Electronic voting machines cheat another Democrat out of an election

The BBQ Pit
61

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
I imagine if the Republicans had lost those elections in similar fashion, and said similar things, they would now have that stigma instead.
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You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. The Rove machine is the originator of the “sue your way to victory” strategy beginning in Alabama elections in the early 1990’s, and it has been used by Republicans several times since then. The Democrats are latching onto what is essentially a Republican invention. The fact that it’s blamed on the Democrats is a golden moment of the right-wing propaganda industry.

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[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Nowhere in that entire article did I see the words, “fixing” or “cheating”. Asking for a recount is one thing. Crying “voter fraud!” for years after the election is something else entirely.
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Does the irony of saying this in the same thread that you brought up Lyndon Johnson completely elude you?

Just wondering.

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It puzzles me that anyone who knows anything about computer programming, much less a PhD candidate in CS, would find electronic voting machines without paper trails to be MORE reliable than paper ballots. I’ve been a database programmer for some 7-8 years, and a computer programmer since 1977. I KNOW how easy it would be to program the system to throw, say, one vote in twenty to a given party of choice, then overwrite the program so that no trace is left at the end of the day. Until all electronic voting machines have a paper trail that can be verified by the voter *at the time s/he votes * AND counted manually if necessary, electronic voting machines aren’t secure in the least. Or don’t you think there are programmers out there who could be bought for $100K? Or a megabuck. Whatever.

This is aside from the security issues that at least in some cases could allow an on-site worker to tamper with the totals on a given machine. Yes, ballot boxes can be stuffed, but it’s not all that easy, and it would be much easier to be caught. All those bulky ballots to deal with, you see.

Electronic machines without verifiable paper trails are totally unsecure.

If there have been more complaints by Democrats than Republicans, it’s because of Diebold’s leader promising to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004. Whether by fair means or foul, he succeeded. It’s bound to raise some suspiscions.

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[QUOTE=Excalibre]
Does the irony of saying this in the same thread that you brought up Lyndon Johnson completely elude you?

Just wondering.
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Yes, it does. Would you care to elaborate?

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Lyndon Johnson was elected as Senator from Texas in an election that is virtually certainly bogus. He won by 211 votes after the ballot boxes for one district disappeared for several hours, only to show up later with just enough votes to give Johnson the election. Oddly, registered voters arrived at the polling station in alphabetical order, and signed thier names in the same, oddly colored pen ink.

Thereafter, he was known as “Landslide Lyndon”.

66

Yes, I’m aware of that. But what’s the irony?

See, I’m in agreement with you guys. I’m all for free and fair elections. I’m all for the idea of printing out ballots. As a matter of fact, I’d prefer to return to the tried and true method of checking the box on a piece of paper. I want the elections to be 100% legitimate. My position on this matter lies on the same path as yours.

That said, I’m tired of the accusations without proof. I’m tired of hearing that if a Democrat didn’t win he must have been cheated. I’m tired of hearing that people who vote Republican are morons, and that the only correct vote is Democrat, and because of that if the Democrat didn’t win it simply must be fraud because nobody would EVER intentionally vote for a Republican.

People can legitimately disagree with your viewpoint, and people can vote for people you think are total scumbags. That does not mean that there was fraud. It’s the equivalent of a kid losing a game and then crying to his mother about how Billy cheated him, when he lost fair and square.

Let’s do the reform. Please. Becuase that way, when your candidate (who is likely my candidate anymore) loses we don’t have to hear the bitching anymore.

As far as recounts go, I do not have, nor will I ever, have any objection to recounts when the result is that close. In fact, I had no problem with the recount in 2000, with one exception: the Constitution (actually, the 22nd Amendment) required that a new President be inaugurated by January 20th. Had the process continued that could not have happened. Somebody had to make a decision, and for whatever reason the Supreme Court made it, for better or worse. The Electoral College could have gone the other way, but they didn’t. And so here we are. Had there been time I would have been all for a total statewide recount in Florida. At the time, admittedly, I was satisfied with the results. That was then, and this is now, and I regret my vote in 2000, but all the same things are what they are, and yelling “fraud” when it either doesn’t exist or cannot be difinitively substantiated is fundamentally dishonest, and that’s why it pisses me off.

