2004 Election Weirdness Continues

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.

Big fucking suprise

[Dotp]

I don't trust this government.

What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[daveschroeder]

Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors - ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia - have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected?

Do you think Kerry's $300M campaign, and the hundreds of experts who worked it for the better part of two years, just said "Oh, well! Guess we lost, even though there's proof of widespread fraud! Let's just throw in the towel and not say anything about it!" Wake up.

These are EXACTLY the kinds of problems, i.e., errors and failures in equipment (and setup) that we aim to prevent. But it is not possible for a central entity to control the vote.

We do need verified voting, but I'm sorry to say that there was no widespread fraud in all e-voting states. It's just not possible. There are thousands of people involved, thousands of pieces of equipment, many, many, many election and other government officials at all levels in extremely disparate jurisdictions with different ways of doing things, with no way for any central entity to reach these machines after the fact. (And no, they don't come "preloaded" with votes for Republican candidates; the logistics of the way they're set up and the diversity of the the configurations also makes that impossible.)

Bush won. Again. Get over it.

H.R.2239 [loc.gov] and S.1980 [loc.gov], discussed further here [verifiedvoting.org] [verifiedvoting.org], will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.

Please, simply support this legislation.

Additionally, the electronic voting manufacturers, such as Diebold, already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products .[1] Don't believe people who make it seem like companies like Diebold are resisting. They aren't. They'll build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.

The roadblock, as it turns out, is often local election boards. First, the new paper verification systems NEED to go through the government certification process - remember, it's the e-voting watchdogs who are chastising non-certified patches/updates being put into place; the paper audit systems need to go through the same certification process. Further, many municipalities can't understand why they should be forcing paper audit trails; after all, they think, they are just getting away from paper ballots - why should they be arguing for paper ballots (and all the headaches that go along with them, ON TOP of the headaches they already have from learning to deal with e-voting), so why should they go back to them?

Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state. Experts dealing with e-voting don't even have this on their radar. [cnn.com] Their concern is more errors and failures. E.g., most of Ohio is still punchcard as it is (the majority of the 35 counties moving to e-voting pushed off the transition until AFTER the election because of problems), and someone like Diebold doesn't even have access to this equipment after the fact. Yes, an unscrupulous election official or enterprising hacker might be able to breach individual machines and potentially even a county - it's possible. But the likelihood of something like that happening on any significant scale, ESPECIALLY without being caught (the articles we're talking about here actually prove that the audit processes, be they what they are, do work) is very, very low.

That said, we absolutely sho

Just guessing....

[bje2]

...but i'm thinking that statistically there were probably annomalies in favor of both candidates...we're just only hearing about the one's that helped bush and hurt kerry because they make for the most sensationalistic story...

Who will be the first

[Zeromous]

to put me down for pointing out the glaringly obvious. Democracy is easily stolen, but I was ridiculed for mentioning that last wednesday. Dont you realize this isnt about Bush? I dont care who won! Its about E-voting removing your right to affect change in your country by making a democratic choice.

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

[VultureMN]

It's not about trying to get Kerry into office. It's about the fact that the voting system is flawed.

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.

you know the voting system is flawed when...

[megarich]

You go to vote and your not even id. "Name, adress....ok go ahead."

Something new?

[jstave]

Does anyone else get the impression that this kind of crap has been going on since day one? At least now we're paying more attention and noticing it -- that's a good thing.

Re:No kidding!!!

[bje2]

something tells me that either party would "not hesitate to cheat in order to win"...

I hope we all continue to investigate this.

[jeoin]

This issue is a central issue to insure that democracy is treated a valid type of government. Everyone must feel that the effort they put forth to vote is respected and heard. The only way we can lead the world on this is to set a good example and to purse with vigilence all reports of vote counting error.

Democrats

[Archangel Michael]

It is funny how the county clerks in all the problem counties are democratic hacks. If there is a problem it is with the CLERKS in those counties and with the idiot voters in those counties.

The problem with issues such as these, especially with the Diebold machines is such that the person who CHOSE them should be sacked (IE the Democratic County Clerks).

I am sorry, but I don't feel sorry for anyone. NO, I didn't vote for BUSH either. Both are losers.

Next time, vote LIBERTARIAN (or some other third party) and have your votes count less.

Black Box Voting

[cardmagic]

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.

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

[AnotherBlackHat]

Your guy lost. Your reported anomilies aren't going to change that. Get over it.

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?

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

[cyberwitz]

my guy did lose, i don't agree with your "get over it" comment. but, your opinion doesn't make you a troll - that's just bad modding.

Sufficient condition for election fairness

[mi]

Your side wins.

ENOUGH ALREADY

[Oz0ne]

Voting irregularities happen all the time. When dealing with so many from so many places.. it's hard to do the job right. New systems, old systems, operator error, etc... these all go into effect. What purpose is posting an article like this with so little information about WHERE the votes were cast, or which votes were suppressed? It means NOTHING! Suppose all votes suppressed were for kerry, and all "extra" votes were for bush? Ok then you'd have an article! As it is you've got nothing more than sensationalist CRAP to stir up impressionable people that don't have the time to do the research on their own. Posting such drivel is highly irresponsible.

Did anyone here the call for unity by John Kerry? How about the one from Bush?

Kerry was a big man conceding as early as he did, he didn't have to, but he chose to make a difference in the best way he could... trying to help unify the nation after such a bitter election.

Apparently no one listened.

Stop B****ing and Make a Difference [livejournal.com]

Re:Random noise?

[arose]

It's the election not some radio receiving test, there should be no anomalies.

Re:Liars

[F34nor]

When you're dealing with a religous son of a bitch, get it in writing. His word ain't worth shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

-W. S. Burroughs.

Fear of change? Or real?

[mveloso]

One problem with these types of events is that nobody can say whether something happened or not. All you can say is that "the numbers don't fit a mental model of normalcy." The problem is that model may be wrong, or that something unusual happened.

If something unusual happened, well, statistically you can try and figure out how unusual the event was, but could you actually figure out if it was a "normal but unusual" event or a "fraud-related unusual" event?

Just because an event is extremely unlikely doesn't mean that it can't happen. People win the lottery every day, even though those events are highly unusual.

Can someone with some knowledge of statistics chime in?

BTW, palm beach found and corrected the 88k discrepancy.

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

[gcaseye6677]

I fully agree that the voting system should be as fair and accurate as possible, and is currently in need of improvement, but people do need to put things in perspective. Voting has always been a somewhat inaccurate process. I'd say there were more problems years ago when technology wasn't as advanced. But it only becomes a big issue when the election will be close. Nobody disputed Clinton's reelection victory over Dole because everyone knew Clinton would win; he was way ahead in the polls. With the 2000 fiasco in recent memory, a lot of focus was put on the 2004 election being as accurate as possible. Inevitably, there were some mistakes, as there always will be, but I'd say that compared to previous elections, this one was surprisingly accurate. The people who are complaining the loudest about problems seem to be primarily the ones who are simply not satisfied with the outcome.

All count mistakes benefit Bush? None for Kerry?

[scupper]

Notice there are NO reports in the media of ballot count mistakes, or diebold glitches which gave Kerry votes. Hmmm Of all the precincts in the US, not one can be found to have one count mistake in Kerry's favor to report on.

Re:Simple question

[calibanDNS]

One thing to bear in mind is that more than just the presidential election was on the ballot. Lots of state and local elections may have been affected by these anamolies and may have had their outcomes changed.

Re:False Alarm

[mar1boro]

You are right. The outcome of the election will never be changed. It will never be allowed to. We can't allow this to continue though. The electoral process in this country should be as close to flawless as possible.

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.

Re:False Alarm

[smclean]

But ain't those October Surprises like Bin Laden, same-sex marriage sort of swung the votes? Although the percentage changes in E-Touch Voting and Op-Scan are too irregular.

I don't think so. The vast majority of polls taken showed Bush ahead by a medium-to-slim margin through practically the entire race. I don't think many people's votes swing entirely on same-sex marraige or anything Bin Laden says, but that could just be wishful thinking.

The differences are not enough to change the outcome. If they were even remotely close, there'd be an army of 100,000 lawyers from both parties raising hell and generally making both parties appear far more unappealing than they already are.

Apparently, really hard.

[pclminion]

int douche = 0; int turdSandwich = 0; if(voteFor = 'BUSH') douche++; else turnSandwich++;

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?

I agree with you

[daveschroeder]

...but the title of the main story in the submission is:

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.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[Fnkmaster]

Bush won. Again. Get over it.

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.

Re:But would it have mattered?

[frankm_slashdot]

actually, 300,000 votes in a single state could have swayed the election.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[jaeson]

You always talking the same shit Dave. The last article on blackboxvoting I saw you posted 10 comments all spouting the same crap. You seem to be very fired up about this topic, perhaps because you either voted for Bush or perhaps you are a closet Republican.

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?

[Smidge204]

Actually, I don't think anyone (at least in the story) is crying foul that it was done on purpose. The point is the machines are showing signs that they screwed up.

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=

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

[Valar]

Thank you. This is exactly what I think. We need to send out the message that election fraud _can not b e tolerated_. Period. The problem of course is that if you cheat, you win. And if you win, you get to make the agenda and so the agenda doesn't say a damn thing about stopping cheaters.

Bush won, but not again.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the tone you take in this comment it sounds like you're a real expert on all of this. Unfortunately, you missed a very important fact. Bush did *not* win the election in 2000. He got a minority of the votes. Florida's top election official, Katherine Harris, illegally stopped the recount in her state (which was already awash with illegal voter purging, something to which she was later forced to admit in court vs the NAACP) and declared Bush the winner of Florida. Subsequently, Bush was *appointed* President of the United States by an unprecedented ruling of the Supreme Court, one which included the sentiment "this ruling applies only to this specific election, and will never be used as a precedent for future elections." Now that's weirdness.

It was only four years ago; I'm surprised how easily people like you forget.

Re:Who will be the first

[mccalli]

Dont you realize this isnt about Bush? I dont care who won! Its about E-voting removing your right to affect change in your country by making a democratic choice.

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

Re:Liars

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely.

I'm almost in a similar position as you are in, I've an undergrad in EE and a double masters, all from top engineering schools. I've enrolled for my PhD in Physics at one of the top 5 Universities, and I'm 23 years old - I'm a Bush supporter.

It was simply logical, and rational. I'm not even a Christian to begin with, nor am I even a caucasian. The image of all the Republicans being a Bible thumping white christian conservative is blatantly false.

Between Bush and Kerry, there is no way in hell that Kerry would have won, no matter what. I supported Bush through and through, and will continue to. I do not agree with all his policies, and all his decisions. However, I do support a vast majority of him, and like the parent poster said, I know that he has my interests in mind.

put your tin foil hats away...

[AxemRed]

I still can't believe how many people think that the election was rigged. There's a more reasonable explanation... We gave contracts to idiot companies whose software was crap. From what I've heard about the programming on some of these voting machines, we would have been better off using Cyrix 6x86-based PCs running Windows ME and using AOL to email the votes to their destination.

