Slashdot Mirror
New Hampshire Primaries Follow-Up Analysis
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica has posted a lengthy follow up analysis of the 2008 New Hampshire Primaries outcome. The article deals with the O'Dell machine/hand-count table that has been circulating through emails. It also points out the combination of factors that resulted in such an odd symmetry of numbers, although the article notes that these numbers have been corrected. The corrections still indicate a discrepancy among the tallies. The article also goes on to talk about the nature of the communities that arrived at these numbers and what/how the handcounts proceeds. This process has been inconclusive; something that does not bode well for the rest of the primaries and indeed the election itself, as only 16 states currently mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results."
It doesn't matter which way the popular vote goes, the electoral college elects the president... if you really wanted to screw with the election in this country, it would be WAY cheaper just to buy some electoral votes than to try to manipulate tons of ballots which won't have any effect on the actual election outcome.
stuff |
I voted for Kodos.
I had just submitted this other story about the Primaries in NH to Firehose: Diebold Effect Persists even after statistical removal of demographics covariates. http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/01/the_diebold_effect_hillarys_vo.php
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
..confusing Democrats for over 200 years. ;)
The article doesn't even mention Romney's unusually high numbers when optical scanners counted the vote. Oh, and I support Ron Paul, so arstechnica has called me loopy because of my political beliefs. Looks like there is one more location I won't be going for any kind of news in the future!
Faithless electors can be punished in 24 states. Furthermore, most electoral college voters are established party faithful -- it'd cost an awful lot of money to start swinging their votes since their political career would be destroyed.
At $1 million each, buying enough would cost $270 million. For that kind of money, why not just run for president and sink it in your campaign like Mitt Romney. How many politically connected folks would throw away their career, their connections, and their source of future income for less than a mil?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
So, I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. But has anyone who has gotten excited about this even bothered looking for unobserved variables. I don't know say, the affluence of a community and the likelihood that they have expensive voting machines. And that affluent communities might have different voting preferences that poorer communities?
Are we going to start banning ice cream to lower the murder rate next??
no comment
Forget the "skew", there was clear evidence of fraud in certain towns where they reported zero votes for Ron Paul, and a couple of supporters who lived in that town came forward and said "uh, I don't think so, I KNOW I voted for him, as did several friends"?
The town did a re-count and magically those votes re-appeared. This wasn't a case of "oops, we were off by a few"- every single vote for a particular candidate was GONE. What's fascinating is that all of the news stories I've read about the NH primary concerns have neglected to mention this, and far as I can tell, nobody has done jack shit to figure out why it happened.
Furthermore, if they lost ALL of the Ron Paul votes- how many other votes did they lose?
Please help metamoderate.
US Elections are so bad, so corrupted, that UN observers wont certify them because they fail to reach minimum standards. And you have seen the programmers testimony havent you? youtube-LHS associates.
I see no choice for you all, you are going to have to, um, rationalise away all that corruption and ignore the facts, just so you can sleep tonight and wake up believing the lie that you are someone who cares about authenticity.
Before you can even bring the EC into play, you have to actually win the party nomination. And to do that, you have to win the primaries (still not the popular vote, though). And the best way to win the primaries (or to not lose them) is to win one of the first couple of states. I don't think NH was "rigged" by any means, but the motive is certainly there. Obama was riding the wave of popularity, and it may have gotten a little out of hand had he beaten Clinton in NH. She always has the advantage with the superdelegates, but if she doesn't win anything before Feb. 5, she'll have a hard time convincing enough people to vote for her. So winning NH was a great way for her to not only stay in the race but reestablish her position as frontrunner.
Now it probably won't do her much good to go and rig the vote in Nebraska or North Dakota...
Hillary steals it from Obama and no one cares?
...but these are primaries. I'm just not sure why all the fuss about primary elections in NH when I am sure that Iowa's caucuses were much less accurate. And, no, I'm not whining, the candidate I supported in Iowa won.
Just talking about election fraud is tired old conspiracy-theory mongering! Election fraud never happens! Bush really did win! When you claim election fraud, the terrorists win! Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor! That does not make sense!
I really hate how having the idea that a group of people ever sat down to do something bad or dishonest together is immediate cause to be branded a lunatic.
+++ATH0
It's good to know they're doing a public hand recount of paper ballots (which is exactly what they need to do), but the primary result of the New Hampshire primary is the media coverage of the winner the day after, so even if the Diebold machine count was wrong by such a huge margin, the damage is already done because the media has already crowned Clinton as the winner of the New Hampshire primary.
Do you have links? I saw that explanation for one single county, and when questioned they looked over the numbers and saw someone wrote down 0 instead of 31 (or something like that). There wasn't a recount, just a comparison of totals vs what got written down on the reporting sheet. Why can't that be human error as they said it was? If I wanted to cheat, I'd put something harder to spot as a mistake like 6 instead of 0.
I'm not saying a recount won't find real problems, but every mistake isn't automatically a conspiracy. Yes it is a shame -- I'd like it if Ron Paul got more votes also -- but until I see the results of the recount I'm not jumping to any conclusions.
