It didn’t have to be massive, and it wouldn’t be at all difficult with the computer votes.
Listen to AAR in the afternoons, Randi Rhodes is staying on top of all of it.
Well isn’t that reassuring.
If there was fraud using optical scan equipment, the beloved paper trail that everyone is screaming for is there. Very simple… go to the counties and count the paper ballots that were fed into the scanners. A couple of days worth of effort to put THAT contreversy to bed. The problem is, it is a lot more fun and cloak and dagger like to throw claims of voter fraud and conspiricy plots at the highest levels around.
If the fraud is there, lets find it before we go much farther. If not… drop it. Otherwise everyone will be talking about it years from now and blaming Karl Rove for fixing the election rather than figuring out why Kerry lost it.
No, the problem is the Ohio Republican secretary of state who hasn’t even decided if the provisional ballots should be counted at all, much less a full recount. The last thing the Republicans want is to revisit an election they see as a done deal.
All right, you caught us.
Yes, the election was rigged. It was all a conspiracy.
The trouble is, it was a conspiracy of over 59 million people, and all of us can keep a secret. So you will never find any evidence, because the cover-up was 100% accurate. You can’t prove a thing.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
Regards,
Shodan
From Area 51, Roswell, NM
What annoys me is the obnoxiousness of Pubs and “rational” Dems alike who start screaming tinfoil hat the moment these questions are raised. Um, you don’t have to believe there was a shooter on the grassy knoll to note that some seriously fishy shit is cropping up around those electronic Ohio and Florida machines. Of course there isn’t enough evidence at the moment to conclusively prove nationwide fraud; maybe there never will be. But if you’re genuinely interested in knowing whether the elections of the greatest country in the world can be convincingly shown as equal parts accuracy and integrity, what say you leave the eye-rolling to those Rightie Dopers who believe George W. Bush is some kind of misunderstood genius.
Suspicious as I am of the various peculiarities in the recent election, the question of whodunit has to be considered as well. If some well-meaning but unhinged person distributed leaflets telling people to vote at a different place or time, do we automatically blame Rove for it? Local fiddling does not require a grand, centrally-coordinated conspiracy. Heck, it doesn’t even require intent by Rove; people are quite capable of thinking up ways to rig the game in favor of their guy without their guy personally asking them to.
Love to help. But the people bringing up these problems are too full of it to allow a cooperative process right now. They don’t say things like “geez, we’re still not good enough at this and here’s some indication of that,” they say things like “the election was hacked” and “all the irregularities are for Bush and against Kerry.”
I agree that the process is not nearly good enough at this time. Hell, my district lost my registration and I had to cast a provisional which may or may not ever get counted. But it is not a massive conspiracy by the Greenwich Village Democratic Club to deny President Bush one of the three votes he got in our ZIP code.
The process will never be perfect. And some of the “improvements” of the last four years are dumb (a ‘secure’ system on a Windows platform? For the love of Cecil.) But with some effort and some cash and some cooperation, it can be as good as, say, the nationwide ATM network, which is pretty darn good. When the other side can talk about the problems without talking about the political leanings of CEOs of industrial companies and when they admit that over-registrations and dual-voters are a bigger problem than the sum of the nits they’re picking right now, start a thread. I think it’ll be a good one then.
The system CAN be perfect. ATMs around the world handle tens of millions of transactions every day and do not make any mistakes. Their accuracy is 100.000% Why do we tolerate less from our voting process? As evenly split as the electorate is, just a little cheating is enough to make all the difference in the world. From the Washington Dispatch
Ideally, the electronic voting could be 100% accurate. But the system lost my confidence when the head of Diebold promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. The sensible thing to do with electronic voting would be to have paper printouts that would be deposited in the ballot box and then compared to the electronic tally. If such backchecking proved accurate, then over time we’d grow confident in the system. But thanks to Republican and Diebold stonewalling, this was not to be. So for the second straight election, the result will always be under a cloud of suspicion.
The optical scan shift to Bush is quite intriguing. Unfortunately, with Kerry’s concession there is no incentive to do a recount. But the should. Can these ballots be turned over by the FOIA?
Not weird. Just used to it. Around these parts you have to wear a tinfoil hat to NOT believe that elections get stolen, which is why I get pretty insulted by the people who act like only partisan lunatics are suspicious of election results.
If you’re talking about the guy in charge of Diebold, I don’t see how his publicly stated vow to get Ohio’s electoral votes going Bush’s way can be dismissed with a shrug. As for false registration, obviously, that’s no less abhorrent than voter fraud. I would never dismiss either of these things out of hand and would support investigation into both- that includes if the national count on Nov. 3 seemed to favor Kerry. Funny thing is, I don’t see many conservatives losing sleep at the moment over this train wreck of an election system. Perhaps they’d feel a greater urgency if Kerry were currently the President-Elect.
Here’s a good page listing some of the irregularities in the election:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities
And here’s some statistics from Cuyahogo County, Ohio, regarding voter turnout. Apparently many precincts had a better than 100% turnout (this is apparently in addition to the discrepancy reported in Gahanna)
You really don’t? Or won’t? Here are some common sense ways:
“I don’t care which side someone is a partisan for, as I expect the product to be sufficiently transparent that it’s irrelevant.”
