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Computerized Election Results With No Election
_Sharp'r_ writes "In Honduras, according to breaking Catalan newspaper reports (translations available, USA Today mention), authorities have seized 45 computers containing certified election results for a constitutional election that never happened. The election had been scheduled for June 28, but on that day the president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted. The 'certified' and detailed electronic records of the non-existent election show Zelaya's side having won overwhelmingly."
The problem is that he is corrupt to the wrong people.
Geez, you got a story here where there just HAPPENED to be found evidence, a long time AFTER the fact, where the finders have every reason to want to find it and weeks of opportunity of "finding" said information. That the finders happen also to be liked by a big northern neighbour with a long history of meddling in its southern countries politics to tune of killing thousands of women and childeren and lots of experience faking, oops I mean, WITH faking in their own elections...
Well, I just don't know who to believe here.
It rather telling the american press is all algainst a corrupt left leader but supported with money and weapons corrupt right wing leaders who killed thousands. It makes me highly doubtfull of any reports about south america.
I think the "true" story here is that this guy got ousted NOT for being corrupt or a crook or faking elections BUT for listening to the wrong people when in power. His replacement ain't any better, but he does listen to the right people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
eVoting CAN and WILL happen. Massively. We just have to work out the details. One way that would work:
- every voter must have its own private key (being done in Portugal/Europe, with the new Citizen Card [I know, you people dislike ID cards])
- voters can then cast a *signed* online vote, and this vote can go to multiple institutions/instances/controllers/sites/etc. Published results should match.
- Voting can be done from home, or with the citizen card (that contains the signature) at the local voting place.
Voting could then be extended to government actions that currently skip the peoples' opinion. Eventually we would see the people voting on a daily basis on the projects they want.
Massive corruption of this system is difficult, possibly impossible, just like breaking a site's SSL.
"you can screw with paper ballots. but a lot less easily and a lot less slower and with a lot more effort and a lot easier to trace than the effort required to mess with electronic voting"
I have actually counted ballots and tampering with them is not at all hard. The fact is that I live in a country that wouldn't stand for this. If there was a government behind it though, fraud is quite easy.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It doesn't matter what Zelaya's politics were, if this is true then he clearly had no problem with electoral fraud. People on both sides of the political spectrum, from the extremists to the moderates, have shown time & time again that they will do whatever they can to stay in power. It is not limited to only the left or only the right, and making silly jabs at the "other" side like that is not only distasteful but juvenile as well.
... would never plant such evidence to justify their coup, would they now?
Here is why this story is important: Zelaya fought for a reelection referendum in spite of a ruling by the Honduran Supreme court. He was going against their constitution, then was purchasing voting machines from Chavez for this special election. Before these special elections could be held though, the military did pull a coup but then they gave it back to the people - just as democracy should work. Cool no? Now, word is coming out that these voting machines had results already "preloaded". Once these facts are verified, Zelaya will be judged for what he is/ is not. Bigger yet, if Chavez is seen as the source of these machines and implicated, then what standing would he have with the Venezuelan populace? Now is the chance for conspiracy theorists to come back that this is a secret plan of the US govt. to oust both Zelaya and Chavez but come on, has the US been that clever in its dealings with south america? Stay tuned
Disposing of a lot of paper isn't hard at all, companies do it constantly without anyone noticing or caring.
Unless the company is under investigation, in which case a whole lot of people notice and care. And it's very often possible to find the people whose job it is and, with appropriate pressure, get them to admit what documents they were assigned to destroy.
Look, of course if the election is corrupt enough, it doesn't matter. The USSR held paper-ballot "elections" for seventy years in which the Communist candidates always got some randomly chosen but large percentage of the vote; everyone knew that had nothing to do with reality, but it wasn't like there was anything anyone could do about it. But if you have a country with a reasonably honest election system, the kind of petty vote-rigging that can throw a close election is a lot harder to get away with when there's a physical record. Preferably a large, bulky record that will take time to destroy, and real effort to tamper with in other ways.
I don't know anything about Honduran politics and don't claim to. But in the US, our preferred method of dealing with questionable elections is the recount. With paper ballots, this make sense, and you can bet the process will be closely watched; if there is serious ballot tampering going on, there's a good chance that someone will talk. With electronic results, what you basically get is, "We ran the query and it gave us the same count as last time -- imagine that!"
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I've thought about this a lot and I think I've come up with a 99.9999999999% secure system. What we need is an encrypted means of verifying our vote after the fact and two receipts.
Then you could independently survey people's actual votes after the fact if people "exit poll" by dropping off their second official receipt. It would be completely anonymous and verifiable.
The receipt would be a 2D Barcode containing: Encrypted name and indicated vote.
You build a database of these encrypted names and votes which are double checkable when you get home or at booths run by party representatives with just an internet connection. Then everyone can check their vote. In order to avoid the government intentionally miscounting but correctly verifying your report you could provide the database after the fact to anyone interested. People could then verify their vote on a third party server as well.
Lastly the extra Exit Poll receipts could be entered into a database on the spot by the media to verify that there is no indication of tampering.
