Sorry if using my brain disturbed you from your Republican denial mantra. The first thing you should do when examining claims is think logically about them. The next step would indeed be an examination of whether or not this is true. That would constitute … get this … an investigation. Logical thought can lead to investigations, you don’t NECESSARILY have to have proof of the thing you’re investigating, before you try to discover whether or not such proof exists. For example, one of the things Pat Fitzgerald was investigating was whether or not a crime had been committed. All he KNEW was that there was a published report that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. But he DEDUCED that someone might have leaked that information. Amazing, eh?
And I DID some research and discovered that the Diebold machines all use a central tabulating unit called GEMS, which is the VERY part of the program that’s most susceptible to hacking! So all those cites stand! (No, really, no need to thank me.)
Actually, no. The original poster said the quotes only showed the Diebold machines had security holes which made fraud very easy to commit, and that that did not constitute proof of fraud. This is true. And the basic fact that Diebold machines are easier to cheat with than a travelling gambler’s dice collection has not changed at all.
It seems to me that if we have strong evidence of electoral vote fraud by means other than Diebold machines (and some allegations about Diebold machines) and strong evidence that Diebold machines can be easily hacked, we have to investigate the possibility that they WERE hacked. I’m afraid that now the only argument you have is IOKIARDI. Good luck with that!
Uh, O’Dell’s statement - the one you’re taking issue with - was in a fundraising letter, so I dunno what exactly your comment is protesting. And you’re still deliberately ignoring a couple basic facts.
Fact One: Only 13 (of 88) counties in Ohio used Diebold machines in the 2004 general election. Quit trying to expand use of those machines over the entire state.
Fact Two: Diebold’s machines were certifed through indpendent testing executed by an impartial company. The State of Ohio approved Compuware’s test plan. Diebold had no part in the certification testing of these machines.
You might also be interested in learning (but I strongly doubt it) that the certification tests in Ohio uncovered more deficiencies in the electronic voting machines (and not just Diebold’s AccuVote-TS system, but the other two systems manufactured by other vendors eventually certified and also used here) that did the certification tests in other states - such as California. The recommendations of Compuware regarding these additional deficiencies uncovered in the Ohio tests, were generally implemented everywhere. The certification tests in Ohio were actually more stringent that those of many other states.
Who am I trying to convince? One person, and one group. The one person is you. The group is everybody else reading the thread.
Of what am I trying to convince people? You, I am trying to convince to produce some evidence of vote fraud. Everyone else, I am trying to convince that you have produced no evidence, and are merely slinging mud.
How well am I doing? With everyone else, not badly - there seems to be general agreement that the title of the OP is false and misleading. None of the “cites” produced to date rise to the level of serious evidence of vote fraud, as UncleBeer has pointed out.
With you, it is harder to tell. This is not surprising, since you have already demonstrated your willingness to ignore calls for evidence, your mischaracterization of the situation, and the general pattern of accusation instead of evidence that permeates what you have posted to date.
My general rule of thumb is that, when you misrepresent or ignore a point I have made, or begin calling me a liar, then that means I have gotten thru on some level. It seems to be the only way in which you react to being refuted.
IOW, the fact that I have not convinced you does not discourage me. I never expected you to admit when you are wrong. That’s not the point. You merely exist (on this messageboard) for my amusement in seeing your ignorance being ground up and tossed aside, and participating in some way in the process. If I can convince some others along the way, so much the better.
As I mentioned earlier, your impact on my thinking is quite small. You aren’t that kind of a poster.
You’ve followed up an inaccurate statement with inaccurate speculation.
The big scandal in Ohio politics has been the loss and alleged embezzlement of millions of dollars in poorly supervised state investments by a businessman with high-level connections to GOP bigwigs. Generalizing from that or any other example of political corruption/ethics violations to say that must mean elections were being rigged too, is foolish.
The same State of Ohio State Dept run by the same guy who was Bush’s campaign chairman did, that is. What’s the difference between Blackwell and Katherine Harris, exactly?
That other people could have done something too, if they’d been in a position to, implies exactly nothing about what Diebold and Blackwell did or did not do.
If you want to continue to defend your party’s stonewalling, that’s your choice. But do consider that credibility must work both ways.
Thanks for deprecatory object lesson. But you’ve got a problem. You need facts to determine the validity of your logical thinking. You cannot objectively determine the truth of something without a concrete hook to hang it on. In any case, I’ve not said that an investigation would be inappropriate. I’m only making the claim that your logical inferences aren’t quite compatible with the known facts. If you can get these things to mesh a bit better, I’m with ya.
Your research is lacking. The centralized tabulator - GEMS - is centralized by voting precinct; it collects only the votes cast at a single site. It then, at operator behest, creates reports which can be sent to the state election boards for analysis and collating. There isn’t one large computer collecting and collating all the data from across the nation, or even across a single state. So those citations still fall well short of evidencing electronic vote fraud in the 11/04 general election voting in Ohio. That’s the allegation in the OP and the only claim I’m taking issue with here. But if you’re so fond of logical inferences, based on not even a solitary concrete data point, then try this one on: California doesn’t give a shit about the dozens of l local school system tax levies that may be on the ballots in Ohio; why would a nationwide centralized tabulation of all this useless data be needed?
