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Ohio Recount Rigging Case Goes to Court
The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that the trial of the three election workers accused of rigging the 2004 presidential election recount in Cuyahoga County is finally underway. As you may recall, this was the case where poll workers 'randomly' selected the precincts to recount by first eliminating from consideration precincts where the number of ballots handed out on Election Day failed to match the number of ballots cast and, then opening the ballot boxes in private and pre-counting until they found cases which would match up. What is interesting here is that they have already admitted doing this and that it was clearly counter to the letter and the spirit of the law, but still insist it wasn't really 'wrong,' presumably since they only did it to avoid having to go to the bother of a full recount as required by law.
So apperently the way this works is that if I do something wrong to basically avoid doing more work later, I'm supposed to get off the hook? If they aren't convicted mare sure to keep this news away from small children everywhere or there will be alot of angry parents!
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I can only hope that their excuse of "it was too hard to keep our democracy" falls on deaf ears and they are punished for their actions. That said I don't even know how this could be considered a reasonable argument since they had to count the boxes twice if I understand thing correctly.
More clearly:
When the party in power in the state or county wins it is the will of the people.
When the other party wins, it was stolen.
The initial count showed her trailing Rossi by 261 votes Recount #1 diminished that lead to only 42 votes. Recount #2 gave her a 10-vote lead. Enter the courts, tossing in some ballots, tossing out others. The final results had Christine Gregoire ahead by 130 votes
... and not CNN. I suppose if we had a respectable voter turn out, then big media might think we would find election fraud newsworthy. I guess the president just isn't as important as "American Idol".
We are all just people.
LOL recounts.
Republicans "asked county auditors statewide to reconsider ballots that were rejected on Election Day." Because apparently when Democrats can't punch out a hole right, they're stupid idiots, but when Republicans can't fill out a ballot, their voice deserves to be heard.
If you're going to point fingers and call hypocrisy, stand on less shaky ground next time. It also helps when you're not trying to defend people that explicitly broke the law.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
On when they would do a full hand-count, if needed: "Our plan was to regroup after Christmas and just work through it." That quote strikes me as awfully suspicious itself. If the election results were in dispute, waiting a couple months to actually start counting all the ballots by hand seems incredibly lax, at best.
What is interesting here is that they have already admitted doing this and that it was clearly counter to the letter and the spirit of the law, but still insist it wasn't really 'wrong,' presumably since they only did it to avoid having to go to the bother of a full recount as required by law.
Laziness is a great excuse for election fraud.
"Because apparently when Democrats can't punch out a hole right, they're stupid idiots, but when Republicans can't fill out a ballot, their voice deserves to be heard."
Hey, are you calling those Palm Beach County butterfly ballot Buchanan voters stupid?
"Nyah nyah nyah, Democrats this... Republicans that..."
It isn't about who won the election. It's about them violating the law and compromising the electoral process that they swore to uphold.
But I know that in the bottom-feeding Republican mind, it's all about tit-for-tat.
I'm shocked-- the Republican party quite possibly did something illegal and unethical. I mean, it's not like they lied about an entire war, or kept a child molester from prosecution, or took bribes, or had drunken stripper parties in the Watergate with lobbyists!
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov
Would it be enough for the Dems to recall him?
"If you're going to point fingers and call hypocrisy, stand on less shaky ground next time."
As a general rule, why should someone do this? When it comes to politics these days (always?) it seems you would be on fairly safe ground whenever you pointed your finger and called hypocrisy. Safe as to being right that is, not safe as to not being one while doing the pointing.
"It also helps when you're not trying to defend people that explicitly broke the law."
Now this statement is true in general, I am not up on the particulars in this instance to know of it applies here.
Feel free to take this whole post with a grain of salt. (Dash?)
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Please... you have a better chance of finding a do-do bird in Cuyahoga County. These workers were just too lazy to do their job.
Yes, Washington has some voting problems, but this is talking about the Ohio recount.
echo YOUR_OPINION >
Yeah, I would have figured it was the other party.
It's only hypocrisy if the GOP isn't genuinely a good deal more ruthless than the Dems. I'd argue that point with you, but unless your head is jammed permanently up your butt I suspect you already know it's true.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
-- Homer Simpson
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Less clearly:
When the party you affiliate yourself with wins, it is the will of the people.
When the other party wins, it was stolen.
Paper beats rock. Rock beats scissors. Science beats romance.
Dino Rossi asked a judge to review the election. The (Republican) judge in (conservative) Chelan County heard the evidence and ruled that the (Republican) Secretary of State had followed the law. Rossi did not appeal, accusing the (fractured) state Supreme Court of bias.
