Does Voting Technology Affect Election Outcomes? 383
l2718 writes "Two
economists have just posted a paper online, showing a small correlation between counties' use of paperless electronic voting systems and voting results in the recent presidential election (after controlling for other factors). They found no evidence for systematic fraud by testing several potential indicators. Rather, the voting method seems to affect the relative turnout of different voter demographies. Thanks to Election Law Blog for the pointer."
Cool Tech (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool Tech (Score:2, Informative)
Why not link to the actual paper, rather than a pay-to-view site?
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/dre.pdf [berkeley.edu]
It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:5, Interesting)
In the UK its even worse. They operate a first past the post system where for example 65% of the people may not vote for you but you can still be elected. Recently the LibDems got 6 million votes in the Euro elections and not 1 seat because of the system.
Here in Ireland, and several other European countries we operate Proportional Representation systems where by you can specify you preferred candidate and then a list of your 2nd, third choice etc. Its a system which represents the popular vote more accurately and helps avoid having candidates you are dimetrically opposed to foisted on you.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Actually I'm not entirely convinced that fancier voting systems represent the popular vote more accurately. Arrow's Theorem [wikipedia.org] says that it's always possible to game the system no matter what voting system you use.
The real problem, from my point of view, is the fact that we have a country divided enough that we
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, this could just as easily represent a nation of individuals, each torn individually between two parties and two candidates difficult to distinguish in morally ambiguous times.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Informative)
Here we usually call that "IRV" (Score:5, Insightful)
More on the parent's topic, here (US) we usually call that "IRV" - Instant Runoff Voting - and we're using it in some local elections.
http://www.fairvote.org/index.php?page=19 [fairvote.org]
And in response to one of the sibling posts, I strongly believe it does make a difference. Not in how much somebody can "game the system", but on how much the two parties matter - it gives a mostly fair shake to a third party candidate. Politicians here vote along party lines with reckless disregard to what they think about issues - like in the recent Bolton stuff. Because the parties have all the control.
I'd rate the partisan stranglehold as the top problem in US politics today.
I'd rate the elimination of most journalistic integrity from the popular media second.
I'd rate the ability of corporations to outvote citizens third. This is partly weak campaign finance laws and partly citizen apathy.
I believe that if we fixed these three problems most of the details would start to fix themselves.
Exit Poll Numbers Are Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to account for this, news agencies "normalize" their results once the election is in. This means that exit poll data is only useful to access what issues swung the election, and which demographics voted which way. They do not necessary reflect the actual outcome of the election. If you wanted to predict that, you would need to poll at every place of voting, and then normalize that with the number of people who voted at that station.
People should not have been surprised that the poll results differed from the election results. In a close election, this has a pretty good chance of happening. This is especially true when you consider that people living near large population centers (where most exit polls are taken) are more likely to vote democrat.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Actually, most people who claim bush is illegitimate correctly state that he never won the electoral vote. Instead, he appealed the the supreme court and forced the end to a recount mandated by florida state law.
In the end, after all the votes were counted, it was found that he actually lost the florida electoral college. The fact that Bush lost the popular vote is just another reinforcing reason. But definately not the ma
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Except for that time five years ago. And a couple others, I think.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
And Bush didn't even get a plurality in 2000.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Personaly, I'm beginning to think we should change the system so that the president is the one with the most votes, vice president is the runner up and sec state is the third place guy.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Actually, you would be going the other way... taking power from the state, if you disolved the electoral college. Trying to say that you are taking power out of your hands is just plain ludicrous. You _NEVER_ had the power to begin with.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
So over a third of the electorate couldn't be bothered for one reason or another (and if you don't bother, you're effectively supporting whoever wins).
In other words, about 1 in 5 people actively wanted the Labour party in power.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
In the US they say low turnout always favors the incumbent because it indicates that the challenger really hasn't motivated very many people to vote for her/him.
Don't just complain about it (Score:2)
IIRC the UK and US are the only two countries (there may be one other) that still use the "first past the post" system - its rediculous.
In the UK Labour said they would fix the voting system in 1997. Now they are saying that they have fulfilled that promise because they use proportional representation in various regional and EU elections, but the election that really matters, the one for Westminster, is still in the dark ages.
