It is refresing to see some realistic responses from at least some Republicans and Democrats.
I voted for Kerry. HE LOST! And I know it.
I serioulsly distrust these machines because I have rudimentary knowledge of how computers work and are designed and programmed. Not because I think Kerry could have won, or that I want the election challenged, or because I am a terrorist bent on starting a civil war, or because I am a "bitter sore loser".
Unfortunately too many people are trying to squash any investigation of these machines by saying it is "sore loser Democrats who don't know when to give up" doing it. And it does not help that there are a some Democrats who are acting exactly this way. Reading some of the responses to this article, I count at least 25 (browing at +2) where Republicans are basically saying "this is sore-losers and conspiracy theorists" and 8 actual rabid Democrats saying "it was a conspiracy and the election should be challenged". Counter this with about maybe 1 Democrat agreeing with me (not counting responses) and your post which is the first Republican one that questions the machines. This is not good, the loud and illogical extremists on both sides are going to kill any support for real investigation of these machines, which incidentally can be fixed just as easily by a Democrat to deliver a Democrat victory as by a Republican. Maybe even easier, if Slashdot is any indication the people with the necessary knowledge to work for these companies and sneak in code seems to slant pretty far left!
I am hoping that there can be bi-partisan support of people who all agree "Kerry lost the election but that does not mean these machines work". Any idea how to get sensible claims out above all the noise?
Nice going. There have been about a dozen posts from Republicans who want to kill any investigation of the machines by claiming that only "Democrat wackos" will "crawl out of the woodwork". I was relieved to see that the Democrats were in fact pretty reasonable, with only one stupid comment (claiming that any error would require the whole election to be re-run).
Unless you are also a Republican trying to sabotage this investigation with a fake post, you have damaged your own cause.
Face it. Kerry lost, despite my and your vote for him. He lost by a large enough margin that there is no plausable way that any error by the Diebold machines in Ohio could have changed his loss (it would require those precients to be magically 70/30 for Kerry while all others in Ohio appear to be 51/49 for Bush).
The first thing for everybody to do it admit NOW that challenging these machines is NOT challenging the election and drown out all the rabid Republicans who are trying as we speak to stop any attempts to get rid of these illegal machines by making claims that the challenge is from sore-loser Democrats and should be ignored.
You have got to get a clue. Read the comments in this article.
I have seen dozens and dozens of Republicans claiming "the democrats are going crazy". Almost every single democrat response has been "we should audit the machines anyway even though it will not make a difference in the election" and things like "I'm glad it was a clear win though I hate the person who won". Yes there were a few idiots saying "if there was an error the election should be re-held" but maybe you should see the responses and try to judge peoples feeling fairly.
Stop trying to put words in peoples mouths. It is your side that is making up this crap.
I supported Kerry. HE LOST. However no intelligent person here should think that is a reason to not investigate these machines. Perhaps it will be shown that some Democrat fixed them to vote for Kerry. You would love that, wouldn't you. Be changing your tune real quick.
There will be no consequences for the election because not enough electronic votes were used to make a difference. This is a good thing, perhaps there will be non-partisan support for investigating these machines, which MUST be gotten rid of!
Imagine the worst possible scenario: it is proven that the Diebold machines in Ohio were programmed to make Bush win. Obviously from the outcome they must have been programmed to just slightly deliver a majority for Bush. However a lot of people using those machines probably voted for Bush anyway, so the error is in how many votes were changed from Kerry to Bush. I believe I heard that for this to be enough votes to change the outcome in Ohio, those precients with Diebold machines would have to have voted like 70/30 for Kerry for there to be enough Kerry voters to change the outcome. This is extremely unlikely when neighboring precients all seem to have voted 51/49 for Bush. Under no reasonable scenario would even completely screwed up machines had altered the final outcome.
However this also does not mean that the machines should be ignored. I am worried that without the ability to change the election nobody is going to care and we will be stuck with these until they really do screw up our democracy.