The biggest problem with that election was outrageous sloppiness in (Democratic) King County. It looks more like sloppiness than fraud, given that the problem is that they misplaced and didn't count thousands of ballots that were likely to have favored Gregoire. The Secretary of State excoriated them for that and other screwups. (They also tried to cover up a spectacular failure to keep a record of how many absentee ballots came in).
For more about King County, see blackboxvoting.com.
WELCOME our new human overlords...
While it's good to scrutinize problems with our electoral system, I think there's too much of an obsession with Ohio. It wasn't the narrowest race, nor was it the one with the most irregularities, but it's where all the hindsight gets focused. It's easy to see why... Ohio was the state that came closest to swinging the election the other way, and thus becomes the center of all the "OMG Bush stoled teh election AGAIN!" rhetoric. However, this emphasis exclusively on Ohio (and Florida in the previous election) overlooks the issues everywhere else. It effectively says, who cares if there were problems in Michigan (or wherever), Kerry won that state so let's not worry about the election there. Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.
Does this mean we'll be seeing criminal charges against others who subvert the voting process, say by shipping machines with different software than they submitted for certification, or trying to obstruct voting on election day?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Am I the only person that thinks that willfully subverting the electoral process, on which every thing in our country's governance hinges, should be tried as NOTHING LESS than treason?
I don't care if you're running for dog catcher... the democratic process should be defended with the most uncompromising principles possible, should it not?
I always get a kick out of how blindly everyone around here thrashes conservatives and praises liberals. I'm a liberal myself, but I don't pretend for one second that the liberal politicians or groups are any "better" or "worse" than their conservative counterparts; even independents have their problems.
In reference to your assertion of cranial-rectal immersion, the Republicants (spelling error mine) happened to have the power, and thus the ability to be ruthless with it, which they undeniably did. As for the Democrats, it's difficult to abuse power that you don't have. But now that the Democrats have the power, they are already moving to abuse it.
In other words, don't be a shill for a particular party. They both suck and neither cares about your rights.
Me
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Actually, it's just the opposite. Lazy folks don't do preparation work and end up with even MORE work later. No, these folks were VERY dilligent VERY early making darn sure that they could eliminate any scent of voting irregularities.
A lazy Republican operative would have let someone choose precincts at random, counted just the three and then found out that they then had to recount every single ballot.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The law says they have to manually recount a randomly selected 3%, and if that comes out close enough they can do the rest of the recount by running it through the machine again. Otherwise they would have had to manually recount them all.
So they did a quick search for precincts that might match (e.g., skip the ones where the total number of votes was way off or that otherwise looked fishy), counted some of them until the had 3% that would pass muster, and that became their "random sample" for the public recount.
What is amazing is that they (&, IIRC, the voting machine tech that helped them) admitted this to the people doing the recount.
--MarkusQ
--Diebold
To a Democratic society, elections are our most sacred ritual. Desecrating elections should be one of our highest crimes. We should treat those who murder democracy at least as harshly as those who murder people. I'd say a proof solid election fraud case should be a 10-20 years in prison. A further insult would be putting these individuals' jailhouse photos on the election training materials so that everyone KNOWS what happens to those who subvert democracy.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
"Me"
The American Way. Our values do persist in these troubled times! Hurrah!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You forgot the issuance of press credentials and the subsequent destruction of visitation records for a certain male prostitute.
[url]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/12305
One has to wonder exactly who he was "interviewing" after hours?
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Aren't they?
Plus, it's a heavily Democratic county.
The latest Slashdot meme.
So they precounted a selection likely to match and eliminated ones that where the count was wrong in order to avoid a recount.
So how many precincts did they have to eliminate to get their 34 'matching' precincts and who supplied the counting machines for those precincts that didn't match?
Are anyone aside from Republicans saying that? Their credibility just so happens to be pretty shot... Oh, and also, they have a lot to gain by making that fatuous argument.
Perhaps the Democrats aren't child molesting, war mongering election thieves? Perhaps they aren't election thieves at all? Of course, this sort of thing is hard for a Republican to understand. Nonetheless, it's a point that you may want to consider.
> When the party in power in the state or county wins it is the
> will of the people.
I don't think there's any question about the outcome in this case. From TFA:
# Candidates for president from the Green and Libertarian parties requested
# the Ohio recount. State laws and regulations specify how a recount works.
In other words, the Democrats, who lost by a narrow margin, did not request the recount. If there'd been any real question about the outcome, they would have done so. So that's not what's at stake.
What *is* at stake is that we CANNOT have election officials violating election laws and getting away with it. They acted to avoid a painful and expensive recount process that would not change anything, but they did not have the authority to do that, and we cannot let them off with a stern lecture and a slap on the wrist, because if we do, it'll happen again, and again, and again, and at some point it'll happen when it matters. I hope the courts rake them over the coals but *good*. Make an example out of them: we will not tolerate election law violations.