The Independent newspaper is pushing the issue, see this art [independent.co.uk]
Re:Don't just complain about it (Score:2)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
The fact is the two-party system is one of the greatest strengths of the United States. It forces compromise, and guarantees the largest proportion of the populated will be represented. It also provides stability because it makes it impossible for a radical leader to come to power. That is why we end up with Pres
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:2)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Informative)
e.g.
Labour, 36% votes, 55% seats
Tory, 33% votes, 30.5% seats.
Lib Dem, 22% votes, 9.5% seats
Others, 9% votes, 4.6% seats
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, and here's why in a simplistic example: Let's say you like party A, are ambivalent about party B and dislike party C. So you go to the polling place and vote for party A. Party A and B each get 45% of the votes and therefore 45% of the seats in the legislature whie party C gets a measly 10%. The leaderships of A and B, both immensely impressed with themselves and full of bluster, won't talk to each other to form a coalition over certain key issues. Party C's leadership approaches A and says 'Hey, we can work with you guys on some certain issues and get your legislation passed as long as you promise to vote our way on just a few of our pet issues.' OK, so the party you voted for is now working with the party whose platform you can't stand in order to get anything at all done. If you and a few others who were ambivalent about B but voted for A anyway knew that ahead of time, you probably would have voted for B and given B a majority to avoid all of C's policy positions. See the problem? With lots of parties to vote from, you never know who else your party is going to end up making a deal with to get legislation passed. And it isn't always with another party you like at all. WIth America's two (for practical purposes) party system you ALREADY KNOW the composition of the parties. On the Democrat's side, you have workers' unions and miscellany other socialists, the outright communists, the peaceniks, the greens, etc, and the Republicans have the religious right, business owners and other capitalists, etc. In either case, pick your poison, but at least you already know ahead of time who you're dealing with.
Re:It hardly matters very much (Score:3, Interesting)
You are illustrating one possible outcome amongst many in your example.
In practice, if a minority party holds the balance of power, then yes, deals will be made. But those deals will be based on common policies. If 40% of the parliament want X and 40% of the parliament are against it, the 20% minority party will side with the party that aligns with their policies giving them a 60%. But isn't that what democracy is about? Because presumably part of the reason they got the 20% was on the basis of their po
more /.ers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:more /.ers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:more /.ers (Score:3, Funny)
You obviously never worked at a helpdesk...
Re:more /.ers (Score:2)
I think you forgot about something [blogger.com.br]
Ack (Score:3, Funny)
red screen of death... (Score:2)
In Longhorn the BSOD has been replaced by a RSOD to correctly reflect the party colors of the your corrected voting choice as determined by the system.
Maybe the article is right for once? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the article is right for once? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they work most of the time, I'm nervous about a black-box machine with persistent (albeit non-fraudulent) technical problems just telling me who is in charge of the country without being able to provide any evidence. That's what causes the real alarm -- regardless of any fraud that did or didn't happen in the past, we need to find a way we can be reasonably sure it doesn't happen in the future, and desensitizing people to the enormous technical problems with existing e-voting systems is a huge step in the wrong direction.
Actually, you can see what is done with them. (Score:2)
With paper ballots, that is.
In theory, any citizen can watch the entire process.
Re:Actually, you can see what is done with them. (Score:2)
Re:Maybe the article is right for once? (Score:2)
Re: Maybe the article is right for once? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but how would you know that, when there's no paper trails, and no way to verify/make sure of that? I mean, if exit polls would confirm election results accurately, then you might as well do away with elections and use poll results instead to decide the outcome, right? Isn't the whole point of -honest- elections that voters can verify the proc
Re:Maybe the article is right for once? (Score:2)
You missed the most obvious: some researchers found problem, others didn't, and only the ones that didn't find problems get air time. This is a time honour
Two economists have just posted a paper online (Score:2, Funny)
Two economists are *selling* a paper online (for $5).
Spoiled Ballots+Margain of Error... (Score:5, Insightful)
Different voting methods have different methods of error. In fact, this is enough to throw an election to one side or the other. I havn't done the numbers for 2004, but I suspect they're somewhat similar.
