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The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud
cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."
This is all a bunch af HOOEY to justify tossing out a legit candidate that none of the BIG MONEY wanted. Too bad, so sad, HE WON!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You know an election has gone seriously wrong when the total number of votes reported in the Republican primary is not equal to the total voter Republican turnout in the same area.
Was he listed under "A" or "G"? Were the other candidates listed around "Z", "Q" and "U"?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Here's the problem... if this was a "dirty trick" by the Republican side.... why in this much of an already red district? This was a safe seat that's now in jeopardy if this scandal goes much further.
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
The P value of this test is 0.1, pretty much all research I read demands a P value of 0.05 to justify a hypothesis. How many elections are there in the USA every year? By this standard even if all of them were not tampered with and totally legitimate 1/10th of them would be found to have been tampered with. That's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation.
Basically, bullshit, either do better research to get a lower P value or stop drawing such spurious conclusions.
s/this nonsense/humanity/
South Carolina voter registration is close to 50% AA according to NPR. Greene is black. Greene had the first position on the ballot. Rawl did not raise money or campaign. Rawl did not do basic opposition research to find out Greene's shortcomings before the election. It sounds like Rawl should have lost because he is a terrible candidate and basically assumed he would just win because he was the "establishment candidate". In case people have not noticed the "establishment candidates" haven't been doing particularly well lately.
depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance.
Just no. There's 10 percent chance of a type 1 error, assuming the null hypothesis (no cheating) is true.
Ya'll racists can't accept that Mr. Greene, a popular African-American, won the election fair and square so you guys undermine the integrity of our very system that is so great so you can throw out the will of the voters that elected him.
Why don't you guys put on the white robes, toss the bed sheet on the horse and chase this guy out of town you bunch of racists!
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again? I have quite a bit of experience with secure systems, and while I grant you that extant voting machine makers need to be dragged out and shot, I don't see any evidence to conclude what you do.
I don't know, to know all the crap the fellow in office is going to jail for ahead of time quite refreshing really. Saves a lot of drama later.
hey guys, Been stuck on Grepolis.net the past few months. Anyways I feel that daily voting can fix lots of this. I am wondering if an open source software system could be made. -anon voting while preventing double voters (craigslist email style, only system knows yer identity) -330 million Americans, 30 million Canadians, 60 million UK residents, all downvoting "RIAAtarded" laws no one wanted in the first place Hoping "iVote" will take the lead someday. If voting is so important every 5 years why do we not do it everyday? With secure voting systems the military would use to protect THEIR systems (heard they run varities of Linux b/c Windows is too insecure) My big question is can this even be done? You guys are the smart ones on here. I await the idea of online 24/7 voting on some website to be cut up and reverse engeneered for the betterment of man. :P
I just thought the ideals of Linux could port over to our corrupt government, easily bought. They should ref the game, not give home team advantage....
Anyways I felt enough about this issue to buy up:
http://www.opensourceg.com/
Just a place to rant and save ideas about the possibility of voting each day like e-mail of facebook.
Thanks for reading. :)
FreeSCV
http://www.opensourceg.com - A Man Can Dream
Of cause, if the other side won, it's still only 90% chance. I don't think 9 times the chance is sufficient to say that no tampering was involved.
I saw an interview with the guy. There are no words. If he won fair and square, then I weep for my children.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Party politics aside - I don't really know what anyone from any govt. could have done about this. Once the thing blows all you can do is make sure the people responsible are doing all they can do fix it, and are adequately punished. After all they know best how to fix the mess, and have plenty of reason do to so (i.e. the quicker they fix it the less they pay over all).
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
It's worth noting that in some precincts, Mr. Greene received more votes than were cast. As in, he got 115% of the votes. In others, he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60. There are major, major discrepancies in vote tallies in this election. You can quibble about confidence intervals and statistics all you want, but it won't change the fact that *something* went wrong here. While it's probably not malicious, it absolutely should be investigated.
My other sig is clever.
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
There are two problems with everyday voting, you are only trying to solve one: the technology. The other problem is that to make important informed decisions every day you need to do research and think about the issues. Most of us have jobs and family to keep us busy and many of us aren't really interested in "researching and thinking". The realistic expectation is that everyday voting would lead to ultra-low participation, rampant sensationalism (as that would be the only way to make people actually vote on specific issues) and hiding important issues as "everyday stuff".