Obama and Edwards are great candidates, but I was sure Hillary had an ace up her sleeve to skew the results. You can't skew caucuses where folks have to line up on one side of a room or other. But it's easy to hack the results of a Diebold vote.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I have always found it incredibly curious how, of all countries, the United States has such big problems for vote counting. I know that problems like these are everywhere to be found, and that the US hava a very atypical election machinery (with each state presenting votes as they see fit, and other decissions based on a per-county basis, etc etc), but all in all, it should be pretty obvious that you have some serious election problem.
Down in my country (i'm form Chile), the electoral system is incredible clean and efficient. Every vote is hand counted, and the aggregated results of the election are official one or two hours after the last table closes, with a certainty of about 99.9%... and it's not a technological wonder: just ordered hand counting, and coordinated recollection of results. i know, we are a small country, but the voting population is about 4 mill people... more than NH in any case.
And in the event that there's a problem (i don't remember any in the last 20 years), we can track each ballot to the specific table where it was counted and check it all the way down to the ballot.
And Chile is a country with a reputation for chaos and disorder. Should i be amazed for our electoral system, or be amazed for how crappy the united states' system is?
in other words... with all due respect (and i mean it, it's an honet question...), why do you have such a crappy system? wouldn't it be cheaper to implement a low-tech, efficient and accountable sytem rather than risking every election with a thrillion different systems for each district and all this eternal debate about who probably got more votes?
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
The third time will NOT be charm.
It's a pattern!
Wake up USA.
The Muslim religion got hijacked by extremists.
You're getting your entire country hijacked right in front of you!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Rigging primaries is the way to go. Actually, the way to go is validvote VVPT any-PC voting, in the blog as a base64 encoded tarball at www.myspace.com/presidentbyamendment and demoed on YouTube, linked off the above. When you're ready to stop being such suckers... www.myspace.com/presidentbyamendment
The US mainland crosses 4 timezones, so by the time the west coast polls close and you take your couple hours to finish tallying, you are talking the next day for those on the east coast! People want the result before they go to bed so they know whether they have to get up in the morning or not!
Since, in this election the exit polls that predicted Gore to win were wrong the first time ever! (The Dewey-Truman? election was a newspaper screw up)
..........FULL STOP.
In Minnesota the random audit from the last election did not take place with public results.
Each county is supposed to have an election commission that does the random audit of one or a couple precincts. How random? Decided by the county. Where are the results? not posted at
the Sec of State of MN. Not at the County (Hennepin largest population. Did it even take place?
Maybe.
Just like "having a paper ballot" does not mean they get counted by the machines, having "audit" does not mean it is a real audit of an election. It is in the transparency of the process, secret audits are not transparent, not posting results is not transparent.
"Forget the "skew", there was clear evidence of fraud in certain towns..."
Ok, that's a lie, read the story instead of repeating something you heard.
"The town did a re-count and magically those votes re-appeared"
That's also wrong.
"This wasn't a case of "oops, we were off by a few"- every single vote for a particular candidate was GONE"
And yet, it was obviously "fraud" and not a simple omission by ONE worker in ONE location. Oh wait, that's exactly what it was.
"What's fascinating is that all of the news stories I've read about the NH primary concerns have neglected to mention this"
Wait, you post on slashdot, but don't read it? Because it was covered right here.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/10/1635225
"and far as I can tell, nobody has done jack shit to figure out why it happened. "
That's because THEY KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. Someone forgot to write down the number. THAT'S IT. Get over your persecution complex, someone's granny had a brain-cramp and forgot to write it down. It got fixed (because a ZERO for a legitimate candidate is a pretty fucking obvious mistake) and life went on. Unless you're SuperBanana, in which case, you're ranting about it still even though it a nothing story.
"Furthermore, if they lost ALL of the Ron Paul votes- how many other votes did they lose?"
They didn't "lose" the votes you fucking twat, stop lying.
YOU are what is wrong with politics in this country, a simple mistake, EASILY identified, and obvious to anyone who isn't retarded turned into "clear evidence of fraud" because your boy was involved.
+5 informative my ass, he got every single fucking fact wrong.
Example: What if the precincts with higher proportions of Obama supporters happen to be those with hand counted ballots? This is well within the realm of possibility, and from a statistical standpoint, just as likely a hypothesis as wrongdoing.
So, what's the answer? Regression. Regression not only gives you the correlation (which everyone knows is high), but also explains the significance of that correlation - how much it matters.
The result? I ran regressions of Clinton/Obama total vote percentage against hand/machine counted from the first 150 or so precincts (alphabetically) from the list of results and there were two important figures:
p-value of less than .05 (the relationship between method of vote counting and the final vote breakdown was significant).
Adj R-Squared less than 0.10 (the method in vote counting explained less than 10% of the variation in vote totals).
In plain English: 90% of the variation in results across precincts CANNOT be explained by the counting method.
Furthermore, the even with significance, the model may merely pick up variables related to the ones being used. Perhaps precincts with machine counting are wealthier, and wealthier precints trended Clinton. In that way, machine-counted precincts would skew Clinton but with no sinister activity.
