WA Governor Race Ends 119
Republican Dino Rossi decided last night to not appeal yesterday's decision by Chelan judge John Bridges to let last November's governor election stand -- the closest in U.S. history -- which keeps Christine Gregoire, who won by 129 votes after two recounts, in office. The Republicans claimed that fraud and mistakes far exceeded the difference between the candidates, and that statistical analysis showed Rossi might have received more legal votes. Bridges concluded there were thousands of incorrect votes and other major problems, but that the Republicans didn't meet the high threshold of proof that the result was incorrect. He also said he feared current law will make elections problems even worse, and urged the government and voters to work to fix the system.
Here's an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll get a bigger turnout, and possibly a true outcome.
So What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I predict that some people will try to mod me down to suppress the truth, but they will fail.
More information:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.h
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
The importance of Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Happy Island County Democrat here!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
What he was asking for was that the questionable results be set aside and the state be given a chance to have an honest election. (i.e. without King County's felons and dead voting)
That being said, I will abide by the rule of law and accept Gov. G. as our overlord for now. On the other hand I sure hope we can all work to prevent this from happening again.
Perhaps those of us in Island county can set the example since it seems we were one of the few places that seem to have a properly working election board.
Your point? (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't justify the errors in Washington, but it doesn't justify villifying one side either. Just about everyone cheated, somewhere.
I believe that it is vital, if democracy is to have any meaning, to work on developing a system that is provably reliable. It is possible to create essentially tamper-proof cryptographic signatures. If you add votes via a version control system of some kind, then sign every "version", you can "prove" the stream has not been modified since being created.
The vote would be in the form of a written-out XML file, so that it was absolutely clear as to what a vote was. Signatures would be in the form of an RSA public-key signature, where the signer was the voting machine, not the voter.
The first "signature" would cover the first vote. The second would cover both the first and second votes plus the first signature, etc.
This would prevent tampering, but it would also prevent database corruption as votes could only be added via the intended interface, as the signature entry would not be present.
There are other methods. I've suggested before that you could have "anonymous" encryption - unassociated private keys, with the voter using a public key they were provided with as their "voter registration card". That way, the vote would still be anonymous, but as only valid decryption keys would be used, only valid encryption keys could be used to generate the vote and provably only used once.
Indeed, you wouldn't even need high-tech voting. Anti-counterfeit measures used on currency would work just as well on ballot papers. Voting stations would then need to account for every ballot paper (unused, discarded, vote) going through them. It would make it considerably harder to add votes prior to the election, or for anyone to swipe a ballot box in transit and change the contents.
In the first two cases, system errors would not add valid information and therefore not produce fake votes, and the requirements to perpetrate electoral fraud (by a voter, candidate or party) would be raised sufficiently high to put it beyond the reach of the usual suspects.
In the third case, the bar would be lower than with the high-tech solutions, but definitely raised from where it is now. The idea is not to make fraud impossible, but to put it beyond the reach of "opportunists" and outside the realm of "accidents". There will always be people who try to beat any system, but you can reduce the number of people who have the skill to succeed from a few hundred million to a few hundred.
In other words, we don't need faulty systems in this day and age. Faulty systems are a choice, not a necessity, and I personally regard them as a remarkably stupid choice.
Re:Happy Island County Democrat here!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow....all you need to do is replace 'Gore' and 'Gov. G' with 'Bush' and 'Rossi' with 'Gore', and you have exactly what Dems were saying after the 2000 election.
Funny how being on the other side of the issue can change your tune, isn't it?
Re:Happy Island County Democrat here!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Follow the Constitution (Score:2, Insightful)
He picked his court venue based on the politics of the court, which leaned Republican.
No evidence of fraud (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Definition of close (Score:3, Insightful)
Germany's invasion of poland was an attempt to combat terrorism. Poland was a clear and present danger to germany.
Government's always have a good excuse... but if you look at their actions you can see the truth. If Republicans wanted to protect the country from a diffuse threat like terrorism, they would support a diffuse defense, like private ownership of guns.
But they have taken the anti-gun position, with Bush calling for renewal of the AWB, etc.
After 9/11 Bush took no action to restore gun rights, but lots of action to make it harder on gun owners, and everyone else who might want to fly.
9/11 is an excuse, like the reichstag fire.
yep, still a loonie. (Score:3, Insightful)