The 2004 election isn't what's at stake here. The 2008 and 2012 and 2016 elections, and every one that follows, are what's at stake.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The events you mentioned took place over a span of 40 years. Furthermore, they were done by a number of different people in different times with different political climates. The Republicans did those things in the span of year. Overachieving is great, but let's be sensible here. I don't claim that the Democrats are saints, but the Republicans completely discredited themselves in twelve months. That's why we have a democratic Congress.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov
You started out strong, but lost all credibility when you linked to Michelle Malkin...
I agree 100%. As I have said many times, I wouldn't be all that interested in having Kerry as President, though I don't like Bush either. But if we're going to have an election between two worthless shills I'd still insist on having an honest election between them.
Further, we should be (and, thankfully, some of us are) looking at the recent midterms as well. Cases like the guy that got no votes (even though he voted for himself), the close House race where 18000 votes went missing, and so on need to be investigated. Further, we should be paying a lot more attention to things like Rahm Emanuel's involvement in the timing of the Foley scandal, which constitute election rigging of a different sort.
And finally, we need to keep clear that this isn't a partisan issue. I am a registered Republican, but I want nothing to do with cheaters on "my side." This is actually a pretty common reaction at the grass roots level -- for instance, left leaning sites are as annoyed at Rahm as the right leaning sites.
Even in hyper-partisan times, the red team and the blue team (again, almost exclusively at the grass roots) have common ground in wanting a fair system.
--MarkusQ
FTA: "In Cuyahoga, a Democratic stronghold where about 600,000 ballots were cast, the recount did not have much effect on the results. Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six." Oh ... my ... God, Kerry actually gained votes and Bush lost them! This is most certainly the work of those evil Republicans!
FTA: "Kerger said he believes there are two reasons, generally, why an elections board would precount before a recount. The first is to change the results of the vote, which he does not believe happened. The second, he speculated, was that 'the workers were so tired and didn't want to hassle with doing a hand recount.'" If this whole process was biased, it was biased in favor of the Dems.
My advice: RTFA. There was no fraud. The election workers were just too lazy to do their jobs properly. I'm guessing they must have been liberals because it's obvious you were too lazy to read the article before blaming Republicans, but that's just a guess.
I mean, it's not like they lied about an entire war, or kept a child molester from prosecution, or took bribes, or had drunken stripper parties in the Watergate with lobbyists!Well, I think the other AC handled that one quite well.
Sure, sure, just like it's no big deal if somebody opens fire in a shopping mall, so long as they don't hit anybody. Or like the way it's OK to swipe people's credit cards, as long as you don't buy anything with them.
--MarkusQ
When a Republican wins a close election, it was stolen.
When a Dem wins a close election, it's the will of the people.
See Governor, Washington state. How many selective recounts did it take until the Dem won?
Starting Score: 0 pointsModeration 0
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Heh. I do believe I find the moderation on this post more interesting than the actual flamewar that it inspired. I almost wish we had meta-meta-moderation so I could see how this plays out...
"Victory passes back and forth between men." -- Homer "The will of Zeus was accomplished." -- Homer
Knowing Kerry, he'd probably pardon them for the various charges of election rigging, domestic wiretaps, ware crimes and other violations of international law, missing Iraq reconstruction funds, etc., etc. and then announce the next day that he hadn't meant to pardon them, but it was too late now and we should just move on.
--MarkusQ
Agreed. If these people broke the law they should spend the rest of their lives in jail. They took away a fundamental freedom of the people of their county. As a result their freedom should be taken away.
Developers: We can use your help.
You aren't the only one to have that reaction. The fact that such a large proportion of them apparently voted for Bush started some people wondering if the votes had been counted correctly.
Thus the 3rd party call for a recount, which the poll workers botched.
It's the very fact that the county is so heavily Democratic that got people wondering in the first place.
--MarkusQ
Oh, the irony. My remarks about Kerry were not intended as a troll.
It was a botched attempt at a joke.
**sigh** I suppose I deserve it.
--MarkusQ
But that was the law - first count was close enough to call a recount, second recount happened because the first was close also - and she happened to win that one.
Good thing too - Rossi actually quoted as saying Alcohol and Cigarette taxes hurt families. (don't think too hard about that one).
Don't dismiss the idea out of hand that sin taxes hurt (poor) families. I think a good argument can be made for it.
Can't say I disagree with a word you said. I lament our two (one and a half?) party system almost every day, and if the Dems win the trifecta in 2008, I'll be on their case on a daily basis as well.