In other words you are attempting to solve a human problem with technology. It will not work.
South Carolina uses an open primary system where any registered voter can vote in the Democratic primary, not just registered Democratic Party members.
Is it possible that thousands of Republicans decided to vote for Alvin Greene not because they want him to be their next Senator, but because he is such a hopeless candidate that he will be crushed by the Republican nominee?
On the face of it, this open primary system seems open to abuse. If you vote for candidate A in the primary, and he wins the primary to move onto the general election ballot, shouldn't your vote be "locked in" to support him in the general election?
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else. Not to mention beating 1 in 10 odds isn't that suspicious.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's funny that everyone is up in arms about a nobody winning this race. If there's fraud, may it be found and dealt with (not fabricated). But couple this with Bob Ethridge's behavior http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/06/rs-_etheridge.html and the arrogance of the professional politician is revealed, it would seem. I recall some local podcasters being called to a "meeting" to discuss new media with some journalists from our local newspaper (a major city newspaper, mind you). Essentially they were sat down and told who the real journalists were. Arrogance generally reveals more stupidity than mastery.
I had an in-depth discussion with several people years ago about doing electronic voting. That was before the whole electronic voting fiasco started.
On the site that I was the Sr. SysAdmin for, and I did a good bit of programming for, it had a voting system. The original programmer couldn't handle the number of votes coming in, so he randomly took 1 in 10 votes and counted it. Sampling is fine and dandy, but in my world I like completely accurate numbers. The final system stayed in place for years. It very typically maintained millions of votes for thousands of items. It had some primitive components, but that was by design. The votes were stored in flat files, as it would bog down the database server trying to insert the votes in real time. The end user submitted their vote, and it was counted immediately (like milliseconds). The entire vote database was retabulated every 15 minutes. Two people had root access to the server, and it required root access to be able to view the voting information.
In that system, it wasn't a simple "pick a candidate". It was a scoring system (1 to 5) for the item being voted on. For years, one lonely dual 400Mhz machine with 512Mb RAM handled the tabulation and reporting. We did on occasion have someone question the results. It was usually on something that they were responsible for. "Why did my score drop from 4.5 to 3 in a hour?" It was simply that as the voting numbers rolled in, it adjusted their score. The preliminary numbers were favorable, but subsequent votes weren't so favorable. I could generate reports off of it for that specific item (it took about 10 seconds), where you could see the votes, and how it adjusted the score.
After a while, we had more robust equipment, and I began storing the voting information in a database. A replica of the database was used for tabulation, so the tabulation machine didn't slow down the vote recording process. That, and a better tabulation machine, brought processing tens of millions of votes down from 5 minutes to less than 1 minute.
So we talked about what else we could do with such a system. Real political voting could be managed in such a way. We ran into the same problems that are being questioned with the voting machines in use. Only two people with no interest in the outcome of the voting had access to the system. To manipulate the votes would be a very cumbersome task (by design). What if we did the voting for real politics.
Problem 1) How would we prove to the voting public that the people running the servers had absolutely no interest in manipulating the votes. There's no way to prove that.
Problem 2) How could we provide for anonymity of the voters. We stored the IP and identifying information with the votes, so we could eliminate voting fraud. Those who voted multiple times on the same item were categorically eliminated from all voting. Their records were stored, but ignored for tabulation. Real political voting requires anonymity. We could provide pseudo-anonymity by storing an ID number with the vote, that would associate with the voters registration. It would then be traceable back to the voter, which is illegal/immoral/just bad. For our application, no one cared.
Problem 3) How would the general public know that our tabulation program gave an honest result. When the votes don't go your way, people assume there had been some tampering with the results. Really, it would have been easy to lower votes ($vote = $vote -1), and make someone score poorly. Who would you trust more, a couple computer experts, or the government. I know I don't trust the later, but the general voting public wouldn't know if we were trustworthy. If presented with $100 million in cash, who's to say we wouldn't subtly adjust the results in favor of the group who paid us. Again, I believe in honesty in voting, but the general public doesn't know I won't accep
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
There were threads about him with 1000+ Diggs *** AFTER *** the election, due to an interview with Keith Olberman (AFTER the election) where he appears to be several bricks short of a load. What does his becoming known after the election have to do with Alvin Green being unknown prior to voting in SC? Illogical argument.
