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2004 Election Weirdness Continues
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Nov 08, 2004 02:59 PM
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
I've read dozens of submissions about election anomalies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I've decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report
that shows that
optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry.
Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters;
that machines in LaPorte, Indiana discounted 50,000 voters;
in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes;
in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards;
Lastly,
precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.
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Liars (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Liars (Score:5, Funny)
A third of them, duh. You obviously don't know religion!
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Re:Liars (Score:5, Funny)
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Who will be the first (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who will be the first (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear, hear.
I'm not an American, I read the article summary and saw nothing partisan in it whatsoever. Then I came to read the comments - full of "Bush won!", "Not statistically enough to turn the election!" and similar pearls of wisdom.
What is being criticised is not this specific election, nor the victory of a particular candidate. It is the process itself under scrutiny here, and that is an entirely valid line of study.
Cheers,
Ian
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Something new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Saw this earlier (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it's interesting, but that's not a useful study, just a dump of a bunch of numbers. There has been at least one serious documented instance of major electronic voting machine failure/fraud in Ohio (the precinct that counted 4,000 too many Bush votes), but this isn't even an analysis let alone proof of anything in Florida.
They list number of registered Republicans and Democrats, but don't show how those same countries voted in the last Presidential election, and more importantly, they don't show any exit poll results.
Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. The best way to flag fraud is to note when the exit polls are substantially out of line with actual returns, and particularly if they are out of line in a systematic (and unpredicted) way.
Beyond that, I have several questions about these numbers shown.
While I have every reason to distrust Diebold given their atrocious history of faulty machines and rabid partisanship, it's hard to believe that a conspiracy of three vendors, all of whom sold optical scan machines to different precincts, worked together to create this fraud.
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South.
So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.
Re:Saw this earlier (Score:5, Informative)
Ask and ye shall recieve. [bluelemur.com]
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Re:Saw this earlier (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like these?
Wisconsin
Bush had 4% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 223 elections
Pennnsylvannia
Bush had 5% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 1838 elections
Ohio
Bush had 4% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 223 elections
Florida
Bush had 7% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 500,000 elections
Minnesota
Bush had 7% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 500,000 elections
New Hampshire
Bush had 15% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 10^22 elections
North Carolina
Bush had 9% over the exit polls
Probability: 1 out of 500,000,000 elections
Reference [scoop.co.nz], probabilities calculated with SD=1.53 for 95% certainty level at +-3%.
This is more than cause for alarm, it's a wake-up call that the voice of the people was overwritten by fraud in this election. Contact your local media, contact your congressmen, tell your friends and family, and force people to pay attention to this.
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Re:Saw this earlier (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, this site [democratic...ground.com] has a graph of exit polls among various states (scroll almost all the way to the bottom) compared to the overall results. They are grouped into the paper ballot states and the non paper ballot states. You can see the obvious differences between these two groups.
Now that said, I don't know where these numbers came from or how trustable this site is. But you asked for the numbers, so here they are.
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How not to write voting software (Score:5, Funny)
Rule #1: Do not use signed shorts to count the total number of votes.
Re:How not to write voting software (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't. They just used "int num_votes" on the modern Windows 3.x platform.
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Black Box Voting (Score:5, Insightful)
Please watch this free 30-minute film [votergate.tv] about black box voting machines.
We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting [wikipedia.org] machines, and for good reason [cnn.com]. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 [wikipedia.org] years [wikipedia.org]. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?
Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software [scoop.co.nz]! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation [wikipedia.org] trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.
Tinfoil hats (Score:5, Funny)
Sufficient condition for election fairness (Score:5, Insightful)
All count mistakes benefit Bush? None for Kerry? (Score:5, Insightful)
16 bit number? (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody PLEASE tell me that that has nothing to do with 32,000 being close to the maximum value of a signed 16-bit number.
Who writes this software?
Open letter to Republicans. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh for the love of Pete (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe Bush won fairly (even though I despise his policies), but I also believe we need to work on getting the most accurate vote count possible, and that's only possible when we admit there are flaws. Geesh.
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Re:Oh for the love of Pete (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
All anonmilies should be investigated, even the ones that don't have a chance of changing the outcome.
If cheating is going on, then it should be stopped. No exceptions.
Even if it's just stupidity and not malice, it should be stopped.
-- should you believe authority without question?
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My Vote Counts (Score:5, Insightful)
I only get one vote. Just like everyone else. I absolutely need to know that my one vote counts and has been counted. It is that simple. There is no just concept where "most" votes count.