You got that right. Be kinda silly of me to thank you for a bad assumption based on misleading information. But hey, I’m glad to hear you finally did some research. That’s a step in the right direction; you’re one up on some of your like-minded brethren here.
Title of the thread: “GAO report upholds Ohio vote fraud claims.” Seems at variance with what you’re saying. Besides, the “original poster” didn’t actually “say” shit. He’s got a thread title, a link, and a quotation from some chickenshit newspaper editorial which vastly overstates the contents of the GAO report it alleges to summarize. Looks a fuck of a lot like a december OP, but nobody seems to give a shit about that.
Again with this crap? Just because somebody can do something, doesn’t mean it’s been done. When you’ve got some evidence, or even a structured chain of inference, that somebody tampered with the data, then we’ll talk about an investigation. Opportunity (and even opportunity combined with motive) isn’t sufficient to begin an investigation. Still gotta have a body - ya know, a fact. It’s also not known from that memo which particular version of the software they’re talking about. And that memo was written in 10/01 - a full three years before the 11/04 elections happened (and more than two years before the certification tests in Ohio). There ain’t hardly any software that doesn’t have a major version release in that kinda time frame. If you wanna use that memo as evidence of a flaw in the software, you’ve gotta be able to show that they’re talking about the identical product. My intuition tells me they ain’t, but that doesn’t necessarily mean shit. It could very well be identical software under discussion, but that’s a fact that you’re gonna have to prove.
I guess I dunno. I thought you were making the claim that some methods of making a statement like O’Dell’s might be more acceptable than others - like in a fundraising letter rather than a company press release. I confessed I didn’t understand your point.
Obviously, it reduces the opportunity for vote fraud commited by Diebold’s management. If you remember, one of the legs of the tripod of inference put forth by the people advocating an investigation here is opportunity; the other two being means and motive. If opportunity is reduced, then the whole inference is weakened. And it should actually make it easier then to find patterns which might be indicative of fraud.
Yeah, it’s true (and a little troubling) that Blackwell was a Bush campaign operative, but there’s no evidence that Blackwell has done anything wrong. You’ve got an inference (and a veiled accusation), but no evidence of any misdeed.
Well, it says to me that Ohio’s certification plan was more rigorous, and thus less susceptible to tampering, than other states might have been without Ohio’s qualification testing. This tells us that Blackwell did a more complete job than, say, California, so accusations of complicity between him and Diebold are shakier. Again, reduction in opportunity.
I’m a member of no politcal party. I have no agenda here except a demonstration that objective facts showing electronic vote fraud in Ohio in 11/04 are substantially lacking.
There’s an interesting philosophical twist to this debate… many on the conservative side are asking (rightly) for any evidence that a crime has been committed, rather than evidence that a crime could have been committed.
But what if the crime is one such that it would leave no evidence at all? That is, suppose hypothetically that there WAS vote fraud pushing 1% of votes from Kerry to Bush. Would the evidence available to us today be any different than the evidence available if Bush won honestly by 0.5%?
I’m not saying that I believe there was vote fraud. I’m saying that if someone is claiming that a crime was committed, and providing an argument that it could have been committed while leaving no evidence, then saying “ahh, but where is evidence of this crime?” is a stupid response. Where that leaves us, I’m not quite sure.
(Most crimes, by their very nature, leave evidence that a crime was committed. If you commit murder, there’s a dead guy. If you steal something, its rightful owners no longer have it. But something like vote fraud is different than that… there might NEVER be evidence that it was committed…)
Someone sees something that causes them suspicion (understandably). They start looking to see if their suspicion has any basis in fact. If they find some indication that a potential for real concern exists, that is, that there is a credible reason to believe that a “bad thing” has happened, then you call for a formal investigation of the situation. If that investigation turns up evidence sufficient to lead at least some people (those who are tasked with making formal charges on behalf of “the people”) to conclude that there is no reasonable doubt that a crime has occurred, then criminal charges get brought.
Here, we have an understandable reason to be suspicious (the head of the company making vote tally machines involves himself in an election in which the machines will be used, and does so not only by stating an obvious political bias in favor of one of the candidates but asserts he will do anything to accomplish the goal of re-electing that person). If you aren’t suspicious when that happens, you are an ostrich. So we look around to see if there is evidence that someone jiggered the vote count using the machines produced by that company. After looking into it carefully, all that we can determine is that there might have been the potential for someone to jigger the results, but there isn’t any evidence anyone did jigger the results.
Is this enough for an investigation with formal subpoena powers, etc.? Some might think so, and (here is the important point) no one has said “don’t investigate.” Indeed, as I pointed out, Bricker conceded early in the thread that an investigation would be fine.
