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Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 09, 2008 07:12 AM
from the making-a-difference dept.
from the making-a-difference dept.
Gottesser writes "Bev Harris over at Black Box Voting has done everyone a favor and released her 2008 Election Protection toolkit as an ebook. It's like Cliff notes of Bev's 8+ years of experience on the front lines of the modern voting rights movement. The ebook presents succinct information to get individuals actively involved in the full-contact sport that is democracy. The target audience is those who believe that the political process requires more than just showing up to vote once every four years those who know that something's up with those voting machines. You may remember Bev Harris from her Emmy-nominated HBO documentary 'Hacking Democracy.' I've been working on election integrity issues in Ohio for some time now and have met Bev several times. Her work is nothing less than groundbreaking. Please check it out."
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Theft is not concern #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares about election theft when the average voter isn't capable of making an informed choice in the first place? And no, I don't mean the 50% picking the other party, I do mean that 90% of the people voting hardly have a clue about the issues at stake.
I hate to sound like an elitist but when most other people so clearly demonstrate they are not, it leaves one little choice but to think that way..
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Democracy is worthless without people making informed decisions, and yet you can't force people to become informed. So what is the human race to do.
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I've always said a voting ballot should be a multiple-choice test, where the voter has to prove that he or she has at least some clue what the candidates stand for. It shouldn't be a test that requires above-average intelligence, just an above-average (current average) effort to make an informed decision. Only votes with x out of y questions answered correctly should be counted, and the questions could be something relatively objective, like matching key campaign issues to the candidates.
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(1) When does human life begin?
A. Conception
B. some time later
C. I don't know.
D. It shouldn't matter. The US has already legalised the murder of human life forms for the purpose of self-defense (don't think death row, think tresspassing in Texas). Just kill it.
Re:Theft is not concern #1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares about election theft when the average voter isn't capable of making an informed choice in the first place? And no, I don't mean the 50% picking the other party, I do mean that 90% of the people voting hardly have a clue about the issues at stake.
It absolutely horrifies me to think that a good chunk of the people who'll be casting a ballot this fall still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
If you've read any of my posts you know I'm an Obama supporter... But I'm really not so rabid as to suggest that my opinions are the only valid ones. There's plenty of debate over most of the major issues and folks are perfectly free to disagree with me. But I really wish folks would disagree based on actual facts.
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Good point. But just to be fair, maybe you should also mention the people who believe that raising taxes on the rich will not make the economy worse? Or, how about the people who think that more protectionism is a good thing?
I consider these views as wrong as the one about Iraq and 9/11. But, that is the nature of a democracy and you have to take the bad with the good. The stupid people aren'
Tax cuts for the rich (Score:3, Informative)
Check out Wikipedia's page on jobs created during each president's term [wikipedia.org].
Sort that chart of jobs created during each president's term [wikipedia.org] by the Average Annual Increase:
(Notice that the sort in wikipedia is text based - after sorting, you have to mentally move the top two entries to the bottom to get the real numeric sort.)
The sort neatly puts ALL democrats at the top of the chart, and ALL republicans at the bottom, with one democrat exception (Roosevelt/Truman, who would have placed third best as a Republican).
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I take issue with your statement that raising tax rates on the rich negatively affects the economy. Do you have any relevant, modern, post 1970 examples of your claim? I would note that in the 1980's and 1990's, in Minnesota, that higher and a more fair tax rates, when the tax rates are measured as a percentage of income, coincided with a much better than average economy for the state. In the last decade, lower taxes in the state have coincided with below average economic performance as compared with the
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The only link between Iraq and '95 OKC bombing was a conversation between American
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Seriously, Iraq was a real threat and needed to be dealt with.
I can imagine Saddam talking to one of his generals and saying: Seriously, USA is a real threat and needs to be dealth with.
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Well, there's always the theory that the 90% who have no clue will even out at roughly 45% on each side so that the election will be decided by the remaining 10%.
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Somebody told me that ignorance and apathy were on the rise. Well, I don't know and I don't care.
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Funny, I have seen tremendous displays of political ignorance on Slashdot; in fact, a lot of people here take pride in such ignorant statements as "both parties are the same."
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If you feel that politics, law and economics are easier to grasp than quantum mechanics, fine, but I am not convinced.
Good for you that you have first hand info on most issues, but what I'm trying to get across: 90% of the population doesn't know what the DMCA or net neutrality are, or why it might affect them. But that doesn't make the issues irrelevant, nor their choices informed.