I am floored at the number of /. apologists with regard to this topic. The software development community should be outraged that systems that are fundamentally supposed to do ADDITION are not doing so in a reliable, secure manner. If we can't secure ADDITION, then what can we secure?! There are people in my professional community that should be profoundly ashamed at the results of their incompetence.
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
John Kerry's name is mentioned nowhere in the article. Its just about the quirks of the voting system, which should by and large be fixed. Stop being so defensive, not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.
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I agree with you (Score:5, Insightful)
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
It's comments like that that put people on the defensive, when we should be simply working to ensure ways to make the machines, systems, and processes more reliable, and that a voter-verified paper trail exists.
Though, someone raised a valid concern in a previous slashdot story: if we have so little faith in our ability to oversee, manage, and use e-voting systems, what's to stop any number of groups from demanding paper recounts in almost every jurisdiction, every time. Yes, our democracy is *that important*; I'm not saying it isn't. But this is a double-edged sword: many people have alleged that poorer communities have always gotten the shaft from old, poorly working, or broken election equipment; HAVA aims to ensure that consistent voting systems that meet a certain standard are available to ALL voters - and, naturally, we chose to go down the electronic path. We trust computers with just about everything under the sun: our power, our health, our lives, our money - and we've developed reliable systems for many tasks. Why can't the same be accomplished with e-voting? Sure, if Diebold itself was counting the votes on a single central computer under their control with no audit trail, I could understand the concern. But these are literally thousands of independent, non-network-connected systems in thousands of jurisdictions, monitored by people who have been charged with monitoring our elections forever.
So, what's fundamentally different now? And yes, I'm fully aware what not having a permanent audit trail means. We should have that. But that's not what I'm asking.
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Re:I agree with you (Score:5, Insightful)
If we have no faith in the method, then the method should be scraped.
If a small percentage has no faith in the fairness of the method, then we should be looking for a better method.
When one side loses, they should be thinking "it's a fair cop" not "I wonder if the election was tampered with."
The question of election tampering shouldn't even be entering into their minds.
It should be so unlikely and difficult that even a well organized political organization is incapable of it.
A few simply things go a long way toward that goal;
A vote summary, printed on a card and dropped into an audit box at the polls.
When the polls close, print a summary at each polling station and drop it in the audit box, post it conspicuously in addition to modeming/email or hand delivering it to the main counting station.
-- should you believe authority without question?
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Here, I'll explain (Score:5, Insightful)
The referendum in Venezuela happened a few months before the US eletion, and it was also the first widespread use of electronic voting in that country, so it makes for a good comparison. (Wikipedia background on the referendum here [wikipedia.org], think of it just like an election).
The Venezuelan voting process used thumbprints for verification of voters, had heavy international monitors, used voting machines which source code was open and reviewed by thousands of programmers months before the election, and had no less than three paper trails (one which was given to the Carter center, one given to the election board, the other kept for verification purposes). The process of the electronic voting machines was highly scrutinized and available on the web for months for review by anyone interested (in fact, the website is still up right here on the company's website [smartmatic.com]). Diebold did none of this. The source code was not presented for review. The process was highly unknown and obscure. There were no paper trails.
In the end, Chavez won by 18 percentage points, verified by both the voting comission as well as by the Carter center. The process was standardized and each ballot looked the same and each voter was given the same experience. Exit polls matched, roughly, the actual results. If there had been even HALF the problems in Venezuela that the US has seen, the opposition in Venezeula would NEVER have accepted the results. They would have demanded another election. If 4000 votes were put for Chavez that didnt really exist, the opposition would go crazy. And thats with an EIGHTEEN PERCENTAGE POINT win.
Bush, on the other hand, won by 2 percentage points. TWO percentage points. There were no paper trails. The voting process was NOT standardized. The exit polls did NOT match the final results. Then all these problems arise. And you say "well, he still won by more votes than those which got messed up."
The point is that the voting should be perfect. Why can venezuela do it and the US cant? EASY-- because the venezuelan opposition puts pressure and refuses to accept the results ANY OTHER WAY. Its not that anyone refutes that George Bush got more votes. However, just because it doesnt matter in THIS election doesnt mean it shouldnt be heavily scrutinized and fixed before next election.
Remember, in an election you have to fix things before its a problem. Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000)
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Re:Can't be that (Score:5, Insightful)
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We use these in Loudoun County, Virginia and I can't imagine a reason for not doing it this way. There's nothing mechanical like all these goofy punch card systems... state-of-the-art 1890's technology, with their byzantine layouts. The ballots are incredibly simple and clear, so there's confusion down in the old folks' home where someone mixed up the medications.
