I’m in a good mood. So to answer the OP, here’s some accusations of voter fraud:
And in the interest of fairness, here’s an
Sorry, didn’t mean to hit submit.
As I was saying, in the interest of fairness, here’s ABC report that lists all the complaints of voting irregularities made throughtout the country by both parties.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEE-haaaaaah!!!
We took the House.
Statistics show we have the Senate.
Rumsfeld Gives Up?
Sorry if this is covered elsewhere. I just gotta gloat…
When did I say that I had a problem with that?
You’ve missed my point - there is no evidence of systematic vote rigging. Just like there is no evidence of systematic vote rigging in 2004. However, the Democrats won this election, and therefore are not making unsubstantiated allegations.
The standard changes depending on who wins. Thus it is unlikely that it is commitment to a standard that is driving this kind of behavior.
As I mentioned before, I don’t believe you.
You (not you in particular, the Democrats and the Usual Suspects on the SDMB) can change my mind by making dozens of posts in the next two years alleging that there is reasonable evidence for vote fraud in the 2006 elections, setting up a Congressional committee to investigate “What Went Wrong” in states that Democrats won, complaining after the fact that ballots that your party approved in advance were really misleading (in states that you won only), and doing the other things that lead me to conclude that it is mere partisan whining instead of alleged commitment to fairness.
Or you can drop the subject quickly for lack of evidence, as you should have in 2004.
Regards,
Shodan
So you firmly believe that we should only worry about the problem of ballot fraud, accountability and verifiability after we can prove something has gone badly wrong?
What a lamentable attitude. I do hope you’re not in any sort of engineering field.
Actually more like “why do you only worry about ballot fraud after you lose?” That’s what went “badly wrong” with the 2004 election (for Democrats). Which, as I mentioned, is evidence that accountability and verifiability are not really what concern you.
Regards,
Shodan
Hey, asshole, how’s it feel? Ready to get on a swiftboat and head up…erm, Dubya’s bunghole? Oooops! Never mind. Forgot that’s been your place of residence over the past six years.
Regards,
~Red
All of the ones in Pennsylvania have already been investigated and been found to be without merit. There were malfunctions, but 1) all were discovered rapidly, b) all were found to be human error in programming inasmuch as it was mistakes in lists of names rather than systemic errors that would come from, say, Diebold, and c) everybody who showed up got to cast a ballot, be it electronic or paper. See, we had allegations here where a straight ticket vote for Republicans would magically turn into straight Democrat, and it was found to be baseless. Which is exactly how it is supposed to work.
That is the limit of this discussion from my point of view. I’m referring strictly to the “Diebold fixxor3d teh elec+10n5!!!one11!!” contingent here. I have no reason to doubt that voter intimidation happened, because it always does and it always has. Paper ballots won’t solve that problem. No, I’m simply commenting on the deafening silence from the conspiracy theorists because the Diebold/Rove vote rigging conspiracy either didn’t exist or it went their way and winners never complain, and I’m curious as to which of the two it is.
I’m not a Democrat, I’m not in the USA, I have neither won nor lost anything, and I am still concerned that electronic voting machines are inherently unreliable.
You, on the other hand, seem intent only on being an abject prick. And what a good job you’re doing! It’s profoundly depressing that wanting accurate ballot results is now apparently an undeniably partisan statement, but I guess we have dickheads like you to thank for it. Well done indeed.
Oh yeah,
“Regards”
I sense that you feel you’re a victim of something, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is.
I don’t feel as though I’ve been victimized at all by the election results. It’s simply an inconsistency that grates on my nerves. After all, the results on Tuesday were exactly what I wanted.
I suppose I could better illustrate this with an analogy. Think of the Republicans and the Democrats as two football teams. Both sides have their fans, but the Democrats regularly feel as though their team is cheated by the Republicans. People who follow these games allege cheating but cannot prove that it happens.
Well, the season goes on and the teams are playing for the championship (read: election). The Democrats, leading up to the game, are laying the groundwork for a protest because they think that they will be cheated again, even though there is no evidence of such because it’s more of an inkling rather than a tangible thing. As the game goes on, imagine their surprise when they not only win, but win big! All of the calls seem to go their way. They walk away from the huge victory patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves, ignoring the fact that they had been posturing themselves for months for a challenge. Now, when someone asks them about the results, they are forced to say that either the fix was in for them or it was all their imagination, that there was no fix, their inkling was wrong.