Re:Just guessing....

[Dravik]

Although this election was close, it was not close enough for any of there voting issues to be significant. 500 votes is within the margin of error in Florida. 150,000 votes in not in Ohio. Yes there were problems. There will always be problems when you are dealing with a country the size of the US. If you take every voting issue that may have been in Bushs favor and ignore all that were in Kerrys favor you still will be short tens of thousands of votes in every state that would need to change for Kerry to win.

Is Slashdot becoming a fringe site?

[Spy Handler]

There are thousands of fringe lunatics on the internet proclaiming everything from how flouride in the water is mind controlling the public to how the Holocaust was a fabrication by Jews that never happened.

In the past these thousands were not much noticed in a country with 250 million people... maybe once in a while you'd see a weirdo on a street corner passing out flyers while normal people tried to avoid him, and that was about it. But now the internet has given these kooks a platform from which to be more visible.

I come to Slashdot for cutting edge technology news and some comedy now and then. I'd hate to see it become a platform for fringe lunatics and conpiracy theorists.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[greg_barton]

Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors - ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia - have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected?

So, if they were undetected, how could we have a story on /. about them?

And 2/3rds of the stories linked were about a nonpartisan type of failure, which wouldn't necessarily give advantage to either candidate.

With this many fallicies in the first sentence of your post, why should I read the rest?

Besides, suggesting that the election machine companies are acting together is not farfetched. Their ownership [alternet.org] is rather tight with each other.

Re:Something new?

[Wakkow]

If by "we" you mean slashdot readers, then yes, it's been going on since day one and we HAVE noticed it from the beginning. It's only now the problems that were expected to happen actually have.

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Re:Just guessing....

[pclminion]

But if they are indeed this widespread, I would have to say the election couldnt have reflected accurately what the people voted.

The people's vote itself doesn't accurately reflect what they want. People don't KNOW what they want. Hold the election on November 3 instead of November 2, and you might get a different outcome.

Even with no tampering/screwups in the vote counting, I still doubt the meaningfulness of the outcome. People vote on a whim.

I didn't vote for Bush...

[daveschroeder]

...and I'm not a closet anything, but thanks for your genuine concern.

It's the responsibility of the government and municipalities to demand hardware that provides what they need (i.e., a paper audit trail). No e-voting vendor is going to refuse to build something that municipalities will buy.

But they haven't gone down that road because the whole purpose of e-voting was to eliminate paper ballots, and all the headaches (spoilage, recounts, disenfranchisement via old/malfunctioning mechanical equipment, etc.) that go along with them.

How is it that we can build reliable, accountable systems to handle power, money, and everything else in our society, but somehow it's fundamentally impossible to expect that it could be done with voting. As I've said, I AGREE that we should have a paper trail: but it was NOT part of the specs for designs presented to e-voting vendors. All three of the e-voting vendors already have the capability to add individual receipt printing capability. The onus is TOTALLY on the municipalities to get it, and there should be blanket federal legislation requiring it.

Re:By Weirdness, Taco means

[Woody77]

No, the hole is there, it's just that people choose not to see it. They get hurricanes, that in and of itself is par for the course in Florida. However, the frequency has been going up, possibly climatic change, and Bush isn't doing anything to stop that. What he IS doing is giving them federal aid.

Playing parent again. Which is the one thing he's done consistently well with his first term in office.

He's there to make it so the people don't need to worry or think, because he's strong and he'll take care of them. Or so they think, and he'd like them to think...

I think it's a great way to get votes from dumb voters who don't know how to take care of themselves.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[EchoMirage]

Wow, I wish I could assign all five of my mod points to your post here. Thanks for compiling a level-headed and wise posting for people to read. You're entirely right that the process is too complicated for a conspiracy theory of some sort to hand one candidate or the other the vote. As you also rightly point out, the simple fact that voting discrepancies are being discovered is proof that the auditing trail works.

I doubt this will put some people's minds at rest, finally, and conspiracy theories will continue to be traded about. What would be better would be for the people who backed Kerry (such as myself) to take a long and discerning look at why Bush was able to win the election, rather than lobbing venomous allegations across the political aisle. I think that the results of the election provide more than enough material for the Democrats and non-Republicans to scrutinize during the next four years. Doing so will certainly be far more advantageous in the long run than worrying ad nauseum about shadow conspiracies.

I will grant, however, that the idea of shadow conspiracies swaying the vote is a much more dramatic and interesting explanation than to say that normal political and social causes were responsible.

A routine postmortem audit should clarify things

[davidwr]

Some jurisdictions routinely recount a handful of random precincts and/or routinely recount a random sample of ballots from many precincts.

You can't do this on the no-paper-trail e-voting machines, but you can do it on the optical-scan and other paper systems.

If the recount is done on equipment that's NOT the same as the original counting equipment, and the whole process is watched by observers from both parties, it'll be darn hard ot pull off shennanigans like tampering with central-counting-machines.

By the way, in ANY national election, I'd expect a few statistical anomolies when you compare exit polls to actual results. I am intrigued by some of the patterns in the anomolies. I hope these get investigated further.

Re:Just guessing....

[Woody77]

The real question is if the anomolies are any more or any less than with paper ballots.

Are the new methods statistically any more or less accurate than the last election. That I haven't seen.

How many invalidated optical scan votes vs. hanging chad votes?

Although how you screw up an optical scan vote is beyond my comprehension. The ones we used in Santa Cruz county in Cali were as simple as could be, and you got a copy of the ballot in a voting guide nearly a month in advance, with which to familiarize yourself.

Here, I'll explain

[Angry Black Man]

Let me expand a bit on what I said before.


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)

Re:ENOUGH ALREADY

[MikeXpop]

So just because it happens every year means we should just sit down and go ho-hum?
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?

Re:How not to write voting software

[Tackhead]

> > Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
> > Rule #1: Do not use signed shorts to count the total number of votes.
>
> Rule #2: Do not used signed Ints (sorry man, short in C/C++ only goes up to 127, C# has short that goes to 32k).
> Rule #3: Always use 64 or more bit unsigned integers.

Nyet!

Rule #3: Vary word length (and consequently the sizeof(int)) depending on the size of the precinct, and whether or not you expect the number of voters for your candidate and/or the opposing candidate to be "almost" or "barely over" a power of two.

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Re:Saw this earlier

[Beatbyte]

I'd like to see the source of these numbers.

I also find it interesting there are now only 9 state in the union (according to this graph).

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Re:How not to write voting software

[aarku]

No kidding. Is there anything particularly difficult about writing voting software? It seems like it could be an undergrad CSci assignment. What are some of the major challenges?

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[jandrese]

Maybe Kerry (and any other person who might care) isn't making a big fuss because there isn't enough evidence to make a case yet. Seriously, I doubt anybody who had the ability to rig a national election would do it in a sloppy manner that was easy to detect (Dunno what happened in Ohio, that could be pure user error, although it's odd that the errors seem to favor Republicans in nearly every case). I suspect that if the vote was rigged that we will never get more than some statistical oddities out of it. Even when the same irregularities show up year after year, there isn't enough evidence to make a case out of it. Besides, it would take an act of Congress to get a real investigation going, and somehow I don't see that happening (not as long as these strange coincidences keep getting them elected).

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.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[ConceptJunkie]

not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.

No it doesn't, but I'll bet you a month's pay we'll be hearing exactly that on /. and elsewhere. The parent merely preemptively averted these arguments, and you know people will make them.

What's being alleged is... (ISO 9000 revisited)

[jd]

The damn system doesn't work! The computers are all hopelessly screwed up with buggy software, they can't even get the coding on a simple optical scanner right, and Diebold's CEO's breath stinks. Or something like that.

What it means is that quality control procedures were badly flawed, the products were insufficiently tested, and at least some voting machines use signed 16-bit integers for their counters.

Nobody is claiming conspiracy. But a great many people are claiming slipshod development by computerized voting systems and a complete lack of contingency planning on the part of electoral officials.

One thing I can tell you right now, without even seeing a single line of code, is that not a single provider of voting machines (mechanical or digital) made even the remotest effort to comply with ISO 9000 standards on documentation or quality review. If they had, there would have been a thorough paper trail for every component, every patch release, etc. The fact that patches weren't installed and nobody knew who knew what shows a paper trail for development and deployment (ie: ISO 9000 compliance) did not exist.

Re:you know the voting system is flawed when...

[Babbster]

Except that US citizens are NOT required to have photo ID. Requiring photo ID to vote would mean such a requirement.

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.

Re:There are stringent requirements for the system

[arkanes]

These "stringent requirements" aren't worth shit. The results of the testing are not public. The standards for the tests are not public. The leaked Diebold source code, which was audited by people without a grudge to bear (ie, before all this Diebold crap started making the news), and was shown to be chock full of the most ridiculous security flaws, was code that had run on machines used in elections and theoretically passed these reviews. A review isn't worth a damn if the people doing it have ultierior motives, or are just incompotent.

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.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the main question is whether or not these differences are enough to change the outcome. Even Kerry admitted those 150,000 provisional ballots wouldn't help.

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?

Re:By Weirdness, Taco means

[passion]

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

Re:Just guessing....

[MouseR]

As a Canadian, able to compare news broadcasts from US, Canada and Europe, I've become increasingly doubtful of the election process in the United States.

Quite frankly, anyone in the US who still think they have a democracy ought to seriously re-assess their knowledge base and information sources.

Everything, from the outside, looks incredibly staged, forfeited and just plain wrong.

I'm increasingly worried of what it means to be a US neighbor. News like this only add to the worries.

Elections are not won by the number of votes...

[Anita Coney]

Or by who wins the most electoral votes, it's simply who is better at cheating. Currently, the Republicans are better. But in history past, the Democrats were [adversity.net] quite good.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Just guessing....

[pete-classic]

I'm no statistician, but I don't see how you can measure "Are the new methods statistically any more or less accurate than the last election." without making up a number that is "correct" to compare to.

I mean, if we agreed on a correct number, we wouldn't be talking about it, would we?

-Peter

Say that to Bush

[Daetrin]

trying to help unify the nation after such a bitter election. Apparently no one listened.

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.

Re:I lie....

[MarkusQ]

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

Re:Liars

[meabolex]

Well, my 4 words (as to why the parent poster voted for Bush) are not quite as laconic: "Works For Defense Contractor" You typically vote with your wallet. Conscience? What's that? (:

Re:ENOUGH ALREADY

[jandrese]

I wonder how many of the people who are basically saying "Stop talking about this! It's over! You lost! There's nothing to see here!" would be saying the same thing if the results were reversed? People said the same thing in 2000 and as a result we never did get enough information to really determine if these arguments had any merit. I hope people don't stop short this year, I would like some closure on this myself.

Re:Can't be that

[ConceptJunkie]

Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is? /me raises hand.

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."

Re:I agree with you

[AnotherBlackHat]

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.

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?

Re:Actual Election Tampering in Milwaukee

[avgjoe62]

Yes, I heard about it. And no, I did not cheer for it. And whoever did it, I hope they are caught and appropriately punished.

