to the organizers, and write your MPs and MPPs to tell them that e-voting is not acceptable.
Seriously... most of HBO's programming -- and other networks' -- is available online. The Pirate Bay said so.
In the documentary it mentions Republicans doing the same thing that the Democrats are in other states like Maryland...
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
(posted this elsewhere too, sorry for the dupe)
I agree.
I thought the subject matter was excellent, and it makes you wonder why the most important function in a democracy is treated so cheaply.
However, I was disappointed with the program itself. I was expecting something of the quality of HBO's other documentaries, or something from PBS's Frontline. Rather, instead of being a thoughtful exposition of facts, it was loaded with anecdotes and storytelling. Why would I care about Bev Harris's conversations during their minivan road trip? The "gotcha" moments and the crying were awful, too. Its production quality seemed more like "Taxicab Confessions" or some UFO conspiracy.
But, again, the subject matter is an incredibly important one. Elections are a democracy's lifeblood, and the ultimate checkpoint and balance. The FEC must be more watchful and responsible than it is.
Egads! Somebody please mod parent funny or overrated before people start to believe it's real. LOL
They work because you know it didn't work if it didn't work, because no money comes out. As opposed to a voting machine, where you have no way to know whether it was counted.
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
Well, if you ask me, the deal is that the Bush machine is getting ready to pull some fast ones tomorrow, and they expect they're going to have some peculiar "upsets" that need to be explained away, so they're sending folks like yourself around to soften up the crowd in advance. But hey, some people think I'm paranoid.
Aw, poor baby. You might lose some karma.
Is having a national release tomorrow! One day only!
Why the sudden 180?
Simple: because there have been a number of documented problems involving electronic voting in the last 3 election cycles.
In 2000, everyone (not just the Dems - don't be a tool) supported electronic voting because it looked like the easiest way to avoid another Florida. But then it turned out that the machines government officials latched onto are worse than bad.
Is it so wrong for concerned citizens to want a non-disenfranchising electoral system with both accessibility and accountability?
So you can laugh all you want to...
Andy Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com has the House at 239/196 seats, Senate at 50/49/1.
1. Since Diebold says they have no executables on the memory card ... what happens if you remove the executable and run another "mini" election. If the election works then what they have found is not only a backdoor into the Diebold Voting Machine but also they have found a cracked machine, and a trace on the origin of the executable needs to be done by Federal Authorities.
2. Can the executable be modified to work virally on gem?, or for that matter can a virus be "installed" on the memory card surreptitiously that later transfers to gem.
The first experiment in my mind is the most crucial. As it would point to an entirely different type of smoking gun.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
So the demonstration at the end showed how this could work - they voted in a fake election. They had six votes for "Yes" and two votes for "No". They put in the hacked memory card and it produces the initial printout which shows zero votes for no and zero votes for yes. After entering in the votes through the machine it comes out as seven for "Yes" and one for "No" (so I guess they had -5 "No" and +5 for "Yes" on the hacked card).
My question is - why did the initial printout show zero votes? Was this part of the hack to fool the printer, or did the machine just print "zero" for everything since it had just been turned on? And if the latter of those two is true, how in the blue *heck* did anyone think that this was a good idea? Hell, Diebold makes ATM machines - you wouldn't want those to always say zero at bootup. Is Diebold just so incompetent that this escaped them?
Schnapple
Dude. BIG TROLL. Wish I had mod points.
It's true we need more modern electoral systems. In fact, if we can build a fully electronic system that is reliable and accountable, we can rid ourselves of that electoral collage crap that we deal with today. You know the one where the electoral votes elect the president, not the popular ones? The one where the electoral votes aren't necessarily a reflection of the popular votes?
With a reliable and fast electronic vote system, we can actually have a way to have the people DIRECTLY elect the president. It's a pretting important thing to do and I'm sure "The Democrats" will *still* decry the need for electronic voting.
Having RELIABLE and ACCOUNTABLE electronic voting is important. It's a problem when it's all too secret and too easily hackable. If you don't see that as a problem with electronic voting options being made available at present, then you're just stupid as hell. Whether or not you're also a troll is another matter. But you're taking two matters which aren't directly connected and acting as if they are diametricly opposed. Are you really that stupid?
GoTVNetworks also has a good 4 part investigative report on this:
2 9
http://gotvnetworks.one.revver.com/collection/425
This has been hosted on there for several days now. "Dugg" to the front page I think yesterday or the day before. Seems like the kind of copywrite violation that would normally get wiped after a day or so, tops. HBO and Google are doing a great service by dragging their feet for a couple days on this one.
I thought this would be of interest. I texted a friend of mine who works as a pole worker volunteer about the system used in Orange County California. The "OC" uses a paper audit trail system developed by Hart-Intercivic.
Here is what my friend had to say:
I am still undecided if the safeguards are sufficient, but this sounds pretty good. The "OC" is a Republican area, but the paper audit trail requirement reforms are due to requirements by the California Secretary of State, a Democrat.
Personally, I have no confidence in any system without the p
Yes, now be a good sheep and shut up!
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
Open Voting System Explained
What is the Open Voting system?
The Open Voting system is very much like a traditional system in which the voter enters the voting place, marks his or her choices onto a paper ballot, and inserts the ballot into a ballot box except the voter marks the ballot using a computerized voting station rather than a pencil or colored marker. The Open Voting system preserves the paper ballot. However, which is printed in plain text that the voter can read. Voters have the opportunity to inspect the ballot to ensure that it properly reflects their choices. Poll workers then scan the ballot to count your votes and deposit it into a secure ballot box. The Open Voting system ballots contain a bar code in addition to the plain text. This bar code provides a system of accountability for recounts and prevents voters from voting more than once, although it provides confidentiality for the voter. Open Voting systems can be engineered to accommodate the special needs of those who who have physical impairments and can be operated with touch-screen features and provides audio playback for sight impaired.
I cannot confirm nor deny the allegation or allegations you may or may not have just made
I just watched the entire video. It brought up an interesting point-why aren't the voters able to um.. vote on which machines they want to use? It goes without saying that this should be a paper ballot vote. Which reminds me. What was wrong with the old method? Oh yes, that was entirely to obfuscating for the general public.
The elections in this country are a farce anyway. And before you get your tighty-whiteys in a bunch, I served for 10 years in the USNavy, protecting the values of our democratic society so don't call me unpatriotic. Makes me sick that the core value in a democracy can so easily be corrupted though, which is one of the reasons I got out.
There is simply too much glass..
This is exactly the point the parent was making! It's turning into 'If we Dems don't win, then the election must have been a fraud! It's the only explanation!".