Nothing to see here, this seems just like any of the projects that seem to go ahead at my work, so move along, nothing to see. No rubber-necking please.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
End-to-end auditable voting systems, FIFY.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The problem is that these systems were sold by people with the right connections rather than the people who had the right employees.
Watching a company bail on a 2 million dollar project because of scalability issues caused by the programmers using MS SQL for a comms system because they didn't know about sockets convinced me that the vast majority of people who call themselves programmers .. well aren't.
What we have are hordes of people who's entire skill set is around building apps are either a combination of windows components or in the web2.0 world: writing pretty wrappers around databases.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
--Halons razor
It's not impossible to build a voting machine ; but it is impossible to drag the average high school graduate off the street and have him audit the thing.
In general, people understand ballot boxes but find computers to be a delirious mystery. Don't build voting computers. Use a pencil.
So not really any different from the typical politician.
Apart from being broke, but I'm sure that'll fix itself soon enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hey Mr Foreigner, let us free you from evil by invading your country and giving you democracy! Oh yes, it's great - look how well it works in our world! Oh, hang on...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again?
The voting process has to be verifiable by the average citizen, when a voting machine is involved it almost certainly isn't. You could of course build a voting machine that prints out paper and make the process transparent that way, but then why would one want to go to all that trouble and buy a voting machine for thousands of dollars when a one dollar pen could make the cross just as easily.
so what would they have to gain by doing this?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Stop the snow job. He's a military intelligence vet and a man with a Poly Sci degree. So what if he's unemployed after he leaves the service? It's tough out there. The ABC interview was a butchering.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
It's possible to make a ballot-based voting system that's tamper-proof and simple enough that Joe Voter can understand it. It's not possible to build a voting machine that's tamper-proof and simple enough for Joe to understand, which means that Joe has to take your word on blind faith, and, well... it's always possible to get "experts" to testify for the quality of your product if you pay them enough.
Apart from this, hand-counting votes happens in the open, while a voting machine is a black box. Even if you had sufficient intelligence and expertize to understand how it works, you have no way to know whether a particular voting machine actually works the way you think it does. So even Joe Genius can't really trust them, and has to take their trustworthiness on blind faith.
Once people can reasonably suspect that any election that didn't give the results they wanted was rigged, and that any future election might be as well, democracy is dead. And that means return to violence as the only effective method people can influence their higher-ups.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Depends. I could walk around and see how much mess they made.
But in the voting situation you're trying to make inferences from a hidden process; you didn't actually catch anyone stuffing ballot boxes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Any news that shows the public at large how inherently broken today's evoting system are are good news. Especially so when proof can not be denied.
Why inherently, you ask? Because as long as electronic votes are not _at least_ as heavily guarded on a multitude of levels as electronic money, things can not change. Cost/benefit for attackers to simply too good.
I'd still vote for him over Bush.
Look, SC has been voting crooks into office for generations. So finally they can elect a man who is openly flawed, i.e., human. He'll probably be better (and more honest) than most of his predecessors.
Maybe the voters weren't voting for Greene, but were really not voting for Vic Rawl. Is it impossible to not want ANYBODY that's new when ALL off the current politcos are just jacking up our country? Hell at this point I'd vote for anybody that was NOT a Dem or Rep.
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/HaireoftheDog/archives/2010/06/12/vic-rawl-campaign-relied-on-robocalls-emails-to-win
According to his own campaign people:
"We, on the other hand, while we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on primary, we did do 220,000 robocalls (including one with Rep. John Spratt), and sent out about 250,000 emails in the five days before election. So, yes, we weren’t well known, but we had gone to 80 events around the state, and Rawl had some public profile previously, especially in Charleston County."
If two people were running, and one of them had been robocalling and spamming, maybe this just pissed people off enough to vote for the name they did not recognise?
We will test all campaigns. This is only a test.
This is an outlier.
This will not happen again.
This is not the Dem you are looking for.
Nothing to see here.
Move along.
It makes sense back in 1700s that we would want someone to speak on our behalf. It took weeks for news to arrive by mail to some parts. Now we have the telegraph. The phone. Radio. TV. Internet.
Why is our only voice in our government to give that voice away to people we don't trust let alone even like? Or sometimes to those we don't even know...
