What puzzles me is why the GOP dirty tricksters didn’t try it.
Rove claimed he had The math which told him the Pubbies would do just fine. Bush was reported as being serene about his party’s chances in the elections. I guess he bought Rove’s math.
But all other Republicans, it seems, saw big trouble coming, and I wonder why the party hackers left the machines alone. I doubt it was a question of scruples. After all, they pulled some awful tricks on the Democrats during these elections.
Diebold got kicked out of the California election process after they got caught cheating in the 2003 special election. They’ve been kicked out of Pennsylvania. They’ve been kicked out of several other states and numerous counties after their machines failed basic tests and their executives got caught lying. Further, a lot of states now require that electronic voting machines produce paper printouts which the voters can check. With that, there’s no chance for electronic cheating. Now that the Dems are in control, they’ll probably re-introduce the Count Every Vote Act, which would require such safeguards nationwide.
If you hack them constantly people will revolt. So give the people an unhacked election and they will calm down for a bit. When the next election comes along maybe the hacking tolerance will be higher and they can get away with it.
Isn’t it obvious, based on the election results, that it was the Dems doing the hacking?
Seriously, if anybody did successfully hack the voting machines, it’s very likely that no one would know about it. Unless they were stupid enough to get caught.
No one hacked them because it was never as easy to hack them as RFK Jr. and his ilk said. Furthermore, the convential wisdom among liberals that the GOP routinely steals elections by manipulating vote totals was also false. I know it’s hard to believe that Bush and Co. honestly won in 2000, 2002, and 2004, but they did. They also honsestly lost this year. Sometimes your side wins and sometimes it loses. If you only think you lose because the other side stole it from you, then you are pretty ignorant about politics.
Let me see if I understand you correctly. Are you saying, the Republicans lost, therefore there was no tampering? I’m not an accomplished logician, but it seems to me that’s not enough evidence.
The places where tampering was apparent in 2004 were scattered, and they weren’t all the same method. With a few kinds of hacking that did get caught, it’s quite possible that some methods were not detected. The hackers have had two years to refine the hacks that were not caught.
If the computers were subtly hacked this time, tweaking a few votes in each machine, then the Republican losses would have been worse without the hacks. The Democrats won, but just barely gained control of both houses of congress.
Since the main rationale given by Democrats to prove tampering was that the Republicans won in 2002 and 2004, then if the Democrats won that seems to prove no tampering exists, correct?
Lack of evidence of any serious vote maching hacking has not stopped liberals from screaming that the GOP stole the 2002 and 2004 elections.
In one case, a precinct had more votes for Bush than the number of registered voters in that precinct. There were multiple reports of voters who clicked on Kerry and saw Bush come up on the summary page. In another case, a machine began subtracting votes from Kerry’s column for every one cast for him.
Various computer security experts talked their way into testing voting machines. They found them easily fooled-with, in less than a minute per machine. I don’t suppose any of that counts as evidence in your book, though. Considering that Diebold makes ATMs that can go for months without any errors, and can’t be hacked, it’s not like Diebold doesn’t know how to make a secure system. If it’s hackable, it was intentionally built that way.
FWIW, and I’m not saying it was hacked, but in a close House race, eerily enough, for Katherine Harris’s old House seat, there was an undercount of 18,000 votes in a race won by 400 by the Republican incumbent. There are claims of problems with the voting machines there. People said that they voted for the Dem, but on the summary page the vote was not there. Those folks went back and changed it and then it took. The claim by the Dem challenger is that the machines weren’t functioning properly and if the undercounted areas were her stronghold it can be attributed to her total. In the end it could come down to a decision by the House of Reps.
I gotta say that I’m not at all convinced that votes counted by voting machines were counted accurately. What makes you think the Dems didn’t hack into them, for one? They won some pretty close races. I don’t really think they did, but how are we to know?