The Windows file locking of running programs is just a cheap way of getting most of the same effect as the Unix reference counting to files, but in no way is it better. It is totally unrelated to the "Unix manual file locking", which almost certainly has some equivalent on Windows that is also unrelated to this.
Bush won more votes than any other President in our Nation's history. The American people have spoken, and spoken loudly.
Yea, right. You realize, of course, that Kerry won the second-most votes in our Nation's history.
It is stunning that Republicans will come up with the stupidest spin on this when they won. Usually the losers say the stupid things. I expect the Democrats will say something stupid soon, but you have won the contest!
I think Ohio will count the ballots. However the only way Kerry could win is if a huge majority of those are for him. Since the state is 50/50 it is much more likely that the the uncounted ballots are 50/50. The ratio of 70/30 or so he would need in them is extremely unlikely, though I suppose not impossible.
Also the Diebold machines cannot be blamed. Even if you assumme they were fixed to deliver the vote to Bush, for instance by changing any lead by Kerry into a tiny margin for Bush, you would have to assumme those preceints are 70/30 for Kerry, extremely unlikely when neighboring ones are 50/50.
Unfortunatley all discussion of those machines has stopped because they could not have thrown the election. I am pissed to see an AP article praising them for not crashing too much, and once again repeating the fantasy that the threat is "hackers", which is NOT the problem with these machines.
What would have happened then is maybe we would get rid of this insane election system as both sides would have a case where their candidate "won" but also "lost".
(before all the trolls cry about the poor Wyoming farmers losing their vote advantage, my favorite proposal is to scale the votes from each state so they total the number of electoral votes for that state and then add the resulting (fractional) numbers together. This would make it politically palatable to Republicans. It also serves some purpose by removing the effects of bad weather or regional apathy from the outcome)
No, it would leave the contribution of small states about the same as now. Perhaps it would reduce it, as it really is equivalent to redividing the country into a whole lot of smaller states that are a good deal more even in population than before.
Liberals have to face the reality that the Conservatives do not want true proportional representation and will fight it to the death. So it is useless to even talk about it. I think my proposal has a chance of actually being passed by congress, and maybe we could alter it to proportional representation in the future.
My main proposal is to come up with some system, anything, where the vote total is at the same precision as the population, ie the winner gets 284.238984 electoral votes, rather than rounded, and especially not rounded per-state to numbers larger than 1 which is what we do now. The idea is to make it almost impossible for "voting irregularities" on the scale of 10,000 to actually change the outcome by flipping how a large block rounds. I think the only way to pass this is to seperate it from proportional representation so the Right will consider it.
Has anybody tried replaying this game using the various football simulation games? It might be more accurate, as a computer game would better simulate the effect of the Diebold election machines.
I agree. It's a common confusion, people think that means the prediction is that 55% of the voters will vote for Bush, or that Bush will win by 10%, or some other equivalent of "Bush is predicted to win". It does not mean that.
What it means is equivalent to them thinking there are 20 equally-likely results of the election, where 11 of them Bush wins and 9 of them Kerry wins. If you pick one of these at random, you should not be too suprised if you pick one where Kerry wins, even though there is slightly more chance you will pick one of the Bush ones. If Kerry wins it in no way invalidates their methods. The fact that you can roll two dice and get numbers other than 7 does not invalidate the prediction that 7 is the most likely outcome.
Obviously our limit to 3 colors is an evolutionary advantage: if we needed more than three colors, a tv or computer monitor would be much more expensive!
I agree. Creationists basically are saying that God was not smart enough to design evolution to lead to the result he wanted. They are thus insulting their own God's abilities by saying there is something he could not do. But are too stupid to realize that.
It will mean that gerrymandering would affect the presidential election. The winner-take-all part of the electoral system is not as bad as politicians cannot move state boundaries as easily.
