2004 Election Weirdness Continues 2013
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.
Before you ask, the 4000 votes don't change Ohio. (Score:1, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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]:
Re:It wouldn't affect the outcome of the election (Score:1, Informative)
Closed Primaries (Score:1, Informative)
So in those counties, with closed primaries, many Republican register as a Democrat vote for the most conservative Democrat in the primares, but then vote Republican when they can (like in a Presidential Election). This is a way for Republicans to push toward more conservative candidates.
This has been going on so long, that many Republican candidates will often run as conservative Democrats just to have a chance to win.
Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:2, Informative)
I understand that the electronic voting machines have problems, but that is not the specific issue here. Look, if Bush won, FINE, I can accept that. But, we need to make sure he did it legitimatly, or we will lose our democracy.
Re:Saw this earlier (Score:5, Informative)
Ask and ye shall recieve. [bluelemur.com]
Well, actually... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:you know the voting system is flawed when... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Can't be that (Score:4, Informative)
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We used them in my county. You take a black marker and fill in the little ovals on a paper ballot and feed it into a black scanner/ballot box. There is no paper trail? Well, there is the paper ballot.... This doesn't qualify how?
I am not sure what is going on here, but it is strange. It could be related to limits bugs (as in the 32k backwards counting bug in one of the articles). Overrun bugs are not uncommon in software, so the fact that three different manufacturers have similar bugs would not surprise me at all....
Oh no! A buffer overrun election software! Perhaps this would justify a manual recount in Florida just for the record
Re:False Alarm (Score:3, Informative)
And since Diebold CEO said he'd deliver votes to Bush- well, that's all the doubt you need about the RECORDED votes- provisional ballots be damned.
Re:Before you ask, the 4000 votes don't change Ohi (Score:3, Informative)
If the situation were reversed you can be certain that the "republicans" would be crawling up the orrifice of anyone who ever got near to anyone who ever touched one of those voting machines and contesting every single vote in a last ditch effort to get their man in power.
I hate Bush. I really, really hate what he has done to America and what he is doing to the world.
However, given the way the Dems gave up this fight, one has to question whether they'd have the bottle for the battles they'd be facing on a national and international level. I'm doubting they would.
Re:Random noise? (Score:2, Informative)
In elections like yours you have millions of votes and 24 hours or less to count them in a distributed manner. Physical ballots get squashed, torn, burnt or eaten. Voters are stupid and they vote for wrong candidates and then want to vote again but leave both ballots behind. Digital ballots get swallowed into /dev/null or multiplied (by a signed constant) by random bugs. Don't tell me you really, really believe that every vote is for real?
Sure, you could spend years really refining the final election results, but it's really not worth it. Most of the fraud or mistakes will soon be statistically insignificant.
Re:False Alarm (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that's not exactly true.
It depends on the state.
Some states threaten the electors with penalties if they don't vote along with the popular vote of the state. (Whether or not any of them are actually punished is another story.)
Other states allow the electors to vote for whoever they want.
Re:Just guessing.... (Score:5, Informative)
False False Alarm (Score:5, Informative)
Don't confuse replicable (will produce the same outcome every time given the same inputs) and verifiable. To be verifiable you need something to verify against. The current breed of voting machines are, by definition, not verifiable. As has been repeated here ad nauseum, it is not even possible for the individual voter to verify that the choice the machine logged is the choice they made. In fact, there is ample proof (not speculation) that the voter's choice is not always accurately represented in eVoting machines.
If these machines offered a signficant advantage (cost, speed, reliability etc) over pencil & paper, I might be tempted to say that there is some justification for the risk but these machines are incredibly expensive, slow and unreliable compared to pencil & paper or scanner-assisted voting.
Re:All count mistakes benefit Bush? None for Kerry (Score:3, Informative)
Florida vote distribution (Score:5, Informative)
The remainder has been pretty well covered by other
In the very article referenced [washingtondispatch.com] by commandantTaco [cmdrtaco.net] one reads (if on is able) "...Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy..."