My look wasn't by any means fully rigorous or conclusive, and I can't claim to be expert enough to be certain. And there are probably a few Slashdotters with greater stats skills to puncture my amateur analysis. But I think this is overblown. Let's focus on the real enemy, vote machines with no paper trail.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Americans have been conditioned to accept the narrative that exit polls can be wildly askew from actual results and suspicious results (like Ron Paul's disappearing votes) can be ignored. Properly administered exit polls are highly accurate. Now, I'm not saying that New Hampshire was rigged, but I want to know EXACTLY what happened to change the outcome from a near certain expectation. Only two explanations that I see as viable.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
doesnt deserve to be President. Its a time-honored skill we've come to expect in our politicians!
Honest answer: because not everyone is aware of the problems. And some of those who are aware don't consider them to be major problems.
So how would we fix it? Elections in the US are run by the states, so in order to implement a consistent, well-designed system nationwide we would have to take that power from the states via a Constitutional amendment - something rather difficult to do without broad support. Or we'd need to hold the states to higher standards than the last major voting law (HAVA, the Help America Vote Act) did. But there would be heavy lobbying by voting machine companies against tightening of regulations, because that would require effort and integrity on their part.
In other words, it's a quagmire. And most of the people who recognize the problems are on the political left, largely because most of the controversies so far have related to (or were decided against, in the case of Bush v. Gore 2000) Democrats.
So wait until an elections anomaly affects the right wing: then you'll get bipartisan support for reforms. (I think you'll even hear right wingers denouncing the Electoral College, if the Republicans ever win the popular election but lose the electoral election.)
Canada crosses 5 time zones, and we always have a result before midnight EST. And we don't have any electronic voting machines - every thing is done by hand. A couple of hours to tally results? Most polls report results in under an hour after closing. Maybe it's because you have that ridiculous system where you vote for 20-30 offices on a single day. We only have to count for one.
What was once true, is no longer so
How is graft and corruption ever the have chance in this country if we make it so simple? What would the talking heads talk about if there was a Obviosly, your oblivious to the complication of the American electorate and our diverse needs. Jeesh, dude. Would you think of the CHILDREN?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The UK hand counts all its votes too, it's not a small country (~60m people) but we still get the results in 4-5 hours after the polls close. The reason always given is that the US is too big, but that's a very poor argument. If you have more voters you also have more counters. There is never a lack of volunteers at elections (or if there is your democracy has bigger problems than this).
I suspect the answer lies, as always, in lobbyists. I don't know but I suspect diebold et al make a good few contributions in the right places. Unfortunately they seem to be trying to muscle into the UK now, and the government, always happy to receive judicious contributions, is pushing it blindly. Luckily it seems that returning officers and judges are against it, so maybe they will be able to kill it from the ground up.
you're thinking of michigan
Being young, I haven't paid close attention to elections before the y2k fiasco. My impression, though, is that problems here have been slowly growing worse, but nobody had any reason to care. People didn't know because it wasn't reported. When and where it was brought up, the people willing to talk about problems were seen as paranoid; there clearly weren't problems with the outcomes. Then presidential elections got way too close for comfort, and hysteria broke loose. Throw Diebold into the mix now, and you have chaos. And Diebold isn't the only shifty electronic-election-device peddler in the mix either.
And why does the world put up with Microsoft in the business environment? Probably for similar reasons why we are willing to use Diebold malware. It's available; it seems to work; It's sold by a "big" company; etc.
What scares me is how exactly the nation seems to be polarized between the two parties, starting with y2k. It almost seems to be by design. I just can't find a rational reason for someone to influence a split of this kind to occur.
So my point is: If you've never heard of problems, don't let yourself believe that they don't exist. Find them now before they become real problems!
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I've heard that the whole 2012 thing is a bit of a bugaboo, that nothing is quite so clockwork; that time is somewhat squishy. --Or as the Doctor put it, "Timey-Whymie".
Still. . , as looming and catastrophic endings/beginnings go, the milestones keep piling up, don't they? --And they have an interesting story to tell to anybody who is paying attention.
The U.S. goose is cooked, and there doesn't seem to be anything anybody can do to stop it. People are too far gone and the lunatics are running the show. So what do you do?
--It's important to remember that the real battle is the inner one. Your perceptions and personal alignment are what count. You have to pick a side; service to self or service to others. Sitting on the fence now means another trip on the merry-go-round, and a new dark age is where it all begins again on this big blue marble; huddling in a cave while the cold wind whistles under red skies. There are other places to be if you can keep it together. Dissolve the ego, integrate your shadow self, (we all have stuff we don't want to face or deal with, which we all just want to go away; integrate it and accept it and it will stop be the monster in the closet). So do not judge and be open to transformation.
Do the best you can. Love yourself. Follow that inner guidance system in your belly, follow your real passions, treat people with love and respect and don't let the fear get to you. It's going to get more 'interesting' before the dust settles. Remember; you signed up for this amusement park attraction because this hot spot in the galaxy is the place to be. You're lucky to be here, so pay attention and have fun with your time on this world. And remember, as Bill Hicks put it, "It's all just a ride".
-FL
Hey, did you know one of the base tenements of the Communist movement is to get people to question the validity of Democracy? Indeed... if we continuously question and re-examine and wonder about the legitimacy of our system, one day someone will say, "hey, ya know that communist idea with a benevolent dictator doesnt sound like such a bad idea after all... i mean, i don't control who runs my nation anyway, might as well just set someone in office and be done with it!"
Yeah, you are all sheeple...
"US Elections are so bad, so corrupted, that UN observers wont certify them because they fail to reach minimum standards."