It doesn't matter how people vote or how many safeguards are put in place, if the dems lose this one then you'll hear the "Video the Vote" people apologizing that they were not vigilant enough to stop all the crimes they know were being committed. You didn't see it, we didn't record it, there is no proof, but it happened and you should be outraged!!.
I don't think you're paranoid, I think you're a sheep baah'ing with the rest of your herd.
No, he would lose karma. You may not have noticed, but slashdot isn't exactly (or in any manner) a safe place to criticize the floundering democratic party. *SHOCK!!*.
I'm not saying that there is never any corruption, but you act like bush has minions at every voting station actively working against those who would vote against him. Are you so blinded by partisan stupidity that you believe there aren't just as many rabid bush haters doing the exact same thing? You are not on the "right" side, you're just on the one that decided to look feeble and play the victim card as their strategy.
With everything going on in the world, you're scared of DEMOCRATS? On the INTERNET? Your threat-o-meter is broken.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Not that big of a deal!? I hope it was just a sarcastic remark. I think below may be a list of reasons you should be concerned:
8 241&from=rss
It only takes a very small number of people to control the outcome. Note there are many people handling the voting machine hardware here, and it isn't that difficult for them to find a friend who has a bit of computing experience. Maybe you'll scream unlikely, but think about a simple estimate. If each county has 100 election officials with access to the memory card, average numbef of county per state is about 30, we already have 3000 people with access to memory card per state on average. All it takes is one person to alter pretty much all of the results of the vote. All the analysis used was a card reader bought off e-bay. He didn't have full access to the Diebolt machines.
Worse, remember an article from about a week ago? http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/26/15
The key issue here is secrecy, concentration of power, and accountability.
The problem in Florida wasn't just that we needed to modernize it. The voting system there was broken in more ways than just the age of the antiquated punch card technology. I think the complaint you're referring to was the complicated layout of the paper ballots. Voters had to follow an arrowed line across pages to match the candidate with the punch hole. Electronic voting was offered as one solution, but I think having good, uniform standards for paper ballots go a long way in solving that problem. We got electronic voting because the election systems vendors smelled money, and HAVA ended up being written with all kinds of requirements that could only have been met by electronic systems. Computers are expensive, complex, and maintenance-intensive. That's why the vendors love selling us this shit.
The other problem was the infamous "hanging chad". However, that would not have been a problem if there had been uniform statewide standards for counting those punch card ballots (there weren't uniform standards). A ballot with a hanging chad counted as a vote in one county, but counted as no vote in another county. If you ask me, a hole punched out is a clear indication of voter intent, even with a hanging chad.
I don't think it's fair to say that Democrats specifically demanded electronic voting after 2000 when what we really had were specific complaints about the paper ballots in Florida. If someone posted to Slashdot in 2000 that they were going to build voting systems on Windows CE, Microsoft Access, and write the results to a removable flash card (or even better, over a modem link), I'll bet we all would've laughed him out of here.
It was a good documentary, worth saving for the kids. Video Downloader Extention for Firefox.
No, but close.
Tell yourself that if the software you are writing is not secure, you will lose everything, and then tell all the people up the chain of command and all your customers the exact same thing.
THEN it'll automatically make itself bug-free.
This is a great sworn testimony by a programmer named Clinton Curtis that talks about the hackability of the machines. Eak.
Regardless of the politics, coming home from work and being greeted with news that a documentary just mentioned in a previous story is available online was nice. This is a documentary I wanted to view but without paying for HBO. So thanks to Google as well. I Love an Internet that promises to be the greatest library of all time.
Almost as much as fraud, is that you can hit one button and vote a straight party ticket (at least here in NC.) What ever happened to knowing were a candidate stands on the issues? Doesn't the constitution state that votes will be cast for the CANDIDATE of your choosing, not the party? Also, here in NC write-ins aren't allowed in partisan races. You have to choose Rep or Dem or nothing at all. The only non-partisan race that I saw was for "Soil and Water Conservation District Manager". We can bitch about voter fraud all we want, but until you are allowed to vote for anyone you want, it's not a fair election.
yes yes?
I remember as a kid, there were some kids that were obsessed with "cheating" to the point that playing with them was nearly impossible. At a certain point I realized (often as they were redefining the rules of the game as we were playing it) that they had the slogan, "Either I win, or you cheated..." Technology can be scary, but elections have had a "fudge-factor" since they were created. The best way to win an election is to keep it from being really close. Typically that's based upon good ideas, not on blaming the voting machines. --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
My favorite part of politics is when the fanatics come out and ignore the sins of their own party while accusing others. Voter fraud on the part of Democrats was well-documented in 2004, from paying homeless people with crack to go in and vote to signing up dead people as voters. Even GOP voter vans had their tires slashed the night before the election. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
As is the Dean machine. The left-wing Buckeye blog is even on "Phase II" of recruiting folks to infiltrate GOP get-out-the-vote efforts as a means of discouraging turnout. But of course, only the Republicans cheat!
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm not currently registered with any party. Too many nutcases for me to go with either one at this time.
:) The problem is that even if this election manages to squeak by without major incident; there is a good chance that next election will be "hacked" unless we start the outcry now. Current security is simply not acceptable.
However, (for the record) I'm fairly conservative and probably *should* be registered Republican. Except of course that both parties are fairly conservative now anyway.
But that's not my point.
To believe that there are hacker groups that will be offered large sums of money by interested parties (organized crime, terrorists, foreign governments, etc) is to bury your face in the sand. Our own government has tried to influence who leads other nations (in ways more subtle then invading Iraq). To think that we are the only ones interested in doing so would be.. stupid.
I don't even own a tinfoil beanie, but everyone on Slashdot should know how many people are willing to attempt a hack just for the challenge. Throw a bit of money in the pot and you'd have scores of contenders.
Even if they aren't successful, evidence of a failed attack would cause huge chaos. Do you hold new elections? Try to sort the false votes from the real ones? I can't even imagine the whining on the losing side in any of those scenarios. And it wouldn't be baseless either.
I'm sending a copy of the video to my parents on a DVD they can watch. They don't have cable. They don't have high speed internet. I'm happy when I can get my mom to send an email. But they're voters, and they need to know. I'd suggest everyone here does the same. AND call your Senators / Congressmen.
Our country has enough election problems already.
The third item is complexity. Most election precints in the US have 30-40 separate items that are being voted on. In some areas there may be over 100. There is no good way to represent this in a compact form such that some type of automation can be used to process the paper.
We have seen what the margin of error does to an election. You get a count and someone doesn't like it, so there is a recount. The results are different but still within the margin of error for the manual processes involved. There is another recount and the results change again. You can keep recounting but the results are random - the difference is within the margin of error for the processes being used. There is no choice but to change the process.