To add on to that, the ruling for Bush v. Gore, in all reality, should have overturned practically ever election nationwide, as the jdugement that reducing the margin of error for some districts would cause an Equal Protection violation...
The different margin of errors cause that in the FIRST place. At least if the Surpreme Court was honest, they would have made it a precident, and forced the nation to clean (Read, Standardize) up the electoral system.
Re:Spoiled Ballots+Margain of Error... (Score:2)
What they can do, however, is force a state to comply with equal-protection in both policy and deed. A state can't legally declare that minority votes count as 3/5th that of a white male, or set up one understaffed polling place with few provisional ballots per minority-dominated county and multiple well-staffed and well-run polling places per white-dominated precinct.
Not enough info in the blurb. (Score:3, Interesting)
And they're looking at touch-screen tech and talking about paper-less machines.
It is possible to have touch-screen tech and a paper trail.
This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:5, Insightful)
Paperless designs violate absolutely basic, shockingly obvious, bedrock principles of security. There is a problem simply because I often don't have the vocabulary or metaphors to express to a disinterested layman how wrong a paperless voting machine is. It's like building a bank vault to hold the most valuable thing in the entire world, and refusing to include a lock for the door.
I frankly do not care if the study didn't show malfeasance _or_ some esoteric demographic effect this time. These machines need to go. And all the people who built them, approved them, and paid for them, need to be investigated.
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Don't worry about it (Score:3, Interesting)
You see, there are these things called safe seats, or safe states I suppose in the US. These safe seats and safe states can pretty much be ignored by all, allowing them to concentrate on seats/states which could potentially switch allegiance.
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, voting machines produced by Diebold have none of those protections. You know they could build those features into the machines very easily, yet they don't.
I wonder why that is?
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:5, Informative)
ATM - Receipt.
Voting machine - voter verified paper ballot.
This means that, after the voter verifies the ballot, it gets tossed in a box just like any other paper ballot, eliminating any connection to the voter, but providing a paper record should a recount be required.
Besides, if Diebold cannot provide a proer audit trail for a recount, then maybe we should just go to pure paper ballots and eliminate the technology (and the problem) entirely.
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
I don't know why they don't have paper trails; I suspect it's nothing sinister on their parts, just a lack of demand form voting officials.
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Diebold also fought several states that asked for paper records... but they're certainly not sinister... not Diebold... no sireee bob...
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Have the receipt be the ballot. (Score:2)
He drops the receipt in a sealed ballot box.
The machine adds up the votes at the end of the day.
If there's any question about vote fraud
the machine's displayed total
is checked against
the machine's internal tape
which is checked against
the sealed ballot box.
In case of error, the ballots in the sealed box are the official record.
That way you get instant results, 100% verfication and the voter can individually confir
Re:Have the receipt be the ballot. (Score:2)
Prove the ballots in the box are the real thing, and that they weren't all replaced.
Prove that the number of ballots in the box is the right number.
Prove the internal tape is wrong.
Prove the machine total is wrong
The very nature of secret ballots makes it impossible to guarantee accuracy. The best we can do is trust the voting p
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
In traditional paper ballots they have a list of names and you get removed from it when you vote. You then mark an anonymous piece of paper anonymously. These are 2 paper trails. These papertrails can be easily replicated by machine, and they can be done so securely. Secret Ballot still intact.
Diebold makes near 100% accurate ATMs. There's no convincing me they couldn't build a relative
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Actually, all of the voting machine vendors have paper ballot printouts as options, but most counties didn't want to purchase them - presumably because of the add'l cost of not only the printers/paper, but verifying the votes after the fact. I'm not saying that makes it right, but don't villify the mfr'r when the client (county) is actually th
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
The biggest argument I've heard (in fact, the only real one) is that people can *change* the stored electronic data. That's right, just like those with access to the "recorded count" from a paper system can misreport how a precinct voted. You cannot argue that an electronic system is inherently flawed because a county auditor was corrupt; th
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
No system is perfect, what we need is not a perfect system, but a thorough series of audits.