*DrugCheese rants*
Don't build voting computers. Use a pencil.
Pencil can bee erased, use a pen.
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
His name was the first one on the ballot. Many people just pick the top one. No scandal, human nature, get over it.
A voting machine provides a clear interface so the voter knows precisely his vote. He can go forward or back until final submission. At that point a printout is made that is very clear on the voters intents. You won't have any hanging chads or any impartially filled circles that will allow people to throw your vote out as unclear.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
How can you not see the obvious advantage the Republicans gain from having such an unfit candidate to run against? Practically anyone with a pulse could beat this idiot in a fair election.
You won't have any hanging chads
A mechanical voting machine is still a voting machine and should thus be avoided.
any impartially filled circles that will allow people to throw your vote out as unclear.
I think most people are confident enough in using a pen that that is hardly a real issue.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering
It's not a "10% of a chance". It says that if the election had been fair, then this test should have been different 90% of the time.
In different words, the result says "there is at least a 90% chance that the results have been manipulated; other tests may increase this estimate further".
An inexperienced and uninformed-of-the-issues candidate has entered the national political scene (and I'm not talking about Sarah Palin).
So what?
All he has to do is kiss babies, take money from lobbiests, and vote the way his party leaders tell him to, just like 515 other legislators.
--Joe
How do you suppose we investigate suspicious elections?
On any given election day, imagine how many different elections are going on. There are over 10,000 cities in the US. In a presidential election, the ballot I see tends to have at least ten people to vote for, a mix of local, state, and federal.
Every election cycle, even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance, it's almost certain to happen multiple times each election.
We're always going to have election results that are unlikely.
So what do we do about it? Yes, I will support investigations in events like these, but at the same time, I think we need to start before the election, with the machines themselves.
even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance
How about if it could only happen zero out of a hundred times by chance? For example, another poster has claimed that more votes were counted for Greene in some districts than were cast by a 15% margin.
The ballot entries were listed in alphabetical order. Green comes before Rawls. Both were relatively unknown quantities. People are stupid.
I think, as I heard someone on NPR say this morning, people just choose the first guy on the list.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It is truely fascinating to me that no one (apparently) asked any questions during the primary race, there was very little to no interest in him UNTIL he won the primary, but not just any primary, but a democratic primary at that!
A few questions:
a) Is South Carolina an "open" or "closed" primary? Meaning, can registered Republicans vote in the Democratic primary?
b) Who ran against him? Why didn't they question his candidacy at the time?
c) Why, with a "statistical probability" of about one in ten is this outcome considered so improbable? If I'm asked to pick a number between one and ten and I guess it correctly, is it really proof of a conspiracy?
d) How did he get to self-affiliate with the Democratic party? Is there no process to determine if people who claim to be Democratic candidates are truely Democratic candidates? (You know, like call the party headquarters, request documentation from the candidate, etc.?)
Just a few fun points to make:
1) This candidate can not be accused of not following through on his campaign promises - since he made none.
2) All his "baggage" (showing an inapropriate image to a female college student?) is now known.
3) If this candidate were a Republican, don't you think the Democrats would have researched the snot out of this fellow? (Why hold their own to a lesser standard?)
4) He most likely was not supported by any local "Tea Party" coalition. (Despite dillusional assertions to the contrary.)
5) Any chance the losing democratic candidates will register as Independent candidates and run in the general election, dilluting the democratic ticket by splitting the vote and all but assuring the Republican on the ticket re-election?
Ken
Also, his name is Al Greene. It's neutral. It's comfortable. That means a lot, especially when it's the first name on the ballot. I can't cite because I'm too lazy, but I read a study that suggested that when you have a list of people on a ballot that nobody knows, they will pick the name that looks the best to them. Even more so when the other name on the ballot has a negative association, like Vic Rawl.
Pens are susceptible to whiteout. Carve your vote in the forehead of your chosen candidate!
Back in 1990, Rod Shealy used this exact same tactic in a Lt. Governor race in SC. He recruited a homeless black guy with a criminal conviction in an attempt to take out the Democratic frontrunner, so his sister (a Republican) could win. It was a crass attempt to play on the racial prejudices of SC (both for blacks in the Democratic Party and against blacks among the general populace) to get his sister elected. He almost succeeded to. And he is still working in SC Republican politics (most recently in the Bauer gubernatorial campaign).