I guess the article from Aa href="http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004
Reading the Broward County article [palmbeachpost.com] we learn, "Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one."
The bit [ansiblegroup.org] from NM doesn't reflect much weirdness. Obviously all those folks that were too ignorant to check their paper MUST have been Bush supporters.
LaPorte is not in Michigan (Score:2, Informative)
LaPorte is (IIRC) the county seat of LaPorte County.
Thus, even if all those votes went for Kerry, Indiana would not, switch its 11 electoral votes to Kerry.
Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, in fact they do [diebold.com] manufacture optical "scantron-style" scanners, though the likely vector for tampering is the central "PC" computers, running Windows and Diebold's GEMS software which count the e-votes from the various Diebold optical and touch-screen machines.
Re:Simple question (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. CNN says Bush had 52% of Florida vs Kerry's 47% (3,911,825 vs 3,534,609, a difference of 377,216 votes). The "strange anomoly" the article points to shows e-touch precints voting favoring Kerry more than expected (expected is total vote * %party) by 4,422 votes (out of 3,863,840 total). And the op-scan precints favored Bush more than expected by 599,721 votes (out of 3,419,852 total).
If the op-scan votes had favored Bush over expectations as much as the e-touch had favored Kerry over expectations, Kerry would have won Florida, and he would have won the national election.
I didn't run the numbers on any of the other anomalies.
Competing? (Score:5, Informative)
There is plenty of evidence for potential conflict of interest [serendipity.li] in voting machine companies....
Re:Just guessing.... (Score:3, Informative)
Sometime's it's not the person's fault, it's the machine's.
We had pretty much the same situation as you described where I am (Newport, RI); everyone was mailed a little booklet showing the ballot format long in advance of election day. However, while waiting in line to vote I personally witnessed two instances where a paper ballot was filled out and fed into the optical scanner, rejected by the scanner, and was looked over by two election officials who both said "I can't find anything wrong with this ballot." The voters were then sent back in line to get another ballot and try again. No idea what caused it, but I'm not convinced that optical machines are perfect.
Re:It wouldn't affect the outcome of the election (Score:2, Informative)
Re:False Alarm (Score:5, Informative)
Electronic voting, while a neat idea to speed up the vote counting process, seems to have run into a number of glitches [infoworld.com] (over 1100 nationwide) this November 2nd. In addition to seemingly random problems in Florida [1 [palmbeachpost.com], 2 [bradenton.com]], Ohio [1 [dispatch.com]], and North Carolina [1 [cjad.com]], there are allegations [bluelemur.com] of systematic fraud [commondreams.org] based on statistical comparison of exit polls to final results [stolenelection2004.com] in precincts with audit trails and those without. It is also interesting that in Florida, the voting patterns do not match the voter registration patterns as they do nationwide [rubberbug.com]. This has attracted the attention of numerous civil rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation that has filed at least two lawsuits [eff.org] since election day, and BlackboxVoting.org that has filed a Freedom of Information Act [blackboxvoting.org] request to obtain computer logs and documents from 3000 counties and districts across the US. Equally disturbing is the fact that CNN has (since Nov 2) changed its exit polling results [democratic...ground.com] to reflect the actual results. This has attracted the attention of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida who have jointly requested that the GAO immediately investigate the efficacy of e-voting machines [wired.com].
In case you are thinking that this is just sour grapes from Democrats who lost the election, think again. BlackboxVoting.org [blackboxvoting.org] has been investigating e-voting fraud for years. Likewise, the CEO of Diebold, one of the e-voting machine manufacturers has been quoted [cbsnews.com] as saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." And if that's not conflict of interest enough for you, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (now resigned) is an owner [scoop.co.nz] of the largest e-voting machine company ES&S.
