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Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Westech writes "Multiple indications of vote fraud are beginning to pop up regarding the New Hampshire primary elections. Roughly 80% of New Hampshire precincts use Diebold machines, while the remaining 20% are hand counted. A Black Box Voting contributor has compiled a chart of results from hand counted precincts vs. results from machine counted precincts. In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%, which closely matches the scientific polls that were conducted leading up to the election.
Another issue is the Republican results from Sutton precinct. The final results showed Ron Paul with 0 votes in Sutton. The next day a Ron Paul supporter came forward claiming that both she and several of her family members had voted for Ron Paul in Sutton. Black Box Voting reports that after being asked about the discrepancy Sutton officials decided that Ron Paul actually received 31 votes in Sutton, but they were left off of the tally sheet due to 'human error.'"
These things happen in primaries. Often a lot of independents swing the same way, or last-minute campaigning changes people's minds.
As Bob Somerby points out, the polling for the New Hampshire primary was wrong, by a larger margin, the last time we had a two-party primary:
Just pull out the physical paper ballots and count. . . Oh wait, no paper ballots to count.
Never mind.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dad, you're drunk again!
This may be off topic and moderated as such, but why is it that Diebold can make ATM machines that don't seem to get hacked, but can't manage to prevent hacking in their e-voting machines? Call me crazy, but wouldn't there be just as much motivation (if not more) to hack ATM machines as there is to hack e-voting machines? Something smells fishy.
Polls before an election are a guess who will win, not an actual predictor who will win. Imagine how many white folks said they would vote Obama so they didn't sound like a racist. Plus Hillary cried.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
People deserve the government they get... Sadly, 90% av US citizens don't seem to know that US is a Democratic REPUBLIC... Anything electronic can usually be altered without any trace... I wouldn't trust those machines... but then again, I don't live in US! :D
:p
Enjoy your upcomming fascism!
But it does lend more weight to the theory that we don't really pick our leaders but we have the illusion that we pick our leaders.
There is no smoke without fire...
Time to grab the fire extinguisher and go see where this smoke is coming from.
In the words of Patriot Act protagonists: "if there is nothing to hide, there is no harm in looking"
If for no other reason than to help settle the country down, for fuck's sake, go do a recount and get it over with, then we can all go back to our regularly scheduled updates on Britany and those others.
And please, Quickly do the recount before these people start asking about where the money for the war was spent.
Bunch of freaking radicals... geesh
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Please, not this again! Why do we bother having elections at all if they couldn't possibly deviate from "scientific polls"?
And that's "Dr. Ron Paul", thankyouverymuch.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why similar results showed up in the last MAJOR election and everybody swore that it was just a statistical aberation.
Where is the damn UN or even EU when you need them? ABout time you folks come here and check us for cheating. After all, this impacts the rest of the world just much as us.
As an IT professional, I'll certainly be using a paper ballot! Seriously, with the number of online testing sites and various computer-based tests that are available to record multiple choice answers, how is it that electronic voting gets screwed up so easily when those (presumably) don't?
It says we don't care. With the last election still in question to this day the country as a whole or even a majority doesn't seem to care that we have such a flawed system. What is it going to take a company offering $500,000 to someone that can improve the overall system so that it has an accuracy worthy of a decision this big. There was more outrage(IMO false outrage) over what Don Imus said and his words effect no one!
Anybody more statistically inclined than I able to put together a guesstimate on the likelihood of this happening in the normal course of events?
"Second, these results by themselves are NOT enough to prove that any fraud occured. They simply show that some things stand out as being odd and worthy of further investigation."
...is not infaillible.
A piece of paper can be traced from when you mark your X to when you drop it in the locked box. If it is changed after it leaves the box, hopefully the chain of custody list will show who had access so it narrows down who may have commited the fraud.
Now, in the case of the voting machine...was it biased? Was it designed so that no matter who voted what, the votes would come out a certain way? Was it a hacker? It cannot be readily determined. Now, if there is an error margin that rivals that of opinion polls...should this not make the voting method invalid?
As a canadian voter, I would never approve of digital voting...the more complex the method, the easier it is to foul it up. Having said that, who thinks there will be no recount....oh yeah! How do you recount voting machines?
So Jesus, Mohammed and Abraham walk into a Bar....
First off, comparison to polls are irrelevant. They are predictions, not orders.
Secondly, the notion of an electronic voting machine- running non OSS, no less- is ridiculous. No verifiable ballot, nothing.
The simple solution would be to use an electronic voting machine to make the voting process easy, provide a print out via laser, and right underneath the machine- a locked vote collection box. Voter verifies that the vote is correct, and deposit the paper for record keeping. (No slip to take home, that could encourage vote coercing).
You could get a quick tally via the software stats, verify the number of electronic votes vs. number of physical votes to make sure they match, and randomly audit the paper. Voter gets to verify, two records, and one that can't be modified via editing on a memory card.
And no, I am not an Obama supporter. I am a Canadian...
There are a few reasons why I hope that the fraud is real and can be proven.
1) It will make for good television, and be highly entertaining to me.
2) It will force people to realize that such fraud is possible, and force a solution to be created before the next US Federal Election.
I may be a Canadian, but I am not naive enough to think that your election results wont have an effect on my country. Also, I suspect that the kind of people willing to rig an election are not the sort you want to have running the show.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
END COMMUNICATION
super tuesday has a WHOLE new meaning. Why, I would guess that more than a few ppl at Diebold get VERY rich, right after that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have you ever seen the people who work at polling places? Most of them run about the same age as Rasputin and left the workforce before their offices had touchtone phones, never mind computers. Now imagine these people attempting to operate fairly complicated and very important computer equipment. Throw in some younger folks who were too dumb to get jobs at the DMV and that's your typical local Board of Elections. Clearly something is wrong, but I don't think instantly blaming fraud is in order when there is such a real chance of simple incompetence.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
New York Times has just published an interesting article about all of the problems voting machines have. One interesting part of the article talks about how Diebold wants to change the name of their divison that makes voing machines, since these voting machines have been a public relations nightmare for them (They also make ATMs and what not).
The Western World SANCTIONS other countries when exit polls conflict with actual results. Despite the cries of the punditry, exit polls are highly accurate. Pollsters have been perfecting their methods for decades. If you ever start seeing a deviation, rather than saying "Polls are stupid anyway," you should be asking yourself "WTF is going on?" I'm not saying that the primary was rigged, but SOMETHING happened and we MUST find out if we're to have an honest Presidential election next time around. I know most people can't believe that election fraud on a wide scale can't happen here in "Democracy Central," but we've already found black and white evidence in 2000 and 2004. Ask Tim Griffin about caging lists :(
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop.
No need to "wait for it for days" just saying.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176/
My name is Chad you insensitive clod!
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Electronic voting is/will be a fraud, the prize for winning is too high
I am not saying that it happened now, but i surely will happen, no matter what. Please all of you "good will" men/women come down to earth and stop pretending that electronic voting can be made perfect !
Electronic voting says: "trust me, I will count your vote for you in a way that you cannot verify". This is going to be a terrible democracy crash
Paper trail should/must be the one that counts, all the rest is exit polls (do we really care to know who the next president of US is in real time ? or better, what are we giving up to have real time results ?
There will always be Vote Fraud, because there will always be humans involved.
... oops sorry, he actually did get votes. I don't trust the results at all when shit like this happens.
I'm not sure what scares me more, that either nobody counts the votes (automatic) or that people(manually) count the votes. What I'd like to see, is a double double balloting system, two ballots printed, each with both an encrypted vote, which is automatically scanned / counted by machines and human readable form. When discrepancies seem to creep in they can tally both sets of ballots using both automatic and human counters and make sure that all four counts line up, two encrypted and two human readable on two separate sets of ballots. We can even use four different sets of counters, to eliminate counter fraud.
There is no excuse for something like what is being described in the article happening, ever. Ron Paul not getting any votes
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%"
Sounds like the hand counters did a terrible job. They lost about 9% of Hillary's ballots. I would look into some serious voter fraud on these hand counters. They were clearly trying to throw the vote in Obama's favor.
(slightly sarcastic reply to point out there is more than one way to explain a stat)
I'll have to paraphrase, as I cannot Google the quotation (!)
When the exit polls don't jibe with the results (and there is a Diebold evoting machine involved) then the results have probably been tampered with.
He was speaking before a committee of Congress about being asked to write a program to fix a Florida election, and was responding to a question about whether the Ohio elections of 2004 might have been tampered with.
I remembered his meaning yesterday when every member of the press and their pundits was trying to make sense of a situation that has only one explanation that fits Occam's Razor.
I hate to say it, but it appears our votes no longer count. Or no longer count right....the government they deserve. And as an outside (from the UK) it looks as if that is about to apply to America.
It isn't like any of this is surprising. Everyone knows that Diebold machines are crooked, but they are still being used. Nobody did anything about it, that's why.
I know its a pain standing up for your civil liberties, but don't worry - if you ignore them, they will go away.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
other than you can never be sure when it comes to all electronic voting machines.
Yes, districts with machines are different than districts without. However the differences extend to more than the machines.
The most credible analysis of the Clinton win comes down to this: Clinton was acknowledged to have the most extensive and well run organization. Clinton was counting on NH all along, she's been building the organization there for years, and she spent money and time getting ready. Therefore, she was able to skew the "likely voter" results by making sure that more of her supporters got to the polls come hell or high water -- a significant thing in a country where voter turnout is very low.
The places that went for HRC tended to be the more densely populated areas, where an effective organization can have a greater marginal impact. These are also the places where it is most "advantageous" (if we can use that word) to use electronic voting machines. If a polling place handles lots of voters, its easy to justify technology investments. The last places you'll see technology investments are places like Dixville Notch, which has twenty six registered voters. It's also the last place a campaign will put any effort into organizing its voters.
Now, if you want to show the machines are doing something fishy, the best thing is to compare the official poll results to exit polls. Admitting that there are inevitably differences between these, and that there may even be party bias in the difference, you then look at e-voting districts vs. paper voting districts. If the discrepancy is different between those groups of districts, then something is very likely fishy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ATMs are audited every couple days. Most people audit their bank account at least once a month. If there is a problem they _will_ be caught.
If their ATM screws up there are hundreds of years of case history that state they will be punished. They will be punished hard. They will loose significant amounts of money. Banks will stop doing business with them.
Who audits the vote counts? What penalty will they face if there is a problem? What's the case law?
I find being offended by me offensive.
- the results matched the exit polls, so they must have been fixed too...
Look at the stats, in the (perhaps 1) large town that was hand counted, Clinton beat Obama 44%-31%. If she carried other large towns similarly, why are the overall results so hard to believe? You can read these stats any way you want by looking at just the portions that make your case. Elections are the food that conspiracy theorists live by.
Also note that New Hampshire was a focus of the 1992 book Votescam (full text) regarding the 1988 election:
See the Votescam text for a length discussion on the unreliability of those 1988 electronic voting machines.You're close:
The simple solution would be to use an electronic voting machine to make the voting process easy, provide a print out via laser, allow the voter to verify that his/her vote is correctly marked on the ballot before dropping it into - right underneath the machine - a locked vote collection box.
T,FTFY.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
do NOT welcome the destruction of the democratic process that is happening since the implementation of electronic voting machines, i wont bother to vote anymore...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSPb-fmqUyY
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
In Seattle, WA we have Diebold voting machines which do have a paper tape, though most people don't use them still.
Before we start playing the 'jump to conclusions' game, it's important to determine whether there are any demographic patterns that overlap. I wouldn't be surprised if the roll-out of the Diebold machines went first to wealthier districts, or possibly bigger cities, or whatever.
I have to say, this is really annoying. Thanks to the 2000 election, we're basically going to have to deal with allegations of election fraud from the loser of every close race. I initially thought it was just an anti-Republican thing, but clearly the Democrats are turning on each other now.
Buying Diebold.
Objectively, though, I have to wonder if e-voting machines are statistically worse or better at reporting results than old-school mechanical voting tabulators, mark-sense counters and "fill-in-the-bubble" paper ballots, or even hand-counting.
The major hit in e-voting, as far as I can tell, is the lack of after-the-fact verifiability (a shared issue with mechanical tabulators, I think), commodity software and hardware making the skills needed to hack results almost ubiquitous, and the perception that the vendors involved have political agendas.
But yeah, I'd find a way to absentee vote before I cast a ballot on an e-voting box.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I don't see anything showing an actual statistical significance in this. Has anybody seen any other places with info that might show whether or not these numbers actually have meaning?
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Why are people so surprised to see evidence of vote-rigging in the primaries?