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[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Yes, I’m aware of that. But what’s the irony?

See, I’m in agreement with you guys. I’m all for free and fair elections. I’m all for the idea of printing out ballots. As a matter of fact, I’d prefer to return to the tried and true method of checking the box on a piece of paper. I want the elections to be 100% legitimate. My position on this matter lies on the same path as yours.
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I agree with you completely in sentiment here. But don’t kid yourself that the X in the box will eliminate fraud. Here in Chicago “missing” ballot boxes full of X’d ballots used to be “found” during the vote counts all the time.

I think one of the reasons I am so :rolleyes: about this subject where the democrats are concerned is because I live in a town that is SO liberal that I am still seeing bumper stickers and hearing people complain about how Bush really lost the election in 2000, and never should have been President, and he isn’t “my” President and blah blah blah. Really, after 6 years, you really need to get over it and face reality.

68

Take the recent election in San Diego . Can anyone defend the policy of letting the election workers take the machines home with them over night?

What’s more, the safeguards can be bypassed by rebooting

Are you 100% sure that the vote in the San Diego election was conducted honestly? I’m not. Polling showed the Democratic candidate ahead, but the final tally went the other way. We have a system whereby elections can be rigged with no evidence left behind. And there are some that say that the lack of evidence left behind means that you’re a sore loser if you raise questions about the integrity of the elections. Go figure.

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Airman, I keep running across your demand for proof in various threads. And here’s the thing:

Are you a programmer? Because I am. If you know anything much about computer programming, you will know that one thing programs can do is to overwrite themselves. It’s quite easy.

If my proposed scenario were to take place (in which a programmer was bribed to set up the voting machine to throw a certain percentage of votes one way or another, and then overwrite its own software at the end of the day), and there was no paper trail (which at this point I believe to be the case with the vast majority of voting machines in the country), there’s simply no way that you could find proof. Ever. Even if you found a corrupt programmer’s bought code on his own local disk, yiou could never prove that that was the code that had been in the voting machines in the field, rather than the “official” code. With one person to bribe, and one person to accept the bribe and do the work, it’s not like we’re talking a big conspiracy here. The miracle would be *finding * proof, NOT not finding proof.

You keep demanding proof. I’m telling you as a person in the field of programming that there can’t BE any proof if my scenario is one that ever happened. I’m also trying to show you that while I have no evidence to suggest it DID happen, it wouldn’t have been that hard to do. I think Karl Rove is a smart man, at least as smart as me and probably considerably more so. If I can imagine how to do it so easily, do you think he couldn’t? This is a man who appears to have outed a CIA agent for petty vengence and a long shot at discrediting her husband. Is there anything in his history to indicate to you that his morals are above that level?

I’m not saying anything wrong happened. I’m simply saying that suggesting it might have is, despite lack of any proof, NOT tin-foil hat territory, nor would it necessarily be sore-loser syndrome driving it. I’ve been yelling about electronic voting machines with no paper trails since well before the 2004 elections.

Right now, if it’s happening, it would seem the Republicans are driving it because of their greater (and in a few cases, quite unexpected) success in recent years. But as has been pointed out, it wasn’t so very many years ago (what, sixty or so?) that it was the Democrats who were the masters of fixing the vote. People of both parties should be screaming their heads off about this possibility, because it may be your own vote that gets magically changed next. I’m not of the “all politicians are complete scum” school of thought, but I’m not enough of an idiot to believe that all corruption or lack of principle sits on one side while the other side is pure and clean and shiny.

But if we sit around and wait for proof that someone has tinkered with the machines before we ever take measures to make it more difficult, it will never be fixed. No one is claiming that there is proof that the 2004 election was stolen, and you’ll notice that no one has demanded W’s resignation on that basis, at least that I’ve seen. The point now is that everytime someone tries to point out that there is a real potential problem here, they’re dismissed as whiny losers and demand proof that something untoward has occurred. Well, I don’t need to touch a burner to know it’s hot. Sometimes you can see risks and correct them first.

