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."

Comments

Re:Really

[fastest fascist]

Yea, because they totally couldn't have stuffed boxes full of fake paper ballots.

And This Is the Government of a Country

[Doc Ruby]

Nobody's saying electronic records can't be faked through physical access to the machines. You're the only one who seems surprised at that, in order to deny it should be surprising. Which is a straw man argument.

This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual. Which has consequences. Not the expected consequences of helping keep a president in power, but (even more notably) in helping to keep one ousted by a coup this past week out of power, boosting arguments of his corruption.

Next you'll be sarcastically moaning "oh, noes, presidents are corrupt". FYI: Yes, and when they are, the people need to be outraged about it, and get rid of them.

Re:And This Is the Government of a Country

[Martin Blank]

This was different from what one normally thinks of as a junta. I don't know if the Honduran constitution has a mechanism to remove a sitting president from office, but it was pretty clear that he was absolutely on his own. His own party told him to back off, and that they didn't support the referendum. As was reported by the media, the legislature had passed a law banning referenda within the 180 days prior to an election. The Supreme Court ruled the pending referendum illegal, and issued an injunction preventing the military from making preparations for it. The military was clearly ready to comply with the Supreme Court, but Zelaya was pushing ahead with the referendum anyway, and fired the head of the military. This action was reversed by the Supreme Court the next day. The attorney general issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya, and the day after, the Supreme Court ordered Zelaya's arrest; whether or not that is constitutional, I don't know. Wikipedia's article on the matter suggests that by even trying to hold the referendum, the constitution required that he was to be removed from office.

Presumably, much of this could have been handled better, particularly the removal of Zelaya from the country. But Zelaya seemed to be intent on doing things in a way that is at best gray; that the original ballots were taken possession of by Zelaya and his backers, and would be issued and counted by the same, shows that he had no intentions of having a fair election. If these election computers can be absolutely tied to him, it will at least complicate negotiations for his return.

Re:And This Is the Government of a Country

[Brickwall]

I don't know if the Honduran constitution has a mechanism to remove a sitting president from office

They don't. See "hondurascrisis.org" for details from a Honduran.

Wikipedia's article on the matter suggests that by even trying to hold the referendum, the constitution required that he was to be removed from office.

Again, according to the link above, the constitution does say that trying to change the length of the President's term (currently 4 years) is treason. Zelaya was trying to change the rules to allow for his re-election. So, technically, he was committing treason.

Now, for all those who call this a "coup", ask yourself what the Honduran authorities were supposed to do? You had a President committing treason, repeatedly ignoring the orders of the Supreme Court, and attempting to use the military to hold an illegal referendum. You don't have an impeachment process. Do you:

1: Put him in jail in Honduras? Possible, but then he's in a place where his supporters know where he is, which could lead to a mass assault in an attempt to free him. If that happens, hundreds of people could die, and incite a civil war.

2: Execute him. Obviously, a non-starter. It creates a martyr, and again the chance of civil war.

3: Exile him. Clearly the wisest choice. Get him out of the country, and away from his supporters, try to let the situation cool down, and get the facts out. The fact that CNN, the BBC, etc. are staunchly suppressing these facts, and dressing this up as a military coup says more about their agenda than it does their believability as objective news organizations.

Re:And This Is the Government of a Country

[Jeremy Erwin]

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.

Electronic Efficiency

[RichMan]

I can see why the powers that be like the efficiency of a modern electronic voting system.

Clearly we humans don't have to do anything at all. The machines can read our minds and we get 100% voter turnout with guaranteed accurate results ;-)

Re:So Impeach Him

[I'm just joshin]

That's pretty much what they did according to their own constitution. Unfortunately the rest of the world is getting Chavez's spin on the matter. -J

again, for the morons

[circletimessquare]

and the industry shills who have sold their conscience:

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

simply for the sake of the integrity of democracy, electronic voting should NEVER happen, in ANY country

do you really need any convincing about what can happen to a country if a vote is put in doubt considering recent events?

not that iran used electronic voting, but imagine how much LESS forensic evidence there would be if iran ever lets anyone independently monitor the results

Re:So Impeach Him

[per contra]

They did exactly what their constitution called for and removed him from office after their Supreme Court decided he had violated their constitution. That should have been the end of the story but everyone wants to call it a coup which it wasn't. The leader of his own party called for his ouster.

Re:Really

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You may not have noticed this, but paper ballots are ... made of paper. And lots of ballots take up lots of space. They're heavy. They have to be disposed of. This takes time. People notice. There are witnesses. The amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of a fully computerized election is so much less than the amount of effort involved in altering or covering up the results of an election that uses paper ballots that the two aren't really comparable.

Of course paper ballots are no guarantee of an honest election. Nor is there any guarantee that locking your door will keep your house from being broken into. But an all-electronic election is like leaving your front door hanging wide open and putting a sign in your yard that says, "Come take stuff."