After all, the idea here is to select the candidate with the best chance of winning the presidency right? Well if you can't successfully rig the primaries what good are you when it comes your turn to rig a general election?
Who do you want to vote for?
// should not be reached
1. Obama
2. Clinton
3. Edwards
4. Richardson
5. Gravel
-------
int selection = input();
if (selection == 1) ++clinton;
else if (selection == 2) ++obama;
else if (selection == 3) ++edwards;
else if (selection == 4) ++richardson;
else {
}
When Bill ran in the 90's there were multiple rumors of voter fraud. Many residents of non-decisive states voted in an adjacent swing state claiming simply "I plan to move here within the next year." I live near Chicago and you can see during Presidential elections that busses full of homeless were provided money and food for their vote.
Worst thing for Obama was for Hillary to lose Iowa. Now her husband is pulling out every dirty trick in his arsenal.
Now shameless plug time. Want a candidate who won't change his views just to trick you out of your vote? Want someone with national security experience along with multiple terms in Congress? Fred08.com
Yah, I used to beleive that. Now it's more like "Send in your subscriptions, and waste your time."
:)
I've been here for years, have a four digit ID, and have NEVER had one of my stories posted. Sure, let's say most of them are crap, boring, stupid, lame, but I'd think at least ONE of them would have gotten thru in the last decade. I've seen a lot worse ideas actually get posted.
I'm not angry, I just don't give a crap any more. The other day, after years of not submitting anything, I tried another one, it was about Jack Thompson suing the Omaha Police Chief to get the video game records of the mall shooter. Seemed perfect for Slashdot. Bounced, rejected, nobody got their version posted either.
Just reaffirmed my belief that Slashdot is ran by tin-foil-hat wearing lizard conspiracy overlords trying to turn us slashdotters into mindless consumers.
1) There is a paper trail in NH, even for those who voted on Diebold machines. You want to count the paper ballots? Count them. :-)
2) Vote discrepancies vs. pre-election polls are not prima facie evidence of election fraud.
3) Hillary Clinton was leading Obama in NH for the past year. Obama surged in the past week in NH, that's all. So her win didn't come out of nowhere.
4) Let's assume she DID rig the votes. From my point of view, it's good to have a Democratic candidate who can rig votes as well as the Republicans can, the better to win the election.
A good article to read: http://dhinmi.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176
Apparently we just don't care. As long as my life runs smoothly I don't care. Bush is president and we didn't elect him who cares! We should be outraged we should demand this be fixed but the country as a whole or even a majority of the country doesn't seem to care. There was more outrage(IMO false outrage) over what Don Imus said and that didn't effect anyone. We've had it too easy for too long and we've lost the ability to learn to stand up and be heard when we're being wronged. /rant
Yep, and we're "exportin' democracy" to the rest of the world. Pretty soon it's just not going to be the lunatic fringe that believes in conspiracy theories.
just saying.
I campaigned for Obama for several days out of the North Conway NH office. While the media reported a 10-12% lead, none of us inside the Obama campaign believed them. At best, our own internal polling put us at 1-2% behind Clinton in rural areas and slightly ahead in the urban counties.
In Ossipee, where I spent the majority of my time, Clinton won 281 to 261 over Obama (hand counted). There was record-shattering voted turnout in the area for both parties. Previously, the record was ~1000 voters. On Tuesday over 1500 voters showed up. Several nearby towns even reported running out of paper ballots.
I think the real problem was how the media handled their polls. Many Obama supporters I talked to on primary day mentioned that they were planning to support Ron Paul or vote against a candidate in the Republican party because they didn't believe Obama needed their support. Mind you, these are people with Obama signs in their yards who had actively been helping in his campaign. I wonder how much credit we can attribute to voter complacency rather than some Diebold conspiracy theory.
In any case, I don't understand all the fuss. Obama and Clinton were awarded the same number of delegates. This whole mess only matters to the media and spin people.
At least the war on the environment is going well
Nothing like injecting some facts to disrupt some idiotic slashbot spouting their bullshit
Congrats.
is not that it verifies the results, but that it squelches the bullshit. say, for the sake of argument, that this story is 100% made up. with paper ballots, with enough pressure, you could force a recount. but with electornic voting, no one knows what is real, and what is not. the process is opaque. it's electronic, it's quicksilver
you need an army of conspirators working hard and long to mess with paper ballots to a large degree. you need one asshole in the right spot for 3 seconds to completely alter the results in any way you can imagine, including recreating plausible degrees of randomness, and you can cover your tracks completely
the order of magnitude increase in number of attack vectors that are introduced with electronic voting is one thing, and the radically increased potential for doing massive damage quickly is another. but the real threat electronic voting poses to democracy is that it is opaque. it can't be trusted, because nothing can be truly verified. any "verification" is comparing one piece of easily altered quicksilver to another
i am not in any way joking when i say the greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is electronic voting. it erodes trust, faith, and confidence. strictly because when stories like this one spreads, and they always do, after every election, in every country, there is no way to dispel them. sour grapes or a genuine issue, no can tell for sure with electornic voting
paper voting should NEVER be replaced, and in fact mecahnical voting should be retired as well
i'll say it again: the greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is electronic voting
i firmly believe that. it is a menace
when the next bush versus gore extremely close imbroglio occurs in another election, there won't be any hanging chadsto look at. just some assholes in suits form some private company with questionable political connections telling us over and over everything is ok and everything is verified and everything is squeaky clean. oh really? what you get after that is instant chaos, instant zero legitimacy in the government in the eyes of the public. out of the woodwork come all of the demagogues, spreading all of their lies, and public trust gets placed in the worng hands
give me hanging chads over electronic voting any day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hilary is popular enough that she would not need that. The republicans are scared of Obama and are convinced that if Hilary wins the primary, that they will win the presidential election.
You have to remember that Diebold CEO is a republican supporter and once said that he would do anything possible to have Bush elected.
I doubt that there is fraud in the democratic primary though I would suggest to switch to paper ballots like they have in Canada to be sure that it can't happen. Just the doubts that are coming around on the
issue is enough for people to have no confidence in the electoral process.
I do think that the republicans are stupid to be convinced that Hilary cannot win. Just the thought of having Bill around for another 4 years brings a lot of excitement in a lot of people's heart.
Those would would not vote for Hilary would probably not vote for any democrat anyway so we don't give a f..k.
I find it interesting to note as an impartial observer that Romney appears to have gained an even larger advantage via machine voting than did Clinton. Link: http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS In large towns, Obama fared 4.5% better than the statistical average in districts where Diebolds were used, where Clinton was almost 4% below average. On the GOP primary, Romney was a whopping 10.1% above average. Romney fared better than statistical models would predict in EVERY class of voting district. Clinton only gained machine votes in the small and medium towns, and gave back ground in the larger districts.
I believe this information points not to voter fraud, or Diebold hacking, as much as I would like to see it happen (only to prove a point). Rather, across the board, i believe the larger districts were probably not accurately sampled in the majority of pre-election polling. Many of the media polls and other reported metrics were taken at gatherings and candidate rallies, as well. Typically, only the most passionate supporters, or those who are the most undecided attend these functions. It is difficult to accurately gauge voter opinion for the entire state from such small sample sizes.
Disclaimer: I am a registered Republican in the state of Arizona, and am undecided. I have no preference for a candidate at this time.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
I'm not fan of Diebold's no-paper-trail voting machines. I think it's inexcusable that the Congress, States, and local boards of election allow such an obviously bad implementation of voting to exist.
However, I would also like to point out that it might not be an error that the hand counted precincts give a different result than the machine counted ones. Is it possible that the precincts using the Diebold machines have significant cultural differences from the precincts still using hand-counting? For example, maybe the hand counted precincts are largely poorer rural and/or inner-city areas, while the machine counted precincts are urban and sub-urban communities with different ethnic cultures, levels of education, level of access to the Internet, religious beliefs, etc?
Why would it be reasonable to expect all precincts to vote the same way?
If you look at the chart of data though, most of the votes were in large towns. And in large towns Clinton did almost 4% better in hand votes than in machine. Wow, someone pissed off about how an election went is able to twist data.
You should spend more time at reddit, then...
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
What an effin joke and my apologies to EFF.
:)
Do Americans have any idea that the rest of the world is laughing hard at them (while making scared contingency plans at the same time)
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
What is more likely happening is that they wanted the contract for the machines... and since we tend to have "government by the lowest bidder," that rather ensured that they would get the contracts to make the "certified" voting machines.
OCO is Loco
In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts, Obama beat Clinton by over 4%, which closely matches the scientific polls that were conducted leading up to the election.
I don't know how hand-vs-machine breaks down in NH, but my gut assumption would be that hand-counted precincts are probably in smaller towns (which would skew older demographically, and have too small a budget to afford the machines) while the machine precincts are probably more in the larger cities and college towns (where most of the younger people -- Obama's base, if you will -- reside). So, I would normally expect those numbers to be reversed, with Obama winning in the machine precincts and Hillary elsewhere. Seems a trifle odd.....
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
In the words of Patriot Act protagonists: "if there is nothing to hide, there is no harm in looking"
I'm an advocate of many pieces of the PATRIOT ACT. Why? It was ridiculous previously that our law enforcement had more power to investigate drug dealers than terrorists.
Example. Drug dealers often use pre-paid cell phones and switch them on a regular basis, becoming nearly untraceable. Due to beauracracy, law enforcement would need a separate warrant for each phone. Because of this law enforcement can now recieve a warrant for wiretaps on all phones a drug dealer uses, even if he hasn't purchases them yet. PATRIOT ACT extended this to drug dealers.
I recommend everyone against the PATRIOT ACT to read it, front to back, thoroughly. Most of it plain and simple makes sense, and many of the over-reaching laws have not been renewed or already been declared unconstitutional.
Plain and simple this legislation moved our country into the 21st century.
Just to preface this post, I distrust Die Bold just as much as anyone else here. I really, really do not like the idea of electronic voting machines.
With that said, how can we ensure that traditional ballots are being counted in a better manner? I live in Oregon, and we have "Vote by Mail". You receive your ballot in the mail several weeks before the actual elections. You fill in little bubbles in the ballot, somewhat like the Scantron sheet you see in school. You then seal it in a "secrecy envelope", and place that inside the mailing envelope and mail the ballot back (or drop it off at designated sites).
I've always worried that the optical scanning machines used to count these ballots could be rigged up to produce wrong results, similar to the Die Bold machines. It's something I always think about when voting here.
Git yer shotguns ready ya'll
That's the very clear example. People know they voted for Paul, result says zero. What, the second time they ran the query, it came up with a different result? Bullshit. Something went wrong. I'd don't know or even care if it was intentional or not. If it can't even handle a primary, and has such an obvious and glaring error, we should not be using such a system. Especially if there is no way to verify the results.
It is not just the size of the town that needs to be considered but also the location. Go back to 2000 and 2004 and look at the areas that voted for each candidate. They are *not* equally distributed. One also has to consider past voting biases to get a handle on which areas would be most likely to have independents break for Obama vs McCain.
That is not to say that Deibold machines aren't dodgy, just that this 'analysis' is over simplified.
Can you really trust someone with the name Clinton
I know that this is a silly point to make, but all the Diebold machines were the "Diebold Accuvote optical scan" systems, which, and correct me if I'm wrong, leave a paper trail (fill out paper, run through machine, keep paper) so it *should* be easy to verify. They were not using the fully "ATM style" machines that everyone hates.
Just thought it worth mentioning, as I watch my Karma dive.
Way to go Hillary !
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
are you trying to say that you are not hung?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-2000Nov16?language=printer Like back in 1960.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Up here in Canada we have an easy system. It has worked for over 125 years. Here you put a Pine Cone in a box if you want the man currently in power to stay and a piece of Birch Bark if you want to vote for the opponent. http://youtube.com/watch?v=GuyfmvnwoG8&feature=related
Just an observation.
I give you 10,000 ballots and a pen. I challenge you to make a hanging chad, a pregnant chad, or a chad with 1, 2 or 3 corners torn.
Now, despite the FACT that ballots clearly state that a mangled or ballot in which the punch is not clearly made is invalid and will be trashed - one political party DEMANDED that they be counted. Further, in cases where no clear vote was made, one political party DEMANDED that they could 'read the unconscious intention of the voters'. Wow. One political party told the world that not only were Florida voters too stupid to know who to vote for, but they could 'psychically read the intentions of the voter'.
Now, I can make hanging chads, a pregnant chads, or chads with 1, 2 or 3 corners torn. Simply stack them on top of each other, take a punch and a hammer and stike a blow for tyranny.
