If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things
I guess we have to assume he means "would be a short cut past a lot of things," presumably some re-inventing-the-wheel R&D that was done 50 years ago and has been repeated in Pakistan, India, and now North Korea (where you can get a free pizza with any weapon you buy, as long as you pay shipping). Worrying about it seems a little silly since the Khan network had already done a fair business in selling complete, down-to-the-schematics and Home Depot shopping list tutorials to all sorts of folks. Any country/party that wants to build nukes is going to have a much harder time getting the riht fissile material pulled together than they're going to have setting the thing off.
Their entire business revolves around redisplaying other people's content, not to mention caching other people's content. Without any permission AT. ALL.
Correct.
A little salty, but correct. Which makes their "don't be evil" posture not so much ironic, as extremely clarifying in terms of the philosophy that drives their ethics.
It's such a mess because the [entertainment companies] have all of these valuable assets
Waaah! It's so much harder to make a truckload of money showing people web ads by attracting them with other people's valuable assets if we have to get permission. Waaah!
it just seems like you are more concerned about diffusing the appearance of vote fraud by the Republicans than you are about the major flaws in Diebold's machines
No, I'm concerned about the flaws in their machines being used as an unassailable excuse for insisting that systematic election fraud is taking place, and tired of hearing that from one particular camp without anything concrete to go on. The prospects for either party to hack these machines is just as strong. But the tone here (meaning, in this venue, but also across much of the blogosphere, etc) is built on the premise that this is already some established, ongoing, vast conspiracy, leaning one particular way. Dropping these and similar machines (or adding another layer) is the only way take away the steam with which the kookier people are powering many of their rants.
The news today (um, OK, it's Drudge, but let's assume he's actually quoting someone who's not simply making this up): A Tennessee princt has managed to have a dozen voting machine activation cards stolen. This means that anyone with the right hardware could set them up to allow multiple votes. The flaw here? Absurdly inept control of the voting equipment. It's like losing a box of blank paper ballots. Now: care to guess where the blog-o-spin is going to take this, without any evidence of who has the cards?
you so strongly support the Republicans that you would be willing to overlook vote fraud on their part. That's not true, is it?
No.
If it were conclusively proven that Republicans were stealing votes, you would condemn them for it, right?
Yes. And then some. Just like I get spitting mad at activists registering hundreds of dead people to vote, or walking into every precinct in a couty to vote multiple times. Whatever shortcomings we have to overcome with one device or another as a voting tool, I'm actually far more concerned about entire states essentially not caring if the person who's walking in to vote even IS that person, or whether it's their 10th stop that day. Where's the frothing-at-the-mouth reaction to thatstuff, which has been going on for DECADES? Just aiming for a little perspective, here.
Umm... how do you know that the person entering their SSN is the person associated with that SSN? One of the larger issues here, I think, is the odd resistence against voters having to actually prove who they are. That, truly, I don't get. The rhetoric that it's somehow discriminating (against some particular cultural segment) to ask for ID at the polling place is already preventing such measures from happening even where they're still using much more old-fashioned balloting. Can you imagine the noise we'd hear if the screen were to say... "One moment, checking you against the government database"?
You've also got a huge dependency on the communications pipelines working. The tubes, as it were. Meaning, most systems right now - even the much-complained-about newer ones - will still work while the polling place is untethered from some larger network, with the voting data able to be tallied up at some later time because of local storage. Sort of like keeping a pile of locally cast paper ballots at the polling place until the closed highway re-opens and they can transport them to the election board for counting. Communicating your vote, over the ether, would probably freak people out even more than having it written to a local memory card. A lot more, I'm guessing.
What if the election was subtly hacked, in a way that left lingering doubts (51%-vs-48% kind of results and all that), but no solid proof?
Despite my reputation, here, I'm not being a smart-aleck. What if, as a variation on your scenario, the guy you want to win does so by fairly tight margin? People who think that narrow victories are a sure sign of a vast conspiracy against them personally are looking right past the reality: modern communications (rabid media coverage, the internet, etc) and technology (down-to-the-street-address election consulting databases and laser-sharp mailing/advertising strategies) are creating an electorate that is more divided than ever... but closer than ever. Because where battles appear to need fighting (swing-ish districts or even individual households), both big parties are doing things they've never done before, or to a degree and with a certain sick effectiveness that's getting more polished every campaign season.