The second paragraph of your comment, however, is almost as bad. Posted anonymously without any attribution, it is an example of the un-civil discourse plaguing the United States today. It puts those that disagree with you in a bad light and spreads a rumor about those responsible for the act that is yet to be confirmed. Your statement is a perfect example of saying just a bit too much.

Let's remember how to speak politely in public before the next election. Please.

Re:How not to write voting software

[pete-classic]

You missed the telling quote from the article:

Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman.

I don't expect a mayor to be a comp-sci expert, but this clearly translates to "Neither I, nor anyone on my staff, has any fucking idea how these things work."

Everybody knows how a pen and paper works, and can reasonably verify they are being used correctly. :-/

-Peter

My Vote Counts

[sosiosh]

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.

Re:Liars

[Anonymous Coward]

What, what, what?

What policies?

Trickle down economics NEVER WORKED. Ask an economist. Look at any measure of a civil society. All down hill under Regan, Bush, & Bush. Violent crime, illiteracy, property crime, major corporate scandal, & war.

Military industrial spending, only works for institutional shareholders and members of the board.

Faith based initiatives are antidisestablishmentraistic bullshit.

The Republicans are not the GOP. The Republicans have been becoming the dixiecrats since 1964 and now the transformation is complete.

The GOP right now is a radical anti-government party trying to undo the new deal and reconstruction by stealing tax dollars from the liberal coastal states to subsidize rural Christian lifestyle. Look on a map of what states get more in taxes then they paid, almost all "RED." So they vote for a tax cut and increased spending knowing it means more northern liberals are shelling out for them. The farm bill being a great example.

Why should we "get over" someone stealing an election? Without democracy we become just a bunch of assholes pissing on the rest of the world.

What is this?

[SengirV]

Has /. turning into democraticunderground? If you are going ot look into anything look into the vast number of dead voters in the Chicago area who voted 100% for Kerry. How about the bus loads of voters being bused from NYC to vote in Philly. What about the Dem judges who allowed people to vote multipe times in Ohio. If you don't know what ditrict local you were in, you could vote in any district as long as you said which district you were in. So all you had to do was take a littel trip around the state and vote in each district and have your multiple votes count.

So glad to see this sch even handed reporting here in /. Way ot turn off 52% of the voters in this past election.

Re:Here, I'll explain

[DelawareBoy]

>>> Why can venezuela do it and the US cant

Jimmy Carter himself said it best on Fresh Air. America has too much pride... After, we have to do it right, because, eh, we're America.

The process is more important than the result

[MarkusQ]

It doesn't matter if it changes the results or not. We need a fair and open examination of all of the issues, regardless of any sort of party nonsense. The way to insure trust in a process is to audit the hell out of it. Track down every error, even if it's only pennies, account for every discrepancy, and make the whole process completely open to public scrutiny.

We owe it to ourselves, and to each other; we owe it to the candidates and their supporters who may be being slandered and (if any of them are actually guilty) we owe it to any cheaters to shine some light on their accomplishments as well.

If we plan to export freedom and justice against entrenched politics and religious biases around the world, we'd better make them our priorities at home as well.

-- MarkusQ

Re:Just guessing....

[Snot Locker]

But if they are indeed this widespread, I would have to say the election couldnt have reflected accurately what the people voted

These stories throw out raw numbers that sound big, but you must look at the statistical significance of those numbers in context. Show me statistically significant disrcrepencies that are widespread, and I'll don the foil hat. Otherwise, we have to use our brains rather than our emotions to understand the imperfection of any election system and work on ways to improve it.

Possible explanation: wanted to vote in primaries?

[DunbarTheInept]

Is Florida a state that requires registration to vote in a party's primary, or one that automatically registers you for whichever party you vote for in the primary? If either of those is true, then one possible explanation could be that people registered Democrat so they could vote in the primary that mattered. (In an election where the incumbant has only had one term so far, and is thus eligible for a second, the party of that incumbant always has a pointless primary with a foregone conclusion - they'll run the incumbant.) Therefore voting in their primary is rather pointless. Thus I could easily imagine a lot of people on the fence choosing to claim to be Democrats because their primary is the one in which the outcome is actually in contention. A lot of them might do this even if they aren't certain yet that they will vote Democrat in the final election. A lot might be thinking, "I'm leaning toward voting for Bush, but as long as I can, I might as well have a say in who my second choice might be."

This is why I am opposed to the practice of allowing non-party members to vote in primaries. Parties are private clubs. If you want to have a say in who THEY spend THEIR money on promoting, then join the party and become a member. Otherwise you're interferring, and possibly in an advisarial manner. In the case of an election year with a president trying to renew his seat for a second term like this one, a lot of the incumbant's supporters can safely cross party lines and vote to spoil the opposition party's primary, to try to skew their results and get them to field a weaker candidate.

This is why, despite living in a state where anyone can vote in any primary (you don't even have to register), I wholeheartedly refuse to do so (I do turn in a ballot, since there are often refferenda on them as well as party primaries, but I leave the party primaries's choices blank and ONLY vote on the refferenda.)

Re:False Alarm

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a democrat, and I agree with you. There are too many people here yelling about hijacking and conspiracies because they are unable to accept their candidates loss.

With so much hatred and FUD being spewed here, I wonder how people are going to even last the next 4 more years. We already have people foaming at the mouth over the election outcome, and are trying to come up with ways to "prove" the election was "stolen."

I am willing to bet a lot of them are hypocrites, and while they wouldn't admit it, would support or ignore their candidates doing of the same stuff that they are claiming Bush did.

So, if it is FUD and lies from Microsoft/SCO/RIAA/Bush it is bad, but FUD and lies are ok if it is against Microsoft/SCO/RIAA/Bush.

Re:Big fucking suprise

[learn fast]

Relatively more open and more democratic governments are more trustworthy.

I trust the government more after the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. It's not a cure-all, but it was a huge step in the right direction.

I do not trust the government more if the same party has unmitigated control over every check and balance. I don't think that was such a good idea. I guess we'll see!

Local governments are probably more trustworthy than national governments.

Nationalistic national governments are probably the worst of all. A government that also controls the sources of information is also really bad (see Italy, Russia, currently where the leader also own ).

It's not a matter of black and white. There are things that can be changed that induce governments to be more trustworthy, and they really are affected by democratic processes. It's not a matter of whether governments are evil or not, there are very important differences in the shades in between.

states, not individuals

[brlewis]

The poster you're replying to noted a trend in states, not a universal quality of all individuals who voted for Bush. Yes, you have a job paid for by government spending. Big spender Bush does serve your interest. That doesn't explain the pattern among states.

Re:Saw this earlier

[bombadillo]

"And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South."

Florida really doesn't behave like the South. Pretty much everyone is a transplant from a northern state. It is no suprise for a Dixiecrat ( Democrat that is basically a republican ) to vote for a republican candidate.

For example. Georgia is full of Dixiecrats. Dixiecrats are generally against Taxation, are hipocritical Christians, White and Racist. They can also fall under the category of "Good Ole Boy". As you can see they fit in well with the plank of the modern Republican party which is only "Conservative" on social issues and Liberal on fiscal issues. The growth of Atlanta in the last few decades is now allowing the South to rise as an economic power. This has given rise to the Metro-Crat. This represents the evolutio... wait can't use that word in Georgia. On the 5th day God created Metro-Crats in the image of Dixiecrats. Metro-Crats are basically Yuppie Dixiecrats. They tend to prefer wine, wear expensive shoes, abuse viagra, dislike foriegners, and blame the black man for their problems.

However, there aren't too many DixieCrats in Florida. The east cost of Florida and Miami have a lot of people that originally hailed from NewYork. These types of Democrats don't vote republican.

Re:False Alarm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think many people's votes swing entirely on same-sex marraige...

You're missing the point. The purpose of raising the visibility of homosexual marriage wasn't to sway people to vote for President Bush. The idea was, by putting anti-homosexual marriage questions on different ballots, the Republicans could lure more conservative voters to the polls. And once they're at the polls voting for that measure, obviously, they'll probably also check the box next to President Bush's name.

It was a well-crafted, devious plan that worked. And I say that as someone who voted for President Bush.

Re:Denial?

[Coryoth]

I don't quite get it how anyone in their right mind would really expect that any voting system registers all the votes correctly.

Things like that just don't happen.

But that's absolutely no excuse not to try and eliminate errors, especially systemic errors, wherever possible. I mean, why not just have the electoral officials in each precinct take a guess as to how the precinct voted. Sure there's a certain statistical error in that, but errors happen right, so we should just accept that...

Jedidiah.

Re:Simple question

[antiMStroll]

Nope. If - hypothetical case - this turned out to be the result of vote rigging by businesses and/or local governments sympathetic to a particualr canditate it matters very much no matter who won. We're talking the core democratic right of every citizen here and I'd expect the winner to demand an accounting of why the discrepencies occured and work towards a resolution before the next election. I also think the odds of it happening are nil.

Re:Random noise?

[demachina]

4000 votes for Bush from a tiny county in Ohio that decided the election and where the margin is just over 100,000 is obviously significant.

The optical scanner anomalies in Florida are potentially hugely significant.

The anomalies in New Mexico could easily flip the state in to the Kerry column so they are statistically significant though they can't change the outcome of the election without Ohio or Florida.

The key point is if there is election rigging or incompetence its ALWAYS significant. If you don't report it, investigate it and punish it your opening the floodgates to everyone to do it in every election and your elections turn in to dodo.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Denial?

[October_30th]

But that's absolutely no excuse not to try and eliminate errors

You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.

My point in this thread was simply that even if vote counting is "counting", there is still an acceptable statistical error in the results. I quite don't understand why people got so upset about what I said.

Re:Saw this earlier

[MindStalker]

I think we meant, in a county by county basis, it would be nice to see if the big descrepancies that article mentioned existed. What I bet you will see are very small discrepancies in each county which lead to an overall larger desrepancy state wide.

Re:All count mistakes benefit Bush? None for Kerry

[jxyama]

could it be that it won't make much of a news story?

Re:Saw this earlier

[chancycat]

Odd. Those nine graphs do raise some serious questions. Exit polls should reflect actual votes, if implemented correctly. Still, there might be a reasonable explaniation: perhaps conservatives are simply 'conservative' when it comes to agreeing to participate in exit polls.

Also note thhat those nine graphs were not zero'd. Graphs need a zero in the bottom left corner for scale to be meaningful.

It's only a good thing

[yem]

.. if they do something about it.

Only Pixar Knows For Sure

[Zode]

What's amazing is that hours after the opening weekend of the movie "The Incredibles," Pixar knew exactly how much money they made and how many people bought tickets. Maybe we should use movie theaters as polling places and "sell" tickets to eligible voters.

Btw: this election has been Rated R for violence, foul language, and some sexual situations.