Funny, there were a lot of these hanging chads, a pregnant chads, or chads with 1, 2 or 3 corners torn for one of the political parties. I'll give you a little hint. It wasn't the winner.
So there's clearly evidence that the machine counts are different from the hand counts, when they should both be the same. It doesn't matter which is (more) wrong, the machine or hand counts. The discrepancy clearly shows that at least one of them is wrong. And so they should all be recounted by a method that can be relied on, without the time pressure that the mass media requires from the initial counts. Especially since these recounts could change the winner, but since the election awards proportional amounts of delegates for the final contest at the convention, the recount affects everyone. Especially if some delegates actually decide not to vote for whom they were awarded, because they are unhappy about how delegates were chosen.
That's "democracy". Everything else is just a TV show.
--
make install -not war
In any sane system the counting is done by hand at each local poll and verified by any concerned persons. They leave with their poll's count and can verify it against any tally. That's right, any tally has to give the original counts for each poll so they can be double-checked by the people that observed any particular poll. A recount can be done for any disputed poll location, but in any case all sides know the correct count since they have their own trusted observer at each poll.
At my polling location in northern virginia there are up to 10 people chosen by the elections officials that are allowed observe the memory cards from the computer voting being sent off to be counted. How could that voting not be rigged? Given human nature it's basically impossible that my vote is counts.
If the fraud is real but cannot be proven with hard facts, than it will just be dismissed as a conspiracy theory for idiots. Voters can be forgiving of all sorts of implied corruption, but the moment it is proven, they are made to generally pay for it by whoever has an axe to grind.
As a hypothetical scenario, if an election was rigged by the Republicrats and the Democraticans were able to obtain proof, they would push the issue hard. The issue would go to court, and someone would end up in jail. It is also probable that the election would be declared fraudulent. This is what happened in the Ukraine a few years ago.
On a tangential note, has anyone ever been convicted of electoral fraud in any stable democracy?
END COMMUNICATION
The simple solution would be to use an electronic voting machine to make the voting process easy, provide a print out via laser, and right underneath the machine- a locked vote collection box. Voter verifies that the vote is correct, and deposit the paper for record keeping.
Maybe the sentence doesn't have perfect grammar, but I did include that important bit.
I think there is a good chance there was no deliberate fraud in NH. Exit polls matched up and a few misreported numbers do not make a smoking gun. What I think the tech community of Slashdot does need to discuss is the fact we have a closed proprietary system used to count votes that offer no means to audit the results. Search Youtube for the Dan Rather special on voting machine fraud and you'll see holes in the system that probably half of Slashdot's readership could manipulate to alter results. Diebold and other proprietary systems are a step backwards not forward. A voting system is a simple piece of technology. Why not have an open source system designed by some independent group that can audited by anyone and produce a paper slip that can be used for recounts?
Isn't this just wonderful!
And this too!
Suspicious minds would surmise...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Other sites concerned for greater accuracy than slashdot, have noted that fact prominently.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The fraud is just too obvious. How many times can we experience 'statistical improbabilities' in our election results before we finally just give up and recognize that it's not the exit polls, but the voting system that is rigged? I mean, come on! It's been like this since 2000 at least. And while many were convinced that it was the GOP responsible for all the fraud, clearly the Democratic party insiders are in on it too. This is not about a corrupt Republican party. It's about both party power bases abusing power to retain power, at the expense of the citizenry. BOTH party power centers are using vote fraud to limit choice and debate, yet political parties were *never* ensconced in the constitution.
The only way out of this mess is for liberals and conservatives to drop their petty bickering and join forces to overthrow the whole political party system. Toss the Republican and Democratic parties out just like the Whigs. The parties have forgotten their place and collude to their own advantage at the expense of the entire nation. This is NOT what our founding fathers had in mind. Though they certainly did warn that it might happen.
If you look at the votes by large cities, the hand-counted votes were in favor for Clinton, just like the machine-counted votes. It just seems like the large cities voted for Clinton, and they accounted for most of the actual votes, almost 80% of total votes. The vast majority of the hand-counted votes were in the small cities but only accounted for a small percentage.
PS I hate Clinton, and would prefer Obama, but I still don't think there was fraud.
Remember the article about elections in Russia http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/2222212. This looks like a job for statistician to me. I hope we get to hear more about this in the mainstream media and of course the Daily Show and Conan O'Brien.
A Stanford professor says having your name listed first on the ballot, like Clinton had, gives you a automatic 3% boost. http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/Decision2008/story?id=4107883&page=1
Why cheat by exploiting flaws in voting machines when you can just bus in people from other states to vote for you (which you can do in NH, as long as they claim that they MIGHT move to NH)?
In New Hampshire, as in most (all?) states, voting equipment is purchased locally. The richer the locality, the more money they have to spend on voting equipment. So in New Hampshire, the wealthier localities have electronic voting equipment, while the poorer localities vote on paper. So let's try the nut graf again, only replacing the key bits:Does that sound terribly suspicious to you? Or more like a reasonable correlation between voting behavior and socioeconomic status?
-Waldo Jaquith
Hillary has to stop hiring former republican campaign people
Hopefully this will be the perfect storm of voter fraud exposure. Consider the factors:
:)
1) Voting machines have been decommissioned in several states already.
2) The possibility of voting machine tampering has settled well in the minds of many Americans.
3) Exit polls and virtually all polls prior to the primary showed Obama with a lead. Even the Clinton campaign thought they were going to lose.
4) The MSM hates Clinton. This will give them motive to investigate.
And finally, there is speculative motive on why Clinton would be helped and Paul suppressed. 1) Clinton is the desired opponent of the Republican party establishment. She unites their constituents like no other person alive. And, on the flip side, there's actually a Republicans for Obama movement. 2) The same folks hate Ron Paul. (He would draw off votes from their core voter pool.)
So, if there is intentional vote manipulation, this would be the best time to find it. If it comes out, it can always be pinned to the Clinton campaign. Nothing ever gets done in this country unless a Democrat can get the shaft in the process.
This story isn't about just the polling being different from the counts. It's about two methods of counting ballots coming up with different results. Including possibly a different winner.
So even if that "happens all the time", that just makes it worse. It's a bigger reason to make it stop, not to accept it.
--
make install -not war
See? I told you your vote doesn't matter.
Not really for the same reason I said... but anyway.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
If voting could make a difference, it would be outlawed.
Best signature every.
You could easily snap the picture of your marked ballot, then tell the poll worker you mismarked your ballot, get a new ballot and vote your actual preference. So, the candidate who accepts a cell phone picture as proof when buying your vote is not only evil but also stupid.
Simple. Make that a protected subject at work, like age, sexual preference, race, gender, health statis, and the like. It already is to a certain extent anyway, just codify or clarify in law. Something like, "Employers are not allowed to discriminate based on voter preferences or statistics, nor are employers permitted to research, investigate, or record the voting record or preferences of any U.S. Citizen."
I kind of like the idea of a serial number on a ballot in concert with a receipt, stub, or carbon copy that the voter retains for their own records, should they desire to do so. Of course, I also believe that voting should still be done on a medium that is physically marked or etched by the voter, to ensure that there's an audit trail to keep the counters honest.
Remember, it's not just he who votes, it's he who counts the votes that matters. I'd love it if U.S. election laws prohibited tallying equipment manufacturers from making political contributions and from lobbying in any way...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Attention people talking about things they don't understand: Every ballot in NH was a paper ballot. Diebold was only used to COUNT SOME of the ballots -- the originals all exist. Ron Paul lost because he's a lunatic fringe candidate, not because of some vast conspiracy.
Why would Diebold fix it for Clinton to win, when everyone knows an African American Democratic candidate isn't going to get elected. Also, I thought Diebold worked for the Republican party, so the best way for the Republicans to get in is to have Obama on the ticket ...
'==' != '='
davecb5620@gmail.com
Bear in mind that the hand-counted precincts tend to be small while the Diebold automated precincts tend to be large. Large precincts tend to be urban and suburban while small precincts tend to be rural. Urban and suburban voters have a long and well understood history of voting differently than rural voters.
I'm not excusing the use of the crappy Diebold machines. They should be banned. But I am saying that fraud is the least plausible explanation for the difference in the voting pattern.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The headline really needs to be corrected. It's a question of election fraud, not voter fraud. This is a very important distinction: election fraud occurs when the vote counts are tampered with, voter fraud is when people vote multiple times. The Indiana voter ID requirement is currently being argued before the Supreme Court and the state is unable to document any voter fraud in Indiana's history.
As for what's going on in NH, the paper trail means nothing if it's not used for counting. I've read that 80% of the Diebold paper ballots have not been counted. Since there are some serious questions about the results, why wouldn't everyone say, "Hey yeah, that's what the paper is for! Let's count the ballots?"
This is all poisoned fruit from the electronic voting tree. Nobody believes election results anymore because of companies like Diebold who have taken an open process and made it closed, hiding away what's really happening. Mix in crap technology and you've got a crisis in confidence.
The difference between hand counted and machine counted precints' results does not mean a lot. I don't live there so I am lacking some information, are these counts supposed to represent the same population? For example, I could imagine the areas where hand counting was used to be more rural than the ones in which machines were used, etc, etc, etc.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
People need to stand up for what they believe in. If people didn't care about others knowing who they voted for, they'd
1) Be able to verify votes much more accurately due to any number of 3rd party voting verification mechanisms (think after-you-get-home vote checksum websites)
2) Do away with this whole scam regarding "Is a voting machine secure or not?" because people would be able to TELL if their vote counted or not
3) Probably get a bit more self confidence and esteem, knowing that they can stand up for what they believe in and who they voted for. I'm so sick of people backlashing, saying "What if your boss finds out you voted for someone he didn't like, he'd fire you / give you a pay decrease / kick your ass"...I call bullshit. There are PLENTY of laws regarding harassment and discrimination for this. As long as people weren't so pushed into being secretive about voting for a presidential candidate, maybe these elections wouldn't be widely rumored to be flawed on a fundamental level.
I'm all for voting machines - but you need to MAKE SURE your vote gets counted - and sometimes that requires you tell more than the machine who you voted for - because, as we've all seen in the past, sometimes voting machines "forget".
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The whole state used the same guy to set up the machines. Here's his company's Contact Us page:
LHS Associates contact page
If I was in New Hampshire or working on a campaign in any capacity for any of the candidates, I'd feel free to ask them about any discrepancies.
For those of you using screen readers, here's their phone, fax, and snail mail information since they don't even make their ELECTION RELATED web site accessible to the VOTING PUBLIC (all information is contained in images with no alternate text or titles):
phone: 888-547-8683
fax: 978-687-3670
address: LHS Associates
13 Branch St.
Methuen MA 01844
Or even more better: Hillary is actually a Republican. Best way to make sure a Republican wins is to have both presidential candidates be Republican.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
There's comment in the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080110/NEWSBLOG/836534599/-1/newsblog/ Note that New Hampshire doesn't use electronic voting machines, it uses optical ballot-reading machines that are made by Diebold. There are paper ballots available for recount, and recounts happen all the time. Also, note that only very small communities count ballots by hand any more, so the difference in results could reflect the fact that rural voters had difference preferences than urban voters.
Stupid AC :-P
Whenever I hear conspiracy theories I always ask the obvious question: "if so-and-so was so clever as to pull off this off, wouldn't they have thought of the (usually obvious, first-order) circumstance that led to them being caught?" In this case, if I were rigging the election I would certainly not report a 0 vote tally for a candidate, since then any 1 person who knew they voted for the candidate would immediately know something was wrong. You can't have it both ways. If you posit that there are people clever enough to game the system, you must also admit that they are sufficiently bright as to not get caught with so obvious a screw up.
Because of the above, I believe their explanation of "human error". And as an aside, I have yet to see the results of any vote recount that doesn't yield significantly different totals *every time* they recount. People screw up all the time. That is one reason why I am not so down on electronic voting machines. Yes, I understand the transparency argument, but I believe that can be accounted for through some combination of ideas tossed about this forum (ad nauseum) regarding how to fix voting machines. But thinking that human-counted paper ballots will make all the problems go away is laughable. Look at history. Boxes full of uncounted ballots turn up all the time. Ballots get dropped on the floor, or into waste baskets, or mis-read (accidentally or on purpose) more than we probably know.
No, in this case, Hanlon's razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor applies.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Look at the data. In smaller towns, votes are predominantly hand counted. In larger towns and cities, votes are predominantly machine counted. All this tells us is that voters in larger towns prefer Obama vs. Clinton. Is it at all surprising that there are demographic variations in candidate preference? I can almost guarantee you that if you did an analysis of small towns vs. cities in Iowa, you'd see a similar trend.
Help me understand.