Other numerous problems have been found with the machines from nearly every company in the past [1 [wired.com], 2 [washingtonpost.com], 3 [ejfi.org]]. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been investigating such machines on his own and has found a number of security issues [avirubin.com]. Swarthmore students stood up to Diebold [scoop.co.nz] in November of 2003 after discovering
Sites that monitor election oddities (Score:2, Informative)
Re:False Alarm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:False Alarm (Score:3, Informative)
And those measures were put on the ballot in those states thanks to the mayor of San Francisco and the Mass. Supreme Court making declarations on same-sex marriages last spring. Had those things not happened, these measures (while perhaps still on the ballot) would not have drawn out those voters.
There's no need to have a devious plan when your oppenents do poorly thought out things - and that cuts both ways.
Re:Here, I'll explain (Score:3, Informative)
OK, let me digest this. The checklist of requirements needed for the Venezuelan voting process in order to cast a vote via computer took:
- Thumprints of those voters that had thumbs
- international monitors (heavy)
- open source code that was reviewed by thousands of programmers months before (I guess this was the code running on the machines right?)
- available on the web for scrutany
Comapare this to my precenct where theyCan anyone tell me one thing that is better about the computer system?
We are collecting nominal data here. There is no billions of floating point operations per seconds here. Just a count. The manpower to calculate these data is not taxing. It cannot take long. Casinos count more than two types of cash money all day long and have no issues, and I doubt that they use computers either.
I mean I work with computers for a living, but I don't see all problems as in search of some sort of computer to solve them. Especially when the task at hand is this simple.
Now is the time... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm just pointing that out, thats all. It's in your constitution.
I'll get ready for that visit from the police now.
Steve.
Re:Saw this earlier (Score:5, Informative)
YES, Look here for a detailed analysis (Score:5, Informative)
vvnm.org/resources/florida2004/florida_vote_patter ns.htm
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Ok then only democrats can fill the job (Score:5, Informative)
If you did not serve I presume then that you can't either serve in political office because you are not a citizen. Then almost only democrats can fill the job.
Democrats:
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91. v * Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal. v * Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311. v * Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters. v * Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg. v
Republicans -- and these are the guys sending people to war:
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon! Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve. v * Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: d
LaPorte (Score:2, Informative)
The News Dispatch is a Michigan City newspaper. Michigan City is in Indiana, 7 miles from the Michigan border.
Lots of people get that wrong.
Re:Here, I'll explain (Score:3, Informative)
The fingerprints were just collected. The goverment wouldn't waste an opportunity to get as most fingerprints as they could. The machines were called "fingerprint hunters" for this
The paper trails were fraudulent. Watch my journal for some info. The percentage was a FIXED number in most places in the tallys. And sure, since Carter counted the final tallies, they matched
There were just 2 options to choose. 1 - NO, 2.- YES. Some people's ballots were printing 1.- YES and 2.- NO
The machine's code was not audited, and the code is closed source. Even Olivetti (the ones that made the machines) didn't want to do anything with the election
The machines uploaded data at all times, not just after the election was donde and the ballots were counted
In some states, there were more votes than people elegible to vote
The goverment chose a few random ballot boxes to be audited. Yes, the goverment
And much more. As much as we would like to be an example for the world, especially for the US, we aren't.
Re:What is this? (Score:3, Informative)
You want stories of voter fraud and other shinanigans from the ultra-pure democrats? Here they are
http://www.10tv.com/Global/story.asp?s=2458796
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/102004_ns_east
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/200
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/1
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelea
http://washingtontimes.com/national/2004102
I could go on if you like.
Re:Liars (Score:4, Informative)
I come from a poor family, and I can tell you firsthand how absolutely wrong that is. My father supported a family of five on an income well below half the poverty level, and we paid approximately ten percent of that income in property taxes. Through hard work and sacrifice, we managed to maintain a decent standard of living, but the taxes were still crippling, especially since we were not allowed to sell or develop our property because of targeted zoning changes. Bush's income tax cuts can't help everyone.