If true

[zogger]

They avoided more serious bloodshed the way they did it. If this is a true fact, and he had remained "in power", he would have beern still able to order around a lot of the military forces who were loyal to him, plus cause mass demonstrations, etc and be able to coordinate it better. Because there is no way he would have gone along with getting impeached.

Even on the surface it was a blatant power grab by him, the entire issue was designed to turn him into el presidente for life. The congress there and the judges ALREADY had told him this wasn't proper nor legal, but he was going aherad with this "vote" scam regardless. So what makes you think he would have gone along with an impeachment? They were under the gun of making a time critical decision, and didn't off the guy or anything, just got him out before the situation got worse. If they hadn't already warned him about it that would be different, but they did warn him before the fact.

Ya, two sucky choices, but I think they chose the lesser of two suckages there.

But all of this is based on "if" and we just don't know the veracity of this latest revelation, but we do know about the power grab he was attempting, sort of like chavez making himself the president (basically and practically)for life "legally".

Term limits are a dang spiffy idea when it comes to politicians, no matter how popular they are, and changing the rules, like he wanted to do with this plebiscite, at the last second, is a serious mistake and transparently was just an effort to accrue more power under some umbrella of it legally happening. The people there had a right wing dictatorship like forever, and a lot of them could plainly see a left wing version now happening, and they just went "no you don't!".

That's how I have read these ongoing events anyway.

THERE WAS NO COUP!

[raehl]

The congress and the supreme court tossed him from office when he violated the constitution. The Army just fulfilled their constitutional duty.

It would be no different than the US Senate convicting a President at trial, and the President refusing to leave office. At that point what the rest of the government is supposed to do is toss him, forcefully, if need be, although in the US it would probably be the Secret Service that did it.

Re:Really

[TheLink]

Uh, to rig a paper election you will have to hide something. The more hiding you do the more suspicious it is. The more open the process is, the harder it is to cheat. With people watching each step e.g. checking that the boxes are empty, observing the voting, the storing and opening of the boxes, and the counting, it gets very hard to cheat on a massive enough scale.

Go see how paper voting is done in various countries and you can see it's really hard to rig in some countries, and easier in other countries (ballot boxes are moved, counting is done in secret by one organization).

Sure you can bribe people. But if so many are bribable, the country is screwed up so badly it hardly matters what system you use.

In contrast an electronic election is mostly _hidden_ to observers. So it should be suspicious by default.

If you set it up so that people can observe the storage and counting of the electronic votes, it's going to be as slow as paper voting, but more expensive and complicated.

The easiest way you can rig paper elections that are done openly and properly is with postal votes. However electronic voting systems are just as vulnerable to this problem - if not more so.

Re:No he HAD NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Article 239 -- No citizen that has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President.

Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.

He proposed its reform, which means there WAS a basis for removing him.

Re:No, that's bullshit, ever heard of De Gaulle?

[Red Alastor]

The ~referendum that Zelaya was planning might well have been unconstitutionnal, but he didn't get to do it. Hence he did not break the constitution. Therefore the coup cannot begin to be justified by this stupid talking point.

Yes he did. If you read their constitution, you'll see that there's a section that cannot be changed or amended about the president serving only one term (too many dictator presidents clinging to power) and that it's even illegal for a government official to talk about changing it. According to the constitution, that person would lose his position and be barred from the government altogether for a period of 10 years.

Therefore, he did break the constitution and the moment he did so, wasn't president anymore.

The significance of this for the rest of the world

[goombah99]

One should of course take such breaking news reports with a grain of salt till confirmed, one could imagine this being some sort of misinterpretation of the observations (e.g. maybe those were early voting ballots??), Moreover this is hondouras.....as I'm sure other posters will talk about.

IN any case assuming the report is correct, it's critical contextual significance is thus:

One of the big strawmen often raised by folks in favor of electronic voting is that there is this supposed panacea called "parallel testing" that is touted as being an invincible process of detecting rigged machines. The idea is that at random a machine will be chosen before the elections begin and pulled out of service, then the election workers will cast pretend votes on it all day long. then it's output checked for accuracy. This is called "parallel" testing because it's done in a time period parallel to a real election, supposedly to "fool" any date dependent software. It's not an awful idea and would indeed detect some kinds of naive electronic fraud. But the idea that this is remotely a solution is even more naive.

Moreover, said proponents don't actually ever do this--- it's just a thought experiment. The real reason for that strawman argument is not that people would actually would do it, it's that since you could in principle do it, this keeps that bad guys at bay. Ha Ha Ha.

So it's such a terrible irony then that the very first time in history that, effectively a different kind of parallel test did occur, that yep massive machine rigging is found!

the parallel test in this case is: call an election. cancel it unexpectedly at the last possible second and impound the machines, test them for rigging.