Elections are closely monitored to reduce or eliminate fraud, not to ensure an accurate count. Sure, everyone wants an accurate count, but manual processes that are assured to be 100% accurate (no margin of error) are extremely tedious and involved. Looking at elections in the past in the US, very few were close enough where the difference between candidates was less than 1%. And when this happened, mistakes were made and they have become quite famous. We have just had three rounds of elections where many, many local, state and federal elections had less than 1% difference between the candidates.
The manual processes have to go.
At least they decided to allow the Americans to know they don't have democracy anymore. How long until this sort of thing becomes censored?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
There was a post on /. where DUI charges were dismissed because the manufacturer of a breathalyzer refused to release source code. Does anyone know why a similar principle can't be used in elections when irregularities have been found?
I noted that one of the computers running GEMS (don't know if it was an actual tally machine) seemed to have Bear-Share installed so I assume it was connected to that "series of tubes". Nice; a Windows box running something as monumentally critical as voting connected to the web and probably used for general computing as well - there's a system I would have faith in. I'm also amazed at how stupid this piece of software was. You modify the MS access database (or maybe it was a plain JET database) which has seems to have no protection whatsoever and the stupid software doesn't even notice - "its ok, it has a password". Diebold made much about encryption but it seemd bogus if you can modidy databases and memory cards and not have the software notice. The worst part is the election officials presented all seemed to blindly accept that all was OK. I'm we use paper in my country.
Yeah, and the Republicans are really good at that one. You got to hand it to them, whenever they're under-fire they go on a really strong counter-attack (kind of like this one).
Bullshit. You don't have documentation of that.
Now this at least actually happened. Against the long litany of sins in Ohio in 2004, against the use of hired thugs to interfere with the vote count in Florida in 2000, you can point to this one mindless prank.Hardly. But they cheat so well! Or at least, the new breed of Republicans do... give 'em one or two more elections and maybe we can forget about the rest of them.
To quote an interview with Steven Freeman:
So, what the government is trying to say is that they can detain "terrorists" for no reason, read my email, wiretap me, reveal secret identities of CIA agents, shoot hunting partners, and approve abuse of overseas prisoners ... but they cannot audit the software, security procedures, etc. of the companies that control our elections?
I bet Scooby Doo eating Scoobie Snacks in the Mystery Machine would have solved this before GW put on a scary mask and spooked everyone out.
By the way, if you're voting in California, you might consider that one of the candidates for Secretary of State, Debra Bowen is a proponent of Open Voting.
Bruce McPherson, the incumbent, appears to be obstructing progress towards open voting.
I don't know the other candidates' stances. Anyone?
Unless you're in a state that has completely open primaries, it's unfortunate that you're not registered with a party, because you're effectively disenfranchising yourself, at least from voting in the primaries.
If your state does allow anyone to vote in either primary, then there's really no reason to register with a party, and your stance is understandable. However, I know a lot of people who have never registered because they don't feel an affiliation to either party, and unfortunately under our current system, this means that they often end up choosing between two equally unappealing candidates.
By voting in the primaries, you can at least have some say -- perhaps even a subversive one -- in the party of your choice. And you can do that, even while being involved in promoting (and voting for in the general election, if you choose) a third-party candidate.
I think honestly, that the primaries are really where the big political decisions of our country are being made. By the time you get to the big national elections, you usually have six of one, half a dozen of another.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
- The "safeguards" in place border on the non-existant at this point. No one who understands those DRE machines thought they were a good idea.
- I would not believe the 2004 election was stolen were it not for
- the patterns in the exit-poll data discrepancies
- the huge number of conventional election corruption techniques deployed in Ohio.
In other words, you can spin, spin, spin all you want, but there's a reality-based world out there, and some day the truth (if you will excuse the expression) will out.from paying homeless people with crack to go in and vote
Do you have anything at all to back that up? Or are you just full of shit (as usual?).
Enjoy the midterms!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I'd be happy to document any experiences with the Ontario November 13 municipal elections in my blog, Paper Vote Canada.
i've always thought that the 2004 election was rigged... partly becuase of how fast Kerry conceeded. he's a smart guy, he should have known better?
chat log started********
heres a checker... just to see if you stick to your convictions (anyone)
if clinton was to become a dictator by some wierd ass "whatever" would you be like "alright!!!" OR "WTF THIS IS A DEMOCRACY!!!!!"
i don't think most people would think about it if they liked the person... or their mom and dad told them to vote for so and so.
I was particularly amused about how the icon for GEMS was a giant hand gripping the world. It isn't suttle at all.
You are certainly right about the margin of error problem. The 2000 thing in Florida really was well inside the margin of error. They could have kept recounting several times and gotten a different result each time. In many ways it was lucky the first two recounts came out the same (for Bush) so they quit doing this. If they were different they would have done another recount, and another, and it would get worse, since it really was pretty much random who won the recount, and as more and more of them were done it would get closer to 50% of the recounts for each of them.
I'm not sure I agree with the news problem. I don't think the news media will control the election, I can't see any scenario where the outcome of the election would be overridden by an incorrect news prediction. However the demand to know the *official* results quickly is a problem.
(Not to suggest you mean so.)
Anyway, it is a solvable problem.
Get your open source and well-working solution from openvotingconsortium.org.
Slashdotter SAFH already shared a summary of the system.
Secret source be damned.
So, if he would lose karma, then why is that comment currently at "Score 3, interesting"?
... and then they built the supercollider.
The problem with the so called "paper trail" is that the printer prints with an extremely small font, which is difficult to see under the best of conditions. Secondly, as the documentary showed, the problem was that even though the printer was printing one thing, the memory card was hacked to later print out something else. It also showed that eclection officials in florida threw away into the trash the original printer tape (and also selected which votes would be checked) that showed descrepancies and later printed out another incorrect tape.
Anyway you look at it, it's a mess.
"I stand behind the nation, not the bozo who happens to hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania."
You called the President of the United States a bozo. For any other president, that would be disrespect. For George W. Bush, that is an improvement over what he is usually called, so I guess he can count you as one of his warmest friends.
Check what comedians say about him: Funniest George W. Bush Comedy Videos. (I'm assuming that we can all agree that bozo is friendlier than "cretinous simpleton".)
Do you actually believe any of your own bullshit?
You are part of the herd.
I cannot say that I was really shocked as a matter of fact without knowing many details of the system it just further confirmed my suspicions. I can think of at least dozen more ways to exploit the system.
Take for instance that latest unpatched windows vulnerability that showed a few days ago. Say somebody writes a worm using it that propogates a modified aodb driver that modifies sql commands on the fly. It is extrememly likely that one could infect a fair number of these gems tabulation machines just as a casualty of jacking one into the network. I could of course write such a thing, would I? No I would not, but if I can write it then there are thousands more that could and it only takes one with a motive to really mess with things.