Source this please.
You won't be able to, because as others have said, you're full of shit.
The UN doesn't certify US elections PERIOD. They aren't expected to, aren't asked to, and have no reason to. Yet strangely, to people like yourself, that means "they fail to reach minimum standards".
So, a link SPECIFICALLY showing the UN will not certify US elections because they "fail to reach minimum standards" or admit you're a liar, a fact we already know.
"and ignore the facts, just so you can sleep tonight and wake up believing the lie that you are someone who cares about authenticity."
That's funny coming from you, an individual who openly and demonstrably lied and is pretending his lie is reality.
Characterizing both Kucinich and Paul as "loopy" does nothing to establish the author's credibility.
Story...
In 1980 I lived in NH and there was a recount of both the Democratic and Republican primaries. I happened to have time off so my wife and I volunteered for the recount. In a big room in the capital they set up tables -- one room for the Democratic recount and one for the Republican recount. Maybe 20 tables in each room? An official would bring you a box of votes and you would sit and count them. Across from you at the table would be representatives from each candidate to keep an eye on your count. If there was a dispute over a vote, the ballot went into a disputed pile to be decided on by others. A dispute might come from a check mark outside of a box. We spent days counting the state. At the time I believe that only the city of Manchester had mechanical voting machines -- everything else was paper ballots.
We started on the Democratic side and when those few votes were recounted we helped with the larger Republican vote -- the demographics of NH were quite different 30 years ago. Occasionally, we would come across a town missing ballots. An official would call the local voting official who would try to find the ballots. I remember one small town located the ballots safely stashed in the town crypt! A state police car would be sent to fetch the ballots.
There were, of course, write in votes: Miss Piggy, Donald Duck, etc. We dutifully recorded all.
One memorable candidate was Lyndon LaRouche (D) whose representatives were out-of-state young men in three-piece suits (as opposed to local volunteers for other candidates). They disputed every vote because they knew that the whole election was rigged because they knew that LaRouche had won. I learned a lot from them. For example, our drug problem was because the Queen of England was smuggling drugs into the US. LaRouche later served time in federal prison for tax fraud. He is still politically active.
At least on the machine-scanned ballots Clinton was listed first (the "randomization" letter picked was Z). Ordered results and random results almost always show these kind of statistically significant differences, which is one reason machine voting is useful. Just because your name shows up first is no reason why you should win an election. Touchscreens (w/ papertrails) that randomize the choices provide a more "fair" outcome by evenly distributing those people who are swayed by primacy effects.
Another interesting note is that all the pollsters DO randomize their lists precisely to avoid this effect.
Why do we have such a bad system?
a) It probably depends on the state - I'm no expert on each state's specific requirements.
b) Only 2 major parties. If we had more parties with representatives, this would be much harder to pull off.
c) Our culture. In america, people want the news *now*. Hence machines.
d) Money. I'm just guessing, but I bet real corruption takes real money, and we got that here, nice and concentrated.
I am frustrated too. I see no reason for machines. I see no reason to allow the media to discuss exit polls until the last poling station closes. I have no problem waiting a week for official results - I want them right, not fast.
It's sad. People in America really don't value the freedoms given to them by the founders. They would rather vote away their rights one by one, give control of their lives bit by bit to one big government entity, and in the end they will lose it all.
Melodrama time is over,
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
What happened? Your XO Laptop broke and now you're looking for someone to blame? Come back when you have something meaningful to add to the conversation. At least we don't poison the candidate on the other side. At least we don't kill people at the ballot stations. Our leaders don't try to emulate the great purge of Stalin. Oh wait you're probably a citizen of Europe. Let's see how long your economy would last if we just "took America off the Earth". I hope you welcome your new Chinese overlords. I hear they aren't big on dissent and liberty.
Ummm.. that's an easy answer. How many people are in Chile?....... Now.. How many people are in the US?.... Do you see a difference yet? Perhaps something that could REALLY make the complexity of tracking all those votes just a tiny bit more difficult?
I'm not trying to say that the US doesn't have any problems with this. However, I am saying that people should get their knee jerk bigotries out of the way and look at these questions in their full context.
Yes. Even paranoiacs are right some percentage of the time. But, probably not this time. Or at least I haven't seen any reason to dust off my tin-foil hat yet. Its just the usual election SNAFU action, there is no need to confuse gross incompetence for conspiracy, the former covers most things pretty well.
What gets me is that the media is choosing yet another president. No conspiracy there, just morons voting. Democracy depends on an informed public, which is antithetical to the modern American way of life.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I think the US government has just plain been around for too long. It's generally the same government for the past 200 years, and over time, people have naturally figured out how to exploit all the cracks and loopholes of our system. It's not really some source of evil causing all of this corruption, it is just something that happens. We elect the most "electable" people, who find their various niches in the electoral ecosystem. I think that is why our voting system, among other things, is so screwed up. People have just had too much time to figure out how to push it in a certain direction to make it work in their favor.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Quoth the parent: Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor!
Maybe, but in the run-up to the NH Primary he was campaigning for Ron Paul
Part of the Second American Revolution!
I think it's a valid question.
Part of the problem for outsiders is that they begin with a set of flawed presumptions.