Being a Canadian, I am confused by the US Primary system. Does the primary not exist to elect delegates to the National Convention? If that is the case did Clinton and Obama not tie with 9 delegates apiece with Edwards trailing with 4 ?
Clinton slightly won the popular vote due to higher vote consentration in Cities (which she seemed to do better in) but does winning the popular vote matter at all in a primary?
Every person in NH casts a paper ballot. Some are counted by electronic tabulating machines, but the paper ballots are still available for a recount. There is a big difference between an electronic voting machine (which typically don't have paper trails) and electronic tabulating machines. See this http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176 for a good discussion of why there was probably no fraud in the NH primary. The Ron Paul votes not being initially counted is another matter. Most likely just an incidence of human error.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I've never been to Libya, in fact, I've never even known anyone who was from there. I did read Col. Qadafi's Green Book, and he advocates open elections, and IIRC, it is required for every adult male to cast a vote. (Women are NOT qualified, BTW.) These votes are cast in a town hall meeting, and everyone has to stand up and justify why they vote the way they do. It is to ensure that folks don't capriciously vote incorrectly without good cause. I reckon it makes for a lovely plurality, and probably has gotten the Colonel unanimous landslide re-elections every time. Do you think this is an improvement we need to make?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's also important to note that there's actually a very simple explanation for the results: cities like Clinton.
If you take the cities from TFA (> 5,000 votes, all counted by machine), you get:
That sums up to 97,094 votes (1/3 of the total), of which 42% went for Clinton and 34% Obama. If you restrict to just the largest cities (> 15,000 votes, 13% of total), it's 45% to 31%.
So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes.
(That being said, of course I'd love to see this be the death knell for vote-counting machines which lack a paper trail. Beats me how anyone ever thought those were acceptable; they may be cheaper than hand-counting, but they simply don't do the same job, making a direct price comparison irrelevant. It's like buying a hammer because it's cheaper than a saw.)
Exactly, this is a tempest in a teapot unless there is more information. One needs to show that the effect of electronic versus hand-counted votes on the election is statistically independent of the composition of the population (race, median income, M/F ratio, etc.) of each district. Probably districts where hand-counting is still used are on average poorer than those with e-voting machines, for instance.
The linked site makes a first stab at this by breaking down the data into "small towns", "medium towns" and "large towns", but that's only a start at making a real convincing argument. As the parent states, a comparison of the difference %(Obama) - %(Clinton) to the same quantity in the exit poll results, in hand-counted vs. e-voting districts, would be much more convincing. (Note, I say this as someone who much prefers Obama over Clinton.)
- Kevin B. McCarty
Weighted voting. I mean voting by weight. Install weight sensors throughout the voting region in easily vacated regions. Then have people stand in the area where you want to vote. Candidates of course will begin courting the more portly populace. "I'm Mike, vote me, but get a few hamburgers before you go to vote. And if your neighbor isn't voting for me, remind him/her how fat they are so they'll be tempted to fast before voting."
Perhaps I'm naive, but this seems to be spiralling into wild hypothesis as opposed to actual legitimate concern. Or maybe I'm just too naive to know this is actually happening on a wide-spread basis. But I'd be interested if someone could actually point me to recent non-anecdotal evidence or reports of this kind of "vote my way or you're fired/out of consideration for promotion".
Especially in a country where you can sue someone for practically anything. (E.g. for slipping on your garden path; I was amazed when I had to get insurance to cover precisely that possibility. But I digress...)
Yes.
The way you propose to set it up, it wuold become trivial to pay people for votes. You could actualy get a receipt proving that your money was well spent. I can see the project simmilar to Amazon's mechanical turk on some offshore server - input your serial number now, and if after the votes are published it turnes out to be candidate X, you get some cash... Besides, if this is suposed to be truely anonymous, what is to stop someone from claiming that he had a different serial number and so his vote was miscounted? I can see a great new area for demagoguery right there.
Following up on my previous post that this has only to do with the demographics of voters, since the hand-counted votes in NH were predominantly from small towns:
I couldn't find data for Iowa broken down by large vs. small town, but here
you can see by county. So I picked Des Moines (obviously, containing a big city) and Taylor (in the middle of nowhere).
Des Moines County: 40% Barak Obama, 29% Hillary
Taylor County: 35% Hillary Clinton, 20% Obama
Sorry, folks. There is no scandal. People in smaller, more rural areas prefer Hillary (surprised? she's white). People in larger, more urban areas prefer Obama.
...and so little actual fact.
- Roughly 81% of the ballots that are cast in NH are counted by Diebold scanners. The remaining 19% are counted by hand.
- The machine counting is done, consistently, in larger towns. Rural and urban voters regularly show preference for different candidates. Anyone with a room temp IQ in NH has noticed this in previous elections, and knows that this has led to accusations like this in the past, which have been proven baseless by recounts.
- NH is very serious about "clean elections," so much so that they went after the Republican party a couple of years ago for some telephone-based naughtiness, and send sheriff's deputies out to precincts to make sure that handicapped voters are provided access to the polling sites, and to HAVA-mandated voting equipment.
- The most egregious errors that have been reported from actual precinct checklists and documents have been human error, including the "31 missing votes for Ron Paul from Sutton." Virtually all of the other claims for fraud have pointed to web sites or documents that represent unofficial results.
- The reason for having "official results" in any election is to provide time for vetting what is on the documents. This includes making determinations of "challenged ballots" (those cast by someone with a registration under question), for adding totals of absentee ballots, and for making sure that the numbers get a "reality check."
- One of the more notable comedies of Tuesday was some horror over Dixville (the first town to report results, since they open the polls at midnight) showing 17 votes counted, with only 16 registered voters. The 17th came from a brand-new registration, processed that morning. The database that contained the count of "registered voters" doesn't get updated until the end of the day, when same-day-registration documents get processed along with totaling of the results.
- The chain of custody of the Diebold machines and programmed memory cards is dramatically different in NH versus any other state, in actual practice. When Harri Hursti (infamous for the attack on the machines in FL) met with NH over this issue and examined their process, he agreed that NH effectively mitigates virtually all of the known attacks on that scanner. Unfortunately, when a security researcher finds nothing of interest, it doesn't make headlines.
- In multiple recounts of NH elections in the past 10 years (which, by law, are performed by hand counting), the Diebold results were ALWAYS more accurate than the results from the hand counted towns.
- Undeclared voters in NH can choose, on the Primary Election Day, which ballot they would like to vote. Most of these voters were not canvassed in the pre-election polls. Disparity between pre-election polls and the final results is one of the "smoking guns" that people point to, without any regard for who was polled prior to the election.
- The reports of shortages of ballots in various areas were for the Democratic ballot, which suggests that Undeclared voters used more Democratic ballots than Republican. Clinton is reported to have had a much stronger base in the Undeclared camp.
- By NH law, any candidate can request a recount in a primary if they do so before Friday. So far, none have.
- Complex election law (such as what is supposed to happen if, in a general election a voter chooses "Straight Party Voting" at the top, and then selects an individual candidate in one or more of the contests), rules for dealing with write-ins, and poorly marked ballots are known to create problems with ballots. These situations are (generally) even more inaccurately counted by humans than by machine.
- Conspiracy theorists will not be satisfied with recounts that confirm the numbers from Diebold scanners, or any other electronic voting equipment, and will continue to push for "hand-counted paper ballots," even though this has been proven to be less accurate than machine counting.
- Hardly any of the people commenting on "fraud rumors" spent any time in a NH precinct, or watching any of the activities surrounding the counting and totaling process. That hasn't stopped any of them from claiming all sorts of malfeasance, without a shred of evidence.
So I believe its fairly clear at this point that there is a general distrust of voting machines in the US. Its also become fairly clear that it would be relatively simple to rig an election where a voter verifiable paper trail isn't present.
While I in no way condone the rigging of an election, I think a good solution to this problem would be to rig an election in a way which would make it obvious that there was a problem. I.E. everyone using a diebold machine wrote in candidate Cowboy Neal for president. The problem is, that most people with the technical expertise, and the motive to rig an election would do so in a way which would make it extremely difficult to track (and probably walk away with a good chunk of change for their effort). Since its virtually impossible to discredit an election where its "pretty close" the only way to show the errors in the system is to exploit them such that it is obvious to the public that they have been hosed.
By the way I live in Colorado, where several voting machines have recently been decertified by our Secretary of State. Interestingly, it wasn't just one manufacturer (in fact only one manufacturer had all their machines successfully recertified), nor one type of machine (both the machines you can vote on, and scantron type vote counters were decertified).
Perhaps other states would be well suited to follow?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
"The most serious threat to democracy is the notion it has already been achieved."
Earliest attribution? Some protester outside the Republican Convention in Philly in 2000.
i am the opposite of tom_good, i am the XOR of ]=9fÆ"ÝÕ and ÖÆ\KF, i am 746F6D5F6576696C00.
Before i cry foul play i would like to know a little more about the distribution of voting machines.
For example, if the 20% are mostly rural, and the 80% the urban centers, such a small difference would be perfectly expectable.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
>In machine counted precincts, Clinton beat Obama by almost 5%. In hand counted precincts,
> Obama beat Clinton by over 4%
Districts that have hand count and districts that have machine count weren't randomly distributed over the state. The districts in each group are there because they chose to be, which means the demographics of the two groups will tend to be different.
In this case, the districts with machine counts likely have a higher average income than the ones with hand counts (which is why they were able to afford all the fancy equipment). Polls show that higher income voters leaned Hillary, lower income voters leaned Obama.
Michigan Democrats will have a hard time casting meaningful votes, considering Obama and Edwards aren't on the ballot.
Also, in the general election the vast right-wing conspiracy would rather run against Clinton with her 50% negative rating than against Obama, who seems to be successfully casting himself as the outsider/candidate of "change".
I think one of the bigger issues being overlooked here is that numerous papers have been published verifying the basic fact that Diebold voting machines, both optical scan and touchscreen are highly incompetent products not deemed acceptable for production use. Whether or not fraud has taken place (and I would like to believe it hasn't hopefully), given Diebold's past actions, we can never be too sure. Diebold has systematically destroyed any trust the public should have with their systems. Each election needs to be subsequently checked and tested for accuracy, regardless of whether it "seems" like there was no fraud committed.
Furthermore, I would like to know who at Diebold OK'd the use of using MS Access for vote storage and tabulating? They should be banned from IT for life. Who uses MS Access for production on such a large scale application as e-voting??? I mean they didn't even have any basic encryption or password protection going either with their Access files. Wow.
Diebold is suspect always.
Did anyone read the article? All the ballots were paper. There are no ATM style voting machines in New Hampshire.
The question is whether the ballots were counted by hand or by optical scanner. The larger towns counted votes by optical scanner while the smaller towns counted them by hand. Since all ballots are paper, it would be very easy to recount the scanned ballots by hand and see if there was any voter fraud.
Why the vote difference between "hand counted" vote percentages vs. "machine counted" percentages? Larger towns vs. smaller towns. It wouldn't be unusual for one candidate to be favored in the larger towns while another candidate was favored in smaller towns.
It could be that Clinton concentrated her GOTV effort in larger towns while Obama made a statewide effort. Or, maybe blue collar women -- a demographic that heavily favors Clinton -- tend to live in larger towns. Meanwhile, younger, richer voters -- the demographic that favor Obama -- live in more suburban communities.
My other half worked for a major polling firm for over a year. She was shocked by what really happens there.
- polling questions can be crafted to lead to specific results.
For example, pharmaceutical companies looking for a
specific result set would ask the questions in a way that would
make their specific drug seem desired or appear to be effective.
- most importantly, not all demographics respond to polls. For example,
often lower income people were simply not home because they were
working two jobs. Many people did not speak English well enough
to understand the questions. Polling firms require that all questions
be answered. If the respondent does not understand the question
because the english is too advanced for them, the survey is ditched.
There are other things but I don't remember them for now.
It could be voting machines in part. But my girlfriend's experience has
definitely lead me to question ALL polls.
I used to have the unglamorous job of keeping an absolutely horrid, ground-up custom hack job accounting system more or less alive. This thing was written over several years by three or four people who had never met each other in a half dozen wonky relatively dead languages. I had an accounting manager roll into my office in hysterics screaming about how the internal reports and external audits varied by $112...over $250,000,000. This was obviously rounding and not even in error, but even the perceived error was on the order of 0.0000448% -- and that was considered unacceptable, which is a tad absurd when the values in question don't even have that many places. But, we're talking integers here. There is no rounding error.
I mean, come on, the average precinct BARELY record 1000 votes and the biggest don't even hit 3000, yet the voting system for the average high school prom, while equally as complicated, extensive and at risk for fraud, is more secure and less prone to error.