Oh, and I didn't mean to claim I'm part of the 10% that does know it all, for most issues I'm probably just as clueless as the
don't waste your time (Score:4, Interesting)
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw [youtube.com]
Re:don't waste your time (Score:5, Funny)
Did somebody just post the subject "don't waste your time" with two links to YouTube videos? I can't even begin to tell you what's wrong with that!
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Work-around: absentee ballot (Score:2)
You don't need to be out of town or anything to get an absentee ballot. All you have to do is request one ahead of time.
Come on, people; is this so difficult?
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Not true... (Score:2)
Every state has different rules on what's a valid reason for an absentee ballot.
I've only done it once (when I was going to be on a business trip), and although I found it much slower to vote as I was looking up people's voting records and such while filling out the ballot, I felt as if I had made much better informed decisions on my choices, rather than just going by name recognition or party affiliation.
Archive.org (Score:5, Interesting)
On page 48 (or 24 since the PDF has two document pages per PDF page) of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf [blackboxvoting.org] they recommend keeping a sequence of snapshots of the web pages reporting the raw results to detect any anomalies.
Now keeping snapshots of webpages to analyze how they change sounds exactly like what Archive.org was designed for. It would be nice if on the night of the election, Archive.org set their refresh (?) rate for those pages abnormally high. Then the data can be used by everyone and not just those who thought ahead of time to take the snapshots.
Be an election judge (Score:5, Insightful)
The single most important thing you can do to protect our democracy is to volunteer as an election judge -- or poll worker, or election inspector, or whatever you call us in your state.
It's easy, it's fun, and we desperately need more people under 80 to do it.
I started right after the election debacle in 2000. Call your city elections department NOW while you can still get into training sessions. Make sure that your local voting is clean, fair, legal, and trustworthy. It all depends on volunteers!
Re:Diebold's confession (Score:5, Insightful)
We already know in advance that the election is going to be as rigged as the GOP believes they can get away with. Diebold was forced to admit it. Fortunately, Obama's success this November will be too sweeping for even the usual election-stealing shenanigans to saddle us with four more years of war, corruption, lies, and deepening economy woes.
Honestly, folks like you worry me.
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same... I'd love to see Obama in office... And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
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I cannot see any similarities between Bush and McCain beyond their oppinions of the Surge. Those differences are precisely why I was leaning Barr in this election.
Re:Diebold's confession (Score:4, Informative)
And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
I'd hate for something measly like facts to get in your way, but there is the small problem that McCain is leading in the Gallup polls today 49% - 44%. Yup, no challenge at all.
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Re:Diebold's confession (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same... I'd love to see Obama in office... And so far it really doesn't look like McCain is going to provide much of a challenge...
I fail to see the difference in McCain's and Obama's foreign policy.
Both want to take troops out (eventually) of Iraq to put them in Afghanistan. Both support the giant permanent bases being built in Iraq, which guarentee 50k+ troops even after any "pullout," plus the probably 100k+ contractors.
Both are agressive towards Iran, leaving nothing off the table (including a nuclear first strike). Iran has proven multiple times that they don't have a weapons program and they can legally enrich uranium for legal purposes. They've only been proven to enrich uranium to around 3.7% (you need 90% for weapons grade material).
Both want to give over a billion dollars to Georgia (as does Cheney), which is going to do nothing but provoke Russia even more. Georgia was the aggressor against S. Ossetia. Saakashvili is a NATO puppet who is extremely dangerous (and loves to eat ties).
Putting a new face onto the same terrible foreign policy decisions doesn't change anything.
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Both are agressive towards Iran, leaving nothing off the table (including a nuclear first strike).
I'd say that McCains camp would leave direct talks to Ahmadinejad (or whoever else happens to be the head honcho over there at that point) off the table.
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Yes, this talk is particularly silly considering that the latest polls have McCain ahead.
He's not ahead if you look at delagate count, but he's in easy striking distance there too.
Note that after the democratic convention bounce in '88, Dukakis (the democrat) was up by 19 points. That's far more than Obama has ever been up. After the Rep dirty trick machine had 3 months to work him over, he ended up taking only 10 states. If you think they won't spend the next 3 months doing the exact same thing this time,
Obama's blowing the election. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sick of W's policies and can't wait to get him out of office... McCain looks like more of the same.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
So, I would look for McCain to be someone in the mold of a Teddy Roosevelt, whom he has publicly said that he idolizes. As a president, I would probably look to see McCain do some of the progressive things that T.R. did, while still working to bolster Pax Americana. If McCain lives up to his fiscal promises and the way he's generally voted, I think there's probably enough libertarian and fiscal Republicans (as opposed to the religious right), and right of center Democrats to actually put together a governing coalition that for 4 all too brief years sheds the lunatics on both sides of the aisle.