The thing that astonishes me is that *anyone * thought it was a good idea to make or buy an electronic voting machine *without * a voter-verifiable paper trail! This ain’t rocket science, folks. One programmer in the right job at the right time, one briber. That’s all it would have taken, and all it WOULD take.

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I’m sure you’ll understand that “my guy lost because of fraud, but you’ll have to take my word for it because I can’t prove it” is not a particularly good argument in a debate. You might as well tell me about chemtrails or near-death experiences.

Even if I concede that it can be done, which I will quite readily do, that in and of itself is still not proof that it happened. So what we should be discussing is the idea that the machines should be verifiable on principle, which some people are doing, not that the machines should be verifiable to keep the Democrats from being cheated again, because you can’t prove they were cheated in the first place. Two different arguments, one rational and the other one not so rational.

There would be widespread agreement, probably near-unanimity, on this point if the “we wuz robbed” crowd would stop advancing such a disingenuous argument. Of course, by now the two are inextricably linked, so every time this comes up it’ll end up the same way. More’s the pity.

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[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
That said, I’m tired of the accusations without proof. I’m tired of hearing that if a Democrat didn’t win he must have been cheated. I’m tired of hearing that people who vote Republican are morons, and that the only correct vote is Democrat, and because of that if the Democrat didn’t win it simply must be fraud because nobody would EVER intentionally vote for a Republican.
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I know I generalized about Democrats in the OP, but it’s not even about Republicans vs. Democrats. McKinney lost the primary to another Democrat, but just couldn’t concieve of the possibility that she lost fairly. No no no, it had to be the electronic voting machines. Sore loser.

72

[QUOTE=Oy!]
If my proposed scenario were to take place (in which a programmer was bribed to set up the voting machine to throw a certain percentage of votes one way or another, and then overwrite its own software at the end of the day), and there was no paper trail (which at this point I believe to be the case with the vast majority of voting machines in the country), there’s simply no way that you could find proof. Ever. Even if you found a corrupt programmer’s bought code on his own local disk, yiou could never prove that that was the code that had been in the voting machines in the field, rather than the “official” code. With one person to bribe, and one person to accept the bribe and do the work, it’s not like we’re talking a big conspiracy here. The miracle would be *finding * proof, NOT not finding proof.
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Isn’t this kind of assuming that everyone who’s auditing the program before it’s used is a complete moron? Don’t both parties get to look at the code in the machine before it’s used?

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[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
Isn’t this kind of assuming that everyone who’s auditing the program before it’s used is a complete moron? Don’t both parties get to look at the code in the machine before it’s used?
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What, you think each precinct, or *any * precinct has programmers who review the code before the voting begins? It’s probably in machine language at that point anyway - a programmer would have a hell of a time with it, let alone a lay person, and *certainly * couldn’t detect any hanky-panky in a 10 minute check unless they knew exactly what to look for. They usually just barely seem to get them on and running by start of voting, if that, from what I’ve heard in the news.

I’ve never heard of any auditing procedures anyway. Have I just missed it? (This is entirely possible.)

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[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
Isn’t this kind of assuming that everyone who’s auditing the program before it’s used is a complete moron? Don’t both parties get to look at the code in the machine before it’s used?
[/QUOTE]
I am a central player in my company’s ongoing (read: never-ending) Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit right now, and let me tell you, circumventing code review and version control is frighteningly easy. Our last few meetings have followed basically the same pattern: the auditors propose a control methodology, I examine it and explain how it can be bypassed, and the auditors blanch and schedule another meeting for a few days hence to give themselves a chance to formulate a new scheme. Rinse and repeat.

And you’ll note that Diebold et al. have steadfastly refused to release their code or permit any kind of independent review of their security procedures, ostensibly for “trade secrets” reasons. Trade secrets are important, yes, but when it comes to the integrity of my vote, which is our last collective line of defense between freedom and tyranny, you’ll have to forgive me if I absolutely fucking insist that they demonstrate the reliability of their systems out where I can see it.