I continue to be astonished by the target-edness of the stuff I'm getting in the mailbox and that rings through to my listed phone number. Nothing like it, in years past.
With a bit of nod to Sigmund Freud, here... somestimes a close race is just a close race. And sometimes that 2% margin doesn't go your way (or mine, etc). Your question seems to be defaulting towards a presumption of corruption - is that because the guy you're asking seems to be posturing that way?
How much clearer can I be? In 10 different ways, I've said I don't like the Diebold systems, as bought and deployed. That the product(s) the various election boards have purchased from them are sure as hell not what I would have purchased if I were in that role, doesn't, by itself, mean that I'm right on board with "therefor they are stealing elections." These are two different issues.
Perhaps they are also bribing the people in charge of buying the machines.
But I haven't seen any indication that's actually the case. Perhaps Democrats are whipping this up to provide cover in case they lose more races than they'd like. I mean, it's a hypothesis, isn't it?
Just because someone else okayed the purchase doesn't mean that Diebold isn't rigging the elections. I'm not even sure how one would make that leap of logic.
Total non-sequitor. Someone else (by the hundreds of committees and election boards) buy the equipment. There, that's the end of that issue - it's just a simple fact. Now: "doesn't prove they aren't rigging the elections" is like saying it doesn't prove they're not aliens or working for the ghost of Elrond Hubbard, either. It's a fantasy, unless you've got actual evidence. And everything I'm seeing points to weak engineering, stupid election boards, and a media culture desparate to find a simple-explanation devil in place of the several actual factors that add up to the anecdotal noise that's being trumpeted.
I leave it as an excercise for the reader to determine WHY you might want us all using a system that has been proven insecure.
I leave it to readers to figure out why you're pretending I've ever said that, once. I have not. But I will also leave it to readers to wonder why you're conflating two separate issues. Perhaps because that makes the conspiratorial spin easier to digest? Who knows. But don't put words in my mouth.
No one is alleged to have voted or be planning to vote with any false registrations. No votes at all were made.
Come on, now: there is no other reason to register hundreds and hundreds of fake people than to walk up to that precinct's polling place (where you don't have to show ID!) and then vote. If, as in the cases like ACORN, you've got a handful of people creating registrations that will allow people to walk up and vote, you've got two outcomes: either they and their associates get to cast multiple votes, or they get to claim that they were cut from the lists, in a PR move to cast doubt on results. In the example cited above, and hundreds of others if you bother to look, you've got double-voters, dead voters, voters with non-existent SSNs, and so on. Do you really think that, year after year, people (who do nothing but deal with voting issues for their parties!) would continue to do this if there was no connection between creating bogus registrations and then actually using them?
By focusing (rightfully) on placing the blame on the officials who buy the equipment, it looks a little like you are trying to excuse Diebold. You aren't, are you?
Excuse Diebold for pitching a less-than-perfect system? Not per se. Take some of the fun out of the mythmaking that Diebold is stealing elections? Yes.
It cannot be said enough - voters must not get a receipt of their vote that they leave with.
I suppose it never occurred to me that there would be substantial enough "market" pressure to drive the need for a voter to present a receipt showing how they voted before getting paid. In essence, I figure that someone so slimy as to take money in order to vote a certain way probably doesn't much in the way of principles that would cause them to then vote another way once they're in the polling booth. Further, any vote buying scheme that involves after-the-fact transactions is just so screaming for a set-up and bust by law enforcement that I don't think most people would bother.
Of course, that being said, I wouldn't have expected get-out-the-vote activists claiming to back candidates on the basis of their integrity (etc) to submit thousands of obviously fake voter registrations, either, but that's happening as we speak. So, I guess I shouldn't assume anything about what people will and won't do! I agree that you have to build a trustworthy system, and then actually trust it. How trustworthy the current system is is certanly open for debate - and how eager some people are to create an atmosphere of distrust where none is really needed, specifically because of how it allows them to whip up conspiracy theories for a certain audience, is, too. Some of each, I'd say.
But that doesn't mean that blaming Diebold is inappropriate!
This isn't an either/or.
I'm definitely not impressed by Diebold's approach to this - in the sense that they should have been evangelizing for a hybrid method that includes paper output... if for no other reason than to also sell millions of rolls of paper. But no matter how middling their design is, it simply would never see the light of day if the guys signing the purchase orders didn't buy them.
And states/locals DO NOT have the kind of funds available to blow tens of millions on Diebold and then chalk it up as a loss when they found out the product was faulty after-the-fact.