And unless you have some kind of seizure while wielding the pen, there's no chance of ambiguity. But it doesn't reap millions of dollars to a company for forcing expensive, buggy, hopelessly complex solutions, where simple tried and true technology serves effectively, so I guess it's just not a feasible solution.
In addition to being prone to ridiculous errors, there is also the possibility of fraud, although I don't believe most of these can be attributed to some widespread conspiracy to cheat. As I've always said "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence." and to that I would add, "The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe this. The electronic voting issues have been issues since well before this election however, and I'm not about to stop inquiring into the many documented problems just because I accept that Bush won this one any way you slice it.
As for why it takes a while for this stuff to start coming out, a lot of the detailed numbers and vote counts aren't released until at least a week or two after the election occurs. So it's not possible to find these serious errors on day 1.
I think a lot of this stuff is being overstated, like the Florida "inconsistencies", which don't seem so unreasonable to me when you correct for geography, cultural makeup, campaign time and other issues. And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable.
However, the 4000 Bush votes that mysteriously appeared in an Ohio precinct with less than 1000 registred voters is a proven and acknowledged issue - that's why this story was carried by CNN, not just some crazy blogger. And other legitimate issues will crop up, I'm certain of it. Whether anything will indicate provable, large-scale fraud, I am very doubtful, but more evidence is surely forthcoming that indicates the inherent weaknesses of many of the black box electronic voting systems that have been put in place over the last few years.
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big point you don't seem to get is that without an audit trail these machines are totally unaccountable. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE, so yes, even the "300M Kerry campaign" wouldn't be able to find out what really happened. This is the whole fucking point. So, please, pull your head out of your ass. You can't say with *ANY* certainty that Bush actually won.
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of who won, and regardless if it was intentional or not, it is essential to investigate the problems, if only to prevent them from happening again. If it is determined that the errors are significant and widespread, then the elections must be redone. Those are the breaks.
We can discuss possible fraud once we know what the problem is.
Oh, and unless Diebold manufactured scantron-style counters and are responsible for printing provisional ballots with no addresses, I think your little rant is just slightly misplaced.
=Smidge=
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
College professors and other academics can point out the irregularities in the system all they want, they don't have the power to actually change anything (what are they going to do? Vote those jokers out? Ha!)
At this point I havn't seen anything like a smoking gun (don't expect to either), but I also have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that appeared right when it became obvious that yet again the exit polls (the primary measure of voting fraud in foreign countries) were skewed yet again this year (even with different people in charge!). Either 5% of the population have started systematically lying to exit pollsters (refusal rates havn't changed significantly), or there is something else odd happening.
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Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.duke.edu/~mth6/florida2000.xls [duke.edu]
I bet that if you took the time to look at 96, 92, etc, you'd see the same trend. For some reason a bunch of voters in those precincts register as Democrats, but always vote for Republicans.
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Re:There are stringent requirements for the system (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you don't think that adminitrative pressure to roll these machines out wasn't responsible for a lot of the problems we see with them then you're deluding yourself.
Diebold is spinning like a top to counter this kind of publicity. It's possible that this represents a legitimate change of heart there, but I really doubt it. I'll take thier past actions and thier documented behaviors under a lot more consideration than last minute claims made in the middle of a hail of bad publicity.
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Re:Big fucking suprise (Score:5, Funny)
I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club. The correct phrasing is I don't trust government.
Your statement implies there is/was/will be a government you trust. That thought is just plain scary.
-Charles
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Re:Big fucking suprise (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I was going to trust a government that was run solely by me, but that was because I paid myself off...little do I know I'm double crossing myself, and won't really support myself when it comes time to vote.
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Re:Just guessing.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Just guessing.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Random noise? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Random noise? (Score:5, Funny)
We're talking about counting ballots. These are macroscopic measurements, and any actual physicist (not a pretend one, like you) should understand that there's no problem at all in measuring things accurately unless they're really tiny and moving really fast. Either you're a liar or the most incompetent physicist ever.
I bet if you got pulled over for speeding you'd try to convince the cop that there's no way he could possibly accurately measure your speed and at the same time know what road you were driving on.
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Re:False Alarm (Score:5, Informative)
In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):
==========
Thanks for sharing the data. Looking at it, I don't see any indications of Republican foul play. My analysis follows.
First, I loaded your data into R from The R Project for Statistical Computing [r-project.org]:
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Re:False Alarm (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:False Alarm (Score:5, Insightful)
It is time to take the manufacture of voting devices and the auditing process out of the hands of partisans. And to all of you out there saying, "Boo hoo, Kerry lost. Get over it." How is it that Democracy in America is being hijacked, and you don't seem to give a shit? I'd wager you are the true anti-Americans. You do a lot of name calling, but when the shit hits the fan you show your true natures. Sunshine Patriots. Educate yourselves, and stand up for the Constitution you so loudly claim to believe in. Stop being little automatons.