The US is huge, but that's not the primary problem. The problem is the heterogeneity which is CONSTITUTIONALLY built into the system at all levels.
At least theoretically, the US is a democratic republic. That is, it is a collection of nominally-independent states who have certain guaranteed rights as members of the association, many of which have to do with voting procedures, as these were extremely sensitive and deeply-discussed subjects during the formation of the country.
The best way to explain it is that the states form an intellectual marketplace for their citizens. Each state is allowed a certain amount of freedom within certain federally-established limits, to set their own rules. If you don't like the rules, you have two options - leave and go to another state with a 'better' system (in your view) or establish power within the state to the point where you are able to change the rules. If enough people agree with you, this is a far easier system to 'fix' than to have to change the voting rules for a country of 300 million all at once.
So there are a couple of answers to your question:
1) it's not as simple as a federal law just saying "everyone do it this way"...I don't believe that's even possible.
2) the chaos is the messy result of democracy AT WORK. Yes, it's messy. But it sorts itself out.
-Styopa
Considering the NUMBER ONE crime prosecuted by the government is.... CONSPIRACY!
Didn't commit the crime, but mentioned it to someone else? You're now guily of conspiracy and can get just as much time as if you actually did the crime...
but only lunatics in tin-foil hats believe in conspiracies...
When BS is all your post is.
"The reason UN observers do not monitor US elections is because US officials refuse to invite them."
http://www.infowars.com/print/nwo/monitor_election.htm
Is it really that hard to read the post DIRECTLY ABOVE YOURS?
I guess when it makes you a liar it's something you have to pretend doesn't exist.
We're apparently far too busy telling others how Great our country and our democracy is to do something like actually make it work like we say it does.
Besides, in the U.S., it's all about appearance, not substance. We apparently figure that if we claim something loud enough and long enough, everyone else will believe it. What else do you expect from a bunch of marketing and "business" types? We don't have any real manufacturing here anymore and our engineering is quickly disappearing, so marketing and "business" people are all that's really left. You know, the kind of people who will say anything and promise anything as long as it sounds good.
Bitter and cynical? Who, me?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Count em' by hand. Scales effortlessly and is almost impossible to game.
... it's far too late to stop that huge rock hurtling down the creek.
Damn you people are slow, even stupid.
Just have fun with it
It's clear that there has been fraud.
Just like it was clear (and proven conclusively) that there was fraud that altered the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, and 2000 as well.
The mainstream media is completely compromised. Anybody who is waiting to hear this proclaimed on NBC wil be waiting forever (stupidly).
Many people just don't understand that this isn't a right/left dem/rep issue - The powers that be have a vested interest in ensuring that if it's democrat it is Hillary - if it is a republican it is MCCain or Giuliani.
They also want to limit mainstream exposure of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich...They certainly couldn't have straight shooters like these guys on a live TV major network debate speaking truth right next to a bunch of controlled corporatists who want to talk about the crap the mainstream media has been forcefeeding the public without making media darlings look like the cardboard kleptogarchs they are.
UN observers are usually sent to third-world nations and "flawed democracy", not countries like the US or any other Western country for the matter. So, as a matter of mact, UN observers won't certify US elections because nobody asked them to, not because they were there and refused to do it in light of widespread fraud, as your message implied. You and your '+5 Informative' are so very wrong:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A team of international observers will monitor the presidential election in November, according to the U.S. State Department. [...]
Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.
After Annan rejected their request, saying the administration must make the application, the Democrats asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to do so. The issue was hotly debated in the House, and Republicans got an amendment to a foreign aid bill that barred federal funds from being used for the United Nations to monitor U.S. elections, The Associated Press reported.
From David de Sola, CNN, Monday, August 9, 2004 Posted: 9:08 AM EDT (1308 GMT)
And their report, on the BBC.
You can't take the sky from me...
You can't take the sky from me...
I grew up in a small Southern town where a lot of "simple human errors" were made at the polling place that happened to be in the black part of town. Such innocent errors are still common even today, though more subtle than in years past. In the 2004 election, representatives from the Republican party showed up at polling places in the state's predominately black colleges to make sure that each voter also had a photo ID with them before they were allowed to vote. But, thanks to what was no doubt a simple human error, the Republican representatives who were supposed to do this at the state's predominantly white colleges got lost and never made it. Those maps can be pretty confusing, you know.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why is Iraq full of cell phones?
Because if you don't have antiquated infrastructure to lean on, you buy the latest and greatest. Same goes for electoral systems and government in general.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I don't think so with the process, regulations and technology in place.
And that's why exit polls are very important IMO.
Let's recap:
- Many states (such as NH and Ohio) still count votes
using machines with secret sauce source code that have been proved to be trivial to crack, making it easy for a single person to alter the outcome of an entire election.
- The media via a private company have conspired to keep the raw exit poll data secret (see first link above) so it can't be used to check the official results.
- A recount was ordered in one of the states that could possibly change the overall winner of the entire election but that recount was rigged and the ballots were destroyed so we have no idea of who actually won.
This is not proof the election was rigged, if the votes had been honestly recounted they may have matched the official results. But why on earth would the two official in charge of the recount go to the trouble and risk of rigging it if they thought the election was honest? Unfortunately we'll never know if it was honest or not. Never knowing if the outcome of an election was actually fair seems to be more than just a minor problem.We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Uh, no, they were asked: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39255
I believe that the U.S. government denied them permission. Too bad. They are certainly needed.