Re:Liars (Score:3, Informative)
Nearly half the ballots uncounted (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Liars (Score:2, Informative)
Answers:
1) Funding vastly increased homeland security costs.
2) Funding military action in Iraq and Afganistan.
3) Funding rebuilding of Iraq and Afganistan.
4) Paying more interest on record-high debt.
5) Standard pork.
Look at the budgets closer. They have cut social program spending.
-a
Re:Liars (Score:5, Informative)
Of course not. The idea that giving rich people more money would help our economy is ludicrous and always has been.
Rich people are rich because they make more money than they spend. That's it. Poor people spend all their money. That's why they are poor.
Giving rich people more money is just going to make them richer.
Re:Liars (Score:1, Informative)
Ok I will.
Does trickle down econmics work?
Oh wait, I AM an economist.
Hate to tell all you anti-Reagan (see I can actually spell his name) Liberals but you can thank Reaganomics for your tech stock options of the 90's (Clinton just sucessfully did what was right and stayed the hell out of the way). Huge Government spending of the 80's focused on military technology R & D and when those technologies hit the private industry you got high paying tech sector jobs with stock options thanks to Reagan.
-CH
Re:ENOUGH ALREADY (Score:3, Informative)
Be careful in this. Ohio already *has* a law requiring a paper trail. However, they have interpreted this to mean only that a printout needs to be generated at the *end* of the night. Further, if the paper trail is not verified by the voter, then it is meaningless. The fraudster could simply have the machine print out different results from those entered by the voter.
In support of your other point: flawed ballots in Florida cost Dole votes in '96 but did not affect the election. In 2000, the same problem did cost Gore the election. In 2004, we already have an error that was clearly in Bush's favor (to the tune of 3893 votes) in Ohio. No, it did not affect the final result; however, in a *future* election, that error could be the difference between victory and defeat. In fact, the margin's in New Mexico and Florida in 2000 were smaller than this error.
At least that error was correctable. In North Carolina, roughly 4000 votes were lost. Not enough to change the Presidential race (and more likely to hurt than help Bush, seeing as how NC went to him overall), but a similar sized error could affect future elections.
Rush Limbaugh full of pus..... (Score:2, Informative)
No Child Left Behind (the draft, that is...) (Score:1, Informative)
The No Child Left Behind Act, for the first time in USA history - requires all schools to submit all the names, addresses and telephone numbers to the US Military upon request.
Failure to comply results in loss of funding, period.
Re:Liars (Score:5, Informative)
No-one ever said there was a connection between the two despite what Michael Moore would have you believe.
As for 9/11 being the cause of the Iraq war, I won't deny that.
WTF? There's no connection but I'm right anyway? I don't care who claimed what if what I say is the truth. Besides, This [whitehouse.gov] is an example of the kind of crap that was coming out of the administration during the run-up to the war. You're right that nobody ever made an explicit connection, but they sure implied it as often as possible. And it worked, too, with almost half the country believing that Saddam Hussein was in some way responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
This article [csmonitor.com] sums it up nicely.
Unfortunately we didn't know the intel was bad until after
You should have. After all, Condi Rice dropped the ball on the Bin laden memo. Seems like a clear indication that something was rotten in Denmark.
Saddam was sending conflicting signals.
The only conflicting signals I was hearing were between Hans Blix and the Administration. I've also never understood the whole WMD rationale. Even if Saddam had what intel said he had, shouldn't Pyonyang be a smoking crater now too? I mean, if you're going to infringe other countries' version of the 2nd amendment, why not start with the big boys and work your way down?
He had violated the terms of the cease-fire of the first Gulf War and numerous U.N. resolutions.
Jesus, not that old chestnut again. Israel's broken more resolutions than everyone else combined and they haven't had so much as a slap on the wrist.
See, shit like this, not being consistent, is what makes this President the world's laughingstock. I find it highly ironic that he's seen as a "steady" leader by his electorate.
I've never read a Tom Clancy novel, though I do admit I enjoyed the Clancy movies with Harrison Ford.