But that being said, I still don't think they hold a candle to the Repugnicans (I prefer that mispelling) when it comes to ruthlessness, corruption, and contempt for constitutional limits. They will at least pay lip service to the notion of a public interest, and while they'll surely have their own scandals w.r.t. lobbyists and such, I doubt that they'll set up the same kind of brazen one-stop-shopping monopoly on corruption that the GOP did with their K Street Project.
And don't even get me started about who's benefitting from our middle east entanglements and who's not, and how that might affect their willingness to (ever) get off the Gravy Train...
But now that the Democrats have the power, they are already moving to abuse it.
Problem: at least two of the three examples you list are complete bullshit. And since the subject is hypocracy, where you appropriatly porportionally outraged at, for example, Tom Delay auctioning off chairmanships to the biggest fundraisers?
No offense, but I find it hilarious that a user named "Black-Man" is telling us what it's like in Cuyahoga Falls. If you're local, you know that it's usualy called Caucasian Falls for a reason.
For the rest of the Slashdot crowd, the Falls is still one of those places where you can get a ticket for driving while black. Or poor. I got pulled over once for simply having a crappy car. The cops there work very hard to keep "that element" out of their neighborhood, if you know what I mean.
Ohio can be a pretty embarrassing place to live.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The real truth is that when it comes to politics, a portion of the supporters of every party believes winning > fairness. All this talk about hypocrisy is just attempting to hide this fact behind partisan blinders.
I think it should be a general policy that any sin taxes on addictive substances get corresponding free medical treatments.
It's idiotic to tax people to try to reduce cigarette use, and not provide at least minimum levels of treatment to get them off of it if they want to.
It's really funny, sin taxes are odd leftovers from the progressive era, and are just kinda sitting around without anyone saying anything about them, but imagine how much outcry there would be if someone tries to implement them today.
That said, I don't think there should be sin 'taxes' on cigarettes, because I think tobacco companies should be dismantled, and tobacco products produced and sold by the government. I'm sorry, I believe in the corporate death penalty for companies that have operated in the manner they did. I think we should seize all their asserts and dismantle them, but I realize that is unlikely and I would happy if they, and everyone else, were just barred from producing tobacco products.
I think we should treat tobacco like we should treat heroin, where the government is the only entity allowed to produce products with it in it, because no company can be trusted to sell such an addictive substance, and it should be sold in carefully regulated places to keep it from children, I'm thinking more OTC in pharmacies than gas stations.
(Yeah, I know don't sell heroin like that either.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So well that you basically made the case of your parent poster for him/her.
You could be right, and I actually hope that you are. In any event, we will see, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high.
Either party would call foul if they lost an election and the
voting anomalies were as great as they were in the last two
presidential elections!
The votes counted were outside of the possible margin of error of
several exit polls in key areas. This means that the votes had been
tampered with. Had they not George W Bush would NOT be President
right now. The war in Iraq, which is part of the Wolfowitz
Doctrine, would not have happened and THOUSANDS of Americans and
HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of Iraqs would still be alive.
These elections were stolen and people are dead because of it. I
call it treason and thing that the people involved in stealing the
country should be hanged until dead. All of them.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Ultimately, you want a system where true recounts aren't needed (but would be guaranteed, in full, if called for). This requires a system that is essentially non-partisan. There would be no quango (govt. appointee) in charge of running the elections or counting the votes. The separation of powers should ensure that a person cannot be elected by the same people they selected.
Some would argue that this is a case for secure electronic voting, provided the code was formally designed and thoroughly audited, and provided the votes cast were retained in some form (electronically or on paper), not merely tallied. Others would argue that it should require paper ballots but where each ballot box is under supervision so can't "go missing" (as often happens) and where each and every ballot is counted by three or more people - no statistical sampling, no "it fell under the table" and no "oh, I didn't think those mattered".
(In all cases, postal ballots should absolutely NEVER be handed to a politically aligned group for forwarding. In fact, if we're going to go with electronic ballots, postal ballots should not exist - you should be able to vote totally securely and totally anonymously - say via a tor-like setup - from any Internet-capable location. What we should not have is political parties able to dump ballots they don't like, which has happened and which will no doubt happen again.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You dumbass, no one kept Mel Reynolds from being prosecuted from having an affair with a 16-year old campaign intern. He was forced to resign from Congress, charged, and convicted. (I have to point out that 16 is of age, and his affair wasn't technically illegal, so they had to come up with weird charges, hence 5 years instead of the 30 or so he'd have gotten if she was 15.)
He was sentenced August 22, 1995 to five years in prison. Everyone remember that, although I realize the person I'm responding to probably can't count. While in prison, he was charged and convicted of, like, a dozen counts of fraud and SEC violations. (Which was also from his campaign. Damn, that place was crime central.) He was sentenced to six and a half more years.