Re:Here, I'll explain

[DunbarTheInept]

Yes, absolutely. Why don't people understand that even if an anomoly wasn't large enough to change the outcome THIS time, that this isn't a good enough reason to ignore it? When votes are counted wrongly, the system needs fixing NOW - before the next time it gets used. You think we'd have learned from last year's Florida result, that a margin of error in the system of 0.02% is STILL TOO HIGH! This constant practice of throwing up our collective hands and saying, "Oh, well, the problems didn't matter this time, let's ignore it for four more years" is precisely what led up to the 2000 fiasco. None of the problems of that election were new. None of them were unknown. It just wasn't a narrow enough margin to have mattered.

The time to fix e-voting is BEFORE it fouls an election. If you wait until afterward, you won't have the proof that it happened. The election must not be hinged upon trusting a single entity's claim that it won't cheat when counting. That's a basic obvious fact every country except the US seems to understand. Why are we being so stupid?

Re:Just guessing....

[Queer Boy]

But if they are indeed this widespread, I would have to say the election couldnt have reflected accurately what the people voted.

You do know that we don't elect the president directly, right? That if one candidate gets 49.3% of the votes and one candidate get 49.4% of the votes, he gets all the electoral votes, and that the electoral college isn't bound to vote by the popular vote, anyway?

How, exactly, does this reflect accurately what the people voted? The electoral college needs to be abolished. The fear that candidates will only pander to more populated areas is already realised by candidates pandering almost solely to swing states.

This fiasco is just one more example that we need a direct election. 4,000 votes in a direct election is not as bad as what we have now where 4,000 votes could mean all or none of the electoral votes.

Re:Here, I'll explain

[Richthofen80]

A lot of people wonder how running an election can be so friggin' tough. Well, it is because there are two forces pulling in opposite directions. The first direction is one that requires that everyone who is a citizen older than 18 gets to vote. They can only vote once. They must vote as themselves and not vote for anyone else. They also cannot be dead. (I fear slightly of the electorate of zombies). Pulling in the opposite direction is a treasured concept of Americana called the 'secret ballot'. This is to protect people with potentially unfavorable ideas. Also, we love privacy. We don't like being forced to carry cards that prove we are someone. We don't like being forced in general. 'Mind your own business' is something I'd like to think is uniquely American.

The problem is that to prevent the first problem, we need to slightly violate the second. We could prove that someone is allowed to vote by keeping a photographic ID, required to be updated every year that they must present. It would have biometrics that would identify a person against a giant retinal scan database. We'd probably eliminate 99% of potential voter fraud. But then we'd pretty much have no guarantee that those records weren't matched against our voting. We'd have no guarantee that it wouldn't be abused, and that voters weren't intimidated.

We could ask no questions at the polls, as well. We just let you vote and drop it in a box. You could come into any polling place and they wouldn't know if you lived there. You could make a couple runs in a couple different locations. You could be under 18. We could bus in the invalid and have them vote according to a 'guide', who could divine their voting will by whatever standard he choses. Let's complicate things even further by saying that every state has different voting standards and rules.

Obviously, neither option is very pleasant to think about. Neither is the idea that some half-assed current system might disenfranchise a voter; or that another voter who votes for X has his vote cancelled by a fraudulent voter who votes for Y. Its something to think about, though, since I'm sure some people who should have gotten to vote, didn't. Also, I bet some who shouldn't have, voted.

Re:False Alarm

[JohnnyCannuk]

"Voting equipment today is just about as good as it has ever been in the country's history."

Sorry by MS windows based touch screens storing data in MS Access is just not as good as a pen and a piece of paper and 10 scrutineers counting by hand. A kid in highschool could hack that.

Electronic voting of this nature is quite new and if there is even a possibility that there could have been this kind of fraud, it is prudent to investigate whether it will eventually change the outcome of this particular election or not.

You wouldn't trust your personal data or credit card information to a company that stored it on an ordinary Windows computer using Access, why would you trust your votes to the same?

If the the process is so open, what has happened with Blackboxvoting.orgs FOIA request? As a matter of fact, what happened the blackboxvoting.org today?

I suspect any investigation will likely show that Bush really did win. That's beside the point. Do you really want there to be a possibility in the future of someone using the techniques mentioned in the articles to alter election results?

Think of this as an ethical hacker informing a big company of an enormous hole in their firewall (or other devastating security violation). Don't attack the hacker, fix the fucking hole.

Re:False Alarm

[demachina]

"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):"

Uh, Ohio didn't use electronic voting in most of the state, the one where the 4000 Bush votes happened being more an exception than a rule. So searching for electronic irregularities is for the most part stupid. Someone challenged paperless electronic voting in Ohio and won so most counties dropped it and used their old system, usually punch cards. A few pressed ahead with half assed paper trails that may or may not have conformed to the judges ruling and were hastily done.

You don't need electronic voting to rig elections. They've been rigged as long as people have been voting. Paperless electronic voting just makes it really easy to do in a big way and really hard to catch.

If anyone rigged Ohio they could have done it the old fashioned way. Send poor quality punch cards to Democratic districts so you get hanging chads, or somewhere along the way punch out a chad for Bush in some cards so if the voter votes for Kerry its thrown out. Punch card "spoilage" is a time proven method for rigging an election.

Just because there wasn't a big statistical swing in Ohio doesn't mean the election wasn't rigged. In fact if you are really good at rigging a state you won last time the perfect rigging is to make it come out the same as last time or actually give your opponent a few more votes. Then someone comes along and does what this guy did and says, "No swing, no rigging" and that is not what it means. Its possible Kerry swung a couple percent to his side, thanks to the fact Ohio's economy has cratered under Bush. If you rig the election and just erase that two percent swing you have done a perfect job of rigging.

Again the exit polls suggest there was a swing to Kerry in most of the swing states that disappeared in the actual results, while the exit polls were pretty accurate in most of the non swing states. All the exit polls were biased to Kerry which is distinctly odd. Either they should have been off in all states in Kerry's favor suggesting a model problem or they should have been randomly off in both Kerry and Bush's favor. Just being off in swing states and only in Kerry's favor is odd to put it mildly.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[a_nonamiss]

What if, and please forgive me, because I know this officially makes me a crazy nut, but what if the outcome of this election was already decided before November. What if Kerry and Bush already had a gentleman's agreement between the two of them that Bush was going to win.

What if Bush said "Sure, John, you can go out and spend a bunch of money making the people think they are in charge. Campaign your heart out. Hell, I'll even make myself look like an idiot in the first debate just to make this more fun! But when it's all said and done, I'm coming out on top. Sorry, it's already been decided. Thanks for playing!"

Now, I'm giving this example as Devil's Advocate. I don't walk around witha tin-foil hat on to keep "them" from reading my thoughts. I don't type all of my Slashdot posts on a computer at the public library so "they" can't figure out who I am. Sure, my nick is a_nonamiss, but that's more to protect myself from identity theft or someone who disagrees with me coming to my house to argue. Any member of the government would have no trouble tracking me down.

My point here is this: I can't say if this is how it went down or not, but is there any evidence that this ISN'T what happened. Say there WAS a global conspiracy to keep Bush in power, and Kerry was in on it. Are we protected from this happening? The answer is no. We need to be more dilligent in protecting ourselves. We need oversight as to how our votes are counted, and most importantly, we need to always be paranoid of losing our rights. People should demand that there be a paper trail. We need to have procedures in place so that the above example could never happen, because the only thing worse than living in a dictatorship is living in a dictatorship and having absolutely no idea that you do.

I would post more, but I have to get out of here. The librarian is looking at me funny. I think she's in on it. I have to leave before she cracks through this tin foil hat and starts reading my thoughts.

Integer Math for vote tally...

[librarygeek]

Is it just me, or does it look like they used integer math for their counter in the machines mentioned in:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news /epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html [palmbeachpost.com]

I'm willing to bet 32,000 isnt quite right, try 32,767... the max number for a 16 bit signed integer...

Add one and suddenly you roll over to -32766...

Supposedly it was fixed... fixed by what? using an ABS function to strip the sign from the number??

a proposal...

[bmajik]

the notion that our electronic systems are less accurate, more failure prone, and less trustworthy than 6 senior citizens sitting in a school basement is _hillarious_.

Aircraft are using computers to LAND WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION. I think we can design a system such that it is possible to reliably ADD NUMBERS.

There are tricky problems to voting, like making sure the warm body standing there is authorized to use this particular voting station, but that's not what the griping is about - here there are basic issues of physical security, data security, data auditing, and so on.

These are computer science problems, and they've been solved in practice and in theory.

If you want to see how to use computers to do math correctly with high confidence, look no further than the military avionics and flight control systems.

Namely, what we need is a specification for what a vote counting machine needs to do.

Then we need 2 separate vendors to build clean-room, different technology implementations of the spec.

Then at each polling location, one machine of each type counts every vote. (i.e. each vote is counted by 2 machines)

If the machines agree - bitchin.

If they disagree - now there's legitimate reason for closer scrutiny.

This has a few nice benefits:
- it makes a standard, nationwide voting form. No state can have a pathologically awful ballot
- it gives somebody at the federal government something important to do, since they're going to make new offices and blow money on stupid shit anyway
- people that know wtf they're doing can be involved in the spec review, so you dont have to rely on the machine builders to come up with the right spec, just a good implementation of a public spec

I don't think paperless voting is a good idea.
If you go to a totally paperless approach, it gets MUCH uglier, so i am going to advocate sticking with a paper ballot for now.

I think machine-reading of paper votes is a good idea, and that is what i am suggesting above re: multiple independant readers which must agree before the results are valid.

My personal thinking is that the paper vote needs some sort of bar code representing a guid on it so that a vote can be uniquely identified. This lets you resolve such issues as a vote showing up in one machine and not another.. a vote getting counted twice.. etc. You can also track which paper ballots you issue and see how many actually make it into a machine, etc.

Also, each ballot counting machine needs a way to show that its results are tamper proof; perhaps each machine is given a cryptographic key that it signs the output with. In any case, those are problems/details for the bright people to figure out - all i know is that this is a solvable problem, from an engineering and theory perspective.

I cringe at suggesting the federal government come up with another spec or proposal, or get itself involved in something else, but if there is going to be this much drama surrounding election accuracy, the adults need to step in and apply some actual engineering to the whole problem space.

Re:Denial?

[Coryoth]

You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.

Pretty much all of those listed were statistically significant. Sure, on a national scale as a percentage they were not that significant, but that's the whole point of compartmentalizing into precincts for seperate counts - we can consider error rates on a per preceinct level, and thus expect a much greater degree of overall accuracy.

Pretty much all of the incidents listed were (a) potentially systemic, and thus possibly representative of similar errors throughout the system, (b) very statistically significant as far as the vote count for that preceinct is concerned.

It is perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of error in counting votes, but that error rate should be controlled at the precinct level. Having a 1000% error rate (such as one Ohio precinct) is not acceptable. I don;t care if it is detected after the fact - the fact that we're catching it is good, but we should be trying to eliminate it to begin with.

Jedidiah.

Re:Just guessing....

[Woody77]

However, when votes can be improperly cast, it starts to look a lot more like statistics, and less like exact counts of the opinion of all registered voters.

Except, we're not getting 100% voter turnout, and we're not getting 100% properly cast votes. And not 100% of the eligible voters are registered.