Electronic Voting COULD be easy and safe. It could also be safer, more transparent and reliable than paper ballots. If we just do it right.
I'm sorry, but after the president's ouster it's entirely possible that the coup plotters created these bogus results on the machines. Unfortunately no 3rd party will be allowed to see if the machines were hacked to produce this result, or the ousted government actually tried to rig the elections.
In other words the evidence is questionable both ways.
This smoking gun says that the endless political correctnes that is the USA, today, managed to get a simple issue __wrong__ again, Manuel Zelaya was democratically elected but as with many other countries and leaders, he was in the middle of destroying his country's democracy when ousted. That the undemocratic shills at the UN would oppose was expected, see what they have done about Kaunda, but that the US and Europe would follow is amazing.
... and now Honduras.
What is needed is Congressional term limits in the USA, not their abolition in Honduras.
Now that Chavez has got his way in Venezuela he will be a pain for generations just as Castro was. Every time
This must be the makings of a world record for wrongheadedness and stupidity by both parties in the US, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan
There must be a very strong case for retiring entirely all staff at Foggy Bottom and Langly and starting again, Wild Bill anyone?, since they always pick the wrong side. Now we risk forcing the population of yet another mid-american country the delights of a corrupt socialist government paradise run by an idiot.
The 2nd amendment is very, very important, since it keeps open the possibility of a citizen melitia,
ONE of the things you have to understand about using the military to coerce your own population to fire on their friends or fellow citizens because if they wont you end up with a mutiny as well,
as to stealth bombers, and nukes, they are useless and would not be countenanced within continental NORAM, you need a rifleman, eg the US MARINES, and good luck with even getting the senior officers to order lethal fire, and even more with getting the order obeyed.
A recent article in Slate claimed that Honduras lacked a means of removing the President peacefully.
In virtually every other country in the world, Zelaya would have been removed from office. But, peculiarly, the Honduran Constitution does not include an impeachment procedureâ"Congress is entitled to name a new president only in the absence of the current one. So, rather than bringing Zelaya before a judge to be tried for his criminal misbehavior, the army rousted him out of bed and flew him off to Costa Rica in his pajamas. The legislature then voted to replace him with Roberto Micheletti, the head of Congress, who was next in the line of succession.
In the case of Franken, with which I am not too familiar as I am not a USian, the difference was just 225 votes. Yes, I can see that with such a small difference, influening just a single polling station (or fixing a few recounts) would make a big difference. Then again, with such a small difference, does it really matter that much? (Meaning does it matter who wins; I am not talking about him committing fraud).
What I was talking about is mass fraud, such as seems to be the case with these Honduras voting computers. Mass fraud seems to be easier to commit using voting computers as opposed to paper ballots, and will be a hell of a lot harder to detect.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Nobody in his/her right mind should ever endorse computer-only voting or vote-counting. That is a path to madness and rioting. However, with a verifiable mixture of both paper and electronic voting, we could make everybody happy. Proposal: (1) When a citizen votes during an election, as the paper vote is dropped into the ballot box it is simultaneously scanned by an computer reader which is networked to central tabulation HQ.(If the vote cannot be read, it is not accepted into the ballot box) (2) When voting is finished, all voting staff and political party staff (from all parties running) get instant "un-official" print-outs of voting, with results described by each ballot box, across the entire voting area. Also, these "un-official" election results are posted online the very second voting ends. Ballot boxes with paper votes are securely locked down, as always. (3) Before results of the election can be officially announced, two more things must happen: i)a random sample of a significant proportion of ballot boxes must be counted by hand, and verified to be equal to or very, very close to what the "un-official" electronic results were, which were already posted online for each ballot box. ii)every party running in the election is allowed to request an official hand-count of a generous proportion of ballot boxes, at places of their choosing, with hand-count results to be verified against the original "un-official" electronic results. (4) If in step (3) above any of the hand-counting for any single ballot box is off from what the "un-official" electronic tally originally had reported, the electronic results are deemed VOID and completely thrown out. At this point, ALL paper ballots go to be hand-counted, to get the true election outcome. These steps should ensure as verifiable results as we have had with paper-only counting. However, it should cost a lot less this way to conduct elections, as much fewer votes need to be counted (unless the electronic results are off, in which case more money for counting paper votes is the least of the government's problems). Arguably, these steps may also result in official election results being released to the public faster. Electronic voting can be helpful, but let me re-emphasize what I said in the beginning: The day we allow government elections to go electronic-only is the day we ALL lose democracy.
Honestly, I don't think the US constitution has an impeachment process clearly laid out either. What if a US president is impeached, but refuses to leave office?What is the process? Our situation would be similar.
Qxe4
George Bush narrowly defeated a dastardly plot by Democrat thugs to steal the 2000 election. And the 2004 election was not even in the same ballpark; Bush legitimately thrashed Kerry. I like to think that the spectacle of Dan Rather and his minions trying to throw the election with forged documents may have made up the margin of victory.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Yep, seems likely. The nice round numbers are fishy; people doing test data would do that because it's not meant to look plausible, but election riggers avoid them.