I am a programmer and live a great deal of my life behind a keyboard but the last thing I want is any these machines responsible for vote counting.
Got Code?
I for one welcome our new voting machine overlords!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You mean a score of 0, right?
America's education system really does need some work...
I for one do NOT welcome my vote altering diebold overlords. if i could i would demand that my vote be on paper and paper only. Altho after watching this flic^H^H^H^HFine piece of cinematography, i seriously doubt that would even make a difference.
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
no rebuttal, just accusations.
that hasnt worked for the past six years, maybe its time you tried a different strategy?
Of course you thought so, you answered your own damn question. There is no way you could have written "Bush?" without having thought of it first. Do you often have smug arguments with yourself or is this a new thing for you?
We have them inBC municipalities too. Interestingly, during the Municipal election in 2002, candidates were allowed to download lists of who had voted and the results while the elections were still happenning. The incumbant's campaign team knew about this for several months. The challengers' campaigns were told the day before the election
You ask an excellent question. Would folk be outraged if their candidate had won?
...)
I'll venture a guess. If the Democrats had won amidst the same widespread reports of electoral fraud, many of them would suffer the same bias and belittling of outrage that many vocal Republicans have demonstrated.
Anyone want something like a percentage comparison? Just how many more or fewer Democrats would be assholes and hypocrites about a rigged election that served them versus Republicans? Homey don't play that. If you're curious and you think it's important, you're a fool. It's called sectarianism. It's called an "Us v. Them" mentality, and it is destructive.
(... hundreds of Slashdot readers immediately start trying to perceive me as being from their favorite whipping boy opposing party
Every one of you that's taking a side and rabidly generalizing about the standard opposing party is failing to realize that they're being used. Do you think "Dems blow!"? Or maybe "Damned Republitards!"? You are a tool, controlled with psychological forces seeded by greedy and self-serving players, amplified in an ugly dynamic between our innate tendencies and media pandering. You have failed to question the system. You fail it!
The truth is that every candidate is different, that there is a wide variety of (actual, not professed) platforms, regardless of party affiliation, despite all this damned gravity of conformity and majority voting pulling politics to these polar ideological centers of mass.
If I were on the winning side of an election, I'd be perfectly fine with supporting electoral reform that ensured accurate counting of each and every vote. Is it because I'd be so gracious? Does that really matter? What matters more is that I'd have the goddamned foresight to realize that nobody's political position is safe from electoral fraud and it wouldn't matter anyway if your fucking country were on a rocket sled shooting down the chute of corruption into a dystopic authoritarian septic pond of a future.
Securing the vote can only help. Regardless of your team's color.
openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org
(And if we can get well-working electronic voting instated, we'll be one step closer to implementing a method that helps to combat the ills of majority voting.)
Why does it matter if there's an executable on the card? It's a re-writeable device; that's all that matters.
Any more of this kind of thing and you'll start to make it difficult
for a simple businessman
to run a corrupt incompetent insider-connected company, and at that
point who knows what damage will be done to the US economy.
Be more careful guys!!
The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), a part of The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), made a pretty clear report about the 2004 (US) presidential election:
Report
The voting machines are a problem.
Are you so blinded by partisan stupidity that you believe there aren't just as many rabid bush haters doing the exact same thing?
Wow. If people doing the same thing on the other side, there is no problem? The problem is that people are able to do this in the first place! Which party is doing it is completely immaterial. (especially to me, I don't even live in the US)
I think the black guy at the warehouse said it best:
"Basically you're making a mole hill..." thinks - 'damn I said that wrong, how do I get out of this without looking a fool?' - "...ahm, out of a mountain" - 'Doh!'
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
I don't know if you merely misunderstood his point or if you are intentionally not getting it.
In 2000, the Democrats said that the Republicans stole the election because of the confusing butterfly ballots and that we needed a new and modern way of voting. Now that we have it, Democrats are hedging their bets by planting the seed in people's minds that the Republicans are poised to steal more elections using the system that they themselves demanded.
It smacks of arrogance. These people honestly believe that they only way that they can possibly lose is if the opposition cheats. It's like when a child refuses to take responsibility for any of his own actions by blaming everyone else when he gets into trouble.
Well, if you ask me, the deal is that the Bush machine is getting ready to pull some fast ones tomorrow, and they expect they're going to have some peculiar "upsets" that need to be explained away, so they're sending folks like yourself around to soften up the crowd in advance.
Is it really that unbelievable that there are actually people out here who don't vote the same way that you do? Is it really that unbelievable to you that roughly 50% of the American electorate feels differently about the issues than you do?
People are different, they have different goals, dreams and ideals. As incredible as many people seem to find it, but there are millions of us who will be voting (mostly) for Republicans tomorrow. It's not because we think that the Republicans are ideal, but because we think that the Republicans are a better choice than the only other party that has a chance of winning.
There is no need for paid operatives to infiltrate Slashdot, K5 and where ever else geeks like us congregate online. There are millions of us who vote Republican.
Aw, poor baby. You might lose some karma.
And you're a real paragon of bravery for posting material that defames Republicans in a forum where there is a clear pro-Democrat bias.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It doesn't say, but I honestly hope those filmed in this movie throwing out ballots are charged with their crime. If not, it would be just one more reason not to vote republican.
...a fairly valid defense?
Let me ask you this: how do you know that the printer printed your vote as you intended? If you didn't even know there was a paper trail, then I am going to guess that it wasn't a voter verified paper trail.
What if the "error" is not so obvious as to warrant a paper recount - what if the votes are changed just enough so that one party wins without much suspicion? Will anyone know the votes have been tampered with?
Paper and pen is the best way to vote. Sure, there will always be a little bit of fraud, but fraud on a massive scale then becomes very difficult.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Barcodes sound GREAT - easy for a computer to read, and since democracy isn't worth the time it takes to count votes by hand, we can get things done really quickly. Now that is progress!
The problem with a barcode is that the barcode may not read the way the voter intended. The computer that counts the barcode votes may not count without error.
The only acceptable voting mechanism is one in which the counting of votes can be observed. Any electronic system makes this an impossibility.
It might take a couple hours to count paper ballots by hand and call in the results, but that is an acceptable price for democracy. Progress for the sake of progress is never wise.
There will always be a little bit of fraud and error. But by counting ballots by hand makes fraud on a massive scale very difficult.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Let's not be a gullible partisan, ok? If you think Republicans steal elections, please be intellectually honest and admit that Democrats do so too. Neither party has clean hands historically. The Democrats just happen to be the first party that pretty much justifies their losses exclusively on perceived fraud rather than looking internally to finding out why they don't win elections.