I'm left pretty certain that the only way someone could produce such a system for simple integer tabulation with such comparatively huge error rates is if those errors were in fact deliberate and by design. There seems little other explanation and positively ZERO excuse.
When you vote on an electronic machine, why not have it give you a printout with a unique number (maybe a checksum) just for you and a list of how you voted. Then when all the voting is done, the list of everyone's unique number and how they voted is made public. That way everyone can verify that their vote has been correctly recorded. If there is a mistake they can report it and edit it (within so many days) if you just entered something wrong or alert the authorities if it doesn't match your printout. And the list could have a checksum to prove that copies of it havn't been altered.
"Simple. Make that a protected subject at work, like age, sexual preference, race, gender, health statis, and the like."
Yeah, that's dumb.
First, the idea of writing a new law, or expanding an old one, should be done with serious concern for it's necessity. As it stands, there are much better ways to avoid having your boss get that information than enacting another law.
Second, who you vote for is a CHOICE. Think about how that's different from everything else on your list, and you'll realize why your suggestion fails.
Except that NH used 100% paper ballots. Let's try this again, with more math:
Percentage of Ballots Cast on Paper in NH = 100%
Is that better?
In this case, the difference between machine-counted and non-machine-counted precincts is, surprisingly, how they're counted. In non-machine-counted ones, they're tallied by hand. In machine-counted ones, they're tallied by an optical scan machine. In both cases, the vote itself is cast on a piece of paper, which is then preserved for a recount if needed.
You may recall that in the last election, Ralph Nader raised a few thousand dollars and recounted half of NH's precincts in the wake of the general election, and found no discrepancies. If any of the campaigns thought there was serious fraud going on, they'd pay and file for a recount, as they're allowed to do.
If you break down the votes against other factors - like regions, exit polls, and general support, you can see the results make sense. Clinton did better in the urban areas, which (with higher populations) are more likely to use the high-speed optical scan machines. In the more rural areas, Obama did better, and in those precincts they're more likely to use the cheaper, slower way of counting things (by hand).
Cue The Sun...
I suspect the OP was being snarky. He/she was not aware of a story and hoping to see it posted inasmuch as he/she *knew* someone would cry "foul" about Diebold's equipment in New Hampshire.
Just a theory. *shrug*
I think it is generally agreed that there are some almost-complete but not foolproof solutions to voting based on computer technology. What I wonder is why we haven't pursued a non single-point-of-failure solution? Inevitably it comes down to the fact that the people in control of the voting are unsupervised, and their process is non-transparent. There is no second, verifying agency. Having multiple agencies counting a single vote would not necessarily fix all problems, but it would greatly increase confidence, I think, because you would not know if an election needed a recount; a big enough discrepancy and it becomes obvious.
[Ego]out
I wonder how much credit we can attribute to voter complacency...
In any case, I don't understand all the fuss. Obama and Clinton were awarded the same number of delegates. This whole mess only matters to the media and spin people.
Because we're trying to be be sure democracy (in whatever perverted form as practiced by the US) survives?
Keep in mind the perception of winning is essential during the primaries. The states that hold their primaries later will be influenced by the outcome of the earlier primaries. That's why Iowa and New Hampshire are so important. If Obama had taken the NH primary as well, undecided Democrats in other states would be tempted to vote for the apparent front-runner.
Even the slightest hint of corruption in the democratic process should be investigated, evaluated, and judged. Democracy will only survive under a microscope.
This matters to me. I'm not interested in spin. I'm interested in a voting process that is transparent, accurate, and verifiable. If the Diebold-style of voting machine is none of these things, then it is our duty as US citizens (for those of us who are US citizens) to prove it, and mandate a better system.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Just audit 2%-3% of the precincts randomly. If there is a problem it will most likely show up there... in which case it would be time to talk about a state wide recount. Actually this seems like a good idea to me as the general rule to how vote counting should be handled, regardless of if there is controversy over the results or not.
they must have done an inner join with candidates who were present at the Fox NH Debate when they should have done an outer join
Voter Fraud is Ann Coulter voting twice in Florida.
According the the above mentioned dailykos diary entry,
He's got more detailed regional analysis here.It might also be worth recalling that Clinton led almost every NH poll for the whole year before Jan 8. And that anecdotally, a number of indepentdents say they were going choose democrat and vote for Obama, but since he had it in the bag they instead chose republican and voted for McCain. And that exit polling says Hillary got a big chunk of women's votes. In other words there are enough other explanations that the instant assumption of a stolen election is rather absurd. Can we mod the whole story down as a troll?
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
This is all just too funny. Had this been the actual election and Obama lost by the same percentage to a Republican under the same circumstances, the Left (which is most of Slashdot) would be apoplectic, rioting, screaming "voter fraud!" from the mountain tops. The 2000 election "controversy" would pale in comparison.
But, Hillary was the beneficiary of whatever skulduggery there was and I guess that's ok with everyone. Just too sweet.
You guys are Hilarious.
I've been here for years, have a four digit ID, and have NEVER had one of my stories posted.
Maybe the Slashdot submission process is powered by Diebold?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
This is the most likely explanation. Small municipalities were hand counted and large ones use the optical scan. It's largely an urban and suburban vs rural breakdown.
Are the same twits that really believe that "Clinton body count" email is true.
It's 8 years ago. Get over your Clinton Derangement Syndrome already.
We need a new system Take a data base with the a set of numbers "The number of people voting" 00001 00002 00003 When a person votes, Print a random selection of the numbers to go along with their vote. Sheet of paper with 00003 on it, on Certified "I voted" paper. Publish the voting results and tie the individual votes to the number given out. Security Integrity and The only way to go.
I doubt it. I've been waiting for it too. It's been on the firehose for a day or two and it's a been all over Digg. I love Slashdot for the comment quality but sometimes it's so slow on big stories.
I mean, it's not as though there's no one convicted of any conspiring, or anything. But it has become an automatism to link "conspiracy" with "crazy".
You can't take the sky from me...
You missed the part where several hundred Jews voted for a third-party candidate whose defining feature was anti-Semitism. And the fact that Bush's victory was far less than the number of broken ballots.
But I've stopped caring about one specific case of Florida fraud. My target is bigger. The Electoral College needs to die.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Somebody not only voted for Ron Paul but was willing to admit it? Wow - that kind of brazen lunacy is usually reserved for use in the south.
You ignore the second problem, where the machine was right and the human was wrong.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Each voter fills out the ballot with their pen.
The Diebold machines in question are only used for counting.
America can put a rover into a creator on Mars; America can communicate with Voyager outside of the Solar System, but America cannot correctly count votes in New Hampshire. Awesome.
Please stop posting BBV stories. BBV is to election fraud what Enterprise Mission is to astronomy.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
Why did the vote change? It was guy named Fred. He's 68 and was never much good at his job, but he wanted to volunteer and participate in the system. He was all excited that day and a little tired and cranky and he forgot to list Ron Paul's few votes. He's very embarrassed that he screwed up and his grandkids still like him, so fuck off America.
There's your conspiracy: good old American ineptness.
Still, Fred obviously has a bright future in public service since he's already performed better than half of the existing public employees as well as many Slashdotters.
Electronic voting has way too many dark areas and failure points, especially when marketed by companies who believe in security through obscurity and who have already been involved in several suspicious incidents.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It is a sign of our easy position in the world that we think that 'vote buying' is the worst possible outcome of non-anonymous voting. As another poster said, the real reason to prevent votes from being connected to the voter is that then voters can be extorted.
On the most basic level you have people who physically threaten you; vote this way or we hurt you, your family, your business. Moving up in sophistication, though, you can stand to lose all sorts of things; you didn't vote the company line? No job for you. Worst is that it allows the government that gets elected to single out and quash people who did not vote for it. Oh, you didn't vote for Bush? Well, I hope you want a vacation to Cuba...
In the end the anonymous vote allows us to vote secure in our liberty. This has always been everyone's first priority. It is only a second priority that the vote be accurate and the result a representation of the public will. We are working on how to achieve this second without sacrificing the first.
[Ego]out
I'm just a small cog in a big machine, and don't see too much of the action, but I do work the polls each election. (And vote as well, not that any of that makes a difference.) AFAICT it would be IMPOSSIBLE to "bribe a bunch of the counters", as the old protocols were carefully developed to prevent cheating. Every act has to be witnessed by several or all of the poll workers, citizens are encouraged to watch the poll workers, and we all watch each other. (I do kind of resent the way MOST of the poll watchers act towards me, I'm not personally involved in anybody's conspiracy scheme to usurp power and rule the world. Honest injun.) I suppose that in some precincts in America, some corrupt individuals could hijack part of the results at some level. Statistically unworrisome, to me. One of the CANDIDATES gets elected every time, so nothing can be done anyway. /. readers can see well that the new protocols have opened a window for fraud, and will be/have been abused.
The problem I see is Diebold's resistance to allow fair protocols to be instituted for the new technology. As a group, I believe
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Amen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How do we know that the electronic results are the ones that were rigged and not the paper ones? It is much easier to change/destroy/replace a paper than to hack the machine. At least for the latter one needs at least a few braincells, while for the first no brain power is required. Why is it every time there is a controversial vote outcome there are always allegations of fraud, meanwhile I am still to see definite proof of it? Why did not anyone entertain the possibility that outcome in different precincts can actually be different? There is a way to keep a secret ballot and still have a fair and transparent voting system. Those who support current mess and refuse any change are the ones who are looking to potentially benefit from it by, say, rigging the vote...?
So Billary called Karl (who's not so busy these days) and ask him to "run the numbers"; quid pro quo the promise was made that "you keep Obama out and we'll continue covering up for Georgie when we sit in the oval office".
And voila, the bias knob on the voting backdoor was set to 7 points.
but I'd think at least ONE of them would have gotten thru in the last decade :D
you must be new here... sorry couldn't resist
sarchasm
I've been doing this for years by writing in my own name for some position that only has one guy running. I have yet to see it show up in an official tally. My guess is they throw those ballots out/don't count them/whatever.
If you go back in the literature and read what some of the votefraud guys have been saying (way before blackbox voting), these elections in the US have been controlled for decades now, because past the precinct level and using paper ballots, it is completely opaque to the electorate and there is NO way to verify anything at all. None whatsoever, you have to trust almost invisible political insiders from one of the two wings of the criminal gang that runs the nation to issue the "official" count. In other words, the party has been over a long time now. I still vote, just so that I can bitch about things with a clear conscious, but I think the major candidates are narrowed down to small pool of "good enough" controllable robots that the uberelite are comfortable with to use as their proxy herdmasters and public facing spokesmodels, and they just get appointed in.
The public has nothing to do with the final outcome, it is just a political dog and pony show to keep people from outright physical revolt. And it is an easy fake out for them to pull off, with one party over in barf0stan someplace it is beyond obvious it is a dictatorship and complete rule by the elite there. With two apparently "different" parties they can keep repeating that you have a "choice" and claim with a straight face that it isn't a dictatorship. And that is all it takes, it really isn't any more complicated than that. And with them being able to control the mass media and the process in order to marginalize/ignore/demonize any third party efforts or independent candidates or candidates that haven't been compromised with bribery or blackmail, they can keep this illusion of choice up and running forever.
second that.
;)
and whenever Roland Piquewhatever gets another one of his stories posted I wonder what he's got that I haven't
MP3 Search Engine
Kristoph,
This actually isn't true. Chris Matthews yesterday grilled pundits asking why all the initial exit polls still had Obama up. This isn't conspiracy theory and the exit polls didn't match.
The idea that Obama's camp had internal polling of being behind 1-2 points also isn't true because it's been widely reported that they were thinking they were up by 11 points.
Nor does it float the idea that they would do worse in rural areas. According the the vote counts, they actually did better (since this is where most were hand-counted) and in the Urban areas where they were expected to do better (where the majority was counted by the Diebold machines) he was down by 7% points.
None of this makes sense. This goes beyond conspiracy theory or people being sore losers.
It doesn't matter if they won the same # of delegates. What was at stake was the momentum and the perception of winning. And now this has suddenly raised two issues that only help Clinton more:
1. America's not ready to elect a black President (if they'd lie to the pollsters in New Hampshire, then clearly we're not ready). Despite the fact that Iowa DID elect him in an OPEN caucus.
2. Women are rallying behind Hillary in droves. Which I don't believe either. The crying incident couldn't possibly have swayed that many voters. People either like or don't like Hillary. If they like Bill they tend to like Hillary so gender has very little to do with it.
Through these irregular voting results the entire dialgoue has now been shifted to race and gender -- none of which were issues before.
