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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.'"
Sure, polls and results can differ. However, that is NOT what this is about.
The interesting part is that the results from areas using Diebold machines are significantly different from the results in hand-counted areas -- by an margin amply large to change the result of the primary. The data being published at Black Box Voting show that the differences exist even when accounting for the size of the population centers.
Maybe nothing to see here, but there is certainly enough here to warrant a closer look.
Life is short: void the warranty.
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.
people keep saying that but what is to keep the machine from printing the wrong data on the paper trail?
I guess you could have the booth print the ballot and then the voter check the ballot and then put the ballot in a box...
Except that someone might forget to put the ballot in the box. Or when they do a recount the ballot might be miss read. I guess you could use OCR but that isn't perfect.
Or you could print a barcode that would reflect the ballot that is printed... Unless they hacked that so it didn't match.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
To me the larger issue is the Ron Paul votes that were missing then found again only after the officials were called out on it. This is a very serious problem that can't be refuted or explained away, and I hope it's not overshadowed by the Clinton/Obama issue.
I agree. I think the ballot should be as secret as you want it to be, no more. People should be able to at the very least check their *own* votes.
I know people who have argued that, well, if you can prove that you voted a certain way, people could buy your vote! But there are several problems with that.
1) You could already do the same -- I've never seen a polling place that prevents you from snapping a picture of your ballot with your cell phone. Even if there was an official ban, how would they know you were doing it behind the privacy screen unless they had a camera on you, which would be a much greater problem?
2) Our current system has a huge margin of error -- a couple percentage points, meaning in a national election, millions of votes. Is a slightly increased risk of vote buying really worth millions of disenfranchised voters?
3) Validation isn't really needed for vote buying. Half of Americans don't even vote in national elections, let alone little local ones. Their vote means almost nothing to them. Is one to believe that paying these sorts of people and taking them to the polls that they'll suddenly get a political opinion and vote for someone else, someone who's *not* giving them money? In large enough numbers to be relevant?
4) Even if all of this wasn't true, would it really be worth the risk to a candidate to run an operation in which people vote and then have to return to a campaign office to verify their vote? Or to have an online vote verification operation? Would it even be worth the time to that candidate to have people sit down and look at the votes to catch the few "cheats" that said they'd vote for the candidate but didn't?
It just seems like a complaint blown way out of proportion, and insignificant in comparison to the problems that we've had in voting.
Tonight's Special: Leg of Salmon
treason Pronunciation Key -[tree-zuhn] -noun
1. the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign.
2. a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state.
3. the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.
Perhaps if some investigations were done; and if rumors are shown to be true, and one can show and prove that tampering did occur; we should begin charging people for doing this. When someone takes it upon themselves to subvert the rights of the people to instill leadership - there should be a price to pay.
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.
except for the fact that it was reported that someone got 0 (zero) votes.. when voters said they did vote for the guy. which tells you there is a problem.. how many votes for other people didn't get counted? where did the votes go.. did they give the votes to someone else??
showing 0 (zero) just makes it painfuly obvious there is a problem... 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.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
How is asking for your serial number any different from asking how you voted? If it is illegal to ask how you voted then just make it illegal to ask your serial number.
I do love the automatic assumption of racism.
A precinct in New Hampshire that is considered "blacker" than others would have sixty black people. No joke.
The percentage of black people in NH in 2006 was 1.1%, which out of 1,314,895 people would be about 15,000. Take 301 voting precincts, and there is an average of fifty per precinct.
Instead of automatically assuming that racism is involved, consider that there may be other factors involved.
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.)
These things happen in primaries. Often a lot of independents swing the same way, or last-minute campaigning changes people's minds.
This is true, but it still doesn't explain the discrepancy between the Obama vote in Diebold districts vs hand counted districts. See for yourself.
The Ron Paul situation was inexcusable as well. How does someone receive 31 votes in a small town, but get called in to state headquarters as 0? This indicates one of three things:
1. Whoever was calling in was horribly incompetent.
2. Whoever was calling in was paid off to throw the numbers.
3. Whoever was calling in was personally biased, and decided to ignore the 0.
I tend to think it was #1 or maybe #3, because putting down a 0 would be downright retarded if you're trying to rig an election. Had the number for Paul been 10 rather than 31, nobody would have known. It just became obvious when one Ron Paul supporter said "Hey, I'm from that town and I voted!".