This election is telling. I read in the last 24 hours that polls indicate that while most of the people that are voting Republican are voting for the Republican, most of those that are voting Democrat are voting against the Republican. That might be enough for the Democrats tomorrow, but it isn't indicative of a long-term groundswell of support for Democrats that would help them in 2008 or beyond.
Democrats lose because people think their policies suck; sure, there might be some fraud here and there. I'm sure the Democrats do it too. But the main reason they are where they are is because people don't like their policies.
The weird thing about electronic voting is that after 2000, the Democrats were decrying paper ballots and were all about "modernizing" the system and adopting electronic voting.
Everybody, right and left, was for reform, because hand-counting "leads to hanging chads."
This year, they're decrying electronic voting and all for paper voting because it "leaves a trail."
They're for verifiable voting. If diebold's machines were not black boxes beyond a local election official's ability to verify, no one would raise a stink. Even if it's not copyleft, this is a case where the code should be delivered, and compiled by the government onto commodity hardware of their choice
Why the sudden 180? Is it just to cover their backs if they fail to gain a majority in the mid-term elections ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn electronic voting machines") or is it just a pattern of blaming the system whenever they lose an election ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn paper ballots")? What's the deal?
You must be a republican. A talk-radio republican, by the quality of your argument. Allow me to draw the consistent line which most Americans believe should be followed:
We should use the voting technology that allows the greatest level of confidence that all of the votes were counted correctly. All-paper is bad. All-electronic can be worse; Diebold is certainly no better than paper ballots, just faster and harder to audit.
And while I'm pointing fingers -- George W. Bush won by a narrow enough margin that vote fraud would have been enough to push the election either way. That usually doesn't happen, and if he had done what he said he was going to in 2000 (be "a uniter, not a divider" and kept to his origial lead on the War on Terrorism) it wouldn't have happened in 2004.
It's not rocket science when it comes to winning an election by a large enough margin that you're beyond the margin of error. I hope most of tomorrow's elections succeed where 2004's presidential election failed in that respect. It'll make the outcome, either way, less of an obstacle for Congress doing the people's work.
Hacker votes for %df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%df%56%76Richard M. Stallman.
Stallman wins the Whitehouse.
That would get their attention.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The thing is you can't possibly deny that, say, Diebold Accuvote machines aren't pieces of swiss-cheese as far as vote security is concerned, and you can't possibly deny that the management of the big electronic voting companies (Diebold and ES&S) have a known Republican bias -- both of those points are tremendously well documented. The one and only thing you can possibly deny is that maybe those two points weren't put together to steal the 2004 election -- except that there is that nasty little problem of explaining away the peculiarly large exit-poll discrepancies that correlated with the use of those voting machines.
Hence, I vehemently deny your accusation that this is all Democratic spin, and I reiterate that this is just an attempt at Republican counter-spin.
El wrongo... if you really believe that (and I find it unlikely that you really do) you're not paying attention.
Well, at the moment it's a little hard to believe that, because all polls seem to agree that most people are sick of the Iraq war, and annoyed at the Bush regime's handling of it. The American people can be a little slow on occasion, but they do catch on eventually (you know, "some of the people some of the time" and so on, as was once said by a man who doesn't deserve to be associated with the current crop of people calling themselves Republicans).
What is so hard to believe about Karl Rove engaging in an internet astro-turf campaign? Wouldn't it seem weird if he didn't try something like that?
In any case, I'm not suggesting that every conservative voice on slashdot is necessarily a hired Republican-sock puppet. What I am saying is that there's a surprising number of folks doing mindless reiteration of the same pretty lame talking points, like "Oh the democrats do it too!", or "oh polls are so inaccurate", or "oh you're just a tinfoil hat conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truthies!" Those folks, I find, shall we say, suspicious.
It must be biased. We just don't realize that The Democrats Do It Too (so it must be okay).
In any case: if anyone is so whacked as to still be reading this: don't get so wrapped up in the "the elections are rigged!" business that you don't bother voting. Yeah, they're rigged, but none of us know how badly they're rigged, and if it's just a finger on the scale (and not a two-ton weight) we need all the legit voters out there we can get.
This is definitely a year for the lesser-of-two evils: all we've got is a choice between evil and incompetent, so if you ask me incompetence is the best pick.
Overall, I disagree with your assessment of the American political character. If you did down into people's attitudes about issues, you find that they're a lot more "liberal" than you would think, even when they vote Republican.
After the 2004 election there was an interesting poll that showed that the people who voted for George Bush actually didn't understand his position on a lot of issues, whereas the people who "voted against him" had a more accurate grasp of these things. Just as an example, most people want the government to Do Something about global warming, and had trouble believing Bush was against the Kyoto accord.
GVI format and conversion
.avi files, are modified Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files that have an extra list containing the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. The video is encoded in DivX4 alongside an MP3 audio stream. DivX video players can render .gvi Google Video Files without format conversion (after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi, although this method of just renaming the file extension does not work with videos purchased with DRM to protect it from piracy). Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows the user to convert them into different formats of choice. There are also privately developed software solutions, such as GVideo Fix, that can convert them to .avi format without recompression. MEncoder with "-oac copy -ovc copy" as parameters also suffices.
Google Video Files (.gvi), and latterly its
Very simple conversion with no program
It is Simple to convert a GVI or GVP file. 1st download file, then open file with notepad. There will be a URL address. You copythe URL into your browser then you get a download window from google server for files real format AVI mpep wmv ect.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
The USA used to be considered by the greatest democracy of the world.
The obvious erosion of democracy, the strong evidence of tampering with eletions, the lying about evidence in the USA in order to start a war has a horrible effect not only in the US, but globally.
One of the latest example has just recently happened in Hungary, where the re-elected socialist Prime Minister said on tape for the inner circle of his party that while in power, they were "lying day and night for the fucking country", they "fucked up the country as no other country has been fucked up in Europe", he admitted to feed even the EU with false numbers.
Once the speech went public, it triggered outrage of the voters, which lead to weeks of demonstrations, demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister. The disgraced Prime Minister has refused to resign, he and his supporters happily pointed out, that all politicians in all country lie in order to win the elections.
It's obvious, that if the Bush government had a different record, the Prime Minister of this new democracy would have had much more difficult time to stay in office, claiming that "all piliticians lie - even in the world's greatest democracy".
It's ironic, that while Mr. Bush is trying to export freedom and democracy with weapons in Iraq, his actions at home and the increasing irregularities of democracy in the USA, as documented in the excellent HBO program, spread exactly the opposite around the world.
I sympathise with what you're saying here, but I'm afraid what's probably really going on is a little worse than you imagine.
A "close election" is one of the symptoms of election fraud -- which is not to say that it's proof of election fraud -- there's no point in stealing more votes than you need to win, and if you're going to surprise people with a result that differs from what the polls predicted, it looks a little better if the difference isn't that big.