So, the voting process we have is a statistical analysis of the big picture. And apparently, not a great one, if it's this questionable.

Re:False Alarm

[BrookHarty]

Despite their flaws[snip]

Why should we ignore the flaws? Shouldnt we explore them, correct them, and make them more secure? If the machines have a proven track record of flaws in state level elections, why would we expect them to work for federal elections?

Lincoln once said, the ballot over the bullet. I think hes right, if people don't think their ballots are being counted, then people might be voting with bullets.

Personally, I don't trust the companies that can't be held accountable. Voting machines vendors have no accountability. (Pun intended) If private watchgroups say they are flawed, and the flaw is exploited, who pays?

I just want to know, did they get hacked or was it just software errors. Dont hide the facts. After the facts come out, then you can figure out how to deal with them.

No kidding

[mosb1000]

I and at least five other atheists and agnostics I know all voted for Bush. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to democrats, but not all people support heavy taxation for the wealthy, or huge social programs. More over, not everyone is stupid enough to believe that Bush policies have led to the (relatively small) loss of jobs. I mean, you hear a lot of liberal arts majors complaining that they can't find a job, but how is that any different than it's always been. The job marked has been improving, and that's all there is to it, there's no reason to vote for Kerry there.

I think that a lot of democrats need to take a reality pill and realize that more people voted republican because more people wanted to vote republican. More of this country is not on the eastern seaboard than is, and a lot of us don't have the same beliefs and values that democrats seem to *think* we have.

Re:False Alarm

[Anonymous Coward]

but this type of questioning after the fact isn't all that new, or special.

So why are you so upset about it? Sounds to me like we are continuing a grand tradition of public review and integrity enforcement.

There is no hijacking going on.

How do you know? The auditing must be performed before such a statement can be made.

There were a ton of groups ready to swoop in and challenge result they didnt agree with.

And there were some groups (such as BlackBoxVoting) ready to audit the result regardless of who won. They did this because they are keenly aware of the extreme weaknesses of the current systems.

These types of actions are reprehensible.

What is reprehensible about making sure that democracy was done properly? This sort of act is necessary to avoid the very sort of hijacking that you blindly insist isn't happening.

There are several bills in Congress that will require all systems to have a standardized requirement and verification trail.

And it is publicly known fact that many of the machines used in the 2004 election failed to live up to current legal standards. For this reason, their results must be scrutinized by members of all parties.

Despite their flaws, systems that are recently installed and used are less like to cause spoilage, easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to operate by poll workers.

That, at least, is what their makers would have us believe. But since they use a closed architecture, it is difficult to verify these claims. The only options we have available to us, at this point, is examination of the audit information.

I really can't understand your resistance...are you afraid that it will turn out that your favorite candidate didn't win? Truth has nothing to fear from honest investigation, and neither should you.

No need to guess

[wombatmobile]

The real question is if the anomolies are any more or any less than with paper ballots.

Less. Australia has always only ever had paper ballots. When the result is close, like within 0.25%, losing candidates typically call for a recount. The recount can take a week. What is the deviation of recount from original figures? Typically below 0.0001%.

Re:False Alarm

[palmech13]

Just as an FYI: Franklin County is way more liberal than the rest of Ohio (it's one of the reasons I live here). Everyone worked hard to get out the vote, there are just a lot more democrats here than elsewhere in Ohio. The question wouldn't be whether or not we have fewer Bush supporters than the rest of the state, it would be if we have the right amount fewer.

Re:Just guessing....

[pete-classic]

I'm going to try once more, then I give up.

errors != problematic ballots

-Peter

Re:False Alarm

[Mike Rubits]

Shows a lot about the Slashdot mods when a comment like that is modded funny.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[IdleTime]

It's sad that USA has become a 3rd world country when it comes to elections. The whole election system is flawed and needs a major overhaul.

Just now I can hear the ignorant masses tapping on their keyboards in fury and anger claiming that the founding fathers knew best and that now over 200 years later, nothing have changed in the world so a review of the election process is unecessary.

USA is going down the drain on many fronts these days, it's a matter of time before we are no longer a 1st world country but have sunk down to become a 2nd world country with a 3rd world election system.

Name any other 1st world country with similar election problems as the US...

Re:False Alarm

[hmbJeff]

The electronic systems that are out there now are 100 times more verifiable than most princints in the country. Some of which are operated out of the homes and living rooms of citizens. Despite their flaws, systems that are recently installed and used are less like to cause spoilage, easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to operate by poll workers.

I can't imagine how you could draw this conclusion. The Evoting systems in use today mostly have NO AUDIT TRAIL, aside from writing the vote count into two different data tables. Both the voting terminals and the central vote counting software run on Windows PCs and use standard MDB (Access-type) databases that are not encrypted. The software is closed source and is "certified" by commercial labs who have no published standards, who do not evaluate security issues, and whose results are trade secrets available only to the company who makes the machines (and pays for the test). See BlackBoxVoting.org [slashdot.org] for details of how this testing works.

The big difference between these systems and traditional systems is auditability--on the old systems, there is a paper ballot, which gives the ability to go back later and try to detect fraud. In E-voting systems fraud can rarely be detected because the only "record" is a value stored in a read/write disk file that supposedly reflects a real-time event (the voter making their choice).

This is not to say that it isn't possible to do computer based voting securely, but the system design must start with auditablilty as a priority. See the system they designed at OpenVotingConsortium.org [openvotingconsortium.org] which is an open source, low cost, simple system that give most of the benefits of E-voting (like ease of use, results checking, access for the disabled, etc.) without the risks of electronic tallys. How? They use the computer's touchscreen interface to produce a printed, barcoded ballot which becomes the only official record of the vote. These ballots are pre-checked for consistency before they are cast (no overvotes), are near-guaranteed machine readable (no hanging chads or stray marks) and can be verfied manually to ensure that the printed choices match the barcodes that are used to tally the votes.

Re:False Alarm

[jessecurry]

Exit polls don't mean much though, democrats tend to be much more vocal [msn.com] and may actually flock to the exit pollers.

Re:Liars

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe when these guys grow up, they'll become a real engineers.

Of course, by that time they'll be complete wage slaves just to keep up interest payments on the national debt.

A debt mostly created by the last three republican presidents. And guess who your interest payments are going to?

My wife and I make shitloads of money too. Probably more than these guys. We voted against Bush. He's a deranged amoral liar; the most dangerous type of "leader" you can have. There's not enough money to PAY me to vote for that nutcase.

I suggest in their quest for doctorate degrees, they spend a little time studying history. If they need, there are plenty of plastic surgeons who can remove their heads from their asses. Sounds like they have the money to pay for the operation.

BTW, not one single policy of his has worked. As you would expect given his pathetic business career to know what kind of leader he is. For God's sake, he even cheated on his debate with his "poorly tailored" shirt.

Re:False Alarm

[InadequateCamel]

Finally, I urge you to find me one article or study that can prove that electronic voting machines - flawed as they are - are anything short of the most accurate and secure voting system we have.

Perhaps these voting devices are the most accurate machines you have (err, sorry...precise, but not necessarily accurate) today. That doesn't mean that they are as precise as they could/should be. Why are these machines being made by third parties? Why are they not transparent? You accuse Democrats of being shrill and partisan, but you refuse to acknowledge that your assertion that Diebold's CEO's comment about Ohio was nothing more than "a fundraising pitch in a letter" is somewhat ludicrous. They make VOTING MACHINES for Christ's sake.

I am not so naive as to believe that you can find someone who will have no party affiliation to make this equipment, but is a contributer to the Republican party (or Democrat party, for that matter) whose CEO alluded to voter fraud in a "fundraising" letter, no matter what the context, really the best company for the job? If that is what he is willing to say out loud, what is he really thinking?

There is probably nothing amiss here, but the point that you refuse to admit is that these actions have led people to believe there is a serious conflict of interest here. Why are you so against pursuing this?

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[poot_rootbeer]

the simple fact that voting discrepancies are being discovered is proof that the auditing trail works.

The fact is that SOME voting discrepancies have been discovered.

That's about as reassuring as hearing that SOME of the bugs in Internet Explorer have been patched.

Given that there really is no one "auditing trail", but rather thousands of different ones in different municipalities, I don't see how you can have any faith in the system to work in all, or even most, cases.

I doubt that enough fraud/error will be found to change the outcome of any of this year's races. But that's no reason why we shouldn't take the closer look and find out just how much there was.

It's not about protecting Democrats. It's about protecting DEMOCRACY.

Re:Random noise?

[reverse flow reactor]

I hope you aren't the only person tallying votes. On my calculator, 250,000/110,000,000*100% = 0.2%. You are out by a factor of 10. Not to be picky or anything, but if being off by a factor of ten is acceptable, then Nader stands a much better chance of getting the popular vote.

Face it, people make mistakes. I make mistakes, you make mistakes, But the double-checking for mistakes then better. Every vote matters. It might be that this time, "only 10000 votes" doesn't shift an election, but sometimes that is the difference between two candidates. Also, if someone knows that their vote was thrown out, that makes them a little more jaded knowing their vote doesn't count. Do you want your vote to count? I want mine to count, and I hope that those in charge of my vote after it goes into the ballot box respect that as well.

Elections are a big business

That's awful. Running elections may be big business now, but there are much more important things at stake. Like the political future of a nation. Some things are worth taking the time to do correctly, and not in an environment where the number one priority is shareholder value and profit margins.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Liars

[fmita]

"I was able to reasonably come to the conclusion that he had my interests at heart."

No offense, but I kind of feel that this explemplifies the problem with the election. Sure, maybe Bush has your interests at heart, but do you, who told us you make a "pretty decent living" and have degrees from "top engineering universities," need someone looking out for your interests? Not everyone in this country (let alone the world) is as fortunate as you -- born intelligent and most likely into a middle-class household (with social mobility what it is--so much for the rags-to-riches American dream). Now maybe I should have voted Bush since maybe he "has my interests in mind," but at some point I think politics has to transcend this attempt to help people in general--otherwise you're just pitting one group's interests against another's, we all know what group is will be triumph in the end -- the intelligent, ambitious, and relatively well-off group.

All I have to say is that...

[Anonymous Coward]

people don't line up in the rain for nine hours to tell the president what a good job he is doing.

Re:False Alarm

[demachina]

I'll say what I say everyone time some dick complains about it:

Much truth is said in gest

It was a white tie dinner full of rich fat cats and the fact is they are his base. They give him buckets of money to campaign, he gives them huge tax breaks, interest free loans(from our tax dollars), tax dollar giveaways(a.k.a. "Medicare Reform"), relaxed environmental regulations and on and on.

Its my sig because George just had the poor judgement to say something, in gest, that is taboo to say, the wealthy elite own the government and they own politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its just another case of the poor judgement that is his calling card. It was right up there with his skit with the slides where he is "looking for the WMD's" and can't find any. Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's, thousands more are maimed for life and there are tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's who are dead and maimed too, and the tally is going up everyday and will for a really long time. Funny joke.

Election Outcome Irrelevant

[mutterc]

Whether Bush or Kerry should / should not have won is irrelevant to the topic under discussion.

