Slashdot Mirror
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
Gottesser writes "Bev Harris over at Black Box Voting has done everyone a favor and released her 2008 Election Protection toolkit as an ebook. It's like Cliff notes of Bev's 8+ years of experience on the front lines of the modern voting rights movement. The ebook presents succinct information to get individuals actively involved in the full-contact sport that is democracy. The target audience is those who believe that the political process requires more than just showing up to vote once every four years those who know that something's up with those voting machines. You may remember Bev Harris from her Emmy-nominated HBO documentary 'Hacking Democracy.' I've been working on election integrity issues in Ohio for some time now and have met Bev several times. Her work is nothing less than groundbreaking. Please check it out."
Who cares about election theft when the average voter isn't capable of making an informed choice in the first place? And no, I don't mean the 50% picking the other party, I do mean that 90% of the people voting hardly have a clue about the issues at stake.
I hate to sound like an elitist but when most other people so clearly demonstrate they are not, it leaves one little choice but to think that way..
We already know in advance that the election is going to be as rigged as the GOP believes they can get away with. Diebold was forced to admit it. Fortunately, Obama's success this November will be too sweeping for even the usual election-stealing shenanigans to saddle us with four more years of war, corruption, lies, and deepening economy woes.
Honestly, folks like you worry me.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same... I'd love to see Obama in office... And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u6lCBnRoHQ
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw
On page 48 (or 24 since the PDF has two document pages per PDF page) of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf they recommend keeping a sequence of snapshots of the web pages reporting the raw results to detect any anomalies.
Now keeping snapshots of webpages to analyze how they change sounds exactly like what Archive.org was designed for. It would be nice if on the night of the election, Archive.org set their refresh (?) rate for those pages abnormally high. Then the data can be used by everyone and not just those who thought ahead of time to take the snapshots.
The single most important thing you can do to protect our democracy is to volunteer as an election judge -- or poll worker, or election inspector, or whatever you call us in your state.
It's easy, it's fun, and we desperately need more people under 80 to do it.
I started right after the election debacle in 2000. Call your city elections department NOW while you can still get into training sessions. Make sure that your local voting is clean, fair, legal, and trustworthy. It all depends on volunteers!
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
So, I would look for McCain to be someone in the mold of a Teddy Roosevelt, whom he has publicly said that he idolizes. As a president, I would probably look to see McCain do some of the progressive things that T.R. did, while still working to bolster Pax Americana. If McCain lives up to his fiscal promises and the way he's generally voted, I think there's probably enough libertarian and fiscal Republicans (as opposed to the religious right), and right of center Democrats to actually put together a governing coalition that for 4 all too brief years sheds the lunatics on both sides of the aisle.
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
He's running too far to the left in the general election. Obama's plan is and always was to get all the black vote plus the liberals and the problem is that there's not enough liberals in the states he needs. He's just misread the USA at a national level, and so he has a hard time seeing the need shed his own maniacal base to succeed publicly in a way that Clinton would have surely done.
I thought he gave a fantastic speech, but, since then his moves almost smack of desperation... he's almost devolving into a sort of a classic class war candidate and that's not a good thing to do when American for the most part tend to prefer to keep open the doors of opportunity for the rich just on the offbeat chance that they get rich themselves. I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
Worst of all, Obama's success is his own enemy. He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them. The left wing has this obsession that a leader needs to listen to all of his counsellers, whereas, if Obama just borrowed a small page from Bush and listened to his own gut, he'd more effective in getting what we wants. As it is, the Obama posse is just dragging him down.
This is my sig.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
These are all things McCain did before running for President, and especially before getting the nomination. Since that point he has swung hard to the Republican party lines, even to the point of saying he would not vote for bills he sponsored on immigration. He's backed away from his signature issue of finance reform, and despite being anti-war in the past, no one accuses him of that now.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of what McCain championed before, he's a different man now, with different positions. If you're voting for the McCain of 2000, or even 2004, you're voting for someone who doesn't exist.
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
Let's talk about VP picks first. Until Palin was picked we heard nothing from McCain or the right other than Obama was inexperienced. Palin is as inexperienced as national level politicians get. A governor of two years does not a VP make - and that's about her only credential. Biden may not be your favorite person, but he has a great deal of experience backing him. Further, he has a lot of blue collar people on his side - and has fought for that class well for a long time. He's not the terrible pick the right is making him out to be - to the contrary one has to wonder if they keep calling him a bad pick because he's a good one? This idea that no one likes him is demonstrably false - he's being elected time and again, so it can't be that no one likes him - just no one you like.
But this notion of a character test... where is that from? What makes you think that Obama is going to suddenly implode because of poll results? What, for that matter, makes you think his moves are desperate? Which moves, particularly? And why is it that being a 'classic class war candidate' so bad? Especially in an era when our middle and lower classes have been at the spear's point of the sacrifices our country has demanded?
He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them.
Where are you getting this from? Is there any actual evidence he's being pulled in too many directions? Or is that just the spin right now on why Obama will never work? And where is this idea that he's swung to the left come from? Most on the left would actually say that Obama has swung towards the center (backing off on eliminating our commitment in Iraq, backing off the telecom amnesty) far more than he has taken up hard leftist issues (like... what? Nothing.)
What I hear consistently from the right is that Obama is 'maniacal', 'messianic', 'too leftist', 'egotistical', 'desperate'. Where these claims can be supported or refuted by evidence, they're refuted. His supporters on the left don't think he's left enough - only the right is trying to claim that he's left (presumably to sway the centrists to picking a right candidate). They talk about leeches on his campaign, but never about the fact that of McCain's top ten advisers, se
[Ego]out