All of you who are saying this is a preposterous idea have obviously never been involved in SC politics. This isn't even a particularly nasty tactic by SC standards.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In other words you are attempting to solve a human problem with technology. It will not work.
Au contraire! My wife had an excellent technological solution to this human problem:
A) Establish a set of standardized questions before the Primary. Topics would be current, and agreed upon by all the candidates. You can even do early elections on the questions themselves if you want...
B) Furnish the list of questions to the candidates and get them to provide succinct answers. The election board approves the answers, or resubmits them the failed answers to the candidate for polish and final approval.
C) The electronic voting machine offers a sub-set of the entire question set at random and asks the voter to select the statement that is the most true to their values. The candidates and even the elections aren't known to the voter. The only information at hand is the actual topic.
D) The computer submits a minimum of twenty questions to the voter, and possibly more if it cannot classify the voter's values under the answers of the candidates that best match their choices.
E) Print a slip for the voter with their matches highlighted under each election, along with a score of how they were weighted. Have them mark their actual vote, whether or not it varies from the output, and turn it in.
F) Repeat the process after the primary using the same exact questions, with the opportunity for the candidates to submit new answers to the election board.
In disputed elections, it if found time and again that voters have cast ambiguous ballots, with the mark or marks in the wrong place, or too many marks, or too few. Especially with the relatively complex ballots commonly used in the USA, electronic verification of the voter's choices is a good thing. There is no reason to allow a voter to cast a self-defeating ballot, (The voter should still be able to abstain from one or more races, but the system should verify that this is really what he or she wants to do.)
An electronic system that verifies the voter's choices and then prints them on paper in a format that's easily readable by both humans and computers should not be difficult to implement, and will bring benefits to the voters and to the election authorities.
The Democrats were idiotic enough to buy a pig in a poke.
Now they are stuck with it.
Its not after all as if it were New Jersey where they could do whatever they pleased when their candidate
(Toricelli) was found to have serious problems after the primaries.
So, you're saying that Democrats in SC are so racists that their whole party platform can be brought down by having someone running that is ostensibly on the same side but of a different heritage?
Damn. Just, damn.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
For still having the brains to use paper & pencils.
Now if we can get son of C-61 (Canadian DMCA) buried and C-389 (Gender identity & gender expression) passed, it'd be gold star time for us!
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Let us start with the observation that vote fraud is as american as apple pie. Consider jfk vs nixon. The vote fraud in Texas and Chicag gave the race to jfk. Nixon knew this AND had court room style proof.
My observation is that these statistical type arguments do not do well in a court room. So stat expert could this have happened by chance?
The really relevant thing at this point is that a lot of incumbents simply cannot get elected, on one hand, and on the others, people get elected that no can believe could win, and even after the fact, there is no explanation possible, at least publically. I think of Rogers in texas and most recenty Lincoln in I think arkansas.
Rogers was an unknown, but real clear about impeaching obama and wn the dem CD nminatin in a three way race. Might have got twice the votes of the dem hack. Lincoln is an incumbent dem, but has not been properly obedient to Obama and serious in closing down the speculators. So big money came in against her. Soros, moveon. So she push her attacks on wall street and did fine. But among the important people she had already been retired.
Two things do seem to be of interest. Bill Clinton is popping up to defend some incumbents, as Lincoln. And the mass strike process, which is starting to be called "the french revolution effect". If you are going to use the last phrase, you should ask what Lafeyette did wrong back home.
of Mr. Greene's strategy was that the worse a candidate he seemed to be, the more cross-over votes he got. For all I know, it could be the only realistic way to get on a Dem ballot in SC.
It seems his candidacy is exceptional in many regards; so a 1 in 10 chance that there was a ballot error / fraud seems to me to be the least of it.
Also it seems redundant to manufacture scandal when there is so much naturally occurring scandal in SC politics anyway.
Nullius in verba
A voting machine is impossible because one of the requirements for voting is transparency.
I cannot verify an electronic voting machine. I have no ability to open one up and check the code, or put the hard drive in my computer and run tests on it.
And while that theoretically can be done (Despite almost no one having the skill for it, and it not being allowed anyway, and it taking months of time to go over each line of code.), I physically don't have the ability to open up the chips on the motherboard and confirm they do what they say they do.