In exactly the same way that those entities don't have the money to rebuild a $10M highway bridge that it turns out was illconcieved and should have had an extra lane going each way. Or unwisely purchased police car radios. Or insanely underpowered muncipal office computer networks. This just goes to contracting competence - and many suppliers (who are usually working on very small margins in order to win any such contract) are definitely going to bitch about having to re-deliver what they've alread delivered. The solution is more competent procurement, and better selection of technology by the people that will be using it.
And if the same error happened to throw the wrong numbers the other way? Would we even know about it? I'm going to say no: the only ones you'll hear about are glitches that appear as glaringly against the "expected" demographics. But if a heavily Democratic precint had an error throwing a few hundred extra votes to Kerry, would anyone notice? Would a journalist that did notice even say anything?
Regardless, this is why I'd prefer voting machines with a companion paper trail (receipt-style - one for the voter, and one to be secured after review by the voter). I'm annoyed that this doesn't seem like the only solution to everyone.
What are you talking about? A consortium of journalists (after some delays) sat down and recounted the very same ballots that Gore insisted should be recounted, and did so using several standards - those that the Bush team thought were appropriate, and also the most loose of standards as backed by Gore. The results: Bush maintained the winning margin. So, even if the inconsistent standards that Gore's lawyers wanted (and which ultimately were the sticking point that the courts considered unfair to the voters in other districts) had played out in the way most favorable to Gore, he would still have lost. Journalists in his camp were part of the consortium that drew that conclusion.
Per-capita, older and fewer machines being sent to Democratic counties.
You wouldn't be confusing that with how those counties arrange their spending priorities on polling equipment (vs. other projects), now, would you? In that state, each county buys, maintains, and operates their own eqipment. The only way to get some other county, out of which more tax money can be levied, to pay for some other, poorer county's newer equipment, is to alter that state's methods - a legislative act. You're making it sound like the governor personally walked through some warehouse pointing out the less expensive hardware to ship to his political opponents. People in Florida counties need to take that up with election board people in their counties - most of whom are themselves political animals.
the leadership of ARORN had nothing to do with the fraud - they immediately fired the people involved
Except, they went through this exact same thing in 2003 and 2004. Their excuse is that, as an organization, they can't be held accountable for what individuals working for them do. So... what is the point of the group? What's 'organized' about what they're doing, if the one key thing they're organized to do can be so grossly corrupted?
Give it up, WI. This idiot wil just continue arguing himself farther into the corner and ignoring recent history and easily documented facts.
Yup, here I am in my corner, just saying the same thing: counties and states buy complex, life-and-death systems and hardware all the time. Nobody is making them buy a particular model of voting machine from any particular vendor. Try this: put better people in charge of everything about how local polling places are run. I live in Maryland, and the only thing that went wrong in our primaries was a stunning lack of competence on the part of the people stocking the districts with the supplies they needed to actually use the equipment. But I'd prefer they'd bought something that also spits out paper.
Your anti-memishness is an interesting meme, all by itself.
I kid! In fact, after I rattled that post off, I was actually greatly annoyed with myself for uttering that now-burned-out word. What we need here is a synergistic paradigm shift towards a new, leveraged framework that enhances our core conceptual competencies. I will swear off memedness, as you are absolutely correct.
Diebold has obviously applied the much more lax standards appropriate for their financial systems to these election systems, with predictably dubious results.
No. The county and state officials that spec and procure the equipment with which to run their local polling places are lax about their standards, and are shopping for something that doesn't include that feature. If they shop for that feature, Diebold, or Diebold's competition, will offer it - or not get that contract.
It kind of makes you wonder why they don't, doesn't it?
No, it makes me wonder absolutely no such thing whatsoever. It makes me wonder why, for example, my local election board (run pretty much entirely by Democrats, just BTW), hasn't pressed for the procurement of machines that do offer that exact behavior. It's called putting out an RFQ, reviewing bids, and purchasing the right equipment. Maybe they can buy them from Hugo Chavez' voting machine company. The point is, Diebold is just one equipment manufacturer. If they don't meet the specs set by the customer, they either get to come up with somehing different, or lose the business to someone else. Demand drives this process. Demonizing they people who build what they've been asked to supply is a little silly.
With an electronic voting machine, how do you tell the difference between a 'ballot' that the user screwed up and a ballot where the machine secretly overrode the user's vote?