“A quick look at the vendors in the industry reveals that Mr. O’Dell is about the cleanest guy in the industry – there are guys with real live fraud convictions out there and a guy who happens to be a partisan on the side is spit in the ocean.”
“Being a registered Republican, even an active one, is not prima facie evidence that a person is not a patriot. I’d want to see a lot of evidence before I’d accuse someone of something as anti-American as rigging elections.”
“The owner of Diebold competitor Automated Election Services gives a lot of money to Democrats. Can we please get past this petty shit and onto the real issues?”
But hey. BobLibDem pretty much validated my prior post in it entirety. Get back to us when you’re ready to discuss the actual problem, OK?
The optical scanner thing is a dead end, because optical scanners leave a paper trail.
Optical scanners are the method used in Washington state where I live, and it seems to me they are the absolute best method. Just fill in the bubbles like on all the standardized tests everyone takes in school, and feed your ballot into the scanner. If you vote twice for the same office the scanner will give an error message and you can get a new ballot and shred the old one. All the ballots are saved so they can be recounted later if neccesary. You don’t need to wait in line because there’s only one or two voting machines. And the results are tabulated immediately, just like fully-computerized voting.
So if someone changed the results of the optically scanned ballots, that can easily be discovered if the ballots themselves are recounted by hand.
The thing is, any fraud has to take place at the precinct level, since the precincts report their totals to the state. You can’t just change the state-by-state results, since they won’t add up. But you can’t fiddle the local precincts too much, since they only have a certain number of registered voters, and the voting habits of the precinct can’t be changed by too much without sticking out. As an example, the 4000 extra votes for Bush in one precinct are clearly an easily discoverable error. If you want to steal the election you have to do things a little more subtly.
As for why we’re hearing about irregularities that favor Bush but not irregularities that favor Kerry, I suspect that is simple selection bias. The only people who care are Kerry partisans who are trying to dig up evidence against the Republicans. I can guarantee you that if Kerry had won the elections the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy would be pissing and moaning about fraud from the Democrats. As it is, their man won, so they don’t care.
Manhattan, do you have a logical reason for the Republican stonewalling on the paper trail for e-voting? It just seems to me to be the logical first step to gain confidence in the system. Do you wonder why we feel suspicious when the Republicans didn’t allow for this simple step? Bush thinks he has a mandate, perhaps that’s because he drew 667% of the vote in one Ohio precinct. I work with computer systems and database enough to know that data will find any weakness in your system and find a way to go ca-ca. Things like not knowing how many votes a chip will store and losing votes- sure these are things that can happen with new technology. Another glitch that could have been prevented with paper backup. Do a few elections with backup, let us gain confidence in the system, then perhaps we’ll have faith in the result. But when data shows that exit polls are significantly different than final results only in a few key areas and only where it helps Bush, then by sheer probablilty I assume that something is rotten until proven otherwise. I’d love to see the optical scan ballots in Florida recounted manually. But we won’t see it.
Er, for my part I did get back to you. I’m only one measly liberal, but I stated flatly that as a Democrat I’d move to have all irregularities investigated. Can you say you’d move for the same?
If you do, you’re a pretty unique Rightie.
Not necessarily, I’ve seen ATM’s malfunction before. They just have cameras and whatnot to ensure that if they do mess up, they’ll know who was there when it happened.
I’m sure you’re right. No system is 100% error free. But I think if our election system was as reliable as the ATMs, we’d all feel a lot better. And I think even those that run the elections would admit that the systems are not perfect, so why they do not try to provide the means to reconstruct the intent of the voters as accurately as possible is disheartening.
While I don’t believe any of this conspiricy theory non-sense about the election being ‘stolen’ (as I’ve said in the other 4 or more threads on this subject), I do agree that our current voting technology needs some improvement. The only caviot I’ll make is that this is the first large scale deployment of the technology…hopefully it will improve based on the results we get back this election on its performance.
That said, I DO think they need to put in a feature that prints the results or otherwise puts them on paper for the voter to be able to read…just until the technology is sufficiently understood and trusted. I’m actually unsure why this wasn’t done in fact, and would be grateful if someone could explain this without all the tin foil or other conspiricy stuff. Why DID the Republicans block this? Why did the manufacturers? There had to be a reason (that isn’t ‘so we could cheat and steal the election of course!!’)…what is it? Anyone know?
-XT
Then why are you complaining about optical scan ballots, which do just that? The ballots still exist, if the Democrats complained loudly and long enough they could be recounted. So why not recount them? Because the powers that be in the Democratic party don’t believe the recount would show Kerry winning. If they truly believed Kerry would win a recount they would be demanding a recount.
Here’s the thing. There is no constituency for finding the exact amount Kerry lost to Bush or vice-versa. The Republicans don’t care the exact number, the Democrats don’t care the exact number, they only care that they win. Decreasing the error rate from (say) 1% to 0.1% may seem like a good idea, but the Secretaries of State in the various states don’t have any particular incentive to spend the money to do it.
I think optical scanners are the best, simplest, least error-prone way to go, and lots of places use them. The trouble is that there are no national election standards, and lots of states have a large investment in other infrastructure.