If you want a prediction for tomorrow's election: at a bare minimum, the Senate races in Virgina and Tennessee are going to be stolen -- they're projected to be close enough to make that relatively easy, and they're both "high risk" states with a lot of DRE machines in use. With just those two wins, the Republicans will -- just barely -- maintain control of the Senate.
The Democratic lead in the House looks much too big to be shaved discretely: I would predict that the Republicans will lose control of the House. Though I don't know, maybe that's crazy optimism on my part: those guys have balls of steel and no shame -- they might actually be bold enough (and short-sighted enough) to try to hold onto the house by "crook", if "hook" ain't going to work. In which case, we are in for Interesting Times (in case you thought they were interesting enough already).
Yeah, it does seem like a particularly lame argument, doesn't it? The best that I can figure is that they've decided that slashdot is an essentially liberal forum where they're not likely to win any Republican converts, so one of the best things they can do is play for cynical apathy. If they can convince the average slash-kid to stay home because it just doesn't matter, then that's a win.
I seemed like a cheep trick to present unix source code in notepad. The lines were all jumbled together and little squares were left where line endings should be. It deliberately made it look more confusing than it was.
Well okay. As long as you promise not to drown the facts in another "he said/she said" shouting match.
Oops, too late.
I think the Democrats are too timid to cross the street without a helicopter, the idea of them committing election fraud on the scale that the Republicans have been getting away with is completely laughable.
Even if it were really the case that the Democrats were just as slimey as those damn Republicans, then what? Would everything suddenly be okay? Oh wait: if you thought that were true, you might feel too apathetic to bother going out to vote. Is that the concept here?
Hm... so those specs of dirt over there justify the wallowing in the mud over here?
*phffft*. There are so many things wrong with this kind of thing, I don't know where to start. (1) You don't think Democrats internally reexamine their positions? You can turn-around without stumbling over some monday-morning quarterback explaining their grand scheme to get out the word, get out the vote, and really win one next time. (2) These people very, very rarely have a grasp of the possibility that the Democrats really have been winning: it is now eminently possible to win the vote and lose the election. The idea that The Democrats just won't shut up about election fraud is ridiculous: Mark Crispin Miller has been arguing that they're in denial about how bad the problem is, and he may well be right.
What do they have to worry about? That's the mantra of a large percentage of Americans. Probably the same ones who, over the past couple of decades, in survey after survey, say that Americans have "too much" freedom. These are the people (and companies) that scare me. Not the Republicans.
Without cheating the Republicans could lose the election, but America needs the Republicans to win. It's for the children.
When I saw this, I was wondering about the on card executable. Knowing nothign about the system, my initial thought was that this could be used to distrubute software updates (partial or total) of some kind to the machines. It would be the best way to be sure that your updates were distributed...using a very stupid system. From the hack in the film, I'll guess that these executables are not signed with some big D private key, or that the machine does not check. Even if the machine does check, it only works if the machine is trusted to check and record in a trusted register that it ran the secure code.
Also, important distinctions must be made. You would not use "encryption" to maintain the integrity of the voting information of the card. That would do you no crap good. You encrypt information to keep it secret. YOU DO NOT WANT TO KEEP VOTING RESULTS SECRET. Encryption alone will not help you know where the information came from. The information could still be altered, even if you don't know what you are altering.
I'm sorry, when was this? If it was any time in the past ten years, forgive me for missing it as I was abroad, defending the right to do so. Vote, that is. Please tell me when this voting took place.
There is simply too much glass..
Good Game Americastan, counter terrorists WIN! The Democracy Corp. is saved again.
'Dieb' means 'thief' in German, so could say that you're getting exactly what the name promises. Isn't that comforting?
If you don't want to mess about with Google Video, here's the high-quality torrent http://isohunt.com/download/14712136/hacking+democ racy
The video
:)
0 &secureurl=wQAAAFtCSd0BXfG1A817GeMkPAixlrkhjTWsskg by79JBOPbMzTAWcrRpb5kuJoGJ1uu3ONHnqzgA98N_mFLH_Oxo PJL3TYewqMSfRqbRKDo8XHf6vDHnCg-zRK8FvtnQY8zujarb8N Sd0_hDUs6cD3IP5mk7YpFQNrH9Kq47Tn33koWBKh5gcLkt8fwo 9fqi63QsZjnoESjeD16VJKF4CXrkA0qM6xtKjUEDYw-wmUnLUY iFZ1j1NC6986P-XtJdTmK7OetHXDLjwh_dmNcjDJBs_I&sigh= 13RHbEsHegQ5Ae3kWbGSv_nhTTo&begin=0&len=4917885&do cid=-7236791207107726851
The url to the video. Links directly to the file Short version above, paranoid long version below
http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=
In 2000, the Democrats said that the Republicans stole the election because of the confusing butterfly ballots and that we needed a new and modern way of voting. Now that we have it,
Yup, just that like that guest I served in the restaurant yesterday. He complain there was no sauce on the steak, so I took it back and gave him a new one with sauce but this time no fries. But guess what: he still complained. Sheesh, there's no pleasing some people.
Look, everyone agrees the old system was hopeless. Does that mean we have to accept whatever crap we are offered as a replacement? The main complaint with the voting machines is really very simple: the results are unverifiable. Even if no other actual problems were found (although they have), this really should disqualified the Diebold machines. It is a very simple point, very easy to understand, and very easy to understand the importance of. If you don't get this, you are not smart enough to vote.
The fix is well known: keep a paper trail. Now here's the hard part: That does not mean a return to badly designed paper based mechanical voting. Got that? Yes, I know the word "paper" is involved in both but don't be fooled by that. Really: they are still not the same thing, and they do not share the same problems. Trust me on this, or better still, just think it over for two seconds.
So the only question left is why would anyone oppose the fix, except if they stand to gain from errors and/or manipulation that the fix would prevent?
sudo ergo sum
> who works as a pole worker volunteer
Pole worker eh? Shiny brass or the ones with the power lines on them?
--
Go read NPATs on candidates at Vote Smart
If you don't have the time to watch the entire thing ... start watching at 1:05:15 until at least 1:16:00 ... which includes Diebold stating that the memory cards cannot be hacked without the system knowing, and then watching the process of the memory cards being hacked and altering the outcome of an election (and the system not registering the fraud). All it takes is to preset the cards with a number of negative votes for one candidate and the same number of positive votes for another candidate (thus not altering the total number of votes cast).
"... rabid bush haters ..."
Bush has given the world plenty of reason to dislike him: George W. Bush comedy and tragedy.
"... but you act like bush has minions at every voting station actively working against those who would vote against him."