The EC is critical in preventing the concentration of power within a few key high population areas. Without it, votes from people in Wyoming, Alaska, and other largely rural states would essentially face the decisions make in the big coastal cities.
Regardless of how you come down politically, I think we can agree that any long term concentration of power results in "bad things".
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
K. It's a bit of a troll, but you should seriously all recognize that Kucinich is actually fighting for a fair electoral process in Nevada, Texas and New Hampshire. He might be 'loopy' but he's being the best political activist a elf-looking dude with a hot wife can be. I'm gonna vote for him in our primaries (as if it mattered, it's Utah). Why? Because I'm convinced that he doesn't represent big-business interests.
I honestly think that it's between him and Paul (as far as an actual public servant), but Paul can't seem to organize a nap. Paul has stunning supporters, but can't seem to get the train out of the station. Meanwhile, he maintains the status quo-- no fight in him.
Edwards campaign is based on 'fight.' Obama, etc. pump 'change.' One candidate is out there trying to DO something. I like his fight and a lot of his ideas. I'm voting for that 'loopy' guy.
From what I understand (from across the Atlantic) Paul is not a big contender anyway.
And I presume that, as someone across the Atlantic, you got that understanding primarily from his coverage (mainly, his lack of coverage) on old-media outlets, right?
In case you hadn't noticed, Ron Paul has a very large following among those who have actually HEARD his political positions and voting record. And it is growing, doubling about every two months.
His meet-up groups alone - people actively getting together to plan and execute activities to promote him - now number over 1,500 with members totaling over 108,000 members (about 9% waiting for a group to form), more than 2/3 the US troop strength in Iraq.
In the fourth quarter he raised nearly twenty million dollars. Volunteers unconnected with the campaign staged two "money bomb" donation days, with the first breaking the previous one-day fundraising record for a Republican candidate with over four million, the second shattering that (and the Democrats' record, too) with over six million. And all this from hundreds of thousands of individual contributors and an average donation of about $100 - no PACs, corporate contributions, etc.
Meanwhile, separately, his fans raised about another half-million to rent a blimp and fly it around the US. His signs are hung and posted all over - many handmade. Banners on overpasses. Signs in yards. Clusters of people on streetcorners waving them. And so on. He wins most straw polls. He dominates online call-in polls (such as the "who won the debate" polls - which, counter to claims, allow one vote per cell phone number.) Make a post critical of him and see how many people respond to defend him. B-)
The problem, though, is that virtually all this support comes from people whose primary news source is the Internet. On the old media his name is virtually never mentioned - to the point that people have been cracking jokes about "He who Must Not be Named". The popularity of both Ron Paul and his message crosses party, age, education, race, and income distinctions. So if he got anywhere near as much exposure as the "annointed" candidates get, one could expect him to be a leader in the nomination process and the probable landslide winner in the election if he got the nomination.
But his programs, if adopted, would amount to a major defeat for both major factions currently in power. So he gets major opposition from them.
As for the US (old)media, you need to understand that they are partisans as well. "Freedom of the Press" doesn't mean that the press is unbiased. It means the government must keep hands off while the operators can bias it any way they want. The hope is that all significant opinions will be represented. In current practice not all of them are.
To oversimplify: The (formerly) mainstream media (MSM) are in virtual lockstep, carrying the "progressive" (big-government left-wing) viewpoint while talk radio carries conservative stuff but mainly the Neocon (big-government interventionist) faction. Newscorp (especially Fox News) was thought to cover the conservative side of things but has come out of the closet as being strictly Neocon and blatantly partisan. The other conservative factions (such as the libertarian and paleoconservative, to name two) are still under the cone of silence when they aren't being directly attacked or ridiculed.
Ron Paul is primarily a libertarian with paleoconservative leanings. His candadacy, and the progressively more blatant attempts of the media to squash it, is what shone the spotlight on Fox News' partisanship - especially during the debates. (Turning off his monitor earphone, and the way he exposed that, was particularly ludicrous. See the link in my current sigline for where they cut one of his best comebacks from the west-coast delayed version of last Friday's debate.) But Fox News is not alone in this unintentional humor. For instance: The New York Times real-time election result page had the othe
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The effect of the Electoral College is that smaller jurisdictions MUST be considered when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would just hit a dozen major metro areas and they'd have the numerical advantage sewed up.
And that's its primary purpose.
It's part of the deal that got little states to join up in the first place, rather than swatting down the Federalist coup and sticking with the Continental Congress or going their own way. (The Bill of Rights was another part of that deal.) Changing it would require a constitutional amendment, ratified by 3/4s of the states (i.e. lots of little ones which would lose power as a result) or a constitutional convention (also ratified by 3/4s of the states). So nobody should hold their breath waiting for it to get "fixed". B-)
But it has an additional advantage: It serves as a firewall against election corruption by big-city political machines.
If the president were elected by popular vote, a political machine in one of the largest urban areas could fake enough votes to swing even a not-very-close election. With the electoral college they can swing no more than all their state's electors (which they'd probably have gotten anyhow).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Cryptographic voting is pretty strong now. We should employ it. I read this pdf a couple of days ago and the system that is recommended in section 7.3 seems practicable with current technology and protocols.