But unless and until such an investigation happens, and more evidence than is extant at present exists to create a real belief that a crime occurred, it is irresponsible to accuse someone of crime. You are left with simply suspecting that a crime occurred. And that is where it needs to be left.
It is not possible to commit a crime without evidence. It might be possible to commit a vote-tampering crime without leaving evidence that is easily discoverable; the crime, if committed, might go undiscovered. But, if so, so what? You wouldn’t know it had happened, so you can’t accuse someone of having had it happen. Duh.
Then we’re agreed than an investigation would be appropriate. Why are you arguing with me? Habit?
You and I have different takes on the issue. I take the OP as just saying the GAO account supports the notion that an investigation of the Ohio vote is in order. Which you agree with. We’re not actually at odds here.
I agree that a demonstration that a fraud is possible … nay, easy in this case … does not constitute proof that fraud was committed. But in conjunction with all the other indicators, it does lend suppor t to the notion that a fraud may have occurred. For example, as Christopher Hitchens noted in the Vanity Fair piece, almost ALL of the vote counting “errors” favored Bush over Kerry. How the hell did that happen? Could it be that they were symptoms of a widespread hack on the Deibold machines that showed up as ridiculous errors in some cases … but went undetected in most? Seems more likely than “coincidence.”
If I had hard EVIDENCE of a fraud, I wouldn’t be calling for an investigation to see IF a crime had been committed, I be calling for prosecution of the offenders. Is that distinction really so hard to grasp?
How do you distinguish between a situation where a crime was committed but left no evidence, and a situation where no crime was committed? How do we know, in other words, that the Illuminati haven’t rigged every election since Taft?
Not at all. I’d agree an investigation is merited if:
If you believe that we’re in agreement, you can only have reached this conclusion by ignoring an all-important modifying clause of my statement - just as you’re ignoring the facts which point away from vote fraud. There’s a condition which you (or anyone else in this thread) must meet before you and I can be in agreement. You’re claiming victory before the game is over. I’m arguing with you because I don’t believe you have sufficient evidence to support your call for an investigation. I’m arguing with you in an attempt to bring some facts into your opinion.
Well, since the OP is devoid of any real content, it seems a reach to say there are any claims in there. And if we look at the actual GAO report which the linked news story in the OP is ostensibly summarizing (and even here we have to assume that we indeed have the correct GAO report since there are no concrete facts linking the two), we find that it has nothing to say about Ohio specifically - well almost nothing. “Ohio” appears in but a single instance in the body of that report. (And again you’re telling me that we’re in agreement when we are not. There are conditions which I do not believe have been met placed on my call for an investigation.) Here’s what the GAO report has to say about Ohio:
The footnote appended to this statement refers the reader to this document: http://www.electionline.org/Portals/1/Resource%20Library/Franklin.County
.OH.2004.pdf That document is concerned solely with Franklin County, Ohio - which didn’t even use the Diebold equipment in the 11/04 general election. That document also has a very detailed description of the error, its root cause, and a proposed corrective action. The misreported results favoring Bush were “unofficial” anyway. The error was caught and corrected through the normal means employed for such. Kinda hard to believe this was an attempt at fraud.
I don’t know and I don’t much care. Please review the scope of my interest in this thread. In any case, “almost all” does not equal “all.”
Also pertinent here, is Hitchens doesn’t even really believe what he said - at least not with equivocation. He claims early in his article that “in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.” He makes this claim, then his examples of anomalies (to use his term) do not seem to show a preponderance of errors favoring Bush, or disfavoring Kerry. Finally, near the end he says he could discount all the anomalies he’s mentioned so far - unless "all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" And he hasn’t shown that anywhere near all the anomalies in fact meet this conditional pattern. He also bases his supposed concern on an unnamed anonymous source; troubling at best. If this person is so certain that fraud has occurred, and that it is so easy to commit, why hasn’t she stepped forward?
If we have only non-paper-trail-generating electronic voting systems that have massive security flaws, we DON’T.
(Although for this to a be real concern, the election has to be plausibly close… it would be nonsense to argue that Reagan’s 1984 victory was fraudulent, for instance.)
After using the Deibold system for the first time in Ohio I don’t see the point of the debate. It’s an auditable system. If electronic vote A matches audit printout B then where is the controversy?
I personally prefer the old system (punch cards) because they are the most cost-effective way to vote. If we have to spend the extra money on the new system then I’d like 2 printouts (1 for me) and a voting stamp that would allow me to look up my vote on the Internet as a personal audit.
Just to make it clear, I’m not against the new machines, I like the way they work. However, anyone who would personally complain about the complexity of the punch ballot will always find fault with each change in technology. No amount of money will make these people happy. Therefore, the cheapest, most reliable system should be used.
I thought the criteria for all Ohio machines was auditability (paper or otherwise). Not to sound like I just moved from Misouri but I found it tough to believe any party would except anything less.