I agree - which is why a companion piece of paper, reviewed by the voter and secured, really strikes me as the way to go. But that being said, how do you (given the scenario you've described), conclude the theft of an election? How do you conclude that any more than you do election results that might have been even worse for the losing side, absent their own hacking?
The simple fact that they CAN, is, in itself, sufficient justification to question the whole premise of e-voting.
Yes. I'd much prefer a variation that includes a companion paper output, validated by the voter and then secured. What I object to is the prevailing tone (and I know you know what I'm talking about) that seems to run through these threads, implying that this is all about one party, and only one party, "stealing" the election from the other. It's utter nonsense.
if people screw with my bank account, I can tell when I check my bank balance. i have no way to know if my vote was counted, although in any system of elections that isnt based on proportional representation, most peoples votes are wasted anyway.
Hey, I'm all for a complementary paper trail following behind electronic voting, validated by the voter. But I don't assume that local election boards procuring equipment that doesn't do that is a sign that Diebold is a franchise operator of the Illuminati, etc.
So you don't think it's actually Diebold's responsibility to deliver a quality product? You think their fly-by-night reprogramming shenanigans are just fine?
I think that making the leap from "running a technology product company just about the way that pretty much everyone else does" to "evilly manipulating the election at the behest of their Ceasar-like master" is absurd. Diebold's hardware runs billions of dollars and transactions through it every day. Whatever marginal rough spots that same operation brings to people who would throw them out the door if POS or banking hardware had random flaws would already have them out of business if they acted the way you're presuming that they are.
Of course they're on the hook to provide decent equipment and software patches. And if they don't, the county/state officials that procure voting equipment should turn elsewhere (hopefully, not to a company that has Venezuela's fingerprints on it). But that's a lot different than finding that they're on the payroll of the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Masons, etc.
Most people don't even know what officials handle the selection of voting machines. Do you?
Yes. And in my county, the election board is overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. And while the equipment they chose worked fine in the recent primaries, the procedures they followed completely botched it. If it had been a paper-based process, it would have been the equivalent of not including pencils in the deliveries to the polling stations.
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If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things
I guess we have to assume he means "would be a short cut past a lot of things," presumably some re-inventing-the-wheel R&D that was done 50 years ago and has been repeated in Pakistan, India, and now North Korea (where you can get a free pizza with any weapon you buy, as long as you pay shipping). Worrying about it seems a little silly since the Khan network had already done a fair business in selling complete, down-to-the-schematics and Home Depot shopping list tutorials to all sorts of folks. Any country/party that wants to build nukes is going to have a much harder time getting the riht fissile material pulled together than they're going to have setting the thing off.
Their entire business revolves around redisplaying other people's content, not to mention caching other people's content. Without any permission AT. ALL.
Correct.
A little salty, but correct. Which makes their "don't be evil" posture not so much ironic, as extremely clarifying in terms of the philosophy that drives their ethics.
It's such a mess because the [entertainment companies] have all of these valuable assets
Waaah! It's so much harder to make a truckload of money showing people web ads by attracting them with other people's valuable assets if we have to get permission. Waaah!
it just seems like you are more concerned about diffusing the appearance of vote fraud by the Republicans than you are about the major flaws in Diebold's machines
No, I'm concerned about the flaws in their machines being used as an unassailable excuse for insisting that systematic election fraud is taking place, and tired of hearing that from one particular camp without anything concrete to go on. The prospects for either party to hack these machines is just as strong. But the tone here (meaning, in this venue, but also across much of the blogosphere, etc) is built on the premise that this is already some established, ongoing, vast conspiracy, leaning one particular way. Dropping these and similar machines (or adding another layer) is the only way take away the steam with which the kookier people are powering many of their rants.
The news today (um, OK, it's Drudge, but let's assume he's actually quoting someone who's not simply making this up): A Tennessee princt has managed to have a dozen voting machine activation cards stolen. This means that anyone with the right hardware could set them up to allow multiple votes. The flaw here? Absurdly inept control of the voting equipment. It's like losing a box of blank paper ballots. Now: care to guess where the blog-o-spin is going to take this, without any evidence of who has the cards?
you so strongly support the Republicans that you would be willing to overlook vote fraud on their part. That's not true, is it?
No.
If it were conclusively proven that Republicans were stealing votes, you would condemn them for it, right?
