Well it wasn’t him, it was a lot of others in the background. it sounded like someone told a really funny joke right as I was calling and really brought down the house.
Not me. Fact of the matter is, DeMint is going to beat any Democrat out there in his district. Do you really want to yank Green from the process, thereby demonstrating that the EVIL SOCIALIST COMMUNIST FASCIST DEMOCRATS care so little about our sacred elections process that they will IGNORE THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE to get a white man in place of a black man?
HYPOCRITES!
-Joe
So what?
Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid here, but if I were looking to pull off major election fraud, mucking with a small election nobody gives a damn about would probably be a very helpful trial run. Even if there is no foul play involved, what happens if it happens again in a more crucial race. They’d (rightfully) look pretty stupid to have not fixed it in the first place.
Let me just say I really hate this common notion that it doesn’t really matter since Demint is heavily favored anyway.
First of all this offends my basic sense of civics and the idea that our politics matter. Secondly I think SC Democarts (or any party) deserves someone competent to vote for. And thirdly, it’s always a possibility that a favored candidate will somehow implode, I’ve seen it happen. In an extreme case like that, Dems might have a chance, but now even that wouldn’t increase our chances of defeating him.
Anyhow, I just see it everywhere and I hate it.
I think Greene won because no one took him seriously. He didn’t face any negative campaigning. He didn’t campaign much. That may have helped him. People voted for who they thought he was. A Veteran and a political outsider.
Granted, voting for someone without knowing their political views is a bad idea. Sometimes it happens. I vote every year. I try to inform myself first. But, I don’t always know every candidate for all the various county and state offices. There’s dozens of them.
This was not for drain commissioner. This was for the Senate.
What is weird ,if DeMint actually had this thing won, it was a bad time to reveal the flaws in voting machines. But campaign staffs are known to be overenthusiastic some times. Like Nixon and the plumbers ,who acted when Tricky Dicky had the election well in hand.
Greene did not campaign at all. He had no staff. He can not even explain where he got 10 thou to run.
The idea that his name reminded voters of a popular black singer seems to omit Rawl’s name does the same thing.
Am I the only one reminded of that Eddie Murphy routine? Ha ha! Let’s vote for the black guy-- what a joke! Um. . . oh shit, he won?!!
Well you’re underestimating his obscurity before the election, nobody knew he was a veteran or an outsider. Trust me I’m a political nut and this election was right in my backyard, yet all I knew was that his name was on the ballot.
I tried to patent a scheme, but my company would not pursue it. Basically, each voter gets a receipt with a random number. He/she can use that number later to see if the vote recorded for that number is the same as they intended. The database of numbers and votes can be released to the public so that the press can check to see that it’s the right size, the numbers are unique, and the vote totals match. It’s all anonymized, so no-one except the voter knows how they voted.
It would only take a very small number of people checking their votes to detect fraud within a 99% confidence level.
I don’t think we can rely on voting machines when they have no way to verify the count. The head of Diebold said his mission was to see that Bush was re-elected. He did not say he wanted to have a great working machine. What does it take for us to shit can them?
Wouldn’t the problem then be that that we’d be reliant on people’s words/potentially faulty memories as to what votes the number should correspond with?
For instance in this case I imagine a lot of people who voted for Greene in actuality may say otherwise out of embarrassment, hindsight selective memory, a perceived need for a redo in light of new information, or honest memory lapse since obviously nobody knew a lot about the candidates to begin with.
You could have the receipt say whom you voted for. Of course, people could still say “I told the machine to vote for Bob Smith, but the receipt it gave me said Jane Jones”, but then, that’s something that should be taken care of on the spot, by calling over a precinct worker.
Another problem I could see, though, would be that the machine could assign the same serial number to multiple people who voted the same way. That way, either of them could look in the database and see “Hmm, I’m #24601… Let’s see… Yup, the database has me voting the straight Whig ticket, just like I did”. You could get around that one by having a count of the total number of voters who used the machine, but then the machine could just add an extra Tory ballot for every Whig ballot it gave a recycled serial number. And you can’t test for that in the database by asking “OK, who had receipt #8675309?”, because most people would probably lose their receipts.
In order to swing an election you would have to change a large number of ballots and assign the same ID. If you do this to one out of a hundred votes, and there are thousands of voters, you need a very small number of people to check the database and see that that entry had already been accessed. Besides which, you would make the database public so anyone could look for duplicate unique IDs.
If you have the ability to verify that your vote was counted correctly, then you also have the ability to prove to someone else who you voted for. Which means that you can be bribed or pressured to vote for someone other than your preferred candidate.
Yeah, those “y’all’s all racist!” morons on thestate.com’s comments are all “And why has The State not reported anything about Alvin Greene’s campaign?!” Look, you fucking moron, there WAS NO CAMPAIGN.
Except there would be no duplicate IDs. To illustrate, let’s say that there are three voters, Alice, Bob, and Carol, and only one election, with Yolanda and Zachary running. Alice and Bob vote for Yolanda, and Carol votes for Zachary. The voting machine, however, was made by a crooked friend of Zachary’s. When Alice votes, it gives her a receipt that says “You voted for Yolanda. Your serial number is 17”. When Bob votes, it gives him a receipt that says “You voted for Yolanda. Your serial number is 17”. And when Carol votes, it gives her a receipt that says “You voted for Zachary. Your serial number is 23”. Then, it publishes a database that says that serial number 17 voted Yolanda, serial number 23 voted Zachary, and serial number 42 voted Zachary, and declares Zachary the winner. Alice, Bob, and Carol will all three have receipts that match the database, and the right number of votes have been cast.
Nobody knew he was a veteran or an outsider or black. Or that he was running until the day of the election. Apparently lots of incredibly ignorant people disregarded the old “better the devil you know” saying. Too bad. Now we have a choice for senator between a “Waterloo” megalomaniac and a retard (I’m going to hell for that, I know). I am disgusted.
Isn’t there a green party candidate, Tom Clements, that was equally unreported on by the local paper? Anybody have any idea what his policies are? What a cluster.
If that were an isolated case it would be virtually undetectable, but if it happened enough to actually influence the election then it would take a very small numbers of voters checking their vote for it to quickly become clear that more than oner person was checking that number.
This is the big weakness of the scheme.
How would it become clear? And would it be a clearer sign of shenanigans than, say, someone who didn’t campaign winning 60% of the vote?
Especially when the countable ballots, the absentees, were according to predictions.