Was the U.S. election hacked?

[Musicat]

@milroyj

In the first sentence of your OP, you falsely claimed “according to a news article”, when it was nothing of the sort. It was an opinion piece, by a radio talk show host. Not news. And now you’re repeating the error.

One man’s news is another’s bullshit, I guess.

I don’t care how you tag the article, and I’m as skeptical as the next guy, but I think the claims need to be considered until proven false. A lot is at stake here, and I don’t find the claims all that outrageous, although they may turn out to be so on deeper investigation.

Here’s a related item: Broward machines count backward. Apparently they counted up to 32,000 votes, then began subtracting. Opinion? News? Worthy of consideration?

[Musicat]

I know nothing about the Mercury News, but here’s a snippet from an article:

E-voting reliability still has a ways to go

Media coverage since the election suggests that people using e-voting machines, especially touch-screen video ballots, encountered scattered problems around the nation. One of the more bizarre glitches came in Ohio, where an e-voting system awarded almost 4,000 extra votes to Bush in a precinct near Columbus.

There were disturbing, anecdotal reports of voters selecting Kerry but then seeing the machine indicate a vote for Bush. Poor calibration of some machines may well account for these difficulties.

However, Dan Gillmor, the writer of that article, also said:

While there were some remarkable discrepancies between the exit-polling surveys and the final tallies in some cases, the discrepancies weren’t nearly as consistent as critics charged, nor limited to states where voters used the controversial kinds of electronic voting machines. I think the exit pollsters got it wrong, plain and simple.

[Liberal]

@Musicat

I don’t care how you tag the article, and I’m as skeptical as the next guy, but I think the claims need to be considered until proven false.

Considered what? True? Is that a joke? If someone claims you ate your children, should it be considered [whatever] until proven false?

[duffer]

I am the Second Coming of Christ. Prove me wrong.

[fessie]

@spoke-

I’m a Southern Democrat, and I can tell you that they’re misinterpreting the numbers.

The last vestige of the Democratic Party in the rural South is local offices. The South has turned Republican by degrees, in top-down fashion. First, the South began voting Republican in Presidential elections, while the congressmen and governors of southern states remained solidly Democratic. Then the South began electing Republican Senators and Representatives, while statehouses remained in Democratic hands. And then the South began electing Republican governors. Most recently, state legislatures in the South began to go Republican (it was only in this past election that Republicans at last gained the majority in Georgia’s House of Representatives).

In many rural counties in Georgia and north Florida, local offices (sheriff, mayor, commissioner, etc.) are still held by (nominal) Democrats. People in rural counties vote for these local Democratic officeholders, even while voting Republican at every other level.

Which explains why there is such a high percentage of registered Democrats in these rural counties in Florida. Local elections still get decided in the Democratic Primaries. (Republicans seldom field effective candidates at the local level- though I expect this will be the next step in the conquest of the South.) People want to be able to vote in the Democratic primaries, so they register as Democrats in order to have a say in who is governing them at the local level.

In view of those circumstances, it really shouldn’t be surprising that a given rural county has a high percentage of registered Democrats but votes overwhelmingly for Bush in the presidential election.

Thank you so much for providing this insight. It never would’ve occurred to us.

My Hubby compared the 2000 and 2004 returns for those disputed counties, and found that just as many Democrats had voted for Bush the first time around. What you describe seems to be absolutely true.

[bashere]

@Musicat

Here’s a related item: Broward machines count backward. Apparently they counted up to 32,000 votes, then began subtracting. Opinion? News? Worthy of consideration?

Why the fuck isn’t the source code to all of the electronic voting systems open source? The actual implementation is going to be boring; there won’t be any meaningful intellectual property created, so it isn’t like I’m asking software companies to give away meaningful intellectual property. Do certified build control procedures, have them observed by, say, the EFF, then release the source code to the internet. A million or so people will look for bugs and/or security loopholes in it. Build control procedures verify that the source code distributed was used to create the executable on the voting machines, keeping both the writers and the reviewers honest.

The example Musicat gives is an excellent example: the implication is that someone used a signed 16-bit data type instead of an unsigned data type (doing so would cause those symptoms). That sort of thing is caught in code reviews. That sort of things is unforgivable, given the importance of elections.

I doubt there was wide spread election fraud, nor am I suggesting this would catch all of it. I frankly don’t think it matters whether fraud was or was not committed; best practices would require the widest peer review possible. I am baffled that such a thing was never done, and apparently never suggested.

[NurseCarmen]

@duffer

I am the Second Coming of Christ. Prove me wrong.