What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.

With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's [wakegov.com]), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.

Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.

Re:How not to write voting software

[Tenareth]

Not quite... it's not overflowing the holding space, its just using a spare bit which happens to be the negative bit. This is what you get when this happens:

(Output of a quick C program that outputs the value of t and the binary representation.

T: 32766 [0111111111111110]
T: 32767 [0111111111111111]
T: -32768 [1000000000000000]
T: -32767 [1000000000000001]

Odds are, they just don't display the negative sign which makes it look like its counting backwards.

Re:False Alarm

[zangdesign]

It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!

Go check this [ecotalk.org] to see where the sympathies of the voting machine companies lie. Any claims of non-partisanship on the part of the companies should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad

Best kind of candidate, if you think about it. How much money they make is a non-issue. I don't care how much they make - what I'm worried about is how they handle the election.

This type of question has been around for 200 years.

Sure. But now we can ask it loudly until someone actually answers the damn question! We have at our hands a tool to make sure it gets in front of as many faces as possible. So why not use it?

The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get.

So, what? Just shut up and take it? In case you hadn't noticed, moderation doesn't go over with this administration. Bush was the one who said "You are either with us, or against us." So, I'm coming down on the side specifically against him and his fellow Republiban.

Re:OK, let's make a deal:

[mabu]

The same thing was said four years ago... and what did we get? No significant change. Why should this time be any different?

That idea is being promoted to shut people up.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[glsunder]

If there's no problem, then eliminating the idea of a conspiracy would be a simple as recounting the votes in the evote districts in question. Considering the amount of money involved in the election, the cost of putting most conspiracy theories to rest is minimal.

No amount of saying that it's unlikely is going to be sufficient. There needs to be proof that the election was accurate. People believe in absurd things ranging from ghosts to UFOs to magic to angels, it's going to take more than a logically convincing arguement to convice most people. If the election results can't be verified, then there really is a serious problem with the method, whether the results are accurate or not.

Re:False Alarm

[commodoresloat]

What I don't get is why people who are so certain that there were no irregularities are opposed to independent verification of the election. If you're right and these machines don't have any problems at all, what could be so wrong with verifying their results? It would shut up most of the whiners and it would give further legitimacy to the winners. And, most importantly, it will help restore some faith in the system.

No one saw this coming.

[deemaunik]

I knew this would happen, you knew this would happen, and I'm pretty sure Kerry knew this would happen. But why would he simply roll over and die less than 24 hours after the election began? Before anything was solidified? The illusion of choice. Your votes mean nothing when the candidate you cast for concedes. They shouldn't be allowed to just Give Up. Fuckers.

Re:Liars

[Tinidril]

I still don't understand what Bush has to do with outsourcing. In a global economy there is nothing the government can do to stop it. If they require that US companies only hire US people, then US companies will not be able to compete in the global marketplace because their products will be too damn expensive.

Imposing such laws is a good way to force US companies to move offshore. Not a good idea if you want to create jobs.

The only way the government can really stop outsourcing would be to close the borders to trade, or impose ridiculous terrifs to prevent cheaper products from coming in. Either act would be an economic disaster for both the US and the world.

Re:Why it may actually be a Good Thing that Bush w

[fishbowl]

"Consider that it may actually come out for the best (worldwide) that Bush won the election."

I agree, but not for reasons as complex as your analysis.

Kerry would have inherited a big mess. He would not have appeared to be successful, no matter how well he actually performed.

Bush, on the other hand, has for the first time in his LIFE, become obligated to face the consequences of his own actions.

Anyone who occupies the oval office today, has a lost cause in his hands. Better to watch Bush go down in flames, than to shackle such a legacy on some other more competent leader.

Despite the repeated asseration that "the whole world hates the US", I've seen absolutely NO meaningful opposition to the US policies. Why was no resistance mustered to forestall the invasion of Iraq? The US interpretation, of course, is that the world approves, overwhelmingly. Even those countries that supposedly don't approve, gave their consent by not fighting against it. Yeah, that would have cost lives and broken alliances. We're talking WAR already, so that's what it comes down to.

Re:Sufficient condition for election fairness

[gotih]

legitimate questions about the accuracy of the machines used to administer our democracy are being raised and people feel the need make snide remarks.

BUSH WILL BE OUR PRESIDENT FOR FOUR MORE YEARS, KERRY CONCEDED. this is about fixing problems for the future. we need to be able to trust democracy. we have to know for certain that our system is working. e-voting doesn't have to be complicated or etheral. we can have elections which we can trust. but we have to drop the partisan bullshit and find a solution.

i believe in democracy, not machines built by the lowest bidder. let's make sure everything works.

Any examples of errors in Kerry's favor?

[GeorgeMcBay]

When I first started hearing about all of these election problems, I assumed it was just tinfoil hat stuff. The thing that makes me worry that there might be more to it is that every one of the errors I've heard about has gone in Bush's favor. This could possibly be because (for obvious reasons) the Kerry supporters are more upset about the outcome and more likely to bolster errors favoring the other guy...

So, to ease my state of mind over this, can someone point to significant errors in Kerry's favor? Surely if these are random and unrelated occurances, the distribution of who is being favored should be about equal, right?

Re:Can't win

[EzInKy]

And as for the difference between flaws and fraud: when a huge number of flaws occur apparently independant of one another, but which all seem to favor the same outcome, then I do not think it is unreasonable to suspect that that the flaws may have been intentional (that is, fraudulent).


Did you consider that the flaws point one direction because only one side is looking? And your idea to repeat the election ad infinum until you get the result you desire could very well backfire giving Bush a real mandate.

Hell, as much as I despise him even I would consider switching my vote if that is what it would take to get through your head that Kerry lost because he didn't appeal to "middle" America, that huge expanse of land quaintly referred to as "fly over" country.

Bev Harris reports suppression by network bosses

[wytcld]

See this [democratic...ground.com] for Bev Harris's account of receiving a tip that "the news has been locked down tight."

Here'st the logic as I see it:

1. The Bush Republican faction (not all Republicans, but the Bush folks) has shown no ethical constraint in its tactics to achieve its goals (e.g., lies about WMD evidence, Kerry's Viet Nam record, McCain's adopted child).

2. As Bev Harris's crew has demonstrated, the Diebold vote tabulators were designed (intentionally or not - although there was a known computer fraud felon on the programming team) so as to be trivial to hack.

3. Ohio and Florida have Secretaries of State who are highly-partisan Republicans; in the case of Florida working directly under the president's brother; in the case of Ohio someone who tried to disqualify voter registrations based on paper stock (which would have violated the Voting Rights Act).

4. So we're supposed to suppose that people who have the means (vulnerable technology, officials in place, no discernable ethical restraint against dishonesty), and the motive (a belief that they are doing God's will appears to predominate among them), then were restrained from manipulating the vote count because ... what? There was an angel hovering over every voting booth and tabulator holding a flaming sword to fend them off?

Re:Here, I'll explain

[EMN13]

You're wrong, and your post is misleadingly off-topic to the post you're replying to (about the voting experience a la Venezuela), and I think you misunderstand the use of a democracy.

Wrong because:

There is no reason an anonymous voting process should fail to certify voter validity. Voters themselves are NOT anonymous; rather what they vote is... Yes, that's not perfect: this means for instance you could "maliciously" influence elections by discouraging some people to vote and helping others. Not only is this accepted in the countries I'm familiar with; that's actually pretty publicly practiced (at least they way I see it).

Misleadingly off-topic because:

You suggest that organizing an election is so difficult it's not realistic to expect any better. Even though I don't doubt that organizing an election to everyone's satisfaction is no mean feat; it certainly is possible: Not just does Venezuela succeed; most European countries succeed perfectly fine too, and although I'm unfamiliar with an example, I'm willing to bet some others do to...

There is no real difficulty in requiring voting machines to have public, verifiable blueprints. There is a lot of hassle, but no technical problem in standardizing the voting process - If the Supreme Court rules against a recount on the grounds of the notion of equal treatment of voters, doesn't it seems ridiculous that the first count isn't even remotely equal?

You misunderstand the use of a democracy:

Frankly, I think you're looking at democracy and elections entirely too religiously... Democracy pretty much fails as a type of government...

- Elections don't guarantee any sort of optimum government.
- They don't require the elected government to in any way actually do what they said they will do.
- They don't require any sort of competency whatsoever.
- People actually making the choice aren't actually competent to make that choice. You don't hire people based on the gut feeling of the guy next door, do you?
- Elections are really expensive. Just think about that lost productivity, etc., in addition to the obvious costs of the process itself.
- Elections are very coarse grained. You might choose an idiotic president just to get a good staff and party, or the other way around.

It's probably not realistic to expect any perfect government, so I'm not advocating anything else, but let's not over hype some sort of American dream democracy concept beyond what it's worth.

There is one thing that elections actually do really well (*hint* when done the Venezuelan way), and that's providing a trustworthy, verifiable, hard-to-tamper with means of distributing power. As a side bonus this "government" thing is actually supposed to do good things for "we the people" :-). This discourages people from organizing totally useless things like violent revolutions and talk shows about election failures.

Just to clarify... the grandparent post about the Venezuelan election really was all about TRANSPARENCY, and ensuing benefits, and in comparison to other similar elections the American presidential elections are systematically a failure.

In conclusion:

Secret ballots don't guarantee the anonymity of the voters, but ensure a ballot's owner's identity remains secret; AMERICAN ELECTIONS COULD WORK BETTER; Democracy isn't perfect, it's transparent.

Re:Liars

[trentblase]

Bullshit -- Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy reduced the amount of federal money going to things like schools, etc. This in turn raises the local tax burden.

Re:Say that to Bush

[Daetrin]

You weren't paying attention were you?

Because he said he wanted the Democrats and Republicans to work together. Because he said he wanted the broad support of all Americans.

If he actually _meant_ that he should be working on compromises, not sticking it to the opposition as hard as he can. The states have proven they can outlaw gay marriage if they want. All the states that really wanted to have done so, and any other that want to join in can do so next election. So what do they need a constitutional amendment for? It might make them feel better to inflict their prejudices on people in other states, but Bush has no _need_ to go along with it, he's already won his second term. The only reason for Bush to push for it is because he also believes in forcing others to follow his religious views.

I'm not suprised that he's sticking to it (although it would have been nice if it had just been a hollow pre-election promise) but it makes a mockery of his claims that he wants to bring everyone together now. Clearly he doesn't want to include the ~10% of the nation that is gay or any of the rest of us who support them. Furthermore i suspect that he doesn't really want to join together with _any_ of the Democrats who aren't willing to completly give up their own agendas in favor of his, but the gay rights aspect is just the issue that he's being most blatant about so far.

Re:False Alarm

[demachina]

""Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's...". You obviously have no clue why we went to iraq. Don't say oil, because only 17% of oil comes from that area anyway."

