Slashdot Mirror
Azerbaijan Election Results Released Before Voting Had Even Started
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Florida's hanging chads ain't going nothing on Azerbaijan. Fully a day before the polls were to open, election results were accidentally released via an official smartphone app, confirming what everybody already knew — the election was rigged from the beginning. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008."
Is there a reason why developed countries haven't let users vote with a public/private key pair, and signing your own votes, in a method that can be cryptographically checked and counted by any reasearcher?
This can even be done anonymously, just identify voters from anonymously issued keys...
Certainly problems like this would go away
I guess they will just have to have a REAL election now....
(Gigglesnort.)
Substitute data from the prior election, with entries from the current line of candidates, you have to fill it with something.
TO FAKE IT!
Who says America is the greatest nation in the world! Azerbaijan already has time travel! Now if only we could get that gizmo for some stock market analysis...
We have taught them American politics.
SUCCESS!
"oh dear, i seem to have premature electorate all over my caucus!"
This is offensive to the Great Democracy of Azerbaijan. There is no corruption, this is lies spread by the Islamist Party who are trying to destroy this country. Slashdot should be ashame of itself for posting such vile filth.
SMH...
here we get to vote for one of two parties, but both are controlled by the same group of billionaires so they dont really represent normal people. its at least refreshing to see a government say, "well, yeah your vote is meaningless" as opposed to the United States, where people become upset if you dont believe voting is important. even if it were, and even if we all pitched in to vote for some third or fourth party, theyd get bought off just as quickly. it wouldnt change.
Good people go to bed earlier.
App devs.taking the fall since 2009.
Diebold deliver under budget and ahead of schedule...
Nullius in verba
I build an NCAA bracket tracker. It is a interesting exercise to apply the win patterns from old tournaments to the current year. It is a reasonable way to run a test.
Also the totals show he's a newby. Putin usually arranges for the totals to be 51%, giving the opposition hope in the democracy.
Lucky for America it has a strong judicial process that would prevent such Constitution abuses... oh....wait...I forgot about the illegal mass surveillance, and the super secret courts that have appointed General Alexander as Emperor of all.
Was it rigged? Or, was it an intentional lie to start a revolution?
This is what makes me proud to be an American, at least we know how to properly rig an election.
Ballots determine YOU!
Maybe the app developers are testing this year's app with old data? It should be easy enough to tell if the dataset used is from a previous election.
With a paper audit that's audited by independents or is it the election rigger 9000?
...rises by one.
"The system uses standard personal computers as voting terminals,"
Geez, the NSA pawns PCs. Are you f**ing kidding me?
"with voters using a barcode to authenticate their votes."
Identifiable? i.e. you can be datamined on your voting choice?
"Voting terminals are linked to a server in each polling location using a secure local area network. No votes are taken or transmitted over a public network like the Internet."
FFS, there's no such thing as a 'secure local area network' now. You have a huge agency attacking every network it can. Networks not connected to public networks are hack physically, locally or via third party companies. If Belgacom can't keep its backoffice networks protected, what makes you think you can?
Really in a post PRISM world, recognize that you cannot trust electronic elections, encryption is broken, the keys you send around by email, they're intercepted an read. The networks you create ad-hoc, they're broken into. If you don't want the NSA or GCHQ choosing your PM, you need a paper audit trail.
Shit happens and I bet their voter turnout is better that here in the U.S. - for national elections, I know there's a better turnout for American Idol.
Given a sufficiently high statistical population of dense sample points to calculate trends with statistical certainty, there is very little effective difference between statistical analysis and time travel.
NSA and GCHQ claim it is their goal to monitor all communications worldwide allowing near-perfect trend analysis. This is tantamount to being able to predict the outcome of elections in advance, and what you can predict you can influence.
Looks like they got apped by their own app.
Needless to say, the app developer was taken out the back and shot.
Don't be overly critical. Idiot politicians have not shut down the Azerbaijani government.
The USA is the biggest and best friend of the same authoritarian, non-democratic regime. Just because Azerbaijan helps out in the "war on terror". It is not news that this is basically a dictatorship that violently suppresses opposition, but somethow it never comes up when Americans talk about the country.
BP corporation runs this country, so no need for those pesky elections. According to our bankster-corporate overlords, regime working for BP is "democratic" enough.
Signing a vote isn't going to help one bit because fake citizens can be created that can sign fake votes.
You need anonymity to make certain people vote for whom they want, not whom they want others to think they should vote for.
The only way to prevent rigging is to make certain people get to vote in anonymity, but to be able to see every individual vote go into the ballot and after the voting has ended, be counted by many (independent) eyes.You need to control/bribe a lot of people if you want to get away with rigging an election if that system is in place.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The Onion had done a spoof of this before. The summary reads so much like the script I had to double check that it wasn't April Fools.
I am not sure if this is more or less honest than the modern election campaigns designed to essentially subvert free will. Every voter can only care about 7 issues at any one time. As long as you can manufacture 7 issues capturing people's attention, you can always get them to vote against their interest. Given pervasive statistical data, you can identify very surgically how each group of people can be swayed to abandon their best interests. We KNOW that's how Obama won. No President had ever won with the same performance metrics before (regardless of where your politics are... just by the numbers). Is spending a billion dollars to micro-market more or less honest than simply stealing the election through brute force? I guess it depends on how easy it is to get that billion dollars.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'm in IT myself, and I know how difficult it is to come up with good test-data for your testing...so what's better than production data?
I'm not saying it is so, but it could very well be that the testers have loaded into it this years candidates, made up some likely result, and run the software to see that it works...
And apparently it did! ;)
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5
Looks like someone is going to lose their job... or have their heads roll.
This is a really good point. The inefficiency of physical ballots requiring large numbers of people to participate is a security feature!