In January 2001, Clinton let him be released to a half-way house, that he lived at, leaving only to work, to earn money for him family.
This was technically something like three years into his fraud sentence, because his sex sentence was shortened to 2.5 years, and he'd probably been out early on his fraud sentence too. Also note that he wasn't pardoned, he wasn't even paroled. He was put on a work release program to earn money for his family, which is allowable for up to 15 months before release, but he was still a year away from that. The rules didn't allow work release yet, and Clinton overrode them from a personal plea from the former Congressman so he could 'earn money for his family'.
Even pretending the charges resulting from the affair hadn't been shortened, it would have ended six month before that, on August 21, 2000. At most it can be claimed Clinton got him out of a fraud charge, although that's a pretty silly thing to call 'Work release happened a year early'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Here's a meta-meta opinion for you: One thing that's particularly annoying about this kind of over-moderation is that it can actually lead to the poster getting banned from posting for a significant period. The dynamic I've encountered is that population A, which likes the post, moderates it up to +5. Then population B notices it and starts moderating it down. Population A tries to "defend" the post by up-moderating to cancel out the down-mods. They fight over the post like two dogs fighting over a bone. You can easily end up with a situation where the post gets moderated down to -1, and then stays there after that. In that situation, a post that started out at 2 could end up having had 10 + mods, and 13 - mods. If you make a couple of controversial posts like this, you can easily get banned. It's happened to me (once, in the ~5 years I've been on slashdot). What's more common, and also really annoying, is what happens when you post negatively on a topic where most of the posters and moderators are fanboys. Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of saying something negative about BSD on a BSD topic, or something negative about Freenet on a Freenet story.
Find free books.
Yeah? Which two? I guess you could say that they're "bullshit" as long as you don't mind the gov't telling us who can say what and where they can say it. As long as you don't mind the gov't making one have their "papers in order" before one can engage in certain types of political speech. Personally, I mind. A lot.
And since the subject is hypocracy, where you appropriatly porportionally outraged at, for example, Tom Delay auctioning off chairmanships to the biggest fundraisers?
Yes, I was. If you read my post, you would have been able to see that I am actually quite hostile to both parties. But, apparently, you are only hostile to one and you think that the other has your interests at heart. Pffft, all I can say is "grab the KY and bend over," because you're gonna get screwed.
This has always been a no brainer to me. This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The people ARE the government and they govern through their duly appointed representatives. When this system is circumvented by any means to place people in positions of power who were NOT duly elected by the people, then that is a change of government or, quite literally, the overthrow of the government of the United States, which under US code is punishable by fines and up to 20 years in prison.
It could indeed be argued that such an act would constitute an act of war and therefore rise to treason but I really doubt any court would accept that (Even thought I would advocate it but I am rather intolerant of such acts).
But the fact is, the government of the United States has indeed been overthrown. We the People are no longer in control because the authority of our duly appointed representatives, and by proxy our own authority, has been usurped.
The inevitable argument of "well wouldn't you do the same if you felt it would save the country" has popped up here as well. The answer is a very vehement NO! The drafters of our constitution were not some ignorant hacks that threw something together that just happened to work. They were long time students of political theory who had spent years studying various real world applications of political concepts. They based our system of government on what has worked in the real world down through history, and time has proved them right. Read up on John Adams' statements on France's attempts and failures to form a new government. This system is a critical balance. You upset that balance at your own risk. It must, above all, remain a government of the people whether you or I agree with the decisions of the people or not. It must be our representatives in control. Not those appointed by some individual or small group who think they know better.
So now you have been overthrown. What do you intend to do about it?
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop
Of course, if you were looking at this from an engineering perspective, you would realize there is going to be a certain amount of voter fraud in any election, and develop a system where the outcome would not change based on say a 5% or a 10% miscount of votes (or somewhere around the max voter fraud you can do without it being blatently obvious that the election has been rigged). You make the system fault tolerant.
o d/dp/0571220126 )... although the book is more about companies than politics, a lot of the same principles apply.
Any system that pretends that there is no voting fraud, and depends on there being no voter fraud to function properly, is like developing a network protocal that catastrophicly fails if so much as a single packet is lost. Part of the trouble with politics is that we have given what are really communications systems (an election IS a communication system), a certain moral content. It is "right" that all votes need to be counted, and "wrong" that some should be lost, so we end up designing a system on a rather arbitrary set of moral beliefs instead of engineering it the same way we would a telephone switching system.
One book that kinda goes into the problem is "WHY MOST THINGS FAIL: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod ( http://www.amazon.com/Most-Things-Fail-Paul-Ormer
It is not a voting problem. This is how a recount is suposed to go.