I sure as hell do know why we went in to Iraq. We went in to it because Saddam had WMD's, and was going to use them on American cities, which is the reason I gave in first post, and which is what Bush/Cheney/Fox told us over and over again, and they never lie. It just happens there weren't any. We also went in because Saddam had ties to Al Qaida and was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. Why do I know this because Dick Cheney told me so, on Meet the Press, that it had been proven Iraqi intelligence met with the 9/11 ringleader in Prague. Unfortunately it appears it hasn't been proven and it probably didn't even happen and Saddam probably had nothing to do with 9/11. Reason three way down on the list was to bring freedom and democracy to the ragheads at the point of gun because God told George that this is what he put him on Earth and made him President to do.

Your the only one bringing up the oil angle here. I just have to go with the three reasons my President told me because he would never lie.

You probably haven't noticed but there are way more insane right wing talk show hosts, especially on radio, than there are liberal ones. I don't listen to any of them on either side, excepting Charlie Rose on PBS and I'm pretty sure he isn't insane. If anyone is insane its the right wing talk show hosts that are STILL ranting about the Clintons and seem to hate pretty much everyone and everything excepting their own. Liberal talk show hosts suck because they suck at hate filled, venomous rhetoric like its practiced by the wicked witch of the right, Ann Coulter.

Re:Liars

[Ucklak]

"Not everyone in this country (let alone the world) is as fortunate as you --"

This is one thing that is wrong with the left; hard work + good judgement = fortunate. In reality, it's (hard work + good judgement != fortunate) but (less fortunate = lazy AND bad judgement).

I am so sick and tired of hearing how 'fortunate' 'privileged' people are and how we should help the 'less fortunate'. More like the lazy bums need to get off their ass and learn what hard work is.

I'm a responsible adult, pay my bills, etc...
I had a kid 2 years ago at a cost of $10,000. I have another coming that will be at a cost I'm sure of at no less than $10,000.
I pay what some people call 'insurance' (but more like a payment plan) that pa(id/ys) 80% of it. The rest I paid out of my pocket.
These kids are planned and I provide for my family.

Why is it that the left duck-heads consider a horny irresponsible teenager 'less fortunate' and want ME to pay HER hospital bill???

You know what? I consider her _lucky_ because SHE can have that child at NO COST to her in a public hospital.

If you want to go to a university, work hard for it dammit and STOP asking for hand outs.

There are people who seriously want to get in this country for the opportunity of hard work and then there are people who can work the system so afforded by politicians on the left.

People who work hard and drive nice cars and live in nice houses aren't 'lucky', it's called hard work.

ELECTION FRAUD!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

17 year olds can't vote!

Re:No kidding

[An Onerous Coward]

I dispute the "minor job loss" claim.

In 2000, there were 110M jobs and 281M people, so a rough estimate is that you need (on average) one job to support 2.6 people. We've probably gained about 10,000,000 people since Bush started in 2000, which means that about 3.8M jobs needed to be created during his administration, just to keep pace with population growth. Even if there are the same number of jobs as when he took office, he's nearly four million jobs in the hole.

Nor is it just a matter of liberal arts majors not being able to find work. The total job numbers hide the number of underemployed, who are working fewer hours than they would like or working in jobs that don't utilize their skills and training.

During the eight years of the Clinton administration, total jobs increased by about 22M, more than two jobs for every three people added to the population. Historically, the fastest job growth has always occurred when Democrats were in the White House.

Re:Saw this earlier

[tunesmith]

Exit polls are NOT BASED OFF OF RANDOM SAMPLES.

Exit polls are NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POPULATION.

Exit polls are designed to be used to be normalized by the election results, so we can find out more information about our electorate.

Re:Any examples of errors in Kerry's favor?

[towaz]

After searching around I am still yet to find one example of an error going in kerry's favour.

I don't believe people are not looking.. but something tells me that if (when) one is found the media would be all over it.

I'm sure blackboxvoting.org would also report it the moment one is found... As they are trying to prove but that electronic voting is just not accurate without decent auditing.

But Its not hard to see a trend that errors are always in favour of bush no wonder they are also looking into fraud.

Sort of makes you wonder how the Bush administration would have acted if the tables were turned this election...

I bet the issue would be dragged out in court the instant a report circulated about kerry accidently got a few thousand votes in error :)

--

We used to have those...

[MenTaLguY]

We used to use scantron-type ballots here in Maryland (using a black marker instead of pencil).

Very simple, and even clearer than most "real" scantrons -- each choice was printed directly on the card beside its corresponding "bubble" (actually more of a "complete the arrow" deal).

This year, however, over the protests of many experts we switched to the new touchscreen Diebold devices. Subsequent challenges were also shot down.

As someone who had been following the Diebold fiasco for a while, I felt like crying.

Funny thing is that the losing side hates guns!

[sideshow]

The Democrats and the gun control nuts overlap in a large way.

Oh the irony.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[Eskarel]

First lets get this out of the way to show where I'm biased. I would love for Kerry to come out on top when they fix this.

That said, I don't care if Bush comes out another 3 million ahead at the end of this, if these claims are true, then something has gone drastically wrong. We should all be shocked an appalled by this regardless of our political affiliations or desires.

If 88,000 more people voted in Palm Beach than are allowed to vote, then regardless of who they voted for, we have a problem. If this happened, then either the companies making these machines are corrupt, or else they are incompetent, as are the election officials who approved the machines(everyone makes buggy first run technology, but using buggy first run technology for something as important as an election is, in my opinion, grounds for termination).

We all need to do something about this because if it's true then Republican or Democrat our votes don't matter, we are the whim of either a corrupt organization or total chance. This is something which, regardless of all other ends, is unacceptable in a place which claims to value freedom.

Re:No kidding

[winwar]

"I don't know why it hasn't occurred to democrats, but not all people support heavy taxation for the wealthy, or huge social programs."

Taxation part, fair enough. But huge social programs? Have you looked at the deficit lately, Bush DOES support huge social programs. Some of them are just different....

"More over, not everyone is stupid enough to believe that Bush policies have led to the (relatively small) loss of jobs."

Don't know if I would term it "relatively small" or that Bush policies are not to blame but I can accept the later. HOWEVER, Bush was reelected because the economy DIDN'T suck. All other issues tend to be secondary. The fact that a sitting Pesident BARELY won (or that the election was close) indicates the economy is NOT perceived to be doing well (and perception is more important than the reality...)

But, if a President is going to take credit for the economy (which his policies probably didn't help) I expect him to take the blame for a bad economy (even if his policies didn't hurt). That's just how it is.

Re:Any examples of errors in Kerry's favor?

[forand]

This would mean a lot more if you had some form of evidence other than your anicdotal stories. Did ANYONE report on this? If not then how are we to believe you?

Re:More votes in Florida than voters

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that 237K votes would've helped Kerry win Florida, and I hear all the republicans here shouting up a storm about how this must be a democratic conspiracy to try to contest the election...

Uh, I for one, regardless of who was elected, would really like to know how 7.5million votes were counted in a state where only 7.35million were cast..? Not that its gonna sway the election, not that I think it should, but I'd really like to know that were I a FL resident, my vote for governor of FL wasn't offset by 237,000 "phantom" voters. Or that the mayor of my town of 650 people didn't win by 4000 votes.

Those who argue again investigating things like this, I suppose when your brother gets murdered on the street you'll also just tell the police not to bother investigating, the murderer won, forget about it. Enron? No need to investigate where the money went, the employees are screwed, its over.

Get real.

Re:I agree with you

[elegie]

Electronic voting could make voting easier, but it is a good idea to have a voter-verifiable audit trail. As of now, not all electronic voting machines have such audit trails.

We trust computers with just about everything under the sun: our power, our health, our lives, our money

Security expert Bruce Schneier has talked about secure voting versus secure financial transactions [schneier.com]. E-voting has the difficulty of secret ballots, which is not an issue for even the largest financial transactions. In addition, a single vote is associated with many others. Imagine redoing an election. It is much easier to figure out what happened if something goes wrong with a financial transaction. Though there are mission-critical systems, their design is different from normal systems [verifiedvoting.org], not to mention much more expensive. Electronic voting machines are not designed like this. In addition, voting machines have to be secure against deliberate tampering (possibly from the inside), as well as accidental failure.

Re:Liars

[karniv0re]

See, women do have control over their own bodies-- they can choose to not have sex. Abortion as a method of birth control is murder. Abortion for rape/incest victims or those where the life of the mother is threatened, that's fine. But just getting abortions because "Oops, hehe, I got pregnant again!", that's BS.

I hear that goddamned slogan, "A Woman's Right To Choose" being thrown around in the media and I instantly do a replace on "Choose" with "Murder". Because when it comes down to it, it's really just "A Woman's Right To Murder".

Agreed, for the most part. I'm about as left wing as one can get, but I still have a firm standing belief in Christianity. The trick there is to not let it cloud your judgements. However, I don't think abortion and religion should even cross paths. When you think about it logically, it's murder.

The thing is, making it illegal would do more harm than good. Remember when we had that big "WAR ON DRUGS"? Man, that sure stopped people from doing drugs. You can even ask my ex-friends. Just try to catch them before 4:20 PM. Instead, I propose mandatory counselling for the woman before and after the abortion. And it should be meaningful, with previous aborters there to share their experiences. Abortion is not easy on a woman, no matter how calloused she thinks she is. It has been well known to lead to suicide.

Another problem I have with the Christian view, is their belief - and W has publicly endoursed this - that "Abstinance is the only way." Please people. Kids, are kids. They're going to have sex whether you want them to or not. At least teach them to be responsible. When I was younger, I planned on waiting till marriage. Riiiiight. One thing always leads to another. Thankfully, I was smart enough to use protection.

And finally, one last point: Here in Omaha, one day I saw a string of anti-abortion protestors about a mile or two long. Very impressive. They were holding signs that said, "Abortion kills children." I thought, this statement is true. However, being that a good majority of them were most likely proponents of the war, I thought, if we're going to make this statement, let's not be selective. Let's go across the board. WAR KILLS CHILDREN! "Derrr, No it doesn't. The TV told me they were happy we came in and 'liberated' them."

Ideology is nice, but it's better when backed by facts and common sense. This is something rarely seen in society today. Furthermore, just because you declaire yourself "Conservative" or "Liberal", doesn't mean you need to subscribe to every single belief commonly held by those groups. Let's use that brain that God, or Allah, or Mother Earth, or Evolution, or whatever gave you and think about things a little more.

Re:Liars

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, it's not like a Christian ever did anything immoral, illegal, or just plain mean

Nope. Never. Christians are the best. Slavery never happened in this country. We built our country under God and He blessed it for what we did.

Re:Liars

[DarkEdgeX]

The thing is, making it illegal would do more harm than good. Remember when we had that big "WAR ON DRUGS"? Man, that sure stopped people from doing drugs. You can even ask my ex-friends. Just try to catch them before 4:20 PM.

Yeah, heh, but the war on drugs wasn't about taking lives or murder. My opinion on drugs? Legalize it and standardize it. A big part of the problem with drugs isn't so much people abusing them but the quality of the drugs being so different from dealer to dealer. If the FDA could introduce standards of quality, I think people using drugs would be a lot less likely to hurt themselves. Right now if you get some bad weed or whatever, you can't go sue your dealer without getting yourself in trouble too. Also, part of the draw for drugs is no doubt that it's against the law-- people love to do things that are against the law, especially if the only person who might get hurt is themselves.

