In principle. But considering who made them, I’d say the right has a head start and an inside track and just maybe a few backdoor passcodes. 
This is what I was thinking. Even the paper ballot system was hackable. All it takes is someone stealing ballots and spending a few man hours punching ballots as fast as possible. How many ballots could five people punch in 3 hours? Enough to turn a close local race, I bet. At 10 seconds each, that’s 5400 ballots. Even iTunes has been hacked, and that’s from a multi billion-dollar company with a lot to lose if its partners feel it’s being loose with their product.
But there are ways to prevent that. Based on Thomas Nast’s cartoons, in his day a ballot box was a glass globe in a cubical wooden frame with a slot at the top. Presumably, you’d have to break it to open it and that could only be done once. So if the box were in plain public view at every moment from the opening of the polls to the counting of the ballots, it would be impossible to stuff it without somebody noticing.
Right, but we weren’t smart enough back in Nast’s time to have somebody responsible for that. :rolleyes:
Sure, the globe is “impossible to stuff”. Assuming that everyone who drops in a ballot only drops one in, and not five. And assuming that no one goes through the voter rolls more than once under fake names (or names of the recently dead who haven’t been stricken off the record yet).
And once the ballots are passed off to counters, then there’s a whole new avenue of passing fake ballots into the mix. Hell, one could be completely transparent in building the ballot box, bringing it to the voting station, and then delivering it to the counters, with twenty U.N. overseers ensuring there’s no stuffing, and the election could still be easily rigged through those brought in to make the counts.
Of course, what it comes down to is that the system is only hackable on the assumption that those election officials we trust are inherently corrupt and are willing to throw the election behind one party or the other. Which seems to me to be the exact same charge made against Diebold here.
To cut to the chase- would you be willing to design a system for taking, recording, and tabulating votes, BrainGlutton, and then let Diebold run it?
What “chilling” effect? People show ID for all sorts of things these days, including renting a video at Blockbuster. The # of citizens without picture ID in this day and age is trivial, so it’s a non-starter. With rights come responsibilities, get an ID card, etc. Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote (once) is something everyone can agree on regardless of party affiliation.
Oh irony! Speaking of cites… you claim here again that the outcome of the 2004 election was changed by deliberite voter supression, have you come up with one showing that yet? You know, that proof I keep asking for and you keep declining to provide, as ooposed to wild conspiracy theories and unsupported conclusions? At least this time it’s 2004 instead of 2000, that’s progress I suppose. I learned that repeating something over and over again doesn’t make it so when I was about 4, you might want to look into it.
If you’re dirt poor and wish to vote, a $20 “processing fee” for a photo ID is a non trivial expense. Now if we gave out these IDs for free it would be a different issue.
Have you read the Rolling Stone article on the 2004 election yet? It brought chills down my spine.
That’s why it’s made of glass. Sure, maybe a stage magician could stuff it undetected, but nobody else could.
That’s a different, and non-tecnological, problem, and generally not what we mean by the phrase “ballot-box stuffing.”
Not if every step of the process takes place in public view. And in Nast’s day, I’m not sure “delivering it to the counters” would have been a step at the process. You wouldn’t actually have to move the ballot box, you could break it and count the ballots on the same table where it had been resting all day. Everybody could see the final tally, and if the results reported to the elections office didn’t match that, somebody would notice.
Let a private company run the election? I smell a whoosh, or perhaps a lame attempt at irony.
No, in this thread I have claimed only that the Pubs were guilty of voter suppression in 2004. How that affected the results is another discussion, but see blalron’s post.
Did that article mention the MIT/CalTech study that came to the opposite conclusion? Did the article mention that Dr. Freeman first reported the odds at 250,000,00 to 1? Seems like he has a bit of a “margin of error” himself. You can find a good summar of the 2004 United States presidential election controversy, exit polls on wikipedia. There are studies that support vote tampering and studies that don’t. If one isn’t careful, one can end up seeing only side of the story. This CBS story also came to the conclusion that Election Exit Polls Were Flawed (the exit polls were wrong, not the final vote tallies) for a number of reason, not the least of which was:
Looks to me like the myth of the mysterious exit polls was something created in the bolgosphere early on election day and has lived on as an urban legend ever since.