75

I’m also heavily involved in Sarbanes-Oxley and auditors daily in my job as a financial database and application administrator. Whenever I want to make a change to an approved process or PL/SQL package, I have to prove that I:
[ol]
[li]got the change approved by two layers of management (my boss and the Director of Business Technology, sometimes the VP of Technology or CIO is involved in this step)[/li][li]throughly tested the new process in a test environment[/li][li]saved the results somewhere the auditors can get to it[/li][li]then got the process and test results approved by the same two layers of management again[/li][/ol]
This is all because most of the work my company does is contracted by the federal government, and if we don’t do everything exactly the way they want it done, they won’t pay us. Now, if there aren’t similar controls on electronic voting machines for any reason, I will admit there’s a problem.

So I guess my question becomes, can anyone show me documentation for what the process is for a machine to be approved to be used in the voting process?

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[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
I know I generalized about Democrats in the OP, but it’s not even about Republicans vs. Democrats. McKinney lost the primary to another Democrat, but just couldn’t concieve of the possibility that she lost fairly. No no no, it had to be the electronic voting machines. Sore loser.
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McKinney can’t concieve many things, like how to behave in public. IANAheadD but she is what is called a nut.

We all know this.

You seem to, and many commentators on the right also, link her to everyone who is in the same party.

77

[QUOTE=Zebra]
McKinney can’t concieve many things, like how to behave in public. IANAheadD but she is what is called a nut.

We all know this.

You seem to, and many commentators on the right also, link her to everyone who is in the same party.
[/QUOTE]

Can I help it that the Democrats are the only ones who cry “voter fraud” when they lose an election?

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My Lord, while it would be quite interesting, it almost is irrelevant. Do you honestly think that there is ANY process in place that could circumvent the determination of one of the programmers who wrote the code in the first place? People are people, not machines. “Wait a sec, I’ve got to run back to my desk to get my car keys - I walked off without 'em.” If things are set up properly in advance, that’s all it would take.

Even at highly secure facilities, most programmers tend to be laid back people who think most security regs are a stupid nuisance, which means that they’re often a little loose about going around them. And I doubt a voting machine manufacturer is as rigorous as a Top Secret classification facility. The assumption is that the programmers may screw up unintentionally, but not intentionally. And for probably 99.99% of us, that’s absolutely true.

You may wonder why I don’t have my panties in a twist about national security as well, then. Well, the primary reason is that most national security projects are BIG, and have multiple programmers working on the same code. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be much harder to pull a fast one in that situation. A piddling little electronic voting machine is NOT a big project, and would be unlikely to have more than a single programmer working on it. In that case, there’s a good chance that the programmer himself (or herself, after all, I’m a her) is the only person there who really can look at the code and understand it. Even if he left the offending code right out in the open (and we’re not talking a lot of lines of code here), you could easily have the following:

Manager: Well, what’s this bit doing?
Programmer: It’s doing a checksum to verify the widget paradigm. That way we don’t risk getting the shedelepp in the shticklegrumber. Remeber, it’s in the functional specification? You want the best possible quality, right? Isn’t that part of our corporate mission statement?
Manager: Oh. Yes, of course.

In a small (programming) shop with a non-tech manager, a conversation like that would be very easy.

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[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
Can I help it that the Democrats are the only ones who cry “voter fraud” when they lose an election?
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Actually, it wouldn’t make any sense if both sides were being victimized by electronic vote machine fraud.
And you could help it by telling your elected representatives that you insist on election safe guards like those mentioned in this thread.

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[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
So I guess my question becomes, can anyone show me documentation for what the process is for a machine to be approved to be used in the voting process?
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Well, yeah, but you’re in for some heavy reading. There’s a large handful of documents outlining Ohio’s requirements for the evaluation and certification of electronic voting machines here:

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/HAVA/hava.aspx?section=4

Enjoy!