All distractions and smokescreens. In my opinion, it's the only way the Clintons or Bush's can win elections. They're not strong enough candidates to win on their own.
Obama will win Nevada because it's an open caucus (no machines). Even though he's widely ahead in SC just as he was in NH, I don't have confidence in the vote counting because as far as I know machines are used there.
www.bradblog has posted lots on all of this not to mention how no one knows anything about LHS Associates (the ones who program the cards for the machines). If there is no accountability and we're not even asking questions about the people who work there, bi-partisan protocols they have in place, etc., then what's the point of voting?
Hacking is a possibility, but what is more realistic is someone taking a bribe who programs the cards.
This says it all about how undetectable it is once they're programmed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkKdJoWG3qQ&feature=related
have you seen the florida ballot itself? the design was really awkward for Al Gore - I realised that I would have ended up voting for Buchanan instead. it's about more than just "hanging chads"
which closely matches the scientific polls that were conducted leading up to the election.
These polls are not scientific. They use some scientific methods to determine whom to poll and where to poll, but they are not necessarily what one might call "scientific".
The fact is that unless every voter is polled and answers honestly, then the poll is merely a mathematical approximation, not an absolute result. While Diebold machines are, almost undeniably, faulty, the polls can't be relied on as proof of errors. The fact remains that something that is statistically unlikely doesn't make it impossible. All polls have a margin of error and have no control, so one should take what they indicate with a grain of salt.
This isn't to say that the mathematics used in constructing the polls and interpreting results are not sound, just that they can't account for actual numbers of voters or factors that may cause more turn out in favor of one candidate over the other. If the poll determines that 40% of likely voters are going to vote and 60% actually do, then the poll is likely to be wrong because the reality changed, not its math.
What would be the point in rigging the popular vote when it is irrelevant. The delegate vote is all that matters. Is there some value to the popular vote like more campaign dollars?
Are the electronic machines in urban areas or rural? The places that could afford them may have a different voter make-up than those that didnt. I could think of a half-dozen other factors that need be tested.
Obama 'lost' to Clinton. But they each received 9 pledged delegates. Nationally, there 3515 pledged delegates at stake. Look beyond the hype at the numbers: even if fraud was detected, it shouldn't make on damn bit of difference.
I don't think we need a primary election season that begins and ends with Iowa/New Hampshire.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The problem is that if we set up a system where after the election I can verify that the vote I cast for a particular person was registered, I can also prove to someone else that I voted a particular way.
Which means it becomes possible to buy and sell votes.
Maybe the Slashdot submission process is powered by Diebold?
Well, that explains the dupes^H^H^H^H^Hovervotes.
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080110/NEWSBLOG/836534599/-1/newsblog
Is to give each voter a receipt with every vote. It should include the name of the polling location, the time, and the candidate.
Here is another tool for examining the NH primary results. It compares each candidate's hand-counted to machine-counted vote ratio with the overall ratio, and can limit the report to towns producing a certain range of votes (e.g. say you only want to consider medium-sized towns to factor out the urban-vs-rural issue).
Please consider that the real way to deal with the risk of fraud is for citizens to organize their own exit polling. The commercial exit polling is not truthful-- it is known that they adjust their results to the actual election outcome and do not make the raw data available.
I third that.
I noticed Slashdot editors tend to favor certain posters stories. Beats me as to why.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
In the end the anonymous vote allows us to vote secure in our liberty. This has always been everyone's first priority. It is only a second priority that the vote be accurate and the result a representation of the public will.
Perhaps for everyone in the US. Elsewhere the top priority has been accuracy and secrecy combined: it is not hard to manage. We've been doing it in Europe since before North America was discovered, although admittedly not everyone got to vote until more recently. We are still working on the "...and the result a representation of the public will" bit though. The main problem seems to be that once elected the buggers decide to go off and line their own pockets. So if you do come up with a solution to that be sure to let the rest of us know!
I'm going to have to get all childish and give this a big old heart felt "Well Duh!"
When are going to admit that these, inefficient, impossible to audit, very expensive machines don't actually make elections better, as much as they simply make it easier to cheat for the politicians who seem to like them so much.
These machines should be banned outright, as there is simply not enough incentive for the very few people to make them actually work right. Hand counted paper ballots are the only way to go. They take an army of people all over the place to sway. These machines take just a few people with enough access to completely steel entire elections.
And access to source code is meaningless. Can you look and see the source code running on the machine? no you can't. And they are more expensive, thought I bet it's cheaper (less labor intensive) to steel elections once these ridiculous machines are in place.
http://www.unfocus.com/
As it takes a super majority of Congress to do this - good luck. The founding fathers put it in the Constitution for a reason. We are a Republic not a Democracy. If people knew what a Democracy 'really is' and what it 'really means'; one would not bandy the 'Democracy' term about as it has been used. Let's say that it's not very flattering.
The Electoral College, for it's faults - is a key point in our Gov't and has been for 200 years. I see no reason to abandon it, simply because an Electron did not go the way the majority vote may have gone.
Perhaps CmdrTaco is too busy approving his own stories, but I posted a story about Napster going 100% MP3 this year and it never got picked up and is still pending. The approval of postings lately seems to have gone down by about 200% from what it was this time last year. Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system: * 2008-01-07 15:04:54 Napster to go 100% MP3 (IT,Music) (pending) * 2007-11-28 04:50:33 Forcefield for your browser (IT,Security) (rejected) * 2007-09-10 18:57:27 That web OS we've all been waiting for! (Features,Operating Systems) (accepted) * 2007-03-27 01:57:20 Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007 (Politics,Republicans) (rejected) Summary: * rejected (2) * accepted (1) * pending (1)
On the other hand, I think it is possible to explain these very strange results without resorting to election fraud. Even so, I do think the current situation warants further scrutiny.
The Independent said there was a 11 point swing between the average of the polls (Obama +8) and the official results (Clinton +3). There are reasons other than fraud for Clinton to beat the polls:
-
Voter complacency after Obama's huge lead in the polls. This would lead more independents to vote in the Republican Primary instead of "wasting" their vote for Obama. Also, some first time voters (like students) may have stayed away from the polls confident that Obama would win easily. This could easily account for 3% of the swing.
- Females deciding to vote for Clinton in the last day. There were two events, both widely publicized by the MST that would have made Clinton more appealing to women. First, the way Edwards came to Obama's defense in the Saturday debate could have made both men appear to be anti-female. Second, the most widely publicized event of the primary was Clinton's teary moment that also might have appealed to females. The exit polls said the late deciders were a wash, they followed the trend of the entire vote. I think the two moments cited above nullified what would have been a swing towards Obama in the late deciders. I'd say this could account for 1 point in the overall 11 point swing.
-
The Bradley Effect where white voters lie to pollsters in bi-racial elections. This is the non-fraud explanation for the 7% discrepancy in the exit polls (Obama +4 vs. Clinton +3). We must give this 7%.
IMO, the discrepancy in the exit polls is the most troubling statistic. If we don't see similar discrepancies (of 5% or more) in primaries in other mostly white states then I think election fraud would be the only possible explanation of the New Hampshire results.We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Why are the pundits so brain dead on this (even Keith Olberman, who I really want to like).
Scientific polls are very accurate all over the world - except in the US!? How could we possibly blaim the polls in that case. It's just ludicrous. I really hope the companies and institutions that do these polls start to get together with the Black Box Voting guys and start to take the electioneers on.
Appologies for the second post, it's just so frustrating to sit through such a complete lack of interest in just how abusive these machines can and will be (and you will never ever be able to rely on them - they are too easy to compromise). Maybe Iowans will take their votes seriously enough to actually do something about them, and insist on hand counted paper ballots - many eyes and many hands is the only way to go. It's the only way to make cheating hard enough to keep it's affect minimized.
http://www.unfocus.com/
You may say whatever you want about Mexican politicians, but after several years of electoral frauds we have come with a system that is practically fraud-proof.
There's nothing more secure than counting each and every vote, one by one, by hand. Any electronic system and sufficiently complex mechanical ones may be bent without anyone noticing it.
In Mexico, representatives of each candidate are present when every vote is counted. You can be sure that your vote is counted because there's a supporter of your candidate counting the votes.
Of course, in a country with more than 40 million people in poverty, there's almost nothing you can't buy. But I'm sure the USA can do a lot better than that.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Let me help you out.
Constructing impossible thought exercises to demonstrate why something that clearly is a choice has a possibility of not being a choice doesn't mean I'm wrong, it means you're a pedantic idiot who misses points.
You're wrong, fuck off now.
Morals clause.
Look it up, then come back and admit you were wrong. You won't because your kind never does.
People in other countries get killed or worse every election. When a dictator gets 99% of the vote, I think, "Wow, what a brave 1%. Too bad they and their families are getting tortured right now..."
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
And, even you don't live in my state, may I say as a citizen, thank you very much for volunteering. People like you are a credit to the country.
I have not been able to find any exit-poll numbers that allow me to verify that statement.
The MSNBC guy said otherwise, also.
i think is see your problem. these are digg stories and headlines, reflecting a great deal of bias.
The last time I recalled, counting was still a pretty easy thing to do. You hold up your hands and you count your fingers. If our election system is flawed in the sense that we don't know how to add 1 to a number, what level of confidence should we expect from our so-called "elected" officials. Clearly, if we can't trust those who count, why should we trust the counted?
No they don't.
Large towns (> 5,000 votes) heavily favoured Clinton.
Large towns (> 5,000 votes) were all machine-counted.
Based on that, it's not entirely surprising that machine-counted areas favoured Clinton - both were positively correlated with town size. The original analysis should have noticed that, but didn't since (a) it asked a slightly different question, and (b) it aggregated the data strangely, so it ended up with a misleading result.
There's an important lesson here: not everything you read online is correct.
So not only do you need to RTFA, you need to think about TFA. (The horror!)
I've submitted one and only one story (Story from Wired about the new U.S. cross-country speed record) and it was posted 1-2 days afterward, despite my really crappy summary. Just my experience, apparently YMMV
Voter Fraud is the (largely imaginary) situation where someone tries to vote more than once, or using someone else's identity.
Election Fraud is tampering with the tabulation or recording of votes and results.
They are very different things.
No, goofyspouse was right.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Republican result is for the same reason as the Democratic result - a correlation between city size, machine-countedness, and voting pattern.
If you take a look at the two largest cities (Manchester and Nashua, ~10% of the total vote), Romney got 35% of the vote, vs. 25% state-wide. Those two cities alone are enough to give Romney 2700 "extra" votes, or 15-20% of the machine-vs-hand "discrepancy".
Basically, it's a classic example of a spurious relationship.
They copied it from the email signature of a Diebold employee: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/0726256
The original quote has been attributed to a number of people.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I don't care whether my stories are rejected or not, but the one that is still pending shouldn't be pending after three days as far as I'm concerned. It should be rejected or accepted. As far as bias, when they stop accepting advertoblogs and self-promoters, they can claim they reject things due to a great deal of bias.
Actually Obama is much more popular in wealthier districts, but many of them in New Hampshire are rural suburbs and thus hand counted.
As for the Diebold OptiScan machines, I believe the ballets are fed into the machine right there in front of the voter. I know here in SF, they will actually spit the ballet out and give you a chance to remark it in the case of either under (section left blank) or over (section with two selections) votes
Hehe, where did I mention political discrimination? Oh, you just THOUGHT that was what I said? See, I was responding to THIS part of the OP, "I should be allowed to employ whoever I want for my own business, that's right within free-association if you ask me." And I proved that wrong.
Oh SNAP, you just lost again. Want to try for three? I love making people like you angry. Call it schadenfreude.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Once again I'm concerned by the way the US pushes its version of democracy on The Rest Of The World. If you can't even get counts with relatively small numbers of votes right, in what way can you be confident that the final result in any way represents the intentions of the majority of voters, rather that the majority of whoever pays for the results?
I mean, it's not as though there's no one convicted of any conspiring, or anything. But it has become an automatism to link "conspiracy" with "crazy".
And yet, who are the real extreme conspiracy 'theorists?' The ones who make a living doing it.
They're the ones who tap the phones of the Raging Grannies and peace activists. Those who trumpet a threat through media mouthpieces about badly concocted risks, like WMD, ignoring or downplaying real risks, like traffic and poverty and the Mob. The McCarthys and the JE Hoovers, shock jocks and NSA spooks. The makers of the 100,000 person 'no-fly' lists, who stop people from travelling because of the cover of the mystery novel they're reading. Commies in the woodpile and all that.
Oh sure, there are plenty of ineffective kooks who make the Lone Gunman series look tame, but they're badly outgunned, outfinanced, and make a good paintbrush for the 'crazy' tag that is both so legitimate and so admittedly expanded by black propaganda, fear, and other disinformation.