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Re:Simple question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apparently, really hard. (Score:5, Insightful)
You used '=' instead of '=='. If we assume that the constant BUSH is a non-zero value, then the test is always true, and all votes get counted for Bush. You've proven the point in spectacular fashion.
I mean fuck, if you can make a mistake like that in a simple one-liner, how many flaws do you think there are in a multi-KLoC system?
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Re:ENOUGH ALREADY (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't think anyone here would claim that Kerry lost the election because of these anomalies. Any ones that would think that probably wear tin foil hats. Anyone that thinks Kerry lost the election because of these and thinks posting about it on the internet will change anything is just plain ignorant.
However, we should be paying attention to this. These are not your common irregularities. This is a whole new system of casting your vote. I've seen statistics that 30% of the votes this election were cast electronically. When we have such a large percentage of participation with these things, don't you think it's time we looked at the problems of them? And when stories like these come out about malfunctions and obvious conflicts of interest, don't you think that we, citizens, should make sure they're fixed before the next election?
Personally, I've written several members of my state congress asking about possible bills for requirements of electronic voting machines, such as the all-so-important paper trail. What have you done?
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Say that to Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell no i'm not listening. Bush started out by declaring that he had a "broad victory" and "a very clear mandate from the American people." A 2% margin of victory is neither of those.
Now it's being made clear that he still believes in enforcing his view of morality on the entire nation: Rove: Bush Serious About Gay Marriage Ban [yahoo.com]
He has no actual intent to unite the nation. He's just been saying it for the PR value. Rove probably thinks that if they just shout loudly enough that they have a clear mandate and they want to work with the Democrats that anyone who disagrees won't be believed.
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Re:Before you ask, the 4000 votes don't change Ohi (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if just one such error occured in each of Ohio's counties (88) then Bush would have 350K extra votes.
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Re:you know the voting system is flawed when... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll also give the requirements for perpetrating a fraud such as you're proposing and making it statistically significant:
1) You would have to have many individuals involved in the fraud because voting twice in the same precinct would be too dangerous - a person could easily be recognized as voting multiple times and possibly arrested.
2) Once you have the people, you now have to have access to multiple registered identities, one per precinct per person involved in the fraud.
2a) You need to be certain that those multiple registered identities aren't going to vote, either by registering nonexistant people or somehow figuring out who is not going to show up.
3) Now, you have to have each person travel to every precinct to be defrauded and vote.
3a) Absentee ballots could simplify this process but given how few elections have turned on these ballots over the years it hardly seems credible that this could be done without detection.
Bottom line? Your "undoubtable fact" is very much in doubt and would be difficult to perpetrate under ideal circumstances. Far easier (though I've gotta think still difficult) would be coopting election officials themselves and taking that more direct route to fixing an election.
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Re:By Weirdness, Taco means (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes.
You're right, it's been really hard to get over the fact that the worst president ever was backed by that many people. I've been incredulous all week.
However, Bush didn't win by 3.5 million votes. He lost by about 130,000 votes. If 131,000 more people voted for Kerry in Ohio - he would be our new president-elect. It is for this reason that we should be examining the voting mechanics errors, the number of which are approaching that winning margin. We learned this rather clearly 4 years ago, I'm surprised that you haven't... let me guess, you probably also believe that WMDs were found in Iraq and Saddam was behind 9/11? [pipa.org]
Taco isn't saying that crackers were messing with the system. The story that I read from his headline was that the system is messed up enough as it is, and we aren't getting fair or accurate vote counts. We can't have a truly functioning democracy when so many people's votes aren't counted properly. I mean, how are we supposed to tell Afganistan and Iraq that we know how to run a country better than they do?
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin
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Re:I lie.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand this attitude at all. Why would you lie to exit pollsters? Do you lie to your doctor when you go in for a checkup? Do you lie to the waiter about what you want to order in a restraunt?
Having accurate exit polls is to the advantage of everyone--everyone, that is, except people trying to rig an election. They are the only ones who benefit from trashing the exit polls. Are you trying to help them?
For that matter, why is it that we are expected to believe not only that lying is rampant, but that it is much, much more common for the sort of people who place high importance on "moral values" to lie? Remember, it's not as if a bunch of Kerry supporters are supposed to have lied and said they supported Bush, is it? It the conserviative, upright rural Bush supporters who think moral values are very important that are supposed to have lied en mass. Does that make sense?
-- MarkusQ
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