[QUOTE=Zoe]
Be sure to explain to your daughter that most voters voted for Gore, but in our country, that’s not how you win the election.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I think 4 years old is a bit young to explain the electoral college, especially since a lot of adults still don’t understand that is the system we use.
But, I would guess that had the roles been reversed (Bush won the popular vote, but lost the EC) you would have liberals on this board talking about the “rules” and small states, etc. while the GOP would be talking about “popular will”
[QUOTE=Zoe]
Be sure to explain to your daughter that most voters voted for Gore, but in our country, that’s not how you win the election.
[/QUOTE]
And be sure to explain that if we did go by the popular vote, the campaigning would be done differently, voting patterns would probably be different, and it’s not clear that we would get the same results.
The whole point is that we don’t know because the electronic voting system is not open source. We’ve definitely seen the affects of rigged voting, and even demonstrated it in several instances with proof-of-concept Diebold hacks. It could be from ultra easy to moderately difficult (due to concealing effects like exit-poll statistical anomalies and paper ballot verification).
We do know “they” rigged it against Gore, against Kerry, and now against several people (Paul and Obama) which has become apparent especially in the NH primaries.
One Diebold machine can potentially effect the entire outcome of presidency - this is why you should ask for a paper ballot and try to get that unlawfully motivated company out of the election process.
As a computer security “guru,” I believe that we can and should have a successful electronic voting system one day. There was a great one in Canada created that has end-to-end cryptography, anonymity, and verification for every voter. If something like this were created in America, and was open source, the fraudsters would have a very difficult time getting votes for themselves.
It is of course illegal to directly prevent people from voting because of race, religion, etc., but there are ways around this. For example, in Florida they purged the voter rolls of all felons in 1998 and 1999, and also of all people with names similar to felons. This was completely legal, at least as far as the convicted felons go, since Florida disenfranchises convicted felons. (But the people who had names like felons – completely illegal of course.) And the thing is, felons tend to be disproportionately black. And blacks tend to vote Democratic. So the people with names like convicted felons who got disenfranchised were mostly Democratic voters. There were thousands of them. Bush won the election by 537 votes.
You can also get a friendly corporate CEO to provide you with hackable voting machines, as has been alleged in the case of Diebold, whose CEO actually publicly promised to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party in 2004. (There have been many allegations that Diebold machines are hackable, though to my knowledge no hack has been proven well enough to go to a court of law. The point of hackable machines, however, is that it’s impossible to trace the hacking on the models that don’t have paper trails.)
[/QUOTE]
You can also have people in the canvassing board mark votes for your candidate on voter’s ballots as the Democratic King County Board was found to be doing in a recent Washington gubernatorial election - all perfectly legal since state law allow the county to mark on people’s ballot to clarify their intent. I’m sure it was coincidence that this swung the election into Democrat Christine Gregoire’s favor.
[QUOTE=jtgain]
Well, I think 4 years old is a bit young to explain the electoral college, especially since a lot of adults still don’t understand that is the system we use.
But, I would guess that had the roles been reversed (Bush won the popular vote, but lost the EC) you would have liberals on this board talking about the “rules” and small states, etc. while the GOP would be talking about “popular will”
[/QUOTE]
My memory is fuzzy…but I think something like this happened right before the election. It was thought there was a chance that Bush would win the popular and Gore would win the electoral College. I seem to remember some top Democrats voicing their support of the EC.
{Speaking as one of the few that think the EC is a good thing and is more important than people realize…that if the EC went away the U.S would dissolve within 200-300 years…}
One way to rig an election is to send it to the Supreme Court, where the biased politically appointed judges can make deals. Don’t you recall when Bush won and the following month every justice was sporting new Prada items?
And the way to court is to confuse the count in one (or several) large states. Not hard, since there are thousands of precints all relying on indiviuals to send in ballots.
Bribe one official in four places to simply not send in a count, and there’s your lawsuit.
[QUOTE=BlinkingDuck]
{Speaking as one of the few that think the EC is a good thing and is more important than people realize…that if the EC went away the U.S would dissolve within 200-300 years…}
[/QUOTE]
Whereas if it remains, the US should endure about ten generations.