So, it is both planned and true that firm believers in alternate histories and shadow elites are crazy, because the evidence is so tainted, that to believe it wholly is to be inevitably duped. Still, some of the evidence is for real, right? Occam's Razor suggests that documents like the PAO's "Greater CIA Openness" and Pentagon's "Information Operations Roadmap" memos are real, and that there are always those-who-would-be-king pulling whatever strings they can grasp.
Here's the situation for media skeptics:
How much of USA's population celebrates indefinite ideological domestic and global war? Millions. And the first casualty is always truth (sorry). To answer your first question: conformity is comforting, and authoritarian.
Damn those pesky terrorists
We have a better case if exit polls and actual results pose a huge discrepancy, but this is not the case in NH. The exit polls already suggested a very tight race, resulting in the networks inability to "make the call" until more than 80% of the precincts have reported.
However, if we're talking about Ohio 2004 in which exit polls and actual results don't match at all, then there might be something fishy.
As much as I despise Diebold, I think we shouldn't jump onto the conclusion of fraud just yet if the exit polls are within the margin of error of the actuals.
My only other sneaky secret is to use an RSS feed reader (I use Firefox smart bookmarks, tho' they seem pretty broken in 3.0 alphas) to monitor certain sources that regularly throw up slashdot storie s- the reg, the beeb, space.com, that sort of thing (ain't telling the others, you gots to work that out yerself ;p )
Fraud?
In an election?
On earth?
Surely you jest...........
Based on this spreadsheet, Sutton was a hand-counted precinct, so I fail to see what this has to do with Diebold.
Mr Coward, looking at your posting history you have _way_ more than a couple of UIDs...
... is that the percentage for Clinton using the Diebold voting machine, is closely equal to the percentage lost by all other candidates *combined* using the Diebold voting machines...
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No. The exit polls did not agree with the vote count:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/usa/2008/01/exit_polls_obama_and_mccain_ah.html
Later, the exit poll is changed to agree with the vote count:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/the_difference_.html
While I had to extrapolate the results. They match up pretty well to the actual vote tally.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/epolls/index.html
Sorry, you can't simply claim fraud when things don't go your way!
Is that the gap between the user's experience on Slashdot and his subsequent disillusionment?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Lets use Kenya as an example and shoot our way out of it! Obviously if democracy is to work, than voting needs to be ironclad. WTF!? First chads then computer voting. A portion of funds from the campaign millions should be used to pay for an accurate and secure voting process.
people on ludes should not drive
http://www.ccc.de/ -> the CCC currently fights against the use of the german government approved nedap voting machines in several hessian towns during the hessenwahl 2008, the country`s elections. there has been a lot of discussion going on about the matter, the last election was interjected as beeing fraud, but the motion was denied.
this time they attacked up front, ahead of the january 27th election. alsbach-haehnlein, a small 10000 people town, currently is in the line of fire about this, with town officials officially claiming the CCC is LYING about the uselessness of the machines. which they are NOT.
everyone from involved with the upcoming vote in the area please feel free to contact the town government and ask them about the usefullness of these boxes and why they think the people are lying about the election machines. gemeindevorstand (kringel) alsbach-haehnlein (punkt) de or call the prefix of the town and local number 5008 extension zero.
www.alsbach-haehnlein.de http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landtagswahl_in_Hessen_2008
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahlmaschine
TIME FOR ACTION ! ASK, VOTE ! Democracy is no gift, its a right to be fought for !
How hard is it to make a computer frickin count votes. I mean give me a break.
Voting machine:
"Click the candidate you want to vote for A) B) C) D)..."
"Are you sure you want to vote for candidate B?"
"Are you really sure?"
"Really Really Sure?"
OK heres your receipt. Thanks for voting.
Thats like the simplest computer program on earth. What did they use some circa 1995 pentiums with the math error?
The only reasonable explanation is human error. I know this will not compute with some of the conspiracy theory basket cases who support Ron Paul but there it is.
The CNN and NBC (MSNBC used the NBC results) exit poll results (still available on their sites) have Senator Clinton winning by 2% http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21225995/
Ok, so if we take that assumption as a given, then we can now examine secret vs. non-secret ballots from the perspective of exploitable corruption.
Secret ballot: Exploitation of corruptibility yields completely fraudulent results. It should be assumed that anyone in the position to exploit this corruptibility, such as Diebold, does exactly that and the result is fake elections. We should assume that we are living in that reality today.
Open ballot (name and vote audit-able by anyone on the Internet): Exploitation of corruptibility yields a variety of vote harvesting techniques ranging from vote purchasing to vote extortion. However, because these activities are illegal, there are remedies. Companies that attempt vote extortion on employees could be sued. Organizations that attempt vote harvesting in other forms would face civil and criminal charges. It's in the open for all to see. Remedies exist.
The obvious question is, which is worse? Is it worse to live in a system where we think our vote counts, but in fact we are a bunch of complete bozos - a bunch of hypnotized sheep being led around by wolves that do whatever they feel like doing and make us think it was our idea? Or is it worse to live in a system where various powers may try to put pressure on you to conform to their will, but the will of the people *does* decide what happens in their own governance.
We live in a system where pressure from powerful organizations and interests is ubiquitous anyway. Additional scrutiny and pressure for our political beliefs and voting records would hardly be something noticeable in this land of surveillance and data-mining.
By any measure, it is better to have a system where the peoples' voice counts than any alternative.
Open the vote. The ramifications can be dealt with and the alternative is not acceptable.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
... which would inspire those in SC, and if he were to win that one as well, Florida voters would be more inclined to vote for him.So, are you saying that the majority of voters are sheeple, and wait to see who other sheeple are voting for prior to casting their vote?
Personally, I can't imagine myself ever following the sheeple herd like that.
I do know people who would vote like that, however, the more I think about it. Scary. What's the point of choice in an election, again?
its like fucking a whore knowing you will contract aids, even though you know shit will be bad we still use it?
what the fuck is going on?!1??!?!?!?!
Please stop using Diebold machines. We're tired of reading what essentially amounts to the same story every single election.
Love,
The Rest of the World
So, this data tells you nothing about what the actually exit polls were predicting, because as more and more returns came in, the numbers were adjusted to match the actual vote counts reported.
Read the fine print at the bottom of the page: "Results are based on NBC News projections and unofficial returns". Those are a combination of lots of factors, and they are adjusted over time to reflect the actual vote count. The purpose of those numbers is to predict the official winner.
If you want to compare exit polls against actual returns, you need actual exit poll data, and that's nowhere to be found on that page.
What is your name? I'm confuse
A) Barack Osama
B) Barack Hussein Osama
C) Barry Soetoro
D) Barry Obama
Heeeyyyyy, he has 4 different rotated names!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2007-03/28585966.jpg <--- Here it puts "Barry Obama".
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/photo/2007-03/28585926.jpg <--- What means this jewel?
His father Barack Obama is muslim of Kenya and bigamist (he married 3 wives) after divorced from Ann 2 years later.
His stepfather Lolo Soetoro is radical muslim of Indonesia working first for Army of Indonesia and later for oil company western.
His stupid mother Ann of Kansas in Hawai was atheist but was converted to muslim and got marriage with 2 muslim husbands.
I'm confuse of his school in Indonesia, 1st and 2nd grade is in catholic school and 3rd and 4th grade is in muslim school. <--- How is he converted to Christian if did go first to catholic school and later to muslim madrassa?
And he is membership of www.tucc.org (Trinity United Church of Christ). How is that this muslim is membership of this racist christian churck (only for blackes and for Africa)?
And for demonstration of his christianity, "can Obama eat the iberian ham made from pigs?".
Goes he to pray to Church the Sundays or pray to Mosque the Fridays? Barry Soetoro is hidding his truth.
http://robertghansen.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-hampshire-machine-count-bias.html
[note, I'm related to Robert Hansen...]
If you do a recount for no other reason than crazy people have decided it's necessary, I'm sure they will be satisfied with recount findings that the recount was unnecessary.
People are crazy, but only so far. Give into a crazy person once and they become a rational, thoughtful individual.
The partisan DrudgeReport.com reported that stations had run out of ballots and were scrambling to get stock. There was a record turnout that either was incorrectly estimated or purposely (and strategically)left with low stock.
CNN reported that stations were running low on ballots.
Either way, people do not like waiting to vote.
That could've changed the results.
Interesting... I've submitted just one story and it made the front page. I would say that a lot of it depends on how well written the summary is, but then again like you said: there's a lot of absolute crap (in terms of quality of story and quality of summary) that gets posted.
http://www.chaban.ripside.com/forum/index.php?topic=18.msg45#msg45
The Associated Press showed Ron Paul winning by a landslide in early every pricinct. Then later, the same AP report numbers changed. But even in the first report, the totals at the bottom of the page do not coincide with what was reported pricinct by pricint. The page-bottom total showed McCain far ahead and Ron Paul trailing; but the pricinct-by-pricint tallies showed very few votes for McCain.
Something screwy is going on.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
I voted for baltar
Jeremy Erwin wrote:
Yeah, election integrity is a purely academic issue. (Of course, the same election machines are in use, with the same dubious firm in charge of them, in other states, but no doubt this is just a one-off.) So let's just let this one ride, and forget about it. And mostly likely use the same damn system next time around...
Myself, I think there are a number of interesting things about this beyond "who won". One might be "who dunnit?" If the Clinton campaign managed to arrange this, that would be a good thing to know... on the other hand, if it's a Republican Dirty Trick (to sabotage democratic momentum, sew dissention in the ranks, possibly even to promote a candidate they think is beatable), that would also be a good thing to know. And if there's no way to know who did it, that would also be an interesting thing to know.
Of course it was fraud. That is only to be expected. No matter how hard we try, what lengths we are willing to go to, we will never be truly secure from cheating. I think that, if anyone could accept that, it would be technologists. We don't let viruses stop us from using the Internet, or computers in general, even though the damage they can cause is palpable.
So it does not matter if there is cheating in the primaries.
There is a bigger issue here. On one side, there is Obama, honest, decent, moral, a character right out of a Frank Capra film running the cleanest campaign in US history.
On the other side is the amoral, ruthless, old style politicians that will do literally anything to seize and hold power, characters straight out of a soap opera.
The American people have a clear choice here, the politics of hope and integrity, or the politics of fear and treachery. Let them cheat; cheat in every way they can. It is important that they do so. We Americans have to make a choice, at a national level, as to what our national character is, what it means to be an American, what our national values are.
For most of our history, up until the 1950's, we Americans have lived in fear of attack of one kind or another, and occasionally done some terrible things (like the American Japanese concentration camps in WWII), justified by "expediency". Not nearly as bad as what the rest of the world has done, but still, we let our terror lead us to some darks paths indeed.
It took a few years after the development of the atom bomb. but once we no longer lived in fear of attack, we set out to correct our mistakes of the past. The civil rights movement, environmentalism, a whole panoply of "moral" initiatives that lead us to be far more advanced ethically than most cultures. Not perfect, no, thats impossible to achieve, but we have come a very long way in two short generations.
And finally, we have come to a crossroads. With the whole world watching, with the future uncertain and fraught with challenges, we as a people, as a culture, as a republic are about to make a historic choice.
Do we return to the safe, old ways, where no action is unthinkable as long as we are guaranteed success, even if those fears that prompted us to those actions are imagined? Once we accept that cheating in the "little" things, like primaries, is acceptable, it is not so big a step to believe that that torture, and imprisonment without benefit of trial, is justified. And it is not much bigger a step to throw out the rule of law, let social connections determine what rights you possess.
That is the one future that is being offered in this election. It is attractive, in it's own way. As long as you are a member of a social group that is on top. you have little to fear. Of course, as the neoconservatives discovered, there is no guarantee you will always be the king of the hill. And it is safe, we have a much better chance of success, though what we will be like afterwards, is debatable.
Or do we decide that we have confidence in our abilities, as a culture, as a people, as a republic, to face the future proud and confident of our ability to handle whatever the challenges the future holds for us, to state that we know what we are, and that there are things we will NOT do, not out of fear that we might be punished, but out of belief in that our values are correct, that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that the choice is not all that hard to make.
As for me, I have never been one to hide, fearful of any noise from the outside. Win or lose, I, as an American, choose to face the future with hope, not fear, and believe that we Americans will succeed by our own merits, not by what depths we are willing to stoop to. I choose the rule of law, not privilege. There are many other Americans like me, from recent immigrants to families that have been here for generations. Obama is not our leader, he is just the representative of the choices we made about what we value, and how we wan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGHNEMXVb-8
Malta is a small country of just 400,000 people. Election is based on STV and handcounted, a fairly more complex system (though fairer) whereby people list down numbers instead of just marking with an X the candidate you want.