I live in Washington and followed the election cloesely. Here is a bgi fact most republican crybabies dont want you to know. Each recount counted MORE votes. That means that of the initial ballots that were not counted for whatever reason many of them were eventually counted. There was incidents of ballot boxes getting lost and not counted only to be found later. Just becuase there was an upset to the original election doesn't mean anythign was stolen. Im sure most of us have heard that whenever to TOTAL votes goes up its good for the dems. The GOP wants more ignorance, more apapthy, and less votes. That is how they win.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
There was a recount in this case because STATE LAW DICTATED THAT IT BE SO. Are you seriously suggsting that Ohio does not have the right to perform recounts, just because it offends your political sensibilities? Ohio should tolerate election fraud just because other states may have abused the recount process? No offense (just kidding, offense is totally intended), but fuck you. Fuck you right in the ear. Recounts are awesome. I'll take a hundred recounts, if the alternative is the selection of the head of state by a council of presidential appointees. If it requires a hundred recounts and total openness about the results of every single ballot, well then good. It's about time.
These traitors have already admitted that they broke the law, and rigged the recount. It doesn't matter who won -- they rigged the recount and broke the law. The interfered with the democratic process. They need to hang. It's as simple as that.
I know you're bitter that America is turning against the politics of cowardice, torture, paranoid delusions, and perpetual warfare -- but that's just progress, and you've got to learn to accept with it. The world described in 1984 was supposed to be a dire warning of things to come, not a proposal for the utopian society.
Here's a meta-meta opinion for you: One thing that's particularly annoying about this kind of over-moderation is that it can actually lead to the poster getting banned from posting for a significant period. The dynamic I've encountered is that population A, which likes the post, moderates it up to +5. Then population B notices it and starts moderating it down. Population A tries to "defend" the post by up-moderating to cancel out the down-mods. They fight over the post like two dogs fighting over a bone. You can easily end up with a situation where the post gets moderated down to -1, and then stays there after that. In that situation, a post that started out at 2 could end up having had 10 + mods, and 13 - mods. If you make a couple of controversial posts like this, you can easily get banned. It's happened to me (once, in the ~5 years I've been on slashdot). What's more common, and also really annoying, is what happens when you post negatively on a topic where most of the posters and moderators are fanboys. Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of saying something negative about BSD on a BSD topic, or something negative about Freenet on a Freenet story.
I have to agree with you about the issues of overmoderation. I think that any post which gets massively moderated in conflicting directions should be exempted normal moderation and frozen (perhaps at the posters original level).
With regard to posting an anti BSD type comment in a BSD forum... Its probably more effective to change a persons viewpoint a small bit at a time anyway. Occasionally people have sudden swings in opinion on the basis of a single overwhelming bit of evidence. More likely it will be as a result of a series of smaller dissapointments.
Not to say that your posting points were right or wrong, just that its human nature to defend yourself against someone who comes in all guns firing. A bit like what would happen if you went out into the middle of Harlem and yelled out "nigger" as loud as you could. The response is fairly predictable, and almost independent of whether you are right or wrong. You may well get lynched by the mob. And you end up with a situation where neither the original action nor the response ends up looking so clever.
Strong opinions polarise people, and this doesn't engender rational change. Everyone's limbic systems kick in in response to threat, and rational thinking stops.
Just my thoughts,
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Right on.
These election workers should do serious prison time. You don't get to fuck with elections because you find it convenient to keep the initial, flawed result.
As for the trogolodyte motherfuckers who say "how many times do you want to count the ballots in this box", the answer, as anyone who has ever handled real quantities of cash knows, is: UNTIL YOU GET THE SAME FUCKING ANSWER TWICE.
Sheesh. They act like counting is some mysterious, subjective process.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
so wait a min.. does that mean that bush will be kicked out cause it was ALL fraud!?!??!!?
keeping it Anonymous Coward so i don't have my door bashed in by the feds
The biggest problem I see with the voting machines in current use is the inability to do a recount. The general flakiness and complexity of the things and the actions of Diebold in deployment making it look like they are pulling fast ones to confuse poll workers (although it could just be criminal incompetance) is the other one. If the poll workers don't get hold of a test machine to learn how to use it proir to the election the contract should go to somebody who can no matter how much lobby money is paid.
Easy: the two links about the "political bloggers" bill. It does not affect the average political blogger. You have to be paid $25,000 for political activism in a given quarter-year for it to affect you, and then you only have to publicly disclose your career as a lobbyist. That's it. It only affects astroturfers and paid professional shit-disturbers and it doesn't stop them from doing anything they're already doing. If you'd skimmed either of the two Slashdot discussions on it this week (in which the lazy editors got it wrong too) or if you'd read the bill yourself, you'd know this.