But I keep seeing people completely dismiss the Republican ticket. I keep seeing people talk like it's a done-deal, like the Democrats are already in office
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
He's running too far to the left in the general election. Obama's plan is and always was to get all the black vote plus the liberals and the problem is that there's not enough liberals in the states he needs. He's just misread the USA at a national level, and so he has a hard time seeing the need shed his own maniacal base to succeed publicly in a way that Clinton would have surely done.
I thought he gave a fantastic speech, but, since then his moves almost smack of desperation... he's almost devolving into a sort of a classic class war candidate and that's not a good thing to do when American for the most part tend to prefer to keep open the doors of opportunity for the rich just on the offbeat chance that they get rich themselves. I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
Worst of all, Obama's success is his own enemy. He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them. The left wing has this obsession that a leader needs to listen to all of his counsellers, whereas, if Obama just borrowed a small page from Bush and listened to his own gut, he'd more effective in getting what we wants. As it is, the Obama posse is just dragging him down.
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This election is being blown... out of proportion. (Score:5, Interesting)
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
These are all things McCain did before running for President, and especially before getting the nomination. Since that point he has swung hard to the Republican party lines, even to the point of saying he would not vote for bills he sponsored on immigration. He's backed away from his signature issue of finance reform, and despite being anti-war in the past, no one accuses him of that now.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of what McCain championed before, he's a different man now, with different positions. If you're voting for the McCain of 2000, or even 2004, you're voting for someone who doesn't exist.
Obama is doomed in this election. It's not even that he's black that's the problem, its his politics and his pick of VP. Then, there's a character test here. Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
Let's talk about VP picks first. Until Palin was picked we heard nothing from McCain or the right other than Obama was inexperienced. Palin is as inexperienced as national level politicians get. A governor of two years does not a VP make - and that's about her only credential. Biden may not be your favorite person, but he has a great deal of experience backing him. Further, he has a lot of blue collar people on his side - and has fought for that class well for a long time. He's not the terrible pick the right is making him out to be - to the contrary one has to wonder if they keep calling him a bad pick because he's a good one? This idea that no one likes him is demonstrably false - he's being elected time and again, so it can't be that no one likes him - just no one you like.
But this notion of a character test... where is that from? What makes you think that Obama is going to suddenly implode because of poll results? What, for that matter, makes you think his moves are desperate? Which moves, particularly? And why is it that being a 'classic class war candidate' so bad? Especially in an era when our middle and lower classes have been at the spear's point of the sacrifices our country has demanded?
He's got himself surrounded by so many leaches flocking to all that campaign money he's raising that he's becoming almost Carter like in his perceived obligation to take heed of all them.
Where are you getting this from? Is there any actual evidence he's being pulled in too many directions? Or is that just the spin right now on why Obama will never work? And where is this idea that he's swung to the left come from? Most on the left would actually say that Obama has swung towards the center (backing off on eliminating our commitment in Iraq, backing off the telecom amnesty) far more than he has taken up hard leftist issues (like... what? Nothing.)
What I hear consistently from the right is that Obama is 'maniacal', 'messianic', 'too leftist', 'egotistical', 'desperate'. Where these claims can be supported or refuted by evidence, they're refuted. His supporters on the left don't think he's left enough - only the right is trying to claim that he's left (presumably to sway the centrists to picking a right candidate). They talk about leeches on his campaign, but never about the fact that of McCain's top ten advisers, se
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Surely they believe themselves unstoppable now.
They don't. In large part because this is an issue that the geeks are winning on a political level, as demonstrated by all the states who now require voter-verifiable paper trails, the secretaries of state who have getting replaced, and some case law as well. As far as I can tell, they realize they are in trouble.
And don't call me Shirley.
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They got away with it in 2000 and 2004. Surely they believe themselves unstoppable now.
Then why wasn't the 2006 senate election rigged, oh because your side won.
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Then why wasn't the 2006 senate election rigged, oh because your side won.
I don't have a "side" in the sense that you are thinking. I'm small 'l' libertarian and a confirmed swing voter.