The most basic fundamental requirement of voting is transparency. It's even more important than anonymity, considering that plenty of places vote without that, like legislatures, or anywhere else that votes by a show of hands. The very very minimum of voting is being able to stand there and do the same count as the official counter and come to the same conclusion about the winner. Voting must, must, must, result in the winner and the loser being able to stand there and say who won.
If I cannot see every aspect of the counting, if I cannot verify that the pathway of the vote, be it physical or electronic, is not tampered with, it is not 'voting'. It is a sham. And unless I'm Doctor Manhattan or something, I can't see the layout of electronic pathways, at least not without rupturing the chip and making it unusable. (And thus I can't vote with it.)
Ergo, a voting machine is physically impossible. It is physically impossible to open computer chips up and confirm they do what they are supposed to, so any electronic counter fails the basic requirement of 'voting'. Period. That is not voting.
And, yes, some asshat is going to leap in here about a hypothetical voting machine that just prints paper ballots for people. No one have any problem with machines that help people fill out paper ballots, but those are not 'voting machines' as actually sold to the public. Voting machines are machines that record and tabulate votes. Yes, even the scantron readers, which also can't be confirmed. But a machine that prints a paper ballot that people then count is a goddamn fancy pencil.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's a VOTE, not a friggin' multiple choice test. If you don't have a clear idea who you want to vote for, stay away from the damn ballot box. You obviously have not put enough thought into this thing.
The problem with American politics is that we think a pulse is a qualification for voting, thus allowing every mouth-breathing ignoramus to sway election results.
I'm in favor of the ballot being a sheet of paper with the offices listed with a line next to it. The voters are required to write in the name of the person they are voting for. It must be spelled correctly to count. If you can't even spell the name of the candidate, you've clearly demonstrated that you have not been paying attention.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
s/didn't catch/can't catch/
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hey, you moron, everyone got six votes. The title is even 'Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election'
It's a very strange setup, and I doubt it will make any difference, but, no, Hispanics didn't get more votes than other people.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This is a long post, and I hope to pursue this conversation in earnest, so please don't take offense if I paraphrase you, and don't hesitate to correct me if you think I'm mischaracterizing you.
Problem 1, as I see it, shouldn't come down to trust- it should come down to capability. Pairing based cryptography (full disclosure: my research area) and fully homomorphic cryptosystems provide mechanisms for blind tabluation under the assumption that you can control the keys. I'd imagine that in an online setting that would work out poorly, but I don't see why it would be so hard to provide such a key with a voter registration card.
Problem 2 is again addressed by PBC. There are cryptosystems (my implementation here , under KSW.py) that provide mechanisms to encrypt arbitrary polynomials for evaluation, which means that you can evaluate the basic set operations secretly under cryptographic hardness assumptions, and there has been a lot of work on how to adapt that to voting machines for exactly this reason. There has also been a very interesting push for what's called differential privacy, which would be very interesting in this context.
Problem 3 is again solved- anyone with a public key could verify the results. The question, of course, is whether the machines themselves are bad, and unless people bring their own voting machines (actually not a bad idea, if the machine could be made cheaply) I see no way to avoid that.
Well, no, it didn't work. Read the post.
Republicans have a theory that black people vote for black Democrats over white Democrats, no matter how incompetent they are, or how much they are 'real' Democrats. Ergo, they think if they run incompetent black people as Democrats, they will split the vote. Or at the very least, have some black people, disgusted at the primary outcome, not vote in the general election.
They also think the same thing about women. (Re: Sarah Palin and the whole PUMA thing they invented and pushed in the media)
This doesn't really work that well. It does work a little, though, and it just costs a filing fee.
And it lets the Republicans have better stats. Sure, they don't elect black guys in their primaries much, but, statistically, neither do the Democrats. (Because half of them are Republican plants.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, that's not how it works. You can't equate the probabilities of system failure (including failure to prevent tampering) on both sides of the outcome, because the a priori evidence for each outcome is different.
Or if you prefer frequentist language, a 10% false positive tampering rate when candidate A wins doesn't translate to a 10% false positive tampering rate when candidate B wins, because the two rates are calculated on disjoint outcome sets.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
so this MUST be fraud.
I see what you did there ...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The regulations and inspections on that rig happened on the GOP's watch.