Yes. And then some. Just like I get spitting mad at activists registering hundreds of dead people to vote, or walking into every precinct in a couty to vote multiple times. Whatever shortcomings we have to overcome with one device or another as a voting tool, I'm actually far more concerned about entire states essentially not caring if the person who's walking in to vote even IS that person, or whether it's their 10th stop that day. Where's the frothing-at-the-mouth reaction to thatstuff, which has been going on for DECADES? Just aiming for a little perspective, here.
people to input their SSN and vote
Umm... how do you know that the person entering their SSN is the person associated with that SSN? One of the larger issues here, I think, is the odd resistence against voters having to actually prove who they are. That, truly, I don't get. The rhetoric that it's somehow discriminating (against some particular cultural segment) to ask for ID at the polling place is already preventing such measures from happening even where they're still using much more old-fashioned balloting. Can you imagine the noise we'd hear if the screen were to say... "One moment, checking you against the government database"?
You've also got a huge dependency on the communications pipelines working. The tubes, as it were. Meaning, most systems right now - even the much-complained-about newer ones - will still work while the polling place is untethered from some larger network, with the voting data able to be tallied up at some later time because of local storage. Sort of like keeping a pile of locally cast paper ballots at the polling place until the closed highway re-opens and they can transport them to the election board for counting. Communicating your vote, over the ether, would probably freak people out even more than having it written to a local memory card. A lot more, I'm guessing.
What if the election was subtly hacked, in a way that left lingering doubts (51%-vs-48% kind of results and all that), but no solid proof?
Despite my reputation, here, I'm not being a smart-aleck. What if, as a variation on your scenario, the guy you want to win does so by fairly tight margin? People who think that narrow victories are a sure sign of a vast conspiracy against them personally are looking right past the reality: modern communications (rabid media coverage, the internet, etc) and technology (down-to-the-street-address election consulting databases and laser-sharp mailing/advertising strategies) are creating an electorate that is more divided than ever... but closer than ever. Because where battles appear to need fighting (swing-ish districts or even individual households), both big parties are doing things they've never done before, or to a degree and with a certain sick effectiveness that's getting more polished every campaign season.
I continue to be astonished by the target-edness of the stuff I'm getting in the mailbox and that rings through to my listed phone number. Nothing like it, in years past.
With a bit of nod to Sigmund Freud, here... somestimes a close race is just a close race. And sometimes that 2% margin doesn't go your way (or mine, etc). Your question seems to be defaulting towards a presumption of corruption - is that because the guy you're asking seems to be posturing that way?
How much clearer can I be? In 10 different ways, I've said I don't like the Diebold systems, as bought and deployed. That the product(s) the various election boards have purchased from them are sure as hell not what I would have purchased if I were in that role, doesn't, by itself, mean that I'm right on board with "therefor they are stealing elections." These are two different issues.
Perhaps they are also bribing the people in charge of buying the machines.
But I haven't seen any indication that's actually the case. Perhaps Democrats are whipping this up to provide cover in case they lose more races than they'd like. I mean, it's a hypothesis, isn't it?
Just because someone else okayed the purchase doesn't mean that Diebold isn't rigging the elections. I'm not even sure how one would make that leap of logic.
Total non-sequitor. Someone else (by the hundreds of committees and election boards) buy the equipment. There, that's the end of that issue - it's just a simple fact. Now: "doesn't prove they aren't rigging the elections" is like saying it doesn't prove they're not aliens or working for the ghost of Elrond Hubbard, either. It's a fantasy, unless you've got actual evidence. And everything I'm seeing points to weak engineering, stupid election boards, and a media culture desparate to find a simple-explanation devil in place of the several actual factors that add up to the anecdotal noise that's being trumpeted.
I leave it as an excercise for the reader to determine WHY you might want us all using a system that has been proven insecure.
I leave it to readers to figure out why you're pretending I've ever said that, once. I have not. But I will also leave it to readers to wonder why you're conflating two separate issues. Perhaps because that makes the conspiratorial spin easier to digest? Who knows. But don't put words in my mouth.
You idiot.
Back at you!
No one is alleged to have voted or be planning to vote with any false registrations. No votes at all were made.
Come on, now: there is no other reason to register hundreds and hundreds of fake people than to walk up to that precinct's polling place (where you don't have to show ID!) and then vote. If, as in the cases like ACORN, you've got a handful of people creating registrations that will allow people to walk up and vote, you've got two outcomes: either they and their associates get to cast multiple votes, or they get to claim that they were cut from the lists, in a PR move to cast doubt on results. In the example cited above, and hundreds of others if you bother to look, you've got double-voters, dead voters, voters with non-existent SSNs, and so on. Do you really think that, year after year, people (who do nothing but deal with voting issues for their parties!) would continue to do this if there was no connection between creating bogus registrations and then actually using them?