This sort of thing can't happen in elections.
Even if our elections are not being fixed one way or another, the fact that they can be fixed should convince us to change (god I'm sick of the word change...).
Since this is News for Nerds, does anyone have good ideas for a computer based voting system that allows people to keep the anonymity of their vote while still providing proof the vote wasn't fixed?
And that's "Dr. Ron Paul", thankyouverymuch.
/he's got just as much right to be a doctor as the Schiavo-diagnosis-by-edited-videotape "Doctor" Frist
He's a "doctor" who doesn't believe in evolution... which makes him "mister Ron Paul" in my book.
The people referring to "your boss" and "your job" are looking for polite examples. Do a search for "voter coercion" (depending on your political persuasion you may be more moved by the results if you add "union", "employer", or "government" to the search term) and you get an idea of the risks of non-secret ballots, which run into territory far more serious than missing a promotion, and which cannot be remedied by a lawsuit. You don't hear much "recent non-anecdotal" evidence of voter coercion because we have secret ballots, so it's not generally feasible (the victim can simply lie), but a relevant search will point you to examples from other countries, or non-government elections here.
-Scot
101010, 222, 52,
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.
There is of course a flip side to this that you seem to be unaware of.
Outside of those ivory towers and well manicured suburbs, there's a
world of people where beating up the boss would not be entirely out
of the question. Piss off the "working man" you just may end up
pummeled. The fact that you think you have power over him many not
help. This working man may not be forward thinking enough or in good
enough control of his temper to prevent the inevitable beating.
If you screw around with some yuppie with a working class background
then things can get really interesting...
After the lawyer side of the family is done, the felon side of the
family can be sent in.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't see why choice versus inclination matters. These are still things that can be used to discriminate or intimidate.
Besides, in this data-mining-happy world, I would argue that voting records are very, very sensitive and important. Heck, I'd rank them up there, collectively, with medical records. The very survival of our society is dependent on how we choose our leaders and representatives and who we choose, and if we compromise the integrity of that then we may as well throw the Constitution out the window too.
Why are you against laws that protect the rights of the individual? Isn't that what law is for? Compare laws that protect the rights of people to the laws that restrict what people do and you find that restricting what people do has led to over a million people in jail right now for non-violent offenses. Protecting people doesn't put them in jail, by contrast...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The silly thing is that there are people like you who are arguing here to get rid of the secret ballot, when there's absolutely no need to do so. There's been academic research ongoing for decades in verifiable voting mechanisms, and some of them are truly innovative. Punchscan and Scratch & Vote are two highly visible examples, but there have been scads of other papers on the topic.
Why risk a return to the corruption that occurred when ballots weren't secret when modern technology (not computing, but applied mathematics) provides mechanisms to have our cake and eat it too?
Well, I have a complaint. It is just so, so tragic that neither Clinton nor Obama will openly run on the SAME ticket. Here they have, for FIRST TIME IN US HISTORY TWO gender and color/gender minorities who BOTH have major votes and stand to easily defeat any member of their opposition. . Clinton so much has to make this a personal thing, and probably in the background Diebold was tasked with "preserving the status quo" (keep "the (wo)man" in charge).
We have this so-called great nation, with so many female business owners (I think over 54% of small businesses are female-run or created, and small businesses by far beat in numbers the number of people employed by big companies...) and a nation of historically harangued minorities of color (some, but not all Asians, harangued, too, but paradoxically MANY Asians academically and economically up-end the traditional "expectations" (of white, Black and Latino arguments/side-taking for/against Affirmative Action/Civil Rights, etc.) by amassing clout, money, and economic standing in THIS country in under 25 what many blacks and Latinos have consistently failed to do in over 100 years (granted, only since 1965-ish have MOST of them had an opportunity by law to not be discriminated against, tho institutionally, well...). So, technically, pretty much all non-Caucasian "Americans" have had since roughly 1975 to realize an opportunity to excel (OK, many have, and truly, there are more than dozens of black and Latino millionaires (not counting sports players, ok?)...