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is at the front of the line!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's how internet presentations of election results ARE developed and tested: with current data as far as possible, meaning of course current candidates, too, but with old results. Many years ago, I could get an inside look into the internals of the web presentation software for certain elections within a European country, and that's just how it was done. If they would have accidentally put the test results online, that's what it would have looked there, too. (Perhaps people should form a habit of testing elections using extremely improbable made-up test data...)
Azerbaijanis should be thanking their government for working to save them the time and trouble of going out to vote. At long last, Democracy has become convenient!
Oh dear, you really don't know how programming workse, do you pussy?
Do you think the mailshot from a UK bank which had on every form "Dear Mr Rich Bastard" that this proved that everyone who has a bank account is actually the same single person with a humorous name?
Why is this article tagged Ohio?
Haw, haw, haw. If you're appalled by the gall, the outrageousness, the cojones then you've been duped: this kind of stuff is happening all over the place. When I researched and wrote the Dictator's Handbook: a practical manual for the aspiring tyrant in 2012 I found dozens of examples of this kind of stuff. In the words of an expert, "it's not the vote that counts, it's the count that counts." Have a look at chapter 11 covering elections for some other good examples, including Russia, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, and elsewhere. Hell, there are even some good examples at home, but why bother citing them when the NSA is watching me type?
I'm not going to say democracy is flawed, it's in fact probably the strongest of systems that attempt to bring order to a flawed species. But democracy is a game that's too easily manipulated, which makes dictators of the sort that read my book all-too-capable of having some fun to keep power. Welcome to the real world.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
A little side story. The great irony is, that Azerbaijani people are incredibly corrupt thus they get the government they deserve. I travelled from Tbilisi to Baku a few years ago. Right from the onset from the Azerbaijan border it was ALL about corruption. I had a visa and letter of invitation before hand. Right from the border it began, you had to pay a fee to 'park' in the border area, no pay fee? Your vehicle got trashed, the bloke in front had most of his windows smashed. Then you went from one building to another each time there happened to be forms with a hand written $5 price on each corner. At which a fat oaf with a stamp would refuse to stamp your entry documents unless you gave him $20. I had a buddy tried not to pay and was not allowed into the country. Then 20 metres from the border was a check point where the official would grab your passport and ransom it for $20. Refusing to pay got a bayonet in your tyre. Binoculars came out and there were MANY MANY such check points. So we went off road instead, but now and again had to stop for gas, it said something like .25 for a litre of gas. (it was cheap) except when it came to pay it was not .25 it was 25 a litre. Buying food and stuff the decimal place got moved to the left 2 places.
Even when we got to Baku nobody would give us directions without payment. Similar situation with hotels, big sign saying $x per night PRIVATE ROOMS! No, this is wrong, old sign! price was doubled or tripled.
Tired we paid and found it was a dorm with beds stacked 5 high.
Morning we came out and somebody had stolen our front wheels, $150 if we wanted them back.
Just driving to the port we were stopped and 'fined' many many times...
We couldn't wait to get out of there, heading to the port there was a port tax. Except we had to go back and forth to a building outside the port to pick up forms and get them stamped inside the port. Each time you entered incurred a $5 fee. There were MANY forms.
We got onto the ferry and were happy to be out of there.
Sorry that was moved to the right not left!
There were multiple instances of voting results being recorded before the the polls closed in the 2012 election.
The most egregious was at the Maine Caucus where Ron Paul was shut down. Remember that? It was undeniable in that particular instance, even people who think Paul is loony tunes had to admit that our actual votes had nothing to do with who got "elected". Cue the pro- and anti- Ron Paul people ignoring the real issue here and ranting about him instead. It happened in multiple districts in Ohio and Pennsylvania, too, during the actual election. Both parties were doing it.
Only hand-counted paper votes will reverse the rising tide of vote fraud in America. It's simple enough; if you use voting machines, only two or three people have to be dishonest to break the election process. If you use paper votes, tens of thousands of conspirators have to be working together in order to accomplish anything meaningful.
Faking democracy takes practice and they haven't had nearly as much of it as we have. Before long they'll be as good at faking it as we are.
it's who counts the votes.
"All politics is local" has a caveat that there are still a handful of locally elected folks who have not (yet) been fully bought and paid for. Whether that's your Ron Paul or your Elizabeth Warren, don't discount the local elections entirely because the DNC and the RNC are wholly owned subidaries of Costco or the Koch brothers.
My town managed to elect a Green party candidate to the city council. A Green! The trick is to find candidates who are not insane. Folks who are intelligent and have good ideas. The problem is that those are exactly the kind of people who don't want to work for the government.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Then we'd realize that our elections were fraudulent. And when polls say 70% support GMO labeling in California ballot measure. And then the results are the measure loses and only garners 30%. Really, the polls were off by a 40 percentage point shift?
Is that where they keep prisoner wizards, or somethings.
Like this isn't typical behavior in Chicago, Philadelphia, Obamagrad, or some other Democratic controlled dung heap on a regular basis.
Democracy is more than just holding elections. An effective democracy needs a free press, freedom of speech and an independent judiciary, amongst others. The most important part about creating a democracy is having those effective institutions in place. Holding elections is only the last step on the road towards democracy.
This is why technological solutions won't work - any voting system won't work if they're being implemented by a corrupt and unaccountable executive who can manipulate public opinion by cracking down on dissent. Most dictators attempt to legitimize their rule at some point by holding elections - and when you can control public opinion by limiting dissent and controlling the media, rigging the election isn't even necessary to guarantee an election victory. Elections are meaningless without democratic institutions in place
"If [the more labor-friendly party] wins, we'll be closing up operations here and firing all of you. Remember that when you vote"
And this is in BC, Canada
you are the one that pulled the race card. Don't think you can back out of it now.