By focusing (rightfully) on placing the blame on the officials who buy the equipment, it looks a little like you are trying to excuse Diebold. You aren't, are you?
Excuse Diebold for pitching a less-than-perfect system? Not per se. Take some of the fun out of the mythmaking that Diebold is stealing elections? Yes.
It cannot be said enough - voters must not get a receipt of their vote that they leave with.
I suppose it never occurred to me that there would be substantial enough "market" pressure to drive the need for a voter to present a receipt showing how they voted before getting paid. In essence, I figure that someone so slimy as to take money in order to vote a certain way probably doesn't much in the way of principles that would cause them to then vote another way once they're in the polling booth. Further, any vote buying scheme that involves after-the-fact transactions is just so screaming for a set-up and bust by law enforcement that I don't think most people would bother.
Of course, that being said, I wouldn't have expected get-out-the-vote activists claiming to back candidates on the basis of their integrity (etc) to submit thousands of obviously fake voter registrations, either, but that's happening as we speak. So, I guess I shouldn't assume anything about what people will and won't do! I agree that you have to build a trustworthy system, and then actually trust it. How trustworthy the current system is is certanly open for debate - and how eager some people are to create an atmosphere of distrust where none is really needed, specifically because of how it allows them to whip up conspiracy theories for a certain audience, is, too. Some of each, I'd say.
But that doesn't mean that blaming Diebold is inappropriate!
This isn't an either/or.
I'm definitely not impressed by Diebold's approach to this - in the sense that they should have been evangelizing for a hybrid method that includes paper output... if for no other reason than to also sell millions of rolls of paper. But no matter how middling their design is, it simply would never see the light of day if the guys signing the purchase orders didn't buy them.
And states/locals DO NOT have the kind of funds available to blow tens of millions on Diebold and then chalk it up as a loss when they found out the product was faulty after-the-fact.
In exactly the same way that those entities don't have the money to rebuild a $10M highway bridge that it turns out was illconcieved and should have had an extra lane going each way. Or unwisely purchased police car radios. Or insanely underpowered muncipal office computer networks. This just goes to contracting competence - and many suppliers (who are usually working on very small margins in order to win any such contract) are definitely going to bitch about having to re-deliver what they've alread delivered. The solution is more competent procurement, and better selection of technology by the people that will be using it.
And if the same error happened to throw the wrong numbers the other way? Would we even know about it? I'm going to say no: the only ones you'll hear about are glitches that appear as glaringly against the "expected" demographics. But if a heavily Democratic precint had an error throwing a few hundred extra votes to Kerry, would anyone notice? Would a journalist that did notice even say anything?
Regardless, this is why I'd prefer voting machines with a companion paper trail (receipt-style - one for the voter, and one to be secured after review by the voter). I'm annoyed that this doesn't seem like the only solution to everyone.
Unofficial recounts that indicate that Gore won
What are you talking about? A consortium of journalists (after some delays) sat down and recounted the very same ballots that Gore insisted should be recounted, and did so using several standards - those that the Bush team thought were appropriate, and also the most loose of standards as backed by Gore. The results: Bush maintained the winning margin. So, even if the inconsistent standards that Gore's lawyers wanted (and which ultimately were the sticking point that the courts considered unfair to the voters in other districts) had played out in the way most favorable to Gore, he would still have lost. Journalists in his camp were part of the consortium that drew that conclusion.
Per-capita, older and fewer machines being sent to Democratic counties.
You wouldn't be confusing that with how those counties arrange their spending priorities on polling equipment (vs. other projects), now, would you? In that state, each county buys, maintains, and operates their own eqipment. The only way to get some other county, out of which more tax money can be levied, to pay for some other, poorer county's newer equipment, is to alter that state's methods - a legislative act. You're making it sound like the governor personally walked through some warehouse pointing out the less expensive hardware to ship to his political opponents. People in Florida counties need to take that up with election board people in their counties - most of whom are themselves political animals.
And by "thousands" you mean "about eight"?
No, I mean "thousands."