Anyway, (rambling) Clinton and Obama need to cast aside their gauntlets. Clinton needs to quit whining. Hell, her HUSBAND already served twice. If she weren't running against Obama, and had no other non-Caucasian contender, I'd throw ALL my weight behind her. Same/ditto for Obama. But, both of them together is like splitting and squandering an opportunity. They BOTH should run as ticket mates and threaten the corruption that is visible and invisible in this country: patriarchal/old-boy power, and institutionalized down-trodding on economically disadvantaged. BOTH these clowns need to get on the same page, get in there, and stop and then reverse the sending of US military personnel into foreign countries to occupy or prop up business-backed "expeditions".
Diebold needs to just "die", and maybe die "boldly". Ticket tampering should be MORE than a federal offense: it should be punishable by dismemberment.
Mod me troll or off-topic if you want, but any FOOL can see that (despite the historians here who'll say, "been there, done that, it failed...) we have NOT had today's opportunity before. If Clinton and Obama can't pull their heads out of their asses, then we should just continue down the SAME, TIRED, LITTERED old road we're on until the PUBLIC mobs the government. Oh, wait, we're mostly apathetic, so that won't happen, either.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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
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.
ahh but if anybody is able to see what any serial number voted.. what is to keep your boss asking you the day after what your serial # was? and then seeing if you voted his way?
How about bring in someone elses serial number? Hell, make it so that the elections people will, upon request, print you out someone elses serial number, based on the candidate you want it to reflect. So if you want an 'obama serial number', even though you voted for Paul, just ask, and you'll be given, at random, a copy of someone elses serial number to hand to your boss.
You'll be able to do this anytime, until the polls close.
The only time it won't work is if nobody voted for the candidate the boss wanted. And that's ok, because
a) its not terribly likely, as the 'boss' is probably rooting for a major candidate
b) if the candidates total was 0, the boss is going to know you didn't vote for him, even without seeing your serial number.
You mean: as secret as their bank, employer, or anyone else who can give them shit for not voting as ordered wants. Ballot is secret for a reason, that reason being that it is the only way to prevent blackmail. If it is possible for you to check your vote, then it is possible for someone else to demand that you do so while they are looking over your shoulder, with dire consequences should the vote not be what they want.
Anyway, here's my proposal for a tamper-proof secret voting system:
This way anyone can ensure that their own vote makes it all the way to the top, there is no way for anyone to figure out who voted how (assuming that each individual voting place serves enough people), and there is no point in the loop where anyone could add or remove votes without it being noticed. As a nice addition, the system is scalable to arbitrarily large population (it's a tree model, after all), and the final result will propably be ready by that same evening.
The key is to keep sufficient accounting so that any abnormalities can be detected and traced to the source. Voting machines make this impossible and should not be used in any circumstances.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
If you can call up a web page that shows who you voted for for your own verification, your boss can make you do so to make sure you voted for his candidate.
There's a solution to that problem.
When you vote, the system gives you a single digit number as your verification code. When you go on to the system to verify your vote, it presents you with a list of all the candidates with a single digit number (not the one it gave you earlier) next to each candidate that you didn't vote for and the number that it did give you next to the one you did vote for.
There is then no way for anyone other that you to see who you voted for - all you have to do is lie to your boss about which digit you were given.
This would need to be worked on a little to make it properly foolproof, but it could be done.
Also, you think Bush is bad concerning privacy? Wasn't it the Clintons who requested and "lost" a bunch of FBI files on political opponents? Of course, these files turned up on top of a table in the WH, in plain site after being "lost" for several months. "There these are! They've been here on this table in this hallway the entire time!"
Don't even get me started on Sandy Burgler... Er... Berger. You remember, that Clinton National Security adviser who stole and shredded 9-11 related top secret documents by stuffing them into his pants and socks right before the 9-11 commission got them?