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Many, many, many, many others have already explained this in great detail and better than I probably could, but in brief:
Paper creates forensic evide
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Offhand I suppose at least one thing you are reffering to would be the supposed importance of a physical paper trail that allows for an audit and re-count. I fail to see how digital storage fails to allow for an audit or recount. Paper and digital storage both provide the ability to recount and one is near instentaneous, the other requires a machine process with a high (by comparison) margian of er
Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
I don't buy it... (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll never know because there is NO AUDIT TRAIL.
The system is broken and will not be fixed until we have voter verified paper ballots.
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
Changing a few electronic votes in every precinct with voting machines simply requires a corrupt programmer.
Changing a few paper votes in every precinct would require hundreds or thousands of corrupt poll workers.
Which is more likely?
Re:I don't buy it... (Score:2)
Black Box Voting has reported Diebold's central GEMS tabulator program contains two sets of books, and an operator can change the count with no audit trail. Again, these machines are connected to outside lines, where any sort of mischief can happen.
No
I'm in the UK and.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Machines wouldn't be any more difficult to trick since the same sort of system would apply.
So no, I don't think technology will help at all, the system is far too simple as it is. People can break it now and the only difference if we use machines is we can have errors or crashs which voids all former votes.
So no technology doesn't solve anything int his case, it just makes more problems.
Hand counting is more secure.... (Score:3, Insightful)
With machine counting, you place your trust in an individual or small group of individuals (i.e. those programming and running the machines) With only a few people responsible for the count, one person can affect a LOT of votes.
With hand counting, you place your trust in dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individuals. In this case, one person cannot affect nearly as many votes. This makes the cou
Re:Hand counting is more secure.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of the current UK system (Score:2)
Of course this *all* goes out the window with postal ballots, a bloody stupid idea as the large scale postal voter fraud in Birminham shows.
Re:I'm in the UK and.. (Score:2)
HOWTO: Affect electoral outcomes with comptuers. (Score:3, Interesting)
Under TECK, constituents contact their local office and, with call-back or in-person authentication, vote for bills and/or proxy their votes for bills before congress or state legislatures. Their representative is elected on the Open Proxy Party's political platform which has one plank: Their representative will vote the way the constituents say via their open proxies.
TECK is the seed technology for what is to become the US third-party that succeeds in dramatically decentralizing, reducing and changing politics for the better:
The Open Proxy Party.
The Open Proxy Party's honesty is assured in the most obvious manner imaginable: everyone can see how everyone is voting at any point in time. The current votes and proxies are published on a web page [laboratory...states.com] generated by an open-source computer program. Currently this program consists of around 120 lines of Perl code [laboratory...states.com] (not counting preformatted text like this) to tally and present the proxies for the public.
Electoral corruption is an opportunity for Open Proxy candidates to win against incumbents. Electoral corruption has alienated the vast majority of the voters from the political process. With foreign labor displacing hundreds of thousands of middle aged technical workers in the United States, who have now redispersed to lower-cost-of-living districts, there is a pool of potential candidates who are more than capable of operating the TECK websites, more than motivated to clean up the electoral process and more than available to work for the modest salaries paid to representatives in State legislatures. Moreover, the majority of voters are more than ready for a reform of the political process.
Installation
Just for the heck of it you might have a campaign kick-off party and invite all the un/der-employed computer people you can find to join the fun of doing the TECK installation. An under-employed live band with pot-luck can't hurt either and will keep expenses down.
You may want to send your guests home with a campaign statement along the following lines:
Re:HOWTO: Affect electoral outcomes with comptuers (Score:2)
Bad Logic (Score:2, Troll)
What if "irregularities" took place in lots of places, all of which favored Bush (by their own results)? That would include the more highly "
What can we conclude from this? (Score:3)
If anything, that perhaps there may not have been any fraud in the last election. Do we know this for certain? No. All they have are statistics. Does this mean that we should embrace a paperless vote, especially one that doesn't provide any means of verification/audit?? HELL no. This is something that requires a great deal of care- NOT the kind that we've seen exercised by the likes of Diebold. Knowing how the votes are processed is not an option- it should be public information, and it should be mandated by law. There are some things that are simply beyond the scope of "trade secrets".