Lucky you. His early stuff was good, but then he disappeared up his own arse. Oh and Harrison Ford is not Jack Ryan. Damn you Alec Baldwin for being so greedy!
Where was I? Oh yes...
But what is so sick about what I said?
Anybody who espouses an honest-to-god "better them than me" attitude will always get my contempt. Like I said, we don't live in caves, we've evolved. Maybe your ideas should too.
It's called hitting them at home while they're on the other side of the world rather than waiting for them to come here. Completely logical and strategically sound.
Those that call things like Iraq "pre-emptive war" are not being entirely honest. It's a proactive response to terrorism. We don't wait for them to attack us, we take the fight to them. And based on the amount of insurgents/terrorists in Iraq it looks like we hit the bullseye.
Thanks, this actually mad me laugh out loud. You do realize that the terrorists are there because we're there, right? If Bush had really wanted to hit the Bullseye, he would have hit Saudi and finsihed the job in Afghanistan before moving on to Iraq. Please tell me you don't honestly believe what you just wrote, you sound like a smart guy.
I'd be interested in what you were in the minority on and were later proved right on?
I dunno...I correctly predicted, a year ago, that Bush would win re-election and by a healthy-but-short-of-a-landslide margin.
Actually, I have to admit being wrong on one thing. I am highly surprised that no WMD's were found in Iraq, if for no other reason that they had been planted there by the US. Gotta say I didn't see that one coming.
Re:I agree with you (Score:3, Informative)
The people who founded this country declared that freedom was worth their "lives, fortunes, and most sacred honor". Voting is more mission-critical than a life-safety application.
The threat model is different for voting than for any of the others you've mentioned. People have manipulated bank information systems to steal tens of millions of dollars. That kind of payoff is nothing compared to stealing a US presidential election.
>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.
That's not too far from the reality of a GEMS system.
>monitored by people who have been charged with monitoring our elections forever
They are dedicated and patriotic, but do you think they can audit a closed-source voting system effectively?
Re:No kidding (Score:2, Informative)
This time, we are really in trouble though: The banks that lend us all that money are saying they aren't going to let us get over 8 trillion dollars in the hole. And right now we are at 7.4 trillion. If we meet that threshold, the whole house of cards comes down, and our economy does what happened to the Russians in the 80's. Our time at the top will be done.
Given the anger that everyone in the world has for us right now, I must say I am a little worried.
Re:Liars (Score:2, Informative)
And what do you know about Bush's budget perposal? Did you read it? Did you know he spent so much money he didn't have enough to fund his own homeland security, and millitary efforts. (ON THE PERPOSAL HER WROTE!!!!!!!!) Even after letting all the money out of public schools, to fund private schools, and slashing social programs. Lame! That tax cut to the ultra-rich sure helped out too.
Funny how in the last four years my taxes went up, and I lost my health coverage, but I'm sure 40,000,000 americans can feel me on that.
All I have to say is that you republicans voted wrecklessly.
Re:Simply amazing.... (Score:3, Informative)
so fix the laws. If Finland can get it right, why can't separate states in USA get it right?
Irrelevant. you may have more voters, but you would also have more people counting the votes and such.
Local elections, presidental elections, EU elections and parliamentary elections are all separate here.
In Finland they are hand-tabulated, and the final results are available about 3-4 hours after the polling-sites close. I don't think that's unreasonable time.
I don't have any figures on how often Finns move. But we do have 5% Swedish-speaking minority and we have other minorities as well (Russian-speaking for example) and we don't have any problems.
I don't "register". When I turn 18 I automatically receive the right to vote. I don't have to "register" or anything of the sort, I'm automatically counted as a voter. Of course, I can choose not to vote, or I can place a "protest-vote" if I want to. The officials have my address and they then send me the letter. If I move, I let them know what my new address is (required by law), and they send the voting-letters there in the future. I haven't heard of cases where someone does not receive their letter.