The paper is pretty technical (which is good), but sections 8 and 9 are good reading for anybody(even the impatient person) who wants to see existing voting technology get the smackdown.
One point {in addition to all the other good points above} is that typically in the US each voter is actually voting on dozens of separate elections at the same time. You only hear about the presidential election, but often in the same election there may also be votes for Senators; Representatives; State Senators & Representatives; local officials such as Mayors, Port Commissioners, and Judges; State, County, and City propositions; as well as numerous local voter-initiatives. The ballots can be massive. This in part explains why hand-counting is somewhat {but not totally} impractical compared to the sort of single ballot elections we are used to in the U.K.
Mod parent up.
Yeah, but we actually get to vote for our head of state :-P
Besides, the Constitution requires each state do it Their Way. And nobody seems to want to change the system.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
For example: oh, he's so tired of all these silly internet amateurs, just imagine what the rest of the election process is going to be like! And: all these guys are just trying to make a name for themselves. (They're not, for example, nervously checking to see if there's any hope that the American Republic is intact.)
He informs us that he doesn't think there was any election fraud here, but doesn't bother to enlighten us as to why (his reasons are "too vague").
One of the links he points to is particularly funny: Robert Hansen. Here Robert Hansen is plugging through the statistical analysis, turning up a significant correlation on the counting technique and not on the other possible variables, but he remains convinced that this must be wrong... and is in the process of actively looking for "sources of error" to fix the results.
Anyway: if you're interested in this subject, I suggest keeping an eye on Brad Friedman's bradblog.
(By the way: why are people assuming this would have to be Hillary's fault? A "republican dirty trick" theory would seem a little more likely to me: kill the momentum of the front-runner, sew dissention in the ranks, maybe steer the primary toward a more defeatable candidate... why not?)
As I've stated before: Clinton is going to be the next president. It has already been decided. Use your observational skills on this one but don't expect any other outcome. Vote for Ron Paul!
Believe it.
The effect of the Electoral College is that candidates only have to worry about swing states when campaigning. Otherwise, a candidate would have to campaign across the whole nation...
KY, WY, and MT are you examples? The last time WY went for a Democrat was in 1976 (8 elections ago!) MT and KY went for Democrats in 2 of those 8 elections. No candidate is going to sink much time in to any of those three states (with the possible exception of KY). It's going to be all about the big swing states like PA, OH and FL.
The Electoral College voting system and a popular voting system set different priorities, and the BOTH have their drawbacks. You should consider both sides.
I don't mean any offense to Chile, but you're comparing a country that evidently doesn't have money to spend on election machinery to a country where enough people spout conspiracy theories about a one to two percent difference that candidates are willing to pay for recounts and mainstream media are willing to pick up on the story.
Or, in other words, if you spent a ton of time and money analyzing election results in Chile, you'd find extremely minor discrepancies that are unlikely to change anything.
The inherent problem with vote counting is that the votes are made by humans(and your average ninety-year-old person with significant dementia problems is significantly more likely than average to find some way to mess up a ballot, even if it's straight forward.), and counted by humans(Try counting three hundred pieces of paper. See if you can reliably end up with the same number. Now imagine someone less capable doing it.) or human-made machinery.
Now, there might very well be a conspiracy, or a significant vote problem of some sort, but for the most part our discrepancies are in areas where everyone agrees that there's at least 98% accuracy in the vote counting.
Part of the problem is a lack of people willing to do the drudge work of overseeing an election. It takes something special to care more about the election being fair than having the "right" guy win, and that's something I'm not sure I have.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
First of all, our separate States are States. You know, like England and France? Secondly, one of the party's has perfected pushing chads out of ballots to alter the results. Unfortunately Hugo Chavez' electronic voting machines have back doors. I'm afraid that we need to institute purple fingers as in Iraq and a much clearer, less fraud-prone, vote counting system.
i don't think that you could offend any chilean with that post, but you are not understanding how this copuntry works. We in chile do not have tons of money, true. But if we decide that we need some techno gadget to improve the efficiency of critical systems, usually we find the money and the engineering to pull it off. Take our highway-tolls for example: they are the most advanced in the world, and i'm not kidding you (see here).
Besides that, the point is that in chile we *don't have* discrepancies. We get results with 99.9% acuracy at 9-10 pm on the elction day. We tally all votes in the week following the election, and the final discrepancy between preliminary, 99%-confidence results and final results is always less than 0.02%. that's NOT 98% accuracy. 2% of error in the most important decission a country can take is not acceptable, i would say. That's what surprises me: how can you, as a country, accept this!?
I think that the problem is not machine counting versus hand counting, although i think that hand-counting is the best system for straight, one question ballots. I think that your main problem is that you combine different ellections into one ballot.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
The drudge work of overseeing an election should be done by representatives of the different parties or interenst groups present in the counting process. That's how we do it over here, and i think that in any other transparent voting system: with "apoderados" (i dont know the english term, sorry), that give its aproval to the each and every disputed vote. That way, that responsability falls on the parties.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
yeah, i know how your federeal system works. I know about the electoral college and all that. But just as you can have federal regulations for some things, you could have federal regulations for these things too.