Based on very good evidence, BTW. It was all well-documented at the time and reported in the media. You can find relevant stories linked in the threads linked in post #35.
Voter suppression is, of course, an entirely different problem than vote-machine rigging. By “voter suppression” I mean trying to scare people away from the polls, trying to get them to try to vote on the wrong day, interfering with voter-registration drives, etc. It all happened and it was only the Pubs doing it.
People don’t have to show any ID to vote? How on earth do the people working the polls verify that the person who shows up claiming to be John Smith of 1313 Mockingbird Lane in precinct 1001 is actually the real John Smith, then?
They don’t. But they do have a preprinted list they check off one voter at a time. To falsely vote under another’s name without raising any red flags, you would have to first make sure (1) you knew said voter’s name and address and (2) said voter will not be showing up at the polls later. Possible, but usually too cumbersome to be worth the trouble.
As I said, I have no problem with (free) national ID cards, but for different (actually, opposite) reasons than those for which some Pubs seem to want them.
In addition to verifying my name and address, I had to sign the voter role and have my signature compared to the one on my voter registration card.
Yes, I did. And I have read the Rolling Stone article before. It points out a disturbing statistical anomally. Such an anomally is an indication that something fishy might very well have occured in Ohio in 2004. It is a very good reason to start an investigation, which I wholeheartedly support. Unfortunately for those of you on your side of the fence, none of these investigations has produced any evidence of wrongdoing. If they had I would be condeming the Republicans at the top of my voice. But no evidence has come to light. No proof has been presented. Which leaves your claims…pretty much dead in the water, resting upon the flimsy reed of lies, damned lies and statistics.
In addition, precincts are small and local. Someone wishing to pull this would also have to be sure that the person whose name is being stolen isn’t known to any of the poll watchers. I was a poll watcher once, and I knew a lot of people - the little old ladies who also did it knew a lot more.
The problem with the ID cards, if I recall, is that in Georgia, where they were implemented, you could only get them from a very few places - and they cost, as mentioned. The places were not convenient to where minority voters lived. The clear intent was to make it harder for minority voters to register.
Leaving all that aside, Pub voter suppression in 2004 (which would not, of course, had any effect on exit polls) was quite real. Of course, it’s much harder to determine what effect it had on the results, and that would be a different discussion anyway.
Again, you have proof of this and not the wild speculation of one who has an axe to grind because his side didn’t win? Proof that the Republicans engaged in systematic and deliberite vote supression as opposed to the natural mistakes that are inevitable in any human endevor? I think I went on about that at some length here when we were talking about the 2000 election in Florida. I respect the fact that RTFirefly was willing to admit that he had no proof to give (although I was disapointed that he declined to check my numbers in the logical argument I made there. He’s so much better at math than I am, I was looking forward to his thoughts. He declined to give them and left the thread), but I have never seen the same from you. I’ve seen you living on inuendo. Here’s your chance big boy: put up or shut up.
Which pretty much sums up the discussions on this from the lefties.
Look, you lost, fair and square. Get over it.
Nobody who isn’t already convinced regardless of the evidence is going to buy “The Republicans Rigged the Election, Version XXIII”. And nobody who has read any of these threads is going to buy the notion that the Democrats are entirely motivated by high-mindedness.
You are mad because you lost. There is nothing more to it than that. If you had won, the results and the machines would be perfectly acceptable.
And you would be saying to the Republicans the same things I am saying to you.
I know it is a deeply held article of faith that Democrats are the party of fairness and that their motives are and always will be above reproach, and that this is all motivated by a love for the democratic process. The only trouble with this is that it isn’t true.
Regards,
Shodan