The cite of Kucinich wanting a return to the Fairness Doctrine is an extremely weak third cite if you're trying to show the Democratic Party as being just as bad as the Republicans. For one, Kucinich is not a powerful politician. He's a liberal ideologue with an independent streak who doesn't stay inside the bounds of his party's strategy, sort of like a liberal Ron Paul. Kucinich was the guy who got ABC to boycott his campaign in 2004 after he criticized their coverage of it to Ted Koppel's face. A powerful politician would have made hay of that situation and gotten the party to scream about it all the way into the White House, but the Democrats were glad to have Kucinich shut up. That's how important a politician Kucinich is.
Secondly, a return to the Fairness Doctrine is not a lot to complain about. I'm very wary of the idea of the government deciding what the truth is and what arguments have merit, but of the forty years of the Fairness Doctrine existing before Reagan abolished it, I can't recall ever hearing of its abuse. No one can seriously deny that the quality of the mainstream media has gotten worse and worse now that they are free to be partisan on the publicly-owned airwaves.
The point of the airwaves being publicly owned is important. The media are not all using their private property. Some of them are using public property, held by the government on the condition that it is used in the public interest. Partisanship and disinformation might be free speech, but it is not in the public interest. Look at it this way: Is it worse for the government-supplied media to support one party over the other or for the government-supplied media to attempt to be fair, by somebody's standard of fairness, under guidelines that could presumably be argued in court if someone found fault with them? As an argument against total deregulation: if no media is government-supplied, then the owners of the media threaten to supply the government, especially when allowed to consolidate as much as under the '96 telecomms bill.
Let me guess where you're coming from since I used to be this way myself in the Clinton years: You're accepting that what the Republicans are doing is outrageous, and then you're looking for any kind of outrage being committed by the Democrats so that you can balance the two against each other and consider yourself independent. The problem is that the two parties' wrongdoings just don't balance out evenly these days, and you're not any less independent once you figure this out. On the scale of outrages with 10 being most outrageous, reestablishing the Fairness Doctrine ranks as a 1 or a 2, higher if they try to extend it to private property. The past eighteen years of going without the Fairness Doctrine rank around a 6. The kind of stuff the Republican Congress let George W. Bush get away with every few weeks has ranked in the 8-10 range with plenty of lesser scandals in between. Clinton's perjury was up there in the 8-10 area too, but it only happened once. New Bush scandals are happening all the time.
That's because there never was an effort to remove all of Nixon's band of criminals and they trained a new generation. Actually making bribery illegal, especially by foreign powers, and doing something about it would be a good step - the situation where Nixon took a bribe from the President of Indonesia is the low point we never want to see again.
Everyone can use a bit of help making sure they haven't spoiled their ballot, by marking two candidates for the same race, for example. So the Optical Scan machines are designed to spit out a spoiled ballot so the voter can fix it. Which they do, in white districts in Florida. In predominantly black districts, the machines accept spoiled ballots silently, which are then thrown out and not counted later. This is done "to speed things up" which is Floridian for "throw the election to the Repuglicans."
Same machine, different setting. THe voting officials have discretion.
In 2000, over 100,000 votes were not counted, using this cool setting.
Greg Palast wrote about it...
And of course there is always the electronic ballot stuffing option on the machines. Memory cards need to have 0 votes at the start of the election, but that can include 100 votes for bush and -100 votes for gore. One Florida precinct accidentally released interim counts for gore that shrank in 2000 due to such pre-loaded memory cards. Oh, they said it was a hardware failure... but what programmer would allow negative vote counts by mistake?
Don't dismiss the idea out of hand that sin taxes hurt (poor) families. I think a good argument can be made for it.
Or they could just stop fucking smoking. Your friend is stupid.
Your an idiot, a liar.
There are a lot more folks than just the political outsiders that care about voter rights, and
the complete removal of all electronic voting machines.
This is a NON PARTY ISSUE.
You mention "incidental errors" being corrected in someone's favor.
I call that a "electronic voting machine failure."
Just because Electronic Voting Machine FAILURES didn't make it into the corporate mainstream media e.g. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS does not change the FACT it has destroyed our Constitution, wasted billions of dollars, and cost people their lives!
There are in fact Democrats challenging votes. As there should be Republicans as well as every other party. When you have an electronic voting machine FAILURE, you have denied citizens Constitutional right to vote. You have broken the only link that citizens have to tell the government what their will is.