Nevertheless, the results are known within hours, despite the hand counting and shifting that goes on -- want to make it faster? It scales to whatever you want - just divide the workload, it's a farmer-reaper parallel problem (very few dependencies). Incidentally voter turnout is always around 95% and the result difference between one party and the next is often less than 10,000 votes (so around 5000 people make the difference on who is in power).
In short, we discuss reasons why a party won/lost, but *never* argue if the vote count was valid simply because every vote that happens has eyes from all party representatives looking at it, and I really do mean all:
- You get 1 paper vote
- You vote (in secret) and place the vote inside a transparent box in front of party representitives (that eliminates ballot stuffing)
- Each box from each precinct is opened up, again in front of every party representative
- Each vote of each box is counted, once again, they're looking
The vote results are so close no one trusts no one so all the checks are in place; but the end result is one of perfect voting. Really electronic voting buys you nothing but time - at the expense of vote integrity.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
What people tend to forget is that a statistical correlation is not the same as causation. So in this case it may be that the areas that have mechanical counting are mainly Clinton supporters because the demographical layout is similar. Thus the sample is not (may not be) random.
It should only be criminals who use threats to make you vote a particular way that should matter (and in those cases, whale the tar out of them if you can; what are they going to do: call the police?). If your boss tells you to vote a certain way, record it and get the boss thrown in jail for treason.
Bosh bang wollop.
Hell, take a recorder in with you.
And if your employer wants to discriminate legally based on voting patterns, let them state their requirements publicly. If they're ALLOWED to discriminate on this basis, they shouldn't have a problem in being open and honest about it.
I thought Diebold (aka Premium) machines were banned. In fact I know they are in some places, like California. So NH, why the fuck are you still using machines proven to be unsecure? Stupidity? Inertia? Mind control? WHAT?
Something that might make all of this easier is for federal elections to be run by the fed and ignore state lines. Each district would be a geographic radius or block that crosses state lines as needed to make the districts more equal in population.
i would also trade the senate's and HoR's powers, then turn the senate into a PR body. People vote for a party in a nationwide referendum every four or so years. The % of votes that party wins is the number of seat they win. If the Liberepbulicrats get 22% of the votes, they get 22 seats. This gives small parties some influence if they have even 1% of the population behind them. The senate functions mostly as a check against the HoR and PotUS, by pushing or stopping legislation as needed. i think that would give more people their own voice in government, or a more nuanced voice than LEFT or RIGHT.
But of course IANA(Political Scientist).
Que the anti-federalists.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
"When you cast your vote, nobody can see it any longer."or limit it technologically (e.g. purely electronic or paper-only).
That is not a necessary condition of a voting system. In pure paper and optical scanning electronic systems, many, many people can see it for a very long time.
"The system must be provably good, without looking at its functioning."
That makes no sense, either in the abstract or current execution. You're creating "black-box" voting as a necessity, when that just isn't the case. The only condition that needs to be met is hiding the identity of the individual voter. This is done in many, many systems out there that require a disconnect between source and object (think: double-blind clinical trials where both sides must be mutually anonymous). It is not necessary to obfuscate the operation of the system during tabulation or prevent the ability to positively audit results. The presence of those qualities is represent design choices--poor ones at that.
Primaries are an internal party matter, less a matter of public concern than the general election. Let the fuckers deal with their own problems.
They appear to have been wrong, or at least using a different poll than the LA Times.
According to their poll, Clinton won 29% of the male vote and 46% of the female vote, vs. 40%/34% for Obama. As the voters polled were 43% male and 57% female, that translates into 38.7% of the vote for Clinton and 36.6% for Obama, which is very close to what the final result was.
I have no idea what poll the UK Independent was using, but the data from the LA Times's poll matches up very closely with the actual results. As a wise man once said:
Your link just goes to a guy saying that another guy said the exit polls didn't match. The LA Times link goes to actual data from an actual exit poll, and if you calculate the results, you'll find their exit poll was within ~1% of the actual outcome.
Why are people so desperate to hallucinate evidence of fraud? Not everything is a conspiracy, you know, and there're plenty of real problems you could be devoting your righteous indignation towards. It's good to second-guess and double-check, but that includes your own assumptions. Self-delusion ain't pretty.
We get corruption either way. The trick is to minimize it.
Right now we have secret voting and secret counting, and that doesn't seem to be working too well.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think he's misunderstood the explanation of the problem. If the pollsters have uneven access to the voters - i.e., the officials arrive and chase them off, or don't let them get there until later - then they'll be unable to sample the entire day's voters, and hence the end of day numbers will be skewed.
Of course, the same uneven temporal sampling could happen for any number of reasons. If, for example, one party's voters tend to come in all day (say, students, housewives, people with flexible schedules) and another party's voters tend to come in bursts (maybe church busses or good ol' boys on their way home from work), then interviewing a certain number of people per hour will obviously be skewed towards the first group, as will trying to interview a certain fraction of people and being unable to keep up during peak times.
Another example:
That's simply not true. If one group is disproportionately likely to avoid talking to pollsters - say, a group that routinely vilifies the "liberal bias in the MSM" - then that group will be systematically underrepresented, regardless of how careful pollsters are in their selection process.
And yet, with zero evidence, he dismisses this potential problem as not making sense on the face of it. He complains that it's merely a hypothesis so he can dismiss it, and then goes on to make hypotheses of his own.
I can't say as I think the 2004 election was handled well, but it's pretty obvious that the writer of this paper has an axe to grind and a conclusion he wants to support, so it's hard to take his conclusions seriously.
Moreover, the fact of the matter is that we have no evidence initial exit polls disagreed with the count other than "a guy who says on his blog that he heard a guy on the news say that". For someone who complains about "the MSM", you seem awfully trusting of them when they're saying what you want to hear.
As the saying goes:
You might be right, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it.
(a) Bigger differences - the difference between the exit poll and election results was 12% in the Ukraine.
(b) Supporting evidence - the Ukraine results included a highly suspicious 96% voter turnout rate in the pro-goverment east, vs. an apparent overall turnout of 79%. Plus, you know, the opposition candidate getting poisoned.
It's not like exit polls aren't wrong in other countries, too. In the 2004 French election, exit polls put the vote split at 40/34/17, whereas the final results were 50/37/13, which is quite a substantial difference.
That's an absurd analogy.
If there are problems with polls, they're likely to be systematic problems, such as "conservatives are more likely to ignore pollsters because of antagonism towards perceived liberal bias in the news" or "angry rednecks vote Republican and don't talk to pollsters", rather than the truly random problems he's assuming.
Is the question of tampering worth looking into? Of course, and I'm glad Kucinich is getting a recount going, and anything that gets more paper trails into voting is good, but the eagerness with which people are leaping on the notion of voting fraud - despite very, very thin evidence - is disturbing.
I suppose it might be left over from the losses in 2000 and 2004; however, obsessing over the past isn't going to win the future. Now that there's going to be a hand recount, I'm not at all sure it's in the best interests of Democratic supporters (or democratic supporters, for all that) to engage in a nasty internal spat over accusations of fraud. Don't think this won't be saved as possible ammunition later this year in the actual election.
Okay, how's this for evidence: votes weren't counted.
People voted for Ron Paul. (Not my candidate of choice, but there you go.) They reported no votes. People complained.
That is *evidence* that something is wrong.
Now, as far as the statistics go, significant variance in statistics is evidence. It's enough to support many physics theories (one of the hardest science disciplines you'll find). You might need more evidence to prove something is amiss, but even statistical variance is enough evidence to warrant investigation.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The problem is that the vast majority of exit polls agree with the official results. If this was a systematic error then it would have affected most states and most elections. Instead the anomalies occur in a few key states in a few key elections. For an idea like the one above to fit the data, it would have to explain why conservative voters are almost always willing to talk to pollsters but get pollster-shy in a few battleground states in a few key elections.
Your other suggestion. that the pollsters consistently miss the periods of time when most conservatives vote, doesn't work either. You don't explain why they are only missed in the key states and elections. Worse, since the conservatives need to be bunched for this effect to work then we would expect the pollsters to sometimes oversample the conservatives and this does not match the lopsided deviation almost always favoring the conservatives in the official results.
As a side note, did you know that two Ohio election officials (a Democrat and a Republican) were recently sentenced to the maximum of 18 months in jail for rigging the recount of the 2004 Ohio election? I've got to wonder why someone would go to the trouble and risk of rigging the recount if they didn't think/know there was fraud in the election. Now, thanks to their crime, we can never find out because the ballots were quickly destroyed after they fudged the data that would have determined if a complete recount was required. The judge gave them the maximum sentence because he believed they were lying to him in order to protect higher-ups.
But you and I agree on the main point that we need verifiable paper trails and we need politicians like Dennis Kucinich who have the courage to demand a recount.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
more of those who vote on your candidate.
How? Well, Liebold machine tells you a moment after a vote is made.
IMO the MSM is responsible for confusing the heck out of most people because they never mention that the exit poll data gets "corrected" to match the official results. This is especially sad because checks against raw exit poll results are the number one way to detect election fraud. Governments is Serbia, (the former Soviet Republic) Georgia, and the Ukraine were overthrown after large exit poll discrepancies indicated election fraud. You could argue that presenting raw exit poll data to the public and the world is the number one task of a free press in a Democracy.
The exit poll discrepancies in Ohio in 2004 led to a request for a recount. The recount was intentionally rigged to match the official results. This cheating was detected and two election officials recently received prison sentences of 18 months (the maximum) for rigging the recount. Thanks to their crime, we will never know if the election was rigged because the ballots were destroyed shortly after the two criminals showed that their pre-selected sample of ballots matched the official result.
The MSM talks about bringing Democracy to other lands (such as Iraq) but then turns around and does the best job it can to thwart Democracy in America in order to "avoid embarrassment". Judging by the many people on Slashdot that were fooled into thinking the exit poll data is not "corrected", it seems the MSM is doing a heck-of-a job.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
"showing 0 (zero) just makes it painfuly obvious there is a problem..."
Yes, the problem is called "electronic voting".
"what we need is to design an effective open system so that there are no errors, or a way that the public at large can be assured that their vote counted."
No, what we need is paper ballots. There is no such thing as an electronic system that the ordinary voter can verify is working as advertised - they cannot audit source code, check object code for patches or viruses, or operating systems for the ability to let these loose on the system as soon as they're done verifying. They can't possibly act as scrutineers, can't possibly demand meaningful recount of any non-physical token, and can't possibly have certainty in the final result. The mere fact that software was used leads to the doubt. Software accordingly can't be used, whether "open" or not.
Internet voting is even worse. You lose any guarantee of security and thus the secret ballot, and you lose polling place neutrality: There might be 20 spam windows up on the screen screaming lies and threats at you in the three seconds before you vote. We have laws against campaigning in the polling place for very very good reason.
Yes, "these things happen". They happen in each and every case of electoral fraud in all the rigged votes in history back at least to the Romans.
If you can't recruit your own scrutineer from non-technical people, if you can't read the ballot personally without the intermediary of a machine or another person, if you can't be sure that the polling place itself did not become tainted with intimidation or preferential access for one campaign, if you can't assure the public that the ballot is indeed secret, then you don't have a democracy, period. E-voting in real elections is an inherently bad idea. Read Jason Kitcat's excellent arguments on that as well. He was working on an "effective open system" for a while and then rightly abandoned it for all the reasons I note, and more.
Yes, that's what I'm doing. That's what I said I was doing in the initial post, and said I was doing in the last post. This whole "can't use them to confirm that the machine counts are not corrupt" business is nothing more than a straw man of your own devising.
Let's take another(?) look at what I said:
"So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes."
Two main points in there:
Both of those are quite supportable from the machine-counted data. The first point is simply derived from the data itself, and is true regardless of whether fraud occurred or not, and the second point follows directly from the first.
I'm not saying the machine-counted votes were clean; I'm saying that the analysis which suggests they were dirty is wrong, that a better analysis provides an obvious explanation for the difference, and that Occam's Razor would thus favour the explanation that the root cause of the three correlations we see was town-size effects rather than fraud.
Here is an article that supports your ideas. It appears to be a London Times editorial even though the domain name is typepad.com.
It says that some women who voted for Clinton might have been lying about it to avoid conflicts with their husbands. I hadn't consider this possibility but it makes sense to me and therefore I am less inclined to believe there was a problem with the official tally, although I'm still glad they're going to do a recount.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Ewige Blumenkraft.