My favorite idea which I think is politically possible is to weigh each state's votes so that they total to the number of electors for that state, thus awarding a fractional number of electors to each candidate in each state. This serves a useful purpose so that states with bad weather that reduce turnout are not underepresented, it also makes it palatable to Republicans who do not want proportional representation.
Unmarked buttons like on a lot of ATM machines are even worse for alignment. I usually have to count how many arrows are above the one I want to figure out which button.
Labelled buttons would be a lot better, but since the labels cannot be changed easily you would have to use an API where you navigate using arrows and highlight the candidate you want and hit "YES" and "NO" buttons.
The problem with these machines is that the potential is there for massive and undetectable fraud that far outweighs any of the other worries you notice. Yes, there is lots of other ways of cheating at voting, but the scary thing about these machines is the far higher potential that a small number of unscrupulous individuals could cause massive alteration of votes.
This is also a big deal here because Slashdot readers are very annoyed at the complete ignorance of the population to the actual realities of how computers work. The average US resident apparently is unable to concieve of the machine actually being programmed to not count the vote right, and instead is easily distracted by people saying "the machine is unhackable" as though some script kiddie is real threat. Such ignorance is quite annoying and probably responsible for the huge interest in these machines here.
I certainly believed he was dead, and I am definatly not in the "conservative/republican circle". I'm pretty certain lots of people of all political persuasions believed he was dead.
Though I'm starting to worry I was wrong as nobody has denounced this tape as fake. Still I feel he is gone. If he was around and wanted people to know it, he would prove it more conclusively.
What you want is the same thing about a dozen other people have asked for here (including me). These names should work with the normal libc calls like open()! Having to link with a special KDE library and rewrite the application to use different calls is not acceptable.
Why can't they do this? The excuse seems to be that the solution would be linux-only, but that's a poor excuse, as they could continue to use the old interface on other systems, and really the only other one of interest is BSD and it will probably be fixed, too!
(the filenames should probably be altered somewhat. foo://bar/baz would be/kio/foo/bar/baz)
If you double-click the tar file, this is the url you get. To the user it "works". However compared to Windows, there is an exact string that will go to the same place, which is extremely important despite the fact that it is not something the enduser sees.
I do wish they would get this at a lower level so all programs can use these filenames, however!
Winner-takes-all means there are always going to be two parties, and the best strategy for winning is to position yourself as absolutely close to the center as possible, and the best campaign is to try to pretend your competitor is not right next to you at the center by running attack ads. I would estimate that 3/4 or more of the decided voters for Bush or Kerry don't really like their candidate, but are fueled by hate and distrust of the other side.
With modern polling and computer analysis and targeted campaigning the presidential candidates are able to split the country so exactly 50-50 that any difference is totally swamped by noise. Mathematically I'm afraid nobody is going to win this election, and nobody won that last one either. The difference was 100 times smaller than the margin of error so it is literally impossible to tell. Both the Democrats and Republicans will be able to come up with "voting irregularities" that are 100 times bigger than the difference in votes. The winner-take-all elector system makes this even worse by splitting the election up into 50 seperate ones with much larger margins of error.
My solution would be to switch to Approval or IRV or some multiple voting system. Because the Republicans will never allow actual proportional representation, multiply the votes in each state by a scale factor so that the resulting count is equal to the number of electors that state has currently (this would also help if bad weather or just regional apathy made turnout vary between the states).
You are right, I was ignoring the big decided states. For instance if Texas went 99% to Bush and California split slightly for Kerry it would make no difference to the electoral outcome, but would mean Bush would have far more popular votes.
I feel that it would be impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election, due to the lock he has on a number of small states with much greater elector/population ratios. Can anybody make up a scenario where this is remotely possible? I don't think this is going to be an inverse of the previous election, but a repeat.
Because of which states are going which way (small states with excess electoral votes going for Bush), I think it is virtually impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election. He could lose the popular vote and win the election as with Gore, but not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
It is refresing to see some realistic responses from at least some Republicans and Democrats.
I voted for Kerry. HE LOST! And I know it.