That’s basically what we have here. A large outcry over a perceived fix diminishes to nothing because their team wins. There’s a certain dishonesty that comes from holding that position leading in but not acknowledging it afterwards. I’m putting the spurs to people because I have engaged in debates about this very topic and I was told that I was dead wrong, when, as it turns out, I was anything but wrong. It’s one of those nagging things that won’t go away, similar to the people that beat me up for a few years due to my (erroneous) initial support of the Iraq invasion. This time I feel vindicated and I’m firing a few shots of my own back. If there is any feeling of victimization, that’s what it is.
Doors, I think you’re vastly, vastly overstating any pre-emptive laying of the groundwork for claims of fraud. I routinely tour a host of what you might consider left-wing blogs. I can recall very little in the way of discussion of the sort that you’re talking about. There were a number of stories about just how easy it would be to tamper with these electronic voting machines, but I think that’s something we should all be very concerned about. Don’t you?
You also continue to put forth the appearance that past claims of fraud were based on nothing but sheer speculation and fabrication. This is not the case. If there are any cases of fraud here and now, as well as in the past, I welcome their investigation.
Well, there was enough smoke and not enough fire hydrants for there to be concern about the reliability of elections, whether or not it proved true that Democracy had already burned to the ground.
The problems with your rant are that the complaints about polling practices don’t always come from Democrats, nor did they vanish this year. Nor did they always take the shape of widespread conspiracy theories, but more often took the form of legitimate anxiety over the reliability of the machines and the lack of a verification system.
In your analogy, I think refs can blow enough calls to cost a team a win once in a while, and such a suspicion is hardly disproven because it doesn’t happen in every single game… just a few close ones, where sloppiness makes more of a difference. Moreover, complaints would come from fans of all teams involved, and few fans would say the refs were actually get paid off to fix games, just that they fucked up and they’d like to see a more carefully officiated game. It would be quite a strawman to say that only one team bitches about the officiating, that they all believe the game is fixed, and that their concerns about officiating vanish when their team wins.
No. We are forced to say that we still don’t know what the fuck happened and the reason we don’t know what the fuck happened is that a large contingent of people don’t care and don’t want anyone else to care.
There was some shit going on, believe it. Do a Google for Tam Nguyen. It seems someone (not him of course and nobody that had his approval of course yada yada yada) was caught making threatening calls to voters (he didn’t authorize it of course yeah right). Google it if you wanna know more. So there was shady stuff going on.
Doors, fight your vast ignorance on this topic and then get back to us.
A great start: Black Box Voting
Enough factual information there to convince all but the most partisan of Republican voters.
I’ve wanted to say this for a very long time: Shodan, you are a magnificently spectacular douchebag. You may very well be more out of touch with reality than even the administration for whom you gleefully play the part of Salacious Crumb. You’re vile and nasty with no principles or brainpower to back it up.
Let’s try this another way. Forget about Democrats and Republicans. The losers of the last elections called fraud and requested recounts and demanded impartiality. The winners did not have to do any such thing, because they won.
In the current election, the losers again should be the ones to demand impartiality, call for recounts, and intimate fraud if they wish. The winners, again, do not have to do anything, because they won.
Is this getting through, you pathetic fleck of Cheney’s loose stool? The losers have the right to call for investigations if they believe there is something worth investigating, and the winners have the ethical responsibility to accomodate them within reason.
To demand that Democrats attempt to refute their own success is to expect them to be more than human. There needs to be accountability and accurate vote counting, but if the loser isn’t going to press the investigation, the winner is under no obligation to do so.
Further, if there has been no vote tampering, great, fine, awesome. But you prove yourself to be slimy, vacuous, disgusting, and completely uncredible when you absolutely refuse to even allow investigators to look inside the box to make sure everything’s running smoothly. When you insist on standing in front of the box and going “Nope, nothing’s in there, everything’s fine, there’s no evidence of fraud, you don’t need to look” then you show yourself to be someone who truly does not care about ensuring fair play and the democratic process. You also help to prolong the process, because those of us concerned about such things can not be satisfied that things are operating as they should, and thus these tiring proceedings must be dragged out past the point of reasonability.
You, sir, are no gentleman.
A thing of beauty, BayleDomon.