Instead, I propose mandatory counselling for the woman before and after the abortion. And it should be meaningful, with previous aborters there to share their experiences. Abortion is not easy on a woman, no matter how calloused she thinks she is. It has been well known to lead to suicide.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I don't believe the war on drugs is at all like making abortions illegal. A person doing drugs will rarely impact anyone else directly-- with abortion there will always be a loss of life if it is carried out. See the difference? It's an issue of severity. Legalizing abortion creatures the murky scenario of a mother and her unborn child being killed in an auto accident-- does the perpetrator face one murder charge or does he face two? How do you reconcile an unborn child being valuable in an auto-accident against the proposed legalized abortion where the value of the child is non-existant?

I just don't see how someone, anyone, can say the value of the life is less if the mother wants it dead.

The problem with the big two parties, Democrats and Republicans, is that they're so extreme with regard to their views. Democrats (seemingly) want abortions legalized in nearly all circumstances, even so-called "partial birth abortions". Republicans are the exact opposite, wanting to make illegal all forms of abortion, even abortion in the case of rape/incest or cases where the mothers life is threatened. Why is it they can't realize there's a reasonable center point on the issue where a woman can still get an abortion if the pregnancy is likely to kill her or if she's been raped/been the victim of incest, while making illegal abortions used as birth control?

And as far as kids go, you're right. Kids have sex, but I imagine this is a lot less to do with kids being kids and more to do with kids simply not getting the education up front that sex is, primarily, for pro-creation. Yeah it's fun and great and all that, but then we get into the issue of condoms in school and such, another issue that seems dead obvious to me, but still gets fought out time and again at the local level. As far as deterrants for kids to avoid having unprotected sex-- most states have laws on the books which dictate that whomever takes the child when it's born, the other partner must provide child support. I know that was a scary enough issue for me as a teen, the thought of spending my first 15 years out of school paying child support to some girl. Scaring kids with things like that won't work with all of them, but it ought to catch the majority-- and if some kids go and do it anyways and the female gets pregnant? Well, I guess one of them gets to own up for child support payments for another 18 years. They can serve as the warning to other teens that unprotected sex is an awful idea.

Re:Liars

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor people DO pay taxes. Lots of them. Social security, medicare, and other payroll taxes... sales taxes... all sorts of licenses and fees... when property tax goes up for their landlords (assuming they rent), their rents go up...

The notion that poor people pay no tax is ridiculous. In fact, they tend to pay a greater share of their income, percentage wise, than the rich do (what with all their cuts and tax breaks and shelters, etc, etc).

The fact is, the tax burden in this country has shifted regressively from the wealthy down to the middle-class and working class, and the poor.

Re:Liars

[ozborn]

Because a zygote or a fetus isn't a baby! Many anti-abortionists are also opposed to most forms of birth control as well as regulating (mostly female) sexuality so the issue definitely involves control over a women's body.

Re:Liars

[Alsee]

I don't agree with you, but I'd really love to hear you explain why you believe it's OK to for rape/incest victims to commit murder. If someone breaks my nose, does that mean it's OK for me to murder my 6 year old kid?

As far as I can see your position is indefensable under your own logic. If it's murder then you have no right to murder innocent person X just because guilty person Y commited a crime against you.

-

Re:Here, I'll explain

[jamesmrankinjr]

- People actually making the choice aren't actually competent to make that choice. You don't hire people based on the gut feeling of the guy next door, do you?

Actually, I seem to remember reading recently that the performance of "the mob" in answering questions is often better than that of "experts". If you have a large enough group of people to answer a question, and take the most popular response, it's pretty likely to be right.

An example given for this was on the "Millionaire" show, where the audience poll "lifeline" outperformed the call an expert "lifeline".

Peace be with you,
-jimbo

Democrats don't want vote reform

[ccmay]

Jimmy Carter himself said it best on Fresh Air. America has too much pride

Horse shit. Any proposal for more scrutiny of the voting process a la Venezuela would be shouted down as rank racism by the Democrats. Thumb prints, poll watchers and picture ID's? Why obviously it's a Republican trick to disenfranchise black people!

The fact is that big-city Democratic political machines like things just the way they are. Punch cards and lever machines allow myriad ways to game the system, and the Democrats who control elections in places like Philly and St. Louis make full use of them.

If I were a Republican politician, I'd be happy to get rid of the Diebold machines and institute Venezuelan style verification. But why bother if all it gets you is Al Sharpton shouting through a bullhorn outside your office?

-ccm

Re:Here, I'll explain

[ccmay]

Actually, I seem to remember reading recently that the performance of "the mob" in answering questions is often better than that of "experts".

Something all the outraged "intellectuals" in San Francisco and New York would do well to remember. They just can't believe how stupid Americans are for re-electing Bush.

Listen to the people, comrades. They are smarter than any one of you, or any thousand of you.

--ccm

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

[nate nice]

"There is no need for the Republicans to look. Since only the Kerry supporters will look in detail, expect them to ignore problems that favor their candidate."

You're right in that there may be many errors in Kerry's favor if every error is uncovered, but Republicans should care as every American should care because although it has been said winning is everything, the honest truth is the most important. If my guy won and then it was found out that some error is what made him win, I would want that error found and the correct results factored, no matter how bitter I may feel. My point is a Democracy cannot stand if the people's voice is not really being heard accuratly. Suspicion will only weaken us and provide a breeding ground for doubt and partisinship.

Personally, I feel we all need to find common ground, understand we won't agree 100% but see the need for compromise. We cannot always have what we want but we can find common ground if we are all rational and reasonable. You know what they say, a union divided cannot stand. I

t's too bad we probably will never see this type of cooperation and understadning of our fellow man, but we can dream. No party or ideal is wrong. We all just have to better understand each other. We need to accept contradictive ideas and actually listen to rational arguments. Above all, we need to make law such that it is for people, not against people.

Re:Liars

[karniv0re]

I don't believe the war on drugs is at all like making abortions illegal. A person doing drugs will rarely impact anyone else directly-- with abortion there will always be a loss of life if it is carried out.

I understand this, but my point is that making something illegal doesn't stop it. It usually just makes it worse. Ever seen the "No Coat Hangers" sign? That stands for "No Back-Alley Abortions." It's the same thing (no, not exactly, but along those lines) as drugs. If you make it illegal, you've just opened up a market for it.

My suggestion is to stop people from getting pregnant in the first place. Talk about it in schools. I went to a Lutheran grade school for 10 years. Guess what. We talked about contraceptives. It was so long ago that I don't remember if they recommended abstinance, but I do remember talking about STDs and contraceptives. We also talked about it in my high school. Just giving people the facts could greatly reduce the risk. Yes, scaring works too. Kind of.

But what I'm also saying, about the counsiling, is that by forcing them to talk to people who have done it, they can know what it's like, and it might just scare them straight into having the kid. I'm not a psychologist, but I think they would be of great help. And Republicans and Democrats do look at it wrong. It's not black and white. You'd think we could come to a comprimise here, but people are stubborn.

Simply amazing....

[10Ghz]

that USA, leader in technology and "Leader of the Free World", can't get something like voting right! just how difficult can it be? In Finland it's pretty simple:

1. You receive a letter telling where you can vote
2. You go to the voting-site with that letter.
3. The officials check the letter and your ID. They then remove you from their list of voters and hand you the ballot. The ballot looks like this [iijokiseutu.fi]
4. You walk in to the booth, and write down the number of your candidate on the ballot.
5. You close the ballot so your vote is not visible, and the officials stamp the ballot.
6. You then drop the stamped ballot in to the ballot-box.
7. The ballots are counted manually with observers making sure everything is A-OK. The final results are available few our after the polling-sites close.
8. Results are decided by a direct popular vote. Then one getting the most votes wins. In presidental elections, if no candidate receives more than half of the vote, we will have a second round between the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round.

Related to voting: It's strictly forbidden to campaign right outside the voting-site. I was pretty shocked to see how in USA the people waiting in line to vote were handed pre-filled ballots with campaigners showing them "how they should vote".

really, this is not rocket-science!

Re:antidisestablishmentraistic

[F34nor]

Correct sir.

The philosophy of these people can be coined as Domonists and they are trying to pass laws to make it impossible to sue if someone passes a law that has a biblical basis. e.g. If some asshole passes a law saying that pi=3 because in the bible it says that it was a perfect circle and was 1 cubit wide and 3 in circumference, you can sue him for fucking your local science text books.

Its the same bullshit in the 10 commandments in the rotunda. FOR FUCK'S SAKE! The New Testament supersedes the 10 commandments, that's the point of the NEW COVENEANT. So why doesn't he put up the golden rule instead? Because that requires flexible thinking and empathy something most modern evangelicals lack. e.g. killing is bad. Killing babies is worse. No Abortion. Killing Iraq's? Why the fuck not, they hate us so we hate them. Boy Jesus is going like that kind of thinking let me tell you! If you want ancient laws put up Hammuarabi's code if you want the real historical basis for written laws.

Re:Liars

[F34nor]

I'm for the Tobin tax or transaction surcharge tax applied first to currency trading then domestically to all transaction at one tenth of one percent.

What's so wrong with the British way of voting?

[gfreeman]

You arrive at the polling station.
Your name is checked against registered voters.
Your name is checked off so that you cannot vote twice.
You get a ballot paper with the names of candidates on it.
You go into a booth and mark with a pencil a large X in the box next to the name of the candidate for whom you wish to vote.
You place the ballot paper into a sealed ballot box.
At the close of voting, all ballot boxes are taken to the counting room, which is usually televised thesedays, and a few dozen people sort the ballot papers into piles according to who the votes are for.
Some more people count these piles, while other people walk up and down the aisles making sure all is in order.
The count is announced and a winner proclaimed.

You have it all in physical terms - the ballot papers, the boxes, and you can confirm that there's nothing missing or that there's nothing "extra".

If you were to take a pile of bills into the bank, and they credited your account with "approximately" the amount you thought you had, you'd be pretty upset. Businesses would demand banks be shut down until every penny banked could be accounted for.

So why so lax over something just as important? The signals this gives out is "Democracy good, Capitalism better".

It's not a perfect world, but for something that happens only every four years, why not get it as perfect as you can? And for once, technology isn't the answer. (cue the mod-down remarks for that one)

Re:Here, I'll explain

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

Are you saying that there was never ballot stuffing by Democrats in Chicago because no one was able to find substantive proof? I guess that O.J. didn't really kill Nicole because they couldn't prove it in court. He is, after all, still looking for the "real killer."

Both of your statements are completely unrelated to my assertion that the last two sentences of this post [slashdot.org] (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) (emphasis mine)) is unsubstantiated nonsense that doesn't belong in a reasonable discussion of voting reform that is based on *facts*.

I've seen your type arguing with the random rabbit trails. In my opinion it's a fruitless way to examine things, and seems to be centered on arguing, not determining truth.