I serioulsly distrust these machines because I have rudimentary knowledge of how computers work and are designed and programmed. Not because I think Kerry could have won, or that I want the election challenged, or because I am a terrorist bent on starting a civil war, or because I am a "bitter sore loser".
Unfortunately too many people are trying to squash any investigation of these machines by saying it is "sore loser Democrats who don't know when to give up" doing it. And it does not help that there are a some Democrats who are acting exactly this way. Reading some of the responses to this article, I count at least 25 (browing at +2) where Republicans are basically saying "this is sore-losers and conspiracy theorists" and 8 actual rabid Democrats saying "it was a conspiracy and the election should be challenged". Counter this with about maybe 1 Democrat agreeing with me (not counting responses) and your post which is the first Republican one that questions the machines. This is not good, the loud and illogical extremists on both sides are going to kill any support for real investigation of these machines, which incidentally can be fixed just as easily by a Democrat to deliver a Democrat victory as by a Republican. Maybe even easier, if Slashdot is any indication the people with the necessary knowledge to work for these companies and sneak in code seems to slant pretty far left!
I am hoping that there can be bi-partisan support of people who all agree "Kerry lost the election but that does not mean these machines work". Any idea how to get sensible claims out above all the noise?
Nice going. There have been about a dozen posts from Republicans who want to kill any investigation of the machines by claiming that only "Democrat wackos" will "crawl out of the woodwork". I was relieved to see that the Democrats were in fact pretty reasonable, with only one stupid comment (claiming that any error would require the whole election to be re-run).
Unless you are also a Republican trying to sabotage this investigation with a fake post, you have damaged your own cause.
Face it. Kerry lost, despite my and your vote for him. He lost by a large enough margin that there is no plausable way that any error by the Diebold machines in Ohio could have changed his loss (it would require those precients to be magically 70/30 for Kerry while all others in Ohio appear to be 51/49 for Bush).
The first thing for everybody to do it admit NOW that challenging these machines is NOT challenging the election and drown out all the rabid Republicans who are trying as we speak to stop any attempts to get rid of these illegal machines by making claims that the challenge is from sore-loser Democrats and should be ignored.
You have got to get a clue. Read the comments in this article.
I have seen dozens and dozens of Republicans claiming "the democrats are going crazy". Almost every single democrat response has been "we should audit the machines anyway even though it will not make a difference in the election" and things like "I'm glad it was a clear win though I hate the person who won". Yes there were a few idiots saying "if there was an error the election should be re-held" but maybe you should see the responses and try to judge peoples feeling fairly.
Stop trying to put words in peoples mouths. It is your side that is making up this crap.
I supported Kerry. HE LOST. However no intelligent person here should think that is a reason to not investigate these machines. Perhaps it will be shown that some Democrat fixed them to vote for Kerry. You would love that, wouldn't you. Be changing your tune real quick.
There will be no consequences for the election because not enough electronic votes were used to make a difference. This is a good thing, perhaps there will be non-partisan support for investigating these machines, which MUST be gotten rid of!
Imagine the worst possible scenario: it is proven that the Diebold machines in Ohio were programmed to make Bush win. Obviously from the outcome they must have been programmed to just slightly deliver a majority for Bush. However a lot of people using those machines probably voted for Bush anyway, so the error is in how many votes were changed from Kerry to Bush. I believe I heard that for this to be enough votes to change the outcome in Ohio, those precients with Diebold machines would have to have voted like 70/30 for Kerry for there to be enough Kerry voters to change the outcome. This is extremely unlikely when neighboring precients all seem to have voted 51/49 for Bush. Under no reasonable scenario would even completely screwed up machines had altered the final outcome.
However this also does not mean that the machines should be ignored. I am worried that without the ability to change the election nobody is going to care and we will be stuck with these until they really do screw up our democracy.
The Windows file locking of running programs is just a cheap way of getting most of the same effect as the Unix reference counting to files, but in no way is it better. It is totally unrelated to the "Unix manual file locking", which almost certainly has some equivalent on Windows that is also unrelated to this.