You completely missed the point. You apparently didn't watch the HBO movie, and haven't been reading about Diebold events. The voting machines are computers, and it is easy to program them to give results. In 2003, the Diebold CEO said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to (President Bush) next year.". 'The Cleveland Plain Dealer also reported that O'Dell was one of President Bush's top fund-raisers, ranked in the elite "Pioneer" echelons for collecting a minimum of $200,000.'
George W. Bush is the most disrespected U.S. president, by far: George W. Bush comedy videos.
In 2000, the Democrats said that the Republicans stole the election because of the confusing butterfly ballots and that we needed a new and modern way of voting.
No, that we needed an accurate way of voting. Problem is, Diebold machines are less reliable than the infamous paper punch ballots used in Florida.
Is it really that unbelievable that there are actually people out here who don't vote the same way that you do? Is it really that unbelievable to you that roughly 50% of the American electorate feels differently about the issues than you do?
And this is why the right wing needs to die: constantly refusing to take any responsibility for their own mess while making a mountain out of a molehill of irrelevant issues in a pathetic attempt at distraction. You know, like hyperventilating over a dumb, botched joke from John Kerry while rationalizing the unrationalizable posting of nuclear bomb designs on the web.
222D/1I/212R 50D/2I/48R
+1, insightful
-5, right-wing nut
I mean sure rigging elections is bad and probably has been done for thousands of years. I just honestly dont know whether people would make such a big deal if it wasnt bush in office. Lets say John McCain had won in 2000. I think just the fact that he is a personable guy, people wouldnt be so apt to claim voter fraud. Bush is pretty well hated, so it makes one wonder how he won i guess... I totally agree that if it wasn't Bush in office, voter fraud accussations would not be made so loudly by folks like Robert Kennedy and Rolling Stones mag...
Bullshit. You don't have documentation of that.
Did you notice, by the way, that the only actual fraud in 2004 the HBO documentary FOUND was 200 votes stolen FROM Bush in the "troublesome in 2000" Florida precinct they went after first?
(Of course this is still consistent with the theory that, in 2004, the Republicans knew how to rig things untracably and the Democrats had to do their cheating in a tracable way.)
But I'm happy to see the R's take all the heat on this one. That way the D's will be SO paranoid about having things yanked out from under them that they may actually be willing to sign on to a bill that attacks ALL forms of vote fraud - even the ones massively in their favor - if it fixes the potentially overriding "black box voting" problem.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the R officials believe that the Ds do most of the cheating and derive most of the benefits. (And that, even if they were being used in the R's favor, the blackbox hacks are now both blown and available to all parties.) So they'd perceive such a bill as being in their favor.
For the rest of us, eliminating ALL cheating, computerized or otherwise, is in our interest and what we want.
Right?
I think that documentary was brilliant:
- Democrats see the Republicans stealing the elections.
- Republicans see the Democrats stealing the elections.
- So both of them work for cleaning up the process.
Which is exactly what *I* want. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Posted anonymously because raising questions about Democrats can be risky business on Slashdot."
Normally I could care less what an AC has to say. But that is the most pathetic reason you could have come up with. And some say the Daemoncrats are whiners!
That is exactly how the UltraCons and Fundys operate. The only way they can feel important is if they can say they are being persecuted. "Those mean old liberals will hurt me if I say something they don't like." Which of course absolves them of all sin when they go out and beat a homo to death or blow up an abortion clinic.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
...that had no paper trail. At the end, the old lady running the place gave me a sticker that said "I Voted". I told her, that it must be a misprint... it should say: "I Voted?" ..For the record... this was PA district 06.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Why don't you stick to serving those of us who actually do something meaningful our meals?
Agreed, although I think that the primary system probably isn't the worst part of it.
When you register to vote, you can declare a party affiliation. In most states, it's basically "Republican," or "Democrat," or you just stay "unaffiliated" (aka Independent). In some states you can choose one of the minor parties as a formal affiliation (Libertarian, Green, Socialist, etc.), though I've never seen this personally. If you choose a party, then it usually gets reported to that party, and you get on their mailing list, etc. (Although most of the time if you're unaffiliated, you just get both parties' junk mail anyway.) You don't have to register with a party to vote in the general elections. Of course, this often means you get the choice of picking between two equally unattractive-but-electable major-party candidates (or in many states, one electable candidate from that state's major party), and a plurality of unelectable third-party protest candidates.
So what get for being registered, is the ability to vote in that party's primary elections. In most states, a party's primaries are open only to people who are registered as being affiliated with that party. So if you want to vote in the Democratic primary and help choose the Democratic candidate for the general election, you have to be registered as a Democrat. The primaries take place several months before the general elections and are totally separate -- your vote or participation in the primary is unrelated to your vote in the general election. So I could have, using the last Presidential election as an example, been registered as a Democrat, voted for Howard Dean in the primary, but then voted for George Bush in the general election. But someone registered as a Republican wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary; they would only vote in the general election.
I've switched my party affiliation back and forth in order to vote in primaries several times. In my mind, it's silly to refuse to be registered for a party just because you don't support what they stand for. It's only (in most states) by registering that you have any say in the party's choice of candidates, which can be as important as the general election in some cases. In my mind, registering for a party is a sign of involvement, but not a sign of support per se.
But you're very right in that there is a whole lot that's screwed up about the U.S. electoral system in general, and parties and primaries are only the very beginning. Opportunities for unscrupulous behavior abound (and are quite frequently taken advantage of, IMO); not to mention the obviously undemocratic parts of the process (Electoral College, I'm looking at you), or systemic disenfranchisement of third parties (difficulty of getting on ballots, lack of proportional representation, "winner take all" national elections). The system, quite frankly, is pretty close to fucked.
However, given how messed up the system is, if you're a citizen and want to get the most 'say' that you can, then you need to play the party-affiliation game, get involved in the primaries, and help make sure that candidates that you support make it to the general elections. That way, you can still cast your third-party/spoiled-ballot/etc. protest vote in the general election, but you're not giving up more say in the political process than you have to. If you don't attempt to influence the system through whatever means you have available, at every possible opportunity, then you're not protesting, you're just bending over and taking it in the rear.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Most congressional districts are so gerrymandered that there are only a handful of seats that are truly in competition.
There is only so much hacking of votes one could do without it being obvious, in this election.
The few districts that have actual competition is where I'd watch out for.
If you really want to show your discontent with how corrupt the system is: Vote Libertarian.
The best part is, you can point out how corrupt both parties are and go away with a clean conscience.
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If Republicans take Chicago or Illinois, you know there's some massive fraud involved.
He had two choices: fail to show bravery (by supporting a popular position), or show stupidity (by attacking his own side). He went with the one that wasn't stupid.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Why don't you stick to serving those of us who actually do something meaningful our meals?