Take a student federation, for example: it is composed of different student unions syndicated in one bigger confederation. This unions are autonomous and "sovereign" in almost every sense, but the election for confederate representatives are enforced on confederate regulations.
There is no contradiction between having a federal multi-state republic, and have a coherent, rational and unified ellection system for federal authorities. Take Germany, for example.
And about Chavez... I truly believe that Venezuela's ellection system is waaaaay clenaer and more transparent than the US, at least. Chavez lost his last election, remember? he lost, and even more, he accepted the loss, even when the difference was about 1%... In th US, that same difference usually implies weeks or even months of courts and uncertainty.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
One of the CANDIDATES is sure to get elected anyway. Nothing can be done, unfortunately.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
personally i wouldnt trust any voting system that is hand counted....
to much pressure to be a superman, and give your candiate a little extra nudge in the right direction, i mean it would seem to be more effective to have a lot of people skim just a few votes from every district, or whatever they are in Chile, sorry i am not familiar with the particulars of your countries electoral system. for me its transparent automated systems or bust....
heck to be honest if i could get highspeed internet and still see my family from time to time, i would be happy in Antarctica, but thats just me tho
It's corruption. Simply put, it's usually the people who are in charge who benefit from the corruption, so they don't take steps to fix it. When they're out of power they can't take steps to fix it.
It's mind boggling that any U.S. citizen would accept an Election Commissioner who is also the head of a political parties election campaign. This is a blatant conflict of interest. Yet we see this time and again in the States where the person in charge of the election also has a stake in the outcome.
Americans, however, seem to be ok with cheating, as long as the cheating favours their particular interests. It's not just the mechanics of the elections, however, that are allowed to be corrupted. The actual day-to-day business of Congress is incredibly open to corruption. New laws are bundled with unrelated laws to bribe other congressmen to vote for the bill, or unpopular laws are attached to popular laws to manipulate the votes. Add in the fact that congressman are continually working on their re-election campaign and you can easily scare them into voting stupid but "popular" laws because they a) don't have the time to understand the laws they're passing abd b) don't want to look back to their consitutents by voting against the America Loves Puppies Act even though there's a rider that allows the government to torture political prisoners attached to it. They're more afraid of the media running the headline "Congressman Smith Hates Puppies" than they are of the media running "Congress legalizes torture".
The systems need to be refactored to bring back sanity to the process.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
First off, I said "at least 98% accuracy". Key part of that being "at least"; there are a lot of situations out there, and I'm not going to claim 99.9% accuracy for all of them.
Secondly, the in-depth, but unofficial media recount of the 2000 Florida general election had the vote totals swinging from Gore by 171 to Bush by 537. That's a max swing of 708 votes. Compare that to the total vote count of 5,962,657, and the total accuracy is at least 99.988%.
Now, let's assume that 20,000 random votes were wrong in some way. That would be an accuracy of 99.664%.
Or, in other words, in a Florida election where tons of stuff seemed to have gone wrong(and certain ballot designs were unquestionably bad), the accuracy was over 99.5%.
This is still just a side note, though, and I can't fully disagree with your conclusions; it's just that I doubt that the Chilean system would come out cleanly if there were an election with five million votes, the victor won by fewer than 600, and organizations spent months of time looking for potential problems.
Not only that, those electors may be violating State law, but so what?
There is not Constitutional requirement that the electors vote in any certain way or adhere to State laws or popular vote. That is why we live in a Republic, and there have many historical cases of electors not voting for the "correct" state required candidate. Sometimes by accident even.
Every election, people from out of state say, "AH!!! Diebold machines, must be corrupt!" And the sore losers demand a recount. I've participated in many of the recounts since 2004 at the legistlative office building Concord. Firstly, the machines we use in NH are not the push button types that are controversial. Here in NH, you get a ballot with those little circles in it that you mark with a pen, and the machine reads the marks. Ballots are kept for recount purposes. In my recount experiences, no election has changed its outcome by more than 35 votes, and typically thats because lazy morons were very sloppy in how they filled out their ballots, or marked multiple candidates. We go through every ballot, with a rep from each side of a race sitting in front of a ballot official who holds up each ballot, states what he reads it as, and you can challenge it or not. All the challenged ballots wind up getting agreed on by the secretary of state and a rep from each party as to what they mean. The poor machines are doing the best they can, but you put a garbage ballot in, you get a garbage vote out.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
the democratic party and tammany hall? if one considers that time changes the underlying basis for all labels, they might point out that your linking the present democrats to the heydays is likely invalid.
There is a voter fraud watchdog group that has done in depth investigation and created a documentary (http://cre8ive-design.net/blog/?cat=7) that proves that the way the recounts are performed are meaningless, unless all the votes are counted. Election officials pre-sort ballots by candidate, choose the quantity of ballots for each candidate that supports the official numbers, and provides the pre-selected ballots to the vote re-counters. This was admitted on tape by the election officials. This documentary also contains other evidence that captures on tape election official discarding actual signed poll tapes (from the machines), and when compared to the "officially released numbers" from the same machines, the numbers never match. Further, this documentary conclusively shows how easy it is to hack and manipulate the voting machines and explains fairly convincingly why there are so many anomalies and why Ron Paul never gets a fair shake in the votes. WAKE UP AMERICA!