The Alternative (Score:2, Funny)
SHAME (Score:2, Insightful)
AND
You have no way at all to check or confirm either vote totals, or the software that creates it.
AND
You have compelling evidence that your government lied to you in order to go to war, with major media conivance. Your media still lies to you. Distracts you
why you should vote, imho (Score:2)
meanwhile the less educated, less technical and less thoughtful people, who see only the convenience, vote in greater numbers
this could shift the outcome to candidates, and parties, who directly appeal to the shallow and more popular issues, directly leading to a shallow, populist government
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Does preannouncing affect outcomes? (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you think?
Re:Does preannouncing affect outcomes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea. You can change your mind and vote for the guy who is leading and win big bucks! No wait, there is no reward for voting the winner...guess your analogy doesn't work.
You underestimate the herd instinct and peoples pathetic desires to affiliate themselves with a winning team or brand. How many people do you see wearing shirts with "Abercrombe" or "Tommy" in big bold letters across the breasts? These pathetic people have actually paid money to become a billboard for the brand in the hope that being associated with a successful brand will make them seem like winners. If your candidate wins, you get to take part in celebrations that night - never mind that you chose that candidate because you thought they would win not because they should win. If you vote for the winning candidate, than you get to "fit in" with the majority of the population rather than a minority.
On the flip side, however, people who weren't going to vote because they thought their candidate would get enough votes anyway may turn out if early results show the opponent getting more votes.
They *did* find a correlation with Bush (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a very poor reason to throw away statistical results.
After dismissing the idea of fraud, they went on to say they think it is a turnout problem. Having an electronic machine turn away voters seems just as unlikely of a theory.
Re:They *did* find a correlation with Bush (Score:2)
But a better predictor would be income. It's not inconceivable that the poor would have less experience with and less liking for computers, and the poor swing heavily Democratic.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/st a tes/US/P/00/epolls.0.html [cnn.com]
High School Statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
Correlation does not indicate causation
For example, there is a strong correlation between the IQ of somebody and the number of books they have on a bookshelf. I guess we'd all better go fill our shelves with books so our IQ's go up!
--James
ignoring the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
We first show that there is a positive correlation between use of touch-screen voting and the level of electoral support for George Bush. This is true in models that compare the 2000-2004 changes in vote shares between adopting and non-adopting counties within a state, after controlling for income, demographic composition, and other factors. Although small, the effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some closely contested states. While on the surface this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a closer examination suggests this interpretation is incorrect. If irregularities did take place, they would be most likely in counties that could potentially affect statewide election totals, or in counties where election officials had incentives to affect the results. Contrary to this prediction, we find no evidence that touch-screen voting had a larger effect in swing states, or in states with a Republican Secretary of State.
Um, folks, maybe the people who programmed the machines were a little more interested in winning a federal presidential election than who gets elected dogcatcher in Podunk, Ohio? There's a fallacious assumption here that the alleged fraudsters would have to be the local election officials. If you're going to hack the vote, you don't make it obvious--you do the absolute minimum required in order to sway the results your way.
People have lost their minds... (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, both the Democracts and Republicans have so gerrimandered voting districts as to give each party unending total control of entire areas. The Democrats and Republicans have created laws across the country which require that political party selection be open to everyone, so that they can send in their people to sabatoge smaller political parties like the Libertarians and the Greens (Democrats even openly organized and then claimed credit when they sabatoged Nadar's bid for the Green nomination). Democrats and Republicans openly call people, and ask them their names, and if they are going to vote in the next election, so that they have a list of who is not going to vote in a district in the next election. They then send their activists to vote in those districts as the people not voting. The Democrats and Republicans limit the amount of money that people can give to political parties, thereby ensuring that only candidates who are part of the two large parties are able to advertise.
If you voted for Democrats and Republicans, you knowingly and willingly voted for a party that commits widespread electorial fraud. Most of it is completly in the open and in public record, and the stuff that isn't is easy to see/confirm for yourself by volunteering for one of the big parties. You have to either be retarded, or completly brainwashed and blinded by your alegence to the Democrats or Republicans not to think those parties engage in vast widespread election fraud.