Heck, Diebold even did this as a method of programming - you ask for election results it'd pull from a different(duplicate) data set than if you pulled for a specific district or region.
There are so many reasons that I want votes to be on human readable paper ballots for recount purposes. Use the machine to help make the vote if you must, but the paper is the final authority.
Machine breaks? Unload the ballots and hand out #2 pencils.
I don't read AC A human right
Fixed in short order -- like the Diebold machines have been?
I'm not arguing that B was not colossally stupid, but there's no guarantee the machines will get fixed, even if there's a video tutorial on vote fraud put out by the very ES&S technicians themselves showing the SC voting machines getting tweaked in time for Alvin Greene.
Maybe I'm just too cynical. I actually hope so.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
anything.
The Governor in SC is nothing more than a figurehead position. It's setup in this state that the state senate has complete control of the state and the lieutenant governor can actually stop the governor from doing...a lot. Doesn't really matter who wins, it's a figurehead seat.
If you want to get something changed in SC, you have to go through the people with weight in the state senate. The status quo remains. Our last governor publicly said that it was setup that way out of fears of a possible black governor after the civil war.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
I think what he's saying is that the swing vote will go for the white "upstading citizen" when presented an option of him (on the rebpulican ticket) versus the a homeless black guy with a criminal record (who happens to be the democratic candidate).
Gosh, I wonder why the Republican tactic of literally painting democrats as corrupt, welfare-abusing criminals plays so well in some parts of the country, when it seems like a ridiculous joke in other parts? Maybe because Republicans put homeless black criminals up to run as democrats in certain parts of the country.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Seems like we only hear about election fraud when the Democrat National Committee gets a result they don't like.
But in this current political climate, what's so hard to believe about an unknown outsider at the top of the ballot winning?
The only ones who can't believe it are the ones heavily invested in forcing the outcome to what we're led to believe is the "predictable" outcome.
On Problem 1, it still comes down to trust. I know I don't trust those who are doing it now, and most people don't. The more capable the people running an election are, the more capable they are of inducing fraud. I believe I mentioned it before, I could show a perfect system. The code could be open sourced, and anyone could review it. In reality, a few line change in the tabulation program could sway the outcome significantly. That's where you must trust those who are doing it. I suppose a 3rd party (or parties) audit of the actual elections system post-election would likely show the trust was worth granting. It's never a totally trustworthy solution though. Imagine this as a cron 5 minutes after the voting closed.
59 23 15 jun 2010 /hidden/cleanup > /dev/null
rm /election/tabulation /hidden/tabulator.clean /election/tabulator /hidden/root.cron.clean /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root /hidden
mv
mv
rm -rf
Now your dirty elections system looks clean, and all the evidence is gone. It wouldn't have to be this obvious.
A good cryptographic solution is obviously the best choice, so we agree there.
I'd assume the voter ID number would be their ID, but only in much as to say "this person has voted". There would need to be something to associate the votes. I know it's a common problem where the voter says "I want to change my vote, I made a mistake." A hash of their ID number and password (like the last 4 of their SSN) would keep it relatively secret, but it's still extractable, since someone has all the voter ID numbers.
Well, on point 3, I didn't expand on the idea much in the previous post.
I'd suggest it be an online based system. When voting, people take time out of their days, drive to the voting location, stand in line for an hour, then stand in their little booth and make decisions from memory. Most people don't memorize the entire ballot. Some of us go in with cheat sheets. A friend of mine made up our cheat sheets. We agree on most political things. I reviewed her cheat sheet, and adjusted it at home before we went out voting. If I remember correctly, there were only two items that I didn't agree with.
But on with the show. If every eligible voter could vote from anywhere within a defined voting period (24 hours a day, during the several day period), the voter turnout would increase from what it is currently to a very clear majority. Every voting precinct would simply need computers online, so people with no computer who are used to voting at their given precinct would still be able to. Some people would need assistance, which they could get there. Government incentives to allow voting from Internet cafe's or even businesses who wanted to assist would help. Anyone could vote from their local McDonalds, Starbucks, etc, with no requirement of infrastructure improvement. You could vote from home, work, or any of millions of locations. In theory, you could probably vote from your smartphone, if the code was written well. :) This would also reduce the number of absentee ballots dramatically, but some would still come in.
This puts the voting machines into your hands, and has brought the price down from "cheap" as you suggested, to free. It's something we already have or can get access to, there would be no investment required.