And Congressional elections aren't like Presidential elections. With a presidential election, you have ONE election, and it's very national. Congressional races are lots of local elections. And, until 2006, it was previously believed by both the right and the left that national issues don't decide Congressional races, only local issues do. Guess they were wrong. (No surprise, because the rig
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Back in the late 70's and early 80's I used to play soccer on a team that was mostly black. In Oklahoma. All our opponents were all white, as were all the referees. I happen to know a little bit about playing the game when supposedly impartial "officials" are putting their thumbs on the scales.
Your only defense against this is to be that much better than your competition. You can't allow it to be close, because then its a crapshoot who wins, and you a
We DID rig this election. (Score:3, Funny)
We Republicans did rig this election. You guys always look trying to think we're screwing up votes in Ohio but our strategy has always been to vote for the most radical Democratic candidate in all too many open primaries. Because Democrats have proportional representation, this strategy ALWAYS works.
We registered Democrat in many states and voted for Obama in droves. Then, when it looked like it was over for Hillary, we supported her just enough to drag the race out and bleed Democrats dry. But at the e
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Just... wow... the first sentence of your response sums up my counter-response pretty well.
Forced labor, anarchy, elimination of currency. These are your justifications for public ballots. And that's just to address the two example scenarios I raised. I (and certainly the mafioso's I was using for an example) used money as a placeholder for the attribution of power. Even if you eliminated money, individuals will still strive for power, and they will still use force to acquire it.
Look, if you believe in
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"Look at those Republican assholes, our superhero is guaranteed to win, no matter what!"
Polls suggest a close race. Past decade voting trends suggest a close race. Your optimism just isn't aligned with reality.
Re:Diebold's confession (Score:4, Insightful)
"Look at those Republican assholes, our superhero is guaranteed to win, no matter what!"
Polls suggest a close race. Past decade voting trends suggest a close race. Your optimism just isn't aligned with reality.
Exactly.
I think Bush is an idiot and McCain is more of the same... I can't understand why anyone would vote for him... But that doesn't somehow make me right. There are plenty of people out there who disagree with me. And judging from the polls this is going to be a very close race.
Unless, of course, the Democrats sit back all smug-like and assume their victory is assured...
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Be careful when you try to speak for everyone; some of us other veterans know that merely putting on a lapel pin doesn't necessarily signify any genuine commitment. I suspect this this is primarily a generational difference.
I will not vote for Obama, but I don't doubt his patriotism just because of some piece of jewelry.
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GOP rigging can't happen in the People's Republic of Maryland due to the fact that the GOP is outnumbered something like 2 to 1. In the 2004 election, when I was registered as a Republican, I was directed to a particular voting machine. No body before me had used that one and as far as I could tell no one after me did. It seemed peculiar. The paranoid part of me says that the votes on that machine were not counted.
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"Fortunately, Obama's success this November will be too sweeping for even the usual election-stealing shenanigans to saddle us with four more years of war, corruption, lies, and deepening economy woes."
Good Grief! I have been chuckling when Republicans portray Obama as a messianic figure and Democrats as his devout followers, but you really see it that way. He's "Jesus Christ Superstar" for the new millennium.
Let me clue you in:
- His touch doesn't cure leprosy
- Flowers do not spring up in his footprints
-
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we dont need your kind here, destroying our freedom.
Apparently someone already pried your shift key from your cold dead fingers.
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the voting machines work fine. do you really think a major corporation like diebold is going to make a mistake on something as important as voting?
Yes. If Ford Motor Co. can make a mistake on something as important as keeping gas tanks from exploding on impact (see Ford Pinto) and Firestone can make a mistake on something as important as preventing the tread from separating the rest of the tire (see Ford Explorer) and Mattel can make a mistake on testing their imports from China for lead paint, all of which cause people to DIE, then yes, Diebold can make a mistake on something as important as voting, which is not actually directly responsible for an
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something as important as voting, which is not actually directly responsible for any deaths.
Says you.
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Of course, that assumes the almost uniformly Republican-favoring "errors" found in the 2000 and 2004 elections are actually "mistakes" on Diebold's part. I outgrew most conspiracy theories years ago, and yet I find that part of my brain giving off all kinds of warning signals as we approach this most important election...
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the voting machines work fine.
I know you are just trolling, but in case anyone worth talking to was reading, I invite you to watch Hacking Democracy [hackingdemocracy.com]. It was on HBO a couple years ago. It exposed serious flaws in the Diebold voting machines, and they even had a computer expert trivially fix a demo election (I believe he never saw a voting machine before and within a couple hours was able to do this) without even having direct access to the voting machines. Diebold was so unhappy about it they tried to get HBO not to show it. Here it is