Go back and reread all of your posts. It’ll become clear after a while that you aint no saint.

[Steve_MB]

@CrankyAsAnOldMan

Only a hand count is going to get at the other allegation, which is that every machine is rigged to redistribute votes. You run through a set of ballots and then count them by hand, and see if they tally the same. I assume testing takes place before every single election. The way around this would be to set the machine to “skim” only after a certain number of ballots are cast. That is, if you suspect the machine is only going to be tested with 100 or so ballots, you start the hijinks to start after 200 votes.

Well, then, the test run has to be of a size comparable to the expected precinct vote count. It should still be manageable with a modest randomly-selected sample.

[Musicat]

@Liberal

If someone claims you ate your children, should it be considered [whatever] until proven false?

The short answer: Yes.

You seem to think that fantastic claims, like cannibalism, are so radical that they are not worth investigating. But I don’t feel that an irregular election charge is that radical. Around here, we have a phrase, voting “Chicago style,” which means early, often and using dead people to mark ballots. You think this has never happened?

Bashere, as far as revealing the intracies of the software design, I think that would be a good idea. But it would be difficult to tell if the published software was the version actually used, wouldn’t it?

I think a random check of results each time an election is held should be mandatory. Quality Control isn’t just for moon rockets, but for any process where the outcome has serious consequences.

[bashere]

@Musicat

Bashere, as far as revealing the intracies of the software design, I think that would be a good idea. But it would be difficult to tell if the published software was the version actually used, wouldn’t it?

Nope. That was my point about build control procedures. Software companies face this problem all the time: making sure that the version testing has been testing is the one that is being released. So software companies have reasonably rigourous procedures for rebuilding software. All of the source code is extracted from the version control system, then the software is built using whatever compiler is used, then compared against the target copy. If they match exactly, on a byte-by-byte level, then the source code is the source that was used to build the executable.

If Diebold, or whomever writes the voting software, were to give the source and build instructions to a reliable thrid party (I suggested the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the rough software equivelent of the ACLU), independent verifications could be performed. The voting machines could be checked to make sure that the voting software matched the code distributed.

This wouldn’t eliminate all sources of electronic fraud, but would make them more difficult and would cause them to require a much high degree of skill. Submitting the code to a huge peer-review would eliminate the sorts of bug you mentioned occurred (which really was a beginner’s bug) and elminate some of the concerns.

[Liberal]

@Musicat

You seem to think that fantastic claims, like cannibalism, are so radical that they are not worth investigating.

Nonsense. I’m not responsible for your dangling modifiers. You said, “I think the claims need to be considered until proven false”. And I responded, “Considered what? True?” If you meant “considered worthy of investigation”, you should have said so.

Where the heck is Kimstu to tell you how vague you were?

[Musicat]

@Liberal

Nonsense. I’m not responsible for your dangling modifiers. You said, “I think the claims need to be considered until proven false”. And I responded, “Considered what? True?” If you meant “considered worthy of investigation”, you should have said so.

Considered: 2. regarded with respect or esteem. (Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary, paper edition)

I don’t believe “Considered” requires a word following in all cases. “This needs to be considered” is not an incomplete sentence. It means something needs to be looked at or examined. With “respect or esteem” would indicate that it is not to be discarded lightly.

Bashere, good points. I wonder if those QC procedures are commonly used in practice?

[milroyj]

@Musicat

One man’s news is another’s bullshit, I guess.

Sorry, didn’t mean to be snarky with you. There is a substantive difference, though, between news and opinion. This includes online sources.

The masthead on the Common Dreams website states “Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Community”. Under headlines, they have links to news articles from news organizations like the AP, Reuters, and Knight Ridder. Your link in the OP, on the other hand, takes us to the Featured Views section of the website, which is clearly opinion. Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but it’s not a “news article”, and even Common Dreams doesn’t try to claim it as one. Do you see the difference?

[Musicat]

The Washington Post weighs in. (free registration)

The Washington Post weighed in with its own piece on the post-election online rumor-mongering yesterday, and like the Times, the Post made clear that “[e]ach of the claims is buoyed by enough statistics and analysis to sound plausible. In some instances, the theories are coming from respected sources – college engineering professors fascinated by voting technology, Internet journalists, election reform activists. Ultimately, none of the most popular theories holds up to close scrutiny. And the people who most stand to benefit from the conspiracy theories – the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee – are not biting.”

From the NY Times (free registration), Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried:

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,” trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. “Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines,” declared BlackBoxVoting.org.
…

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved real voting anomalies in Florida and Ohio, the two states on which victory hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah…

The rest of the NYT article is a good read. I reccomend it.