Bush won more votes than any other President in our Nation's history. The American people have spoken, and spoken loudly.
Yea, right. You realize, of course, that Kerry won the second-most votes in our Nation's history.
It is stunning that Republicans will come up with the stupidest spin on this when they won. Usually the losers say the stupid things. I expect the Democrats will say something stupid soon, but you have won the contest!
I think Ohio will count the ballots. However the only way Kerry could win is if a huge majority of those are for him. Since the state is 50/50 it is much more likely that the the uncounted ballots are 50/50. The ratio of 70/30 or so he would need in them is extremely unlikely, though I suppose not impossible.
Also the Diebold machines cannot be blamed. Even if you assumme they were fixed to deliver the vote to Bush, for instance by changing any lead by Kerry into a tiny margin for Bush, you would have to assumme those preceints are 70/30 for Kerry, extremely unlikely when neighboring ones are 50/50.
Unfortunatley all discussion of those machines has stopped because they could not have thrown the election. I am pissed to see an AP article praising them for not crashing too much, and once again repeating the fantasy that the threat is "hackers", which is NOT the problem with these machines.
What would have happened then is maybe we would get rid of this insane election system as both sides would have a case where their candidate "won" but also "lost".
(before all the trolls cry about the poor Wyoming farmers losing their vote advantage, my favorite proposal is to scale the votes from each state so they total the number of electoral votes for that state and then add the resulting (fractional) numbers together. This would make it politically palatable to Republicans. It also serves some purpose by removing the effects of bad weather or regional apathy from the outcome)
No, it would leave the contribution of small states about the same as now. Perhaps it would reduce it, as it really is equivalent to redividing the country into a whole lot of smaller states that are a good deal more even in population than before.
Liberals have to face the reality that the Conservatives do not want true proportional representation and will fight it to the death. So it is useless to even talk about it. I think my proposal has a chance of actually being passed by congress, and maybe we could alter it to proportional representation in the future.
My main proposal is to come up with some system, anything, where the vote total is at the same precision as the population, ie the winner gets 284.238984 electoral votes, rather than rounded, and especially not rounded per-state to numbers larger than 1 which is what we do now. The idea is to make it almost impossible for "voting irregularities" on the scale of 10,000 to actually change the outcome by flipping how a large block rounds. I think the only way to pass this is to seperate it from proportional representation so the Right will consider it.
I've seen buttons with small LED arrays for programmable labels (in e.g. aircraft instrument panels).
Yea I was going to mention that idea as well, but I thought it might be too expensive.
Has anybody tried replaying this game using the various football simulation games? It might be more accurate, as a computer game would better simulate the effect of the Diebold election machines.
I agree. It's a common confusion, people think that means the prediction is that 55% of the voters will vote for Bush, or that Bush will win by 10%, or some other equivalent of "Bush is predicted to win". It does not mean that.
What it means is equivalent to them thinking there are 20 equally-likely results of the election, where 11 of them Bush wins and 9 of them Kerry wins. If you pick one of these at random, you should not be too suprised if you pick one where Kerry wins, even though there is slightly more chance you will pick one of the Bush ones. If Kerry wins it in no way invalidates their methods. The fact that you can roll two dice and get numbers other than 7 does not invalidate the prediction that 7 is the most likely outcome.
Obviously our limit to 3 colors is an evolutionary advantage: if we needed more than three colors, a tv or computer monitor would be much more expensive!
I agree. Creationists basically are saying that God was not smart enough to design evolution to lead to the result he wanted. They are thus insulting their own God's abilities by saying there is something he could not do. But are too stupid to realize that.
It will mean that gerrymandering would affect the presidential election. The winner-take-all part of the electoral system is not as bad as politicians cannot move state boundaries as easily.
