What to do if Oval Office won by fraud?

[Fear_Itself]

Bush is President because the Democrats didn’t hire enough lawyers in 2000. You can be sure that oversight has been corrected.

[elucidator]

@SimonX

Is Wolfowitz coming again?

He hangs with the Zionist-Maoist Popular Front. Idaho.

[MaxTheVool]

To get back to the original question, I think that the ultimate legitimate political power in this country lies not in the current government or current military, but in the constitutional convention. If enough of the populace are disgruntled, they can call a constitutional convention and do to the constitution what the constitution did to the articles of the confederacy.

I’d be quite curious, certainly, how such a scenario would play out.

[PatriotX]

@MaxTheVool

To get back to the original question, I think that the ultimate legitimate political power in this country lies not in the current government or current military, but in the constitutional convention. If enough of the populace are disgruntled, they can call a constitutional convention and do to the constitution what the constitution did to the articles of the confederacy.

I’d be quite curious, certainly, how such a scenario would play out.

I’m in.

[wevets]

@Standup Karmic

And what happens if election fraud is widely suspected, but it is too well buried to provide unquestionable proof. Would that President likely continue to occupy his position for the next 4 years?

All too likely. We’re not set up to deal with election fraud (constitutionally speaking), and all too many people are loyal to a leader just because s/he is a leader (e.g. Nixon, Clinton).

[bup]

At http://www.electoral-vote.com this morning, the webmaster is intimating that Ohio may, in fact, be tainted - the results disagree with the exit polls, and Ohio used ‘no paper trail’ Diebolds, and it’s the very state the CEO of Diebold promised to deliver.

Tin-foil nuttery, or a new Watergate?

[Hazel]

@bup

At http://www.electoral-vote.com this morning, the webmaster is intimating that Ohio may, in fact, be tainted - the results disagree with the exit polls, and Ohio used ‘no paper trail’ Diebolds, and it’s the very state the CEO of Diebold promised to deliver.

Tin-foil nuttery, or a new Watergate?

I don’t know how we can trust these electronic voting machines (from Diebold or either of the other companies). How can we be sure that that they were not used to steal an election by setting machines to switch every 5th vote for “X” to a vote for “Y,” or by deleting a percentage of the votes in districts that heavily favor the opposing candidate, or by some other means?

Also, what about voter suppression? You’d think something could be done in cases of significant voter suppression: enough credible testimony by victims and witnesses should result in the tainted election (be it a single district or a whole state) being excluded or done over. But the vote-suppressers got away with it in 2000. It seemed to be just taken for granted that nothing could be done.

[Gyrate]

@bup

At http://www.electoral-vote.com this morning, the webmaster is intimating that Ohio may, in fact, be tainted - the results disagree with the exit polls, and Ohio used ‘no paper trail’ Diebolds, and it’s the very state the CEO of Diebold promised to deliver.

Tin-foil nuttery, or a new Watergate?

It does put a new light on the Republicans’ inexplicably vehement opposition to allowing the (court-ordered) use of paper ballots to speed up the queues. At the time I thought they were just being contrarian, but now I’m wondering…

[Gyrate]

Self-described “Progressive” website OpEdNews weighs in.

[bup]

Well, as I said in another thread, it’s hard to believe that a whole team of software developers could put this in with nobody squealing.

It’s also a little hard to see how you’d write the software to cheat, without knowing how the voting judges are going to set up the ballot. You could hardcode searching for “Bush” or “Kerry,” I guess.

But if somebody sees a way around those problems, let me know when the mob’s getting together. I’ll bring a torch and a pitchfork.

And maybe a penny-farthing bike. All good mobs need one guy on a penny-farthing bike.

[Gyrate]

From a friend of mine, some anecdotal observations:

I have friends in Columbus, Ohio, who worked their asses off this election canvassing, recruiting, registering people. Unlike some of the folks I know in Columbus, they’re not crazy. They’re actually quite grounded and rational individuals. One of them was the captain of her precinct, though I’m not sure what theat means exactly. She was in charge of a set of volunteers, they drove voters to the polls, etc. They are convinced that there was voter fraud. There were all sorts of dirty tricks being pulled. Emails were being sent to people telling them that, because of massive anticipated voter turnout, Democrats were scheduled to vote on Thursday (two days after the end of the election). People were getting phone calls telling them the wrong voting location. The Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, tried to get new voter registrations invalidated because they were on the wrong thickness paper. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Democrats registered over 8 times as many new voters as Republicans did, around 200,000. Votes submitted at the wrong location were invalidated, per Blackwell. My friend, the precinct captain, went to her voting location and looked at the registered voter list they had posted. She told me that, right off the top of her head, she could see ten people waiting in line whom she had registered herself, whose names were not on the list. When she asked a poll worker about it, she was told that this list was two weeks out of date, and that the lists they were working from were fully accurate. However, she was not allowed to check those lists.

If this is what “democracy” has come to, then Democrats had better learn to play the game. Florida in 2000 was not a fluke. It was a trial run.

:mad:

[rjung]

@bup

Well, as I said in another thread, it’s hard to believe that a whole team of software developers could put this in with nobody squealing.

Why? I don’t think you’d need a big team to write a voting program (hell, you could do it in HTML and Javascript with one guy), and if security is not given a high priority, tht’s all you need.

“Okay, ship the code, we’re done.”
“But boss, it’s not a secure setup. Anyone who runs MS Access can change the results without any log of the change.”
“Don’t worry about it; who’s going to have a laptop with Access in the voting booth anyway?”

@bup

It’s also a little hard to see how you’d write the software to cheat, without knowing how the voting judges are going to set up the ballot. You could hardcode searching for “Bush” or “Kerry,” I guess.

Even easier – just include one step in the vote-counting process that secretly twiddles the results.

“Step 1: Turn off computer.”
“Step 2: Remove Flash RAM card, plug into tabulation PC.”
“Step 3: Run the program COUNT_NOV2004.EXE.”
“Step 4: Report results on screen.”

If COUNT_NOV2004.EXE is not inspectable by a third party, you have no idea if the numbers it reports matches the actual values. Hell, any halfway creative geek could think of a dozen ways to screw with the results.

Paper trails work. That’s why the Republicans have always been opposed to them…

[laigle]

@bup

Well, as I said in another thread, it’s hard to believe that a whole team of software developers could put this in with nobody squealing.

No it isn’t. You would only need one guy to rig the vote code, that’s a simple mathematical transform. Once the rest of the system is in place you’d just need to edit one object.

It’s also a little hard to see how you’d write the software to cheat, without knowing how the voting judges are going to set up the ballot. You could hardcode searching for “Bush” or “Kerry,” I guess.

Well, yeah. The question of where the names would appear is immaterial. You know what the names are going to be. Not exactly brain surgery.

The company I work for does environmental compliance consulting, and one of the things our techs do is write scripts to pull compliance statements off of company websites so we can build a checklist. They’re handling much more complicated formatting than this, and it takes one associate degree tech all of about an hour per site.

I’d also note you’re ignoring the rather important issue of what happens if someone at the secstate office or a hacker just goes in with a service account and fudges the whole thing to hell.

But then we’ll never know. The whole argument is pointless. There is no such thing as a verified computer record on a hard drive. All we have is what came out of the black box. We can no longer verify what was in the black box, and thus we can’t tell what went in. That’s why the nerds wanted a paper trail, because you could match the two up before you relied on them. Now it’s a matter of personal preference, and once the votes are verified by the district you couldn’t overturn the election anyways. It would go under the “Texas isn’t really a state” column.