The whole point of setting up a reliable and verifiable voting system is that you can’t draw conclusions about the validity of the vote by looking at who won except in cases of grossly obvious tampering.
I have high hopes that at some point in the near future a white-hat hacker will hack into a machine and leave no trace of the hack except for every single vote reported by that machine going to a third-party candidate with little popular support. It would fuck up that one election, but the gains in finally getting people to admit that we need physical verification standards would be worth it.
It’s unfortunate that the victory of many Democrats in this election has led people to believe that there’s nothing wrong with our voting system.
As pointed out we don’t know for sure that they weren’t, and if done well we’ll never know. I do remember news stories from before the election that in some places E-voting machines were produce “errors” which consistantly favored the GOP. I also know a lot of places banned them or gave up on them, and given a choice lots of people won’t use them. Quite possibly many were hacked, but few people or none used those particular machines so it didn’t matter.
Besides, it’s only been a short while; there’s lots of time for voting scandals to come out of the woodwork.
…Are we talking about the Die-bold machine that they proved could be hacked by using the memory stick? And/or preloading them with negative votes for certain candidates?
Those are them. You know… the ones apparently used in florida to ensure that the Pubbies only have 33 fewer reps in the House than the Dems, instead of 35. The same ones that were apparently NOT used to secure a tie in the Senate. Obviously, if you’re able to undetectably hack into voting machines and steal votes, the thing to do is win another House seat, so you’re huge loss is a teeny tiny bit better, rather than win one close Senate race that will swing the balance of power your direction.
They were so friggin stealthy in fixing this election, it gave the appearance that the Republicans got thoroughly whipped. Hats off to ya, boys!
An interesting situation took place here in Utah, not with hacking, but with poor design of the ballot.
The first screen gives the voter the choice of voting a “straight party” ticket. All of the parties were listed with their icons.
The last party on the list was the “Personal Choice” party, and the icon is a smiley face.
Many voters selected this, thinking that meant they wanted to make a personal choice for each candidate. The party got about 20,000 more votes than any of the other minor parties.
Cite that Dems are clever enough to hack anything? :dubious:
I find it amusing that the proof that they weren’t hacked is that the “right” side won. As a parallel the fact that Dems sometimes steal campaign signs is not proof that Republicans never do. I don’t believe anyone hacked the voting machines, but if anyone can, both sides can.
Or . . . they tried and it wasn’t enough. Or they tried, and they Democrats tried and were better at it. Or they both tried and it evened out. Or they tried and the Democrats bribed the hackers. As others have said just because the Democrats won doesn’t mean the Republicans didn’t try to hack the election. It doesn’t even mean the Democrats didn’t.
I have not seen any evidence that the Diebold (or any other) e-voting machines used Tuesday didn’t have election-stealing code on them. I think that if the races were closer, there would have been more “surprise” upsets – but the idea of multiple 14% leads turning into 1% losses was too much for anyone to swallow.
Audit that code, dammit!
(And yeah, I realize that asking for proof of a lack of malicious code is proving a negative. But hey, the neocons went to war in Iraq while insisting that Saddam prove he didn’t have WMDs… ;))
If it was somehow proven that not a single vote was tampered with, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. If someone told me that hundreds or thousands of votes were changed without anyone suspecting a thing, I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised.
My objection to many of the electronic voting systems is the fact that they leave open the possibility of tampering without leaving a shred of evidence. So long as that possibility exists, our democracy is in danger. I don’t want it to be merely unsurprising that no electronic voting machines were tampered with, I want it to be virtually inconceivable. I want it to be equivalent to hacking the Pentagon or stealing 100 million dollars from Bank of America.
It’s not proving a negative - you can examine each line of code and determine it’s not doing anything it’s not supposed to. There’s no logical problem there.
Out of curiousity: in the last election, one reason people suspected fraud was that exit polls did not match the final vote in many places. In this election, how close were exit polls to reality? And was anything changed to affect the accuracy of exit polling?