Why would you care about them?
Anyone care to explain why ?
Are you fucking INSANE?!
This is the typical bullshit that the parent was talking about!
EVERYTHING IS A PLOT! THAT SLASHDOT POST WAS A REPUBLICAN PLOT!!!!
How about in stead of pretending that the parent even implied that two corrupt parties was a good thing (how stupid do you have to be to pull that out of what he said!?) or that he was trying to dissuade people from voting (again, another completely baseless and idiotic presumption to make), you quit forcing yourself into the pathetic victim slot no matter how impossible it is.
Oh, and the whole point of that diatribe was to dissuade people from voting, destroy the environment, and invade North Korea -but Im sure you figured that out already.
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It could be as simple as a super-tough box with pull-down punch levers that stamp a whole of a specific shape out of a card. There's no mistaken a circular whole for a square or a triangular one. If the device is simple enough, it wouldn't be possible to screw with.
Then the only issues are: 1) whether people can pull the right 'lever' (always a problem, but again best addressed with big mechanical solutions - no butterfly ballots please, but big levers with 6" circular handles with the candidates name and photograph printed on); and 2) security in counting the ballots (again, a simple mechanical or electrical counter is harder to mess with than a computer-based one, and since even the electronic voting machines have a 'paper trail' physical counting is still a requirement if only as a fallback).
Well, that's how I would solve it anyway.
A-Bomb
According to this post a study by two UC BERKELEY professors determined that there was no detectable fraud in the voting machines.
You've got quite a good analysis here, but somehow managed to reach the completely wrong conclusion.
You say that the margin of error is too high, for example. Let's think about this from the other perspective: you could just as well say that the "margin of winning" is too low! You've noted that elections have become closer over time, but failed to notice that this has happened on purpose: the districts are gerrymandered specifically in order to make this happen.
You've also realized that the ballots are big and complicated, but missed the obvious conclusion that it's simply too much stuff to vote on all at once!
You say that the media reports the results too quickly, before the votes can be counted. But why would you jump to the conclusion that it's the paper ballots that are the problem?
It seems to me that the problem isn't necessarily with the paper ballots, but with the voting process itself. What we need are more frequent elections with fewer items to vote for in each, voting disticts that don't alternately disenfranchise voters or lose the results in the noise, and either more poll workers so that the ballots can be counted faster or a prohibition on releasing any results until they're all done.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Except that there is no exit poll discrepancies. The highest discrepancy I've seen for any of the contested states in the 2004 election is a difference of 5% between the exit-poll result and the final result. Well within the margin of error. What's more, the conspiracy nutcases, as always, have chosen to latch on to the exit polls that best match their theory of voter fraud. Selection bias, yada yada. Take Ohio for example; Slate's exit polls actually show a result closer to the end results (2%) than for states with papertrails. (link)
And as for the general accuracy of exit-polls, well, suffice to say it's usually not all that good.. (link)
One of a Kind <-- You probably won't be interested..
That link should be this. I mis-copied it somehow.
In fact, if we can build a fully electronic system that is reliable and accountable, we can rid ourselves of that electoral collage crap that we deal with today.
Um, no; it'll take a Constitutinal ammendment. Electronics has nothing to do with it. We could have had a popular vote for president all along, with paper or lever machines or any of the other votings mechanisms. But we didn't, because the Electoral College is in the US Constitution. Until this is ammended, a popular vote for president is illegal in the US.
The closest we could come to it is to eliminate the per-state winner-take-all system that most states use. That's actually just a tradition; it has no legal basis. In fact, a few states divide their electoral votes according to the popular vote. If all states did this, it would be close to a popular vote. But again, note that this has nothing to do with electronics. We could have done it from the start. But tradition can have a powerful hold on a system.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Really? I missed that.
Dude, man. Calm down. Just tell yourself "it's only slashdot". Could be I read you folks wrong, after all we're all a bunch of crazed paranoids here. So just relax.
(And I promise not to tell your boss how easy it was to spot you.)
In the polling place there will be a station with a scanner where you can have the barcode scanned while you're wearing headphones so you can hear your selections read to you. The ballot does not have to be removed from the folder; your privacy is assured. Then you go to the ballot box for depositing of your ballot.
How do you know the code running on that scanner is the same code that ultimately counts the votes? How do you know that the scanner won't read your ballot the way you intend, but ultimately mark your vote for other candidates? You can't know because the process is invisible. If you think that any amount of security can prevent this, have a look at such successful endeavors as "CSS." Do you *really* trust election officials to be responsible for a vote counting system that cannot be observed? (i.e., any electronic counting system)
The counting of votes absolutely must be observed by 3rd parties. Any other solution is absolutely, 100% unacceptable.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
This just sounds completely wrong. Trying reading the Freeman and Bliefuss book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
Freeman and Bleifuss work with the Edison/Mitofsky data, for the NEP polls. Slate is a pip-squeak in comparison. (And you're accusing them of "selecting" their polls?)
Ah yes, the usual mysterpollster link. Allow me to reiterate that you should look at Freeman and Bliefuss. The NEP exit-polls have historically been pretty good.
This was the worst piece of crap I've seen in a while. I guess I set my expectations too high when I first heard of the "documentary" a few days ago, but still...
I was hoping for some technical detail, if not in the computer science aspect of the problem then at least in the administrative aspect. Instead all I got was one lopsided rant after another. That woman went on television claiming she found a huge gaping hole in the security of Gems, only for us to find that it consisted of double clicking various icons in the windows GUI until you open up the database in Access and edit the records manually. Somehow I'm not so scared, since this would require access to the tabulators and files anyway, and those people would pretty much already have control over the situation.
And the way they kept droning on and on - most of the people who were involved on the activist side seemed idiotic, irrational and unquestionably emotional, whereas the diebold representatives and neutral parties were far more level-headed. And that's what this was all about, making a huge scene for the camera. The part where they collect the garbage thrown out by an election center in Florida was staged. If you'll notice, she deliberately waited to open the garbage until an employee came by, so she could start a nice fight for the camera. The argument terminated with a cry that the activist was getting all upset over the mishandling of a mere sample ballot.
Sometimes the advocates for the good side are so detestable that you want to join up with the enemy out of pure spite. I feel that way every time I see a bullshit anti-smoking ad (most of the ones with that kid ranting about "zephyr"), and I felt the exact same way after watching this.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
From TFM:
"America, the world's greatest democracy--"
Ah man, so close to not sucking, but then within the first 5 words, you had to go and get it wrong, right out the gate. America is not a democracy. It never was. It was never intended to be. It never should be.
I guess "Hacking the Republic" isn't as catchy as "Hacking Democracy", but going for catchy instead of truthful and accurate makes this immediately suspect.
Fail.
Try again.