As in, 15,000 with problems, and at least 1,500 so far that are likely fraud. Which is to say, a lot more that "eight."
the leadership of ARORN had nothing to do with the fraud - they immediately fired the people involved
Except, they went through this exact same thing in 2003 and 2004. Their excuse is that, as an organization, they can't be held accountable for what individuals working for them do. So... what is the point of the group? What's 'organized' about what they're doing, if the one key thing they're organized to do can be so grossly corrupted?
Give it up, WI. This idiot wil just continue arguing himself farther into the corner and ignoring recent history and easily documented facts.
Yup, here I am in my corner, just saying the same thing: counties and states buy complex, life-and-death systems and hardware all the time. Nobody is making them buy a particular model of voting machine from any particular vendor. Try this: put better people in charge of everything about how local polling places are run. I live in Maryland, and the only thing that went wrong in our primaries was a stunning lack of competence on the part of the people stocking the districts with the supplies they needed to actually use the equipment. But I'd prefer they'd bought something that also spits out paper.
This idiot
Of course, what do I know, right?
Your anti-memishness is an interesting meme, all by itself.
I kid! In fact, after I rattled that post off, I was actually greatly annoyed with myself for uttering that now-burned-out word. What we need here is a synergistic paradigm shift towards a new, leveraged framework that enhances our core conceptual competencies. I will swear off memedness, as you are absolutely correct.
Diebold has obviously applied the much more lax standards appropriate for their financial systems to these election systems, with predictably dubious results.
No. The county and state officials that spec and procure the equipment with which to run their local polling places are lax about their standards, and are shopping for something that doesn't include that feature. If they shop for that feature, Diebold, or Diebold's competition, will offer it - or not get that contract.
It kind of makes you wonder why they don't, doesn't it?
No, it makes me wonder absolutely no such thing whatsoever. It makes me wonder why, for example, my local election board (run pretty much entirely by Democrats, just BTW), hasn't pressed for the procurement of machines that do offer that exact behavior. It's called putting out an RFQ, reviewing bids, and purchasing the right equipment. Maybe they can buy them from Hugo Chavez' voting machine company. The point is, Diebold is just one equipment manufacturer. If they don't meet the specs set by the customer, they either get to come up with somehing different, or lose the business to someone else. Demand drives this process. Demonizing they people who build what they've been asked to supply is a little silly.
With an electronic voting machine, how do you tell the difference between a 'ballot' that the user screwed up and a ballot where the machine secretly overrode the user's vote?
I agree - which is why a companion piece of paper, reviewed by the voter and secured, really strikes me as the way to go. But that being said, how do you (given the scenario you've described), conclude the theft of an election? How do you conclude that any more than you do election results that might have been even worse for the losing side, absent their own hacking?
The simple fact that they CAN, is, in itself, sufficient justification to question the whole premise of e-voting.
Yes. I'd much prefer a variation that includes a companion paper output, validated by the voter and then secured. What I object to is the prevailing tone (and I know you know what I'm talking about) that seems to run through these threads, implying that this is all about one party, and only one party, "stealing" the election from the other. It's utter nonsense.
if people screw with my bank account, I can tell when I check my bank balance. i have no way to know if my vote was counted, although in any system of elections that isnt based on proportional representation, most peoples votes are wasted anyway.
Hey, I'm all for a complementary paper trail following behind electronic voting, validated by the voter. But I don't assume that local election boards procuring equipment that doesn't do that is a sign that Diebold is a franchise operator of the Illuminati, etc.
So you don't think it's actually Diebold's responsibility to deliver a quality product? You think their fly-by-night reprogramming shenanigans are just fine?
I think that making the leap from "running a technology product company just about the way that pretty much everyone else does" to "evilly manipulating the election at the behest of their Ceasar-like master" is absurd. Diebold's hardware runs billions of dollars and transactions through it every day. Whatever marginal rough spots that same operation brings to people who would throw them out the door if POS or banking hardware had random flaws would already have them out of business if they acted the way you're presuming that they are.
Of course they're on the hook to provide decent equipment and software patches. And if they don't, the county/state officials that procure voting equipment should turn elsewhere (hopefully, not to a company that has Venezuela's fingerprints on it). But that's a lot different than finding that they're on the payroll of the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Masons, etc.
Most people don't even know what officials handle the selection of voting machines. Do you?
Yes. And in my county, the election board is overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. And while the equipment they chose worked fine in the recent primaries, the procedures they followed completely botched it. If it had been a paper-based process, it would have been the equivalent of not including pencils in the deliveries to the polling stations.