You would do well to follow Bradblog.com Velvetrevolution.us and Blackboxvoting.org for the last few years, and then let see what you have to say about "incidental errors" (FAILURES)
At worst your comments just continue to spread the corporate voting machine manufacture's lies and allow the courts to decide what our votes were, instead of "we the people" physically doing it themselves. Not to mention the FACT that our current president was not elected BY THE PEOPLE, and has taken us into a FILTHY OIL WAR where thousands have been killed.
Man you better wake the fuck up.
It's not just OHIO! It's everywhere these fucking electronic voting machines were introduced!
There are several problems with recounts.
a.) Physics of electricity
You CAN NOT re-count an electronic signal that is GONE. You can't validate an electronic signal when it exists.
b.) Large amount of money demanded by SOS's.
In order to get a recount, it's costs money, even if the money were raised, the best recount you could get is the same fucking unvalidatable crap coming out of electronic voting machines that have already FAILED! THey will NEVER COUNT ON PAPER.
Countries like Sweden and Canada can hold elections where ballots are cast on paper, which are manually counted on election day, with preliminary results available about 4 hours after the poll stations close. In Sweden the elections are always held on a Sunday. There is a mandatory recount of every vote cast done by the Thursday after the elections, when the election results are declared official and the ballots are archived, in case there should be an appeal. Every single step of the process is open to the public. I can go to the poll station on the night of election day and watch the officials break the seals of the ballot boxes, open the sealed envelopes of the ballots, sort the ballots and count them. There are stringent rules for the order in the area behind the ropes, making it virtually impossible for anyone to add, subtract or modify ballots.
The election officials come from all walks of life and are hired for the occasion. It is very common for people active in local politics to sign up for election day. Civil servants ensure that there is a mix of political affinities in every single group of officials.
For a democracy to work, there must not be a shadow of a doubt about the freedom and the fairness of the elections. It is THE foundation of a truly democratic state. Without it, nothing - from constitution to the president to the lowliest political appointee - can claim to have the legitimacy of being "of the People".
This said, I think there is a case in the USA for using machines to count ballots cast on paper, if there are safeguards, like manual sampling and double counts made using machines from different manufacturers, with the requirement that they must come up with the exact same result. This would probably require the machines to reject a number of border case ballots, leaving them for manual inspection.
I am perfectly aware of all of the Republicans power grabs and rights curtailment--I am against them as well. I am also aware of the public airwaves argument in the "Fairness" Doctrine and the "paid" provision (now thankfully struck down) in the S1 bill.
You made a cogent, well-thought-out and well-written argument, but even if you write 400 paragraphs, it's still the government controlling political speech. And I don't trust some committee of political hacks, whether Democrap or Republicant (spelling errors mine), to decide what's "fair." I would rather listen to some twit like Rush Limbaugh 24/7 than to give the government more authority over free-speech rights. Nor do I trust the government not to use the list or registered (albeit paid) bloggers for future retribution.
My opinion is that trusting the government is historically a bad idea, but if you're comfortable with that and you don't think that this is too much of a transgression, then that's your business and your right. However, I would be willing to riot in the street to keep my (and your) freedoms in this regard.
You know, you'd think that if accountants can figure out how to count things and get consistent results, democracy would be a no-brainer. Maybe I'm giving Humans too much credit...
While I mostly agree, it's not quite so clear cut.
Joe Lieberman, Rahm Emanuele, etc. on the Democratic side are just as tainted / crooked as anyone on the Republican side. Likewise, there are several (not nearly enough) voices of courage and reason reason even among the corporate press. And while the Pentagon and the CIA undoubtedly have many good people, I am equally sure that they have their share of bad eggs.
We are playing "Sneaches on the Beaches" for the fate of the world here, and there really aren't any labels that we can use to separate the good from the bad. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care what somebody calls themselves (or what they are called by others) what matters is what they stand for, and what they won't.
--MarkusQ
Treason is the one crime specifically defined by the Constitution--as such, I consider it especially important we follow that definition. Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
That said, you're absolutely right it should be treated as a very serious felony. I don't care if you're fixing an election for the Democrats, Republicans, or the Down With Lawyers party--damaging our electoral process is one of the worst things a person can do to our democracy, and it should be treated that way. Just we shouldn't label it treason.
Where "working the system" means sitting on evidence of a felony committed by a member of the US House of Representatives?
I suppose that by those sorts of standards things like blackmail and even bank robbery could be written off as just "working the system"?
The fact that in doing so he also betrayed the people of Florida, his own party (except of course any that have sold out along with him), and his oath of office, which I suppose is just frosting on the cake when you're playing at that level.
Let me get this straight--you're saying in effect it's OK to lie to them because they are ignorant and make ill-informed choices? Did it ever occur to you that maybe they wouldn't be so blind and foolish if their leaders didn't get away with lying to them at every turn? I'm just saying.
--MarkusQ