So, if you voted for Democrats or Republicans, shut up already. "Boohoo, the Republicans stole the election with electronic voting machines"... well, Democrats, I can see you can be a little upset that the other party was a lot more sophisticated that you were in their attemps at fraud... but neither the Democrats or Republicans can make any sort of moral arguement against the fraud of the other. Fraud acusations are something that Democrats and Republicans throw at each other when they have been beat at their own fraud game.
much more compelling evidence to the contrary (Score:4, Informative)
A paper came out shortly after the Nov '04 election showing how exit poll data differend from official tallies in Florida, Ohio & Pennsylvania. Exit polls in all 3 states showed a Kerry win. Official results has Bush winning Florida & Ohio, and Kerry winning Pennsylvania by a much smaller margin than exit polling showed. Given the long, accurate-within-a-margin-of-error track record of exit polls, the probability of the exit polls being that wrong in all 3 states is 662,000 to 1.
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.ht
And who decides to not vote just because e-vote machines are in use? The method used to cast my vote at the polling station is the LAST thing on my mind when I go to vote.
Recently, UniLect had their e-vote machines decertified in Pennsylvania, thanks to the efforts of 1 citizen who coughed up $450 for a re-evaluation of their functionality. The results were pretty embarassing for UniLect, to say the least, and I'm baffled as to how this wasn't discovered BEFORE the election: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001364.htm [bradblog.com]
ES&S's explanation for the thousands of extra Bush votes counted by their machines in Franklin County, Ohio in Nov '04 was that the card reader they had hooked up their tabulation laptop was sending the data to the laptop too quickly for the laptop to process it, so some data got dropped. This is either a huge lie, or only demonstrates some magnificent incompetence in ES&S's development team: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001184.htm [bradblog.com] Either way, they should also have their e-vote machines decertified. Here's to hoping.
The Miama Herald also reported this week that their ES&S machines counted more votes than voters in Nov '04: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001390.htm [bradblog.com]
And the fact that Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc, sent a fundraising letter to Republicans in Ohio in 2003 saying that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" casts doubt on the legitimacy of all reported results from Diebold machines in Ohio in Nov '04.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h
I realize that nothing that humans do is perfect, but these e-vote machines used in '04 show a definite trend towards "much less perfect" than in previous elections.
Re:much more compelling evidence to the contrary (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at a map of NY state by county for last election. If your exit pollers were in NYC or Albany, Kerry was winning. If your pollers were anywhere else in the state, the state would be going to bush.
It's true for all exit polls, they're only as useful as the data they cover. Since exit polls don't cover every voting location, they're only good for data at the locations they do cover.
Re:much more compelling evidence to the contrary (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/d o nkeyrising/archives/000940.php [emergingde...weblog.com]
Specifically:
Consider this. The unweighted--completely unweighted--data from the last four presidential elections before this year are as follows:
1988: Dukakis, 50.3; Bush, 49.7
1992: Clinton, 46; Bush, 33.2
1996: Clinton, 52.2; Dole, 37.5
2000: Gore, 48.5; Bush, 46.2
President
Buy my paper for $4.99 (Score:2, Funny)
Of course with no way to verify the actual votes neither papere actaull worthy of anything.
Re:Diebold Errors (Score:5, Interesting)
Broward County, FL: ES&S
Franklin County, OH: Danaher Control
Craven County, NC: ES&S
Carteret County, NC: Unilect
LaPorte County, IN: ES&S
Sarpy County, NE: ES&S
Nice FUD
Re:Diebold Errors (Score:3, Interesting)
80% of the votes cast in the US is counted on machines they coded.
Re:Diebold Errors (Score:2)
Re:Diebold Errors (Score:3, Informative)
I think this does a pretty good job of explaining why exit polls resulted in such a poor estimate of election results.
That report has been discredited. [electionarchive.org]
Re:Don't blame Diebold. Blame Edwards. (Score:2)
For letting it get so close that it could be stolen. If Kerry had run a truly effective campaign, he would have been 10 points ahead in the polls and even Diebold would not have been able to overcome that deficit.