My favorite idea which I think is politically possible is to weigh each state's votes so that they total to the number of electors for that state, thus awarding a fractional number of electors to each candidate in each state. This serves a useful purpose so that states with bad weather that reduce turnout are not underepresented, it also makes it palatable to Republicans who do not want proportional representation.
Unmarked buttons like on a lot of ATM machines are even worse for alignment. I usually have to count how many arrows are above the one I want to figure out which button.
Labelled buttons would be a lot better, but since the labels cannot be changed easily you would have to use an API where you navigate using arrows and highlight the candidate you want and hit "YES" and "NO" buttons.
The problem with these machines is that the potential is there for massive and undetectable fraud that far outweighs any of the other worries you notice. Yes, there is lots of other ways of cheating at voting, but the scary thing about these machines is the far higher potential that a small number of unscrupulous individuals could cause massive alteration of votes.
This is also a big deal here because Slashdot readers are very annoyed at the complete ignorance of the population to the actual realities of how computers work. The average US resident apparently is unable to concieve of the machine actually being programmed to not count the vote right, and instead is easily distracted by people saying "the machine is unhackable" as though some script kiddie is real threat. Such ignorance is quite annoying and probably responsible for the huge interest in these machines here.
I certainly believed he was dead, and I am definatly not in the "conservative/republican circle". I'm pretty certain lots of people of all political persuasions believed he was dead.
Though I'm starting to worry I was wrong as nobody has denounced this tape as fake. Still I feel he is gone. If he was around and wanted people to know it, he would prove it more conclusively.
What you want is the same thing about a dozen other people have asked for here (including me). These names should work with the normal libc calls like open()! Having to link with a special KDE library and rewrite the application to use different calls is not acceptable.
/kio/foo/bar/baz)
Why can't they do this? The excuse seems to be that the solution would be linux-only, but that's a poor excuse, as they could continue to use the old interface on other systems, and really the only other one of interest is BSD and it will probably be fixed, too!
(the filenames should probably be altered somewhat. foo://bar/baz would be
If you double-click the tar file, this is the url you get. To the user it "works". However compared to Windows, there is an exact string that will go to the same place, which is extremely important despite the fact that it is not something the enduser sees.
I do wish they would get this at a lower level so all programs can use these filenames, however!
Do the prize machines come with OS/X or Linux?
Damn good analysis!
Winner-takes-all means there are always going to be two parties, and the best strategy for winning is to position yourself as absolutely close to the center as possible, and the best campaign is to try to pretend your competitor is not right next to you at the center by running attack ads. I would estimate that 3/4 or more of the decided voters for Bush or Kerry don't really like their candidate, but are fueled by hate and distrust of the other side.
With modern polling and computer analysis and targeted campaigning the presidential candidates are able to split the country so exactly 50-50 that any difference is totally swamped by noise. Mathematically I'm afraid nobody is going to win this election, and nobody won that last one either. The difference was 100 times smaller than the margin of error so it is literally impossible to tell. Both the Democrats and Republicans will be able to come up with "voting irregularities" that are 100 times bigger than the difference in votes. The winner-take-all elector system makes this even worse by splitting the election up into 50 seperate ones with much larger margins of error.
My solution would be to switch to Approval or IRV or some multiple voting system. Because the Republicans will never allow actual proportional representation, multiply the votes in each state by a scale factor so that the resulting count is equal to the number of electors that state has currently (this would also help if bad weather or just regional apathy made turnout vary between the states).
You are right, I was ignoring the big decided states. For instance if Texas went 99% to Bush and California split slightly for Kerry it would make no difference to the electoral outcome, but would mean Bush would have far more popular votes.
I feel that it would be impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election, due to the lock he has on a number of small states with much greater elector/population ratios. Can anybody make up a scenario where this is remotely possible? I don't think this is going to be an inverse of the previous election, but a repeat.
Because of which states are going which way (small states with excess electoral votes going for Bush), I think it is virtually impossible for Bush to win the popular vote yet lose the election. He could lose the popular vote and win the election as with Gore, but not the other way around.