And, of course, lets not forget about all the stolen WH silverware. But we're facing serious problems. Iraq's security has improved, but the civil war could return at any moment, because there's no political progress. "Exit" is not a strategy to fix any of that. That's really about the only strategy I've heard from any of the candidates on both sides. Afghanistan is still a mess. Afghanistan is a NATO operation, not a US one. While it is our problem, it's not ours alone. Also, I haven't heard a whole lot from the left except for "Exit". The budget deficit is larger than ever, and the economy is looking bad. First, the US government is pulling in the largest receipts in history. This means that it is making MORE money than ever. Unfortunately, spending has grown faster than the receipts. Next, the economy is looking better than ever, in nearly every single sector. Unemployment, interest rates and inflation are all low while the stock market, GDP and payroll are all up. The economy has been booming since '02. He's got hope, but hope is not going to placate the Republicans when he raises taxes, which he will have to do in order to balance the budget. Again, raising taxes will only slow the economy, which will cause the government to receive less money. Yes, that's right! Raising taxes will LOWER the amount of money the government takes in. Just like how LOWERING taxes INCREASED the amount of money the government takes in. I know it's hard for many to grasp, but it's a tested and true economic principle. Google or Wiki Laffer Curve for an explanation as to how it all works. The problem is spending. While the current administration as congress have not exactly been frugal, the problem is not with the amount of money the gov't brings in, but how much it spends. The gov't is making more money than ever. It doesn't need MORE.
The WSJ has a pretty good write up on it all HERE
That's all I have for now.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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 )
So your boss asks you for your number before viewing the web page.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
... 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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I'm an independent but pretty conservative guy. If anyone but Obama is the Democratic candidate, I'm definitely voting Republican. I like Ron Paul and supported Harry Browne. I like Obama, though. I might vote for him against most of the fairly lousy crop of Republicans. I think the most electable ticket out of the major candidates would be if McCain and Obama crossed the aisle and ran a McCain/Obama ticket, or maybe even the other way around. I like McCain, too, even though he's far from the most conservative Republican running.
So what's to like about Obama? I have several reasons.
He's young. Most people see that as a drawback, but he's had terms in the Illinois statehouse and has been a US Senator for a little while. He still has plenty of energy, determination, and focus.
The man's record tends to reflect his stated beliefs, even if I don't necessarily agree with many of his political beliefs.
He's well spoken and writes well. That man really does communicate with people, and he really reaches them.
He's hopeful, and he's not happy with the partisan bickering and the sorry state of affairs in Washington. We could use someone hopeful rather than cynical in the White House.
The race card has been overplayed by the media in this campaign, but it could really help both at home and abroad. Obama is a first-generation American on his father's side, and half black. Blacks in the US are largely self-disenfranchised because they don't think anyone running the country cares about their plight. I'm not a sociologist, but I grew up in a poorer mixed-race neighborhood and I've seen it. Here's a man who instead of giving in to prejudice and allowing himself to fail because certain ignorant people make life a little harder is taking advantage of all the hard work that civil rights workers of all skin colors have done, and could be President of the United States. The man shouldn't be questioned about being "too black" or "not black enough". That's just more racism. He should be now, and will be if elected, a huge role model for people of all races. He'd also be a sign to the rest of the world that the US isn't always going to be run by the rich white boys' club.
Although he doesn't have as much government experience in international affairs as many other candidates, he has more personal experience with Muslims than any of them. He went to a local Indonesian school for two years from the ages of six to eight. He then attended Catholic school in Indonesia. He grew up part of his life in another culture that our politicians need to understand. I think his life experience and mayb e even the knowledge of others about his life experience could help him reach some agreements with people in largely Islamic countries that the candidates from privileged wealthy families here in the US can't.
Charisma is a good thing not just for getting elected, but also for getting things done with Congress, with the Cabinet, and with foreign dignitaries. It's a strength valued in presidents -- especially Kennedy, Reagan, and Bill Clinton. McCain has it, Edwards has it, Huckabee has it, Giuliani has it, and Dr. Paul has it. None of them have it the way Obama has it. I don't see much of it at all from Kucinich, Clinton, or Romney.
I'd vote for Paul in the general election in a heartbeat if he got that far. I'll probably vote Republican in the general anyway, because McCain will probably be the candidate. I'd vote Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani before any of the Democrats besides Obama. I'll be torn if it's Obama against McCain, and although I like Giuliani and Huckabee pretty well I'd probably vote for Obama over any of them.
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.
Wow.
This is getting complicated. It's all so simple.Just make it like a Cash Machine/ATM.
Go to voting machine.
Enter your vote(s).
Machine prints receipt.
Voter verifies receipt.
Voter places receipt in ballot box.
In case of doubt, you can count the paper ballots. Normal security applies to paper ballots. You can then add the fancy security to check that the ballot actually went in to the ballot box, such as a bar code reader, etc. But that's just icing on the cake.
Complexity is the enemy of security.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music