Something we hadn't hit on was protection of the servers. Multiple clusters of servers in diverse locations would be required to protect not only against the instant load of voters, which will have dramatic peaks during the day, but denial of service attacks which I'm sure would happen. At the company I worked at, we knew all about DoS attacks. We were constantly attacked. I don't say that as like once a mo
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
just months before is trial he had no money. He had to sign an avidaviant saying so in order to get a public defender.
it costs 10K to get on the ballot.
Where did he get the money?
At this point it looks like he was backed by an unknown republican support to cause confusion. It's also not a coincidence they found someone whose name came before the democrat on the ballot
This has happened before, and the state is RIFE with political shenanigan.
.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, this makes perfect sense. Let's commit massive voting fraud to nominate a candidate who has no chance of winning anyway.
Then what? Claim that the Republican win in November is just another instance of the voting machines getting it wrong?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It seems quite undemocratic that the fee is so high that you'd *have* to have external support just to throw your name into a hat.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I have never seen a white paper ballot.
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Listening to the radio yesterday (here in SC) I heard a black man state that in his church, two of the other Democrat candidates for state wide office, whose last names both start with A, were passing out flyers instructing people to vote for the first name on the ballot. He also said that he knew of other black churches where the same thing happened.
Green came before Rawl, simple as that.
Alvin Green won, he should be allowed to run. (Not that he will beat Demint anyway).
Peace
Nor ever a joke, it would seem. :)
This is why I miss elections in CA. The state would publish a nice little pamphlet with a statement from each candidate, and a statement from groups for or against each proposition. Made it very easy to find information about all the 'down ticket' races that did not receive much attention.
Parent poster points out some interesting things about the GOP and racism. The irony of the Deep South being both 'Republican' and racist, is that they were the 'solid South', voting staunchly Democrat, up until Lyndon Johnson signed the Equal Rights Amendment. Why did the deep South vote Democrat for so long? Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
The Deep South voting bloc cares little about niceties like the Constitution if it gets in the way of them having power. They are a cohesive and crafty bunch of politicians. They are more akin to fascists than anything else.
Best regards.
It however comes out to a 90% chance for all other possibilities other than the current case, in which "if the other side won" is a subset of.
Absolutely! I live in SC and can vouch for this. It isn't news down here to either party.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The idiot or apathetic Democratic voters nominated this unelectable guy, and now they want a re-do so they can put in an establishment candidate who has a chance in hell of winning.
He won , So there... people recognized his mane just as much as the other guy(whatever his name was) at this point in the game most of the people I talked to that voted in this race was just pick the first democrat on the list.... And guess who that was ???
FragHARD or don't frag at all
And the ballots should be stored in the bottom drawer of an old filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign saying "beware of tiger" in a stairwayless basement. And the polling box should be placed on top of some high mountain with either a high probability of a) avalanches, or b) flash floods, depending on the weather.
No, not the Three Laws:
"Those with a name early in the alphabet succeed more often than those with names at the end of the alphabet."
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Harry Reid has done a lot worse in Nevada. :/
Gosh, I wonder why the Republican tactic of literally painting democrats as corrupt, welfare-abusing criminals plays so well in some parts of the country, when it seems like a ridiculous joke in other parts? Maybe because Republicans put homeless black criminals up to run as democrats in certain parts of the country.
...and...go ahead, finish the statement... ...and then the Democrats vote for the homeless black criminal, just because he's black. Thus, their racism brings down the whole platform.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Don't you rather mean, because he's the democratic candidate? That's the only reason dyed in the wool democrats vote for black candidates. You don't see democrats voting for black republican candidates because they're black, do you?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We're talking about a Democratic PRIMARY, ie, the Dems are voting to see which of their own will run in the election. In this case, they have elected to have someone run that is ridiculously unqualified. The candidate's win in the primary may be due to the fact that his name was listed first on the ballot. That's definitely a possibility.
However, the original post of this thread suggested that the Dems would vote for a black candidate above a white candidate regardless of qualifications. Furthermore, that Republicans would actually plant an unqualified black candidate in order to have an unqualified candidate promoted to the real election. If this is the case, it would indicate an overriding racism on the part of Democrats. Racism so strong that it is possible to manipulate it in oder to undermine the Democratic platform.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba