I’m in favor of doing something.
What, though? I just don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease.
Such a statement would seem to indicate you have some idea of a bad result coming into existence, due to an effort to inject fairness into the process. Tell me, what scenario do you envision?
Um, yeah, what do you see would be the potential disqualifying problem with making electronic voting machines independently verifiable?
You *say * you want to do something; let’s have it then.
Same-day registration as a solution = too much potential for fraud. No reason that voters cannot be required to register in advance.
I don’t think I have a problem with that.
Thank you. At least you’ll say that. You just spared me from ripping all my hair out. 
Heh. “I’m going to tell you a story I’ve never told any reporter…”
In fact, there’s strong evidence that it was not; the much discussed comparisons between the exit polls and the actual results showed no difference between those places with optical or other electronic voting machines and those with more traditional kinds of ballots. That of course does not forestall the possibility of it happening in the future and I believe that these new systems need to be scrutinized. However, the old ones need scrutiny too.
I believe, and have stated on many occasions, that our election system is poorly equipped to handle close races and that it needs to be improved. Do you know that they found another 90 ballots in the Washington governor’s race just the other day? Or that Milwaukee counted 7,000 more ballots than it had voters show up? A fair-minded person might conclude that instead of Kerry “winning” Ohio Bush might have won Wisconsin!
But even though I believe that a proper reform and improvement in vote registration and counting would on balance help candidates I like more than those I oppose, I’m wary of supporting doing anything until your side gets the freaking moonbats to shut the fuck up and until persons with “intellectual integrity” admit that the problems run both ways or in many instances go no “way” at all except against accuracy. Otherwise we’ll have to hear that any improvements to the system are “proof” that elections were stolen.
Evil Captor. You have a dead body. You also have a person with motive and opportunity to kill the deceased. However, you do NOT have evidence that the deceased was murdered, only that they are dead.
Should you perform an autopsy? Of course, but if you don’t turn anything up, you can’t just accuse the person of murder because he had motive and opportunity.
A lot of people have looked at this, and nothing concrete has shown up to suggest even a single vote was changed. Thus far, you have no proof that a crime was even committed.
You wanna’ use the crime scenario, I’ll use the crime scenario.
“Chief, I think that the same guy is about to try it again.”
“What, the one we couldn’t pin down last time?”
"That’s the one. He has motive, and an opportunity, he just hasn’t tried it yet. "
“Hmmm, well, we almost know he did it last time, maybe this time he’ll try it again. I am authorizing Mahoney and Smith to shadow him”
This has been my fantasy of how things should have gone, if life was a cop show.
Yeah, let’s send our cops around tailing people we think might be trying to commit a crime, even though we haven’t actually verified that crimes are being committed at all.
Just because I’m paranoid that doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get me.
Enjoy,
Steven
- Police really do trail suspect in real life, according to one I asked, at least, though he may have been teasing me, and:
If life was a cop show, I’d have a blind detective in my neighborhood packing heat. And they’d even send him and his partner to investigate my stolen car instead of saying “Come on down to the precinct when you feel like making the report.”
While I would have appreciated the effort when my car was stolen, I think I’d rather not have the blind guy waving his pistol around.
Kidding aside, if things look shady, I can appreciate extra vigilance. But you can’t keep pulling out the shady argument time and again to prove that something happened, you need evidence.
Good thing this is the first time I am using this arguement, then. 
Locked and sealed ballot boxes? In some cases, but what about electronic voting? – No paper trail. No physical ballots. No way to know that every vote cast was credited as cast. Also, what about paper ballots counted, not by humans, but by optical scanners? Like the black box voting machines, optical scanners can be rigged. When e-voting with no paper trial is used, and when paper ballots are counted by optical scanners, we can’t be sure that the reported results are honest.
Another oddity – I remember seeing reports that no other modern day President running for re-election has won who went into the election with approval ratings as low as Bush had going into this election.
Let me get this straight. In this thread we have verified the following facts, which not even the conservatives have tried to disupte.
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That several precincts in Ohio tallied more votes than the number of voters in the district.
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That several precincts in Ohio tallied ridiculously high numbers of votes for third party candidates, and/or ridiculously low numbers of votes for the major party candidates.
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That a computer programmer was hired with specific instructions to create voting machine software with a back door that would allow for tampering with vote totals.
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That Diebold and voting officials in both Ohio and Florida have repeatedly stonewalled lawsuits and investigations that are attempting to clarify whether cheating occurred on election day.
And yet still you say that there’s no serious evidence of anything going wrong on election day.
Sure you can. You pull the pieces of paper out and count them manually. You could use a similar method for electronic voting as has been mentioned here a number of times. The key is to produce a paper trail that the voter sees and verifies.
And I don’t have a problem with this, although I don’t think it would be that hard to design a system which hold votes in “escrow” until verification has occured (and, in fact, I think most places with same-day registration use exactly that type of system).
I’d like to offer that much of this problem stems from the need for election night drama. Why do we have to know who won no later than 1a EST? Why can’t we make it a deliberate process? The votes are cast on Tuesday. Quality Assurance checks (vote audits), absentee verification, same-day registered verification, and other checks and balances occur Wednesday and Thursday. Leaking vote totals prior to Friday is a felony offense with stiff penalties. Friday is “count-the-vote-day”! Fun for kids and adults alike.
As the Washington state Governor’s race has shown us, Republicans believe in election fraud only when the results aren’t in their favor.
ITR Champion, let me see if I can explain my thoughts on this so that you can see why I don’t necessarily think your list is proving anything.
I’m starting from a hypothesis and seeing if the available information plausibly supports the hypothesis. I’m not trying to build a strawman, so tell me if my statement doesn’t jibe.
Hypothesis: The vote tally in Ohio was altered to give Bush the win.
The disparity between exit polls and vote tally supports this hypothesis. The exit polls had Kerry winning, and the vote tally had Bush winning, with a change of ~ 5% to Bush. Now, both you and Evil Captor have mentioned the Diebold security “bug” as a possible method for voter fraud. If this hypothesis is correct there are a number of facts which should also be evident.
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X# of Ohio’s 88 counties used electronic Diebold voting machines with the security problem
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Results in non-Diebold districts should be significantly different than results in Diebold districts
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Diebold districts should have a significant, unexpected, pro-Bush tally
This is a non starter, since the Ohio Democratic Party states
No electronic Diebold voting machines means that a different method must have been used. I have not heard an alternate hypothesis as to what that method is.
Now, ignoring the method problem, if the base hypothesis is true, then I would NOT expect to see similar poll/tally disparities in other (non-key) states. Well, unless you believe there was nationwide voter fraud that attacked all (or most of) the 50 states and was undetected in every state, even though each state has a unique voting system. There were 11 states with a bigger pro-Bush swing than Ohio. Would you, for instance, attempt similar voter fraud in Massachusetts, where Kerry was a lock? According to the OPs link, MA had a bigger poll/tally swing pro-Bush than Ohio did, and Kerry still won by 25%.
Also in our OPs link, on page 6, is a chart which shows the poll/tally difference up against a normal bell curve. The actual values are cleary skewed against Kerry, but retain a rough bell curve shape. It appears to me that the entire curve was shifted 1SD+ against Kerry, which would suggest that the shift (however it happened) wasn’t in just a few key states, but was in all states.
I submit that it was a systematic error in the poll, rather than a nationwide undetected program of massive voter fraud.