RE: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
While Obama promises to redistribute the wealth, isn't it great that we have a fine organization like Acorn to redistribute the votes. Jeff
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
Jeff Fink [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While Obama promises to redistribute the wealth, isn't it great that we have a fine organization like Acorn to redistribute the votes. Let us keep this discussion factual. What ACORN did cannot affect a single vote, or result in any false registrations. Federal law mandates computerized cross-checking of registrations that will easily catch the fake applications. I know a good deal about this because I did similar DP applications at NCR; I have been working with the Georgia registrar's office; I have worked at polling places during elections; and I have been translating Federal and state election laws into Japanese for U.S. citizens who are native speakers of Japanese. Here is what happened with ACORN: They paid unemployed and homeless people $8 per hour to collect registration forms. That's a dumb thing to do. Some of these people turned in hundreds of fake forms, which they filled in themselves with bogus information. They did this to collect the money without doing any work. It is was obvious that the info. was bogus, and the computerized cross checking will easily reveal it. They catch problems such as: the SSN and/or driver's license numbers not correlated; non-existent addresses; the signatures on several forms being the same; no record of the people existing; too many people at one address, and so on. These checks are thorough. This kind of checking has been done for decades. The cross-checking also reveals duplicate applications which are made for legitimate reasons, such as people who think the first application was lost in the mail, or people who realized they filled it out wrong, or people who did not get a registration card in the mail and think they have been deleted from the file (which sometimes happens). There is no penalty or problem with duplicates. The people at ACORN immediately realized that the applications were bogus, but once you recieve an application from a field worker, Federal law mandates that you hand it over to the election registrar. You cannot throw it away or mark it in any way. The people at ACORN attached notes to these applications telling the registrar that the applications were probably fake. That is all they are allowed to do. There is virtually no chance that these applications made it into the system, and even if a few of them did, real people with the names, SSN and other IDs listed would have to show up at the polls for there to be vote fraud. The chances of this happening are small. It would take a lot of effort and money to fabricate the fake IDs, and if the people are caught they would be in big trouble. They probably would be caught, because poll workers check IDs carefully and keep signatures of all voters, and they would notice if the same person came in twice, so you would have to register at many different locations. Georgia has a real-time computer network to check off people as soon as they vote. I heard that some woman in CA tried to register her dog to show how lax the registration procedures are. She found out they are not a bit lax, and she is now in big trouble. It is utterly absurd for McCain or any other politician to cite ACORN as a threat to democracy. The procedures used at the registrars and polling places easily catch this kind of problem. During an election, at any polling place, similar problems come up several times during the day, for legitimate reasons -- not criminal. They are dealt with swiftly. If the poll workers have a problem they cannot deal with, they use a real-time computer connections or they call a staff member at the registrars office, which is open and fully staffed for that purpose. At last resort they file a provisional ballot and deal with the problem after the election. (Provisional ballots must be provided in the case of a dispute.) - Jed
[Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
It couldn't be easier! See: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/how-to-steal-an-election-with-a-diebold-machine-200693.php - Jed
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
Edmund Storms wrote: Jed, do you still think these flaws were accidental, a result of incompetence, or just sloppy design? Do you think the Republicans are not out to steal the election if they could? Indeed. There was a lot of noise on the Internet after the 2004 election about the opscan machines in Florida, but it was all misdirection. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read on. (If you've heard all this before, stop right here, this is four year old news.) Statistics can reveal connections but not causes, and the connection was that the right-wing northern Florida counties used opscan machines in 2004, while the left-wing southern Florida counties used Diebold E-touch machines. In northern Florida it's common to register as a Democrat and then vote Republican in the presidential race. That behavior correlated very closely with use of the opscan machines and made it look, for all the world, like somebody cheated when the votes were tallied. What wasn't obvious without a lot of work is that the weird voting patterns predated the use of opscan and E-touch machines, and so couldn't have been caused by them; the selective use of opscan machines, and the weird voting patterns, were both correlated with a third factor, which was demographic. That same strange voting pattern existed in other southern states, and had existed in those areas for at least a couple of elections before 2004 (and apparently existed clear back to the Reconstruction era, which is what it apparently stems from). ** HOWEVER ** all the heat generated by the apparent (but seemingly not real) hanky-panky with the opscan machines obscured something important: The strange skew in voting patterns between northern and southern Florida was not only natural, but should have been *larger* than it was. The southern Florida counties, which vote democratic, and which used E-touch machines, went *just* *a* *little* less democratic in 2004, for no apparent reason. When all known factors were eliminated, something still remained, which makes one wonder. Here's a summary news story on a multivariate analysis done on the southern Florida voting patterns: http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html http://tinyurl.com/5zhbj I don't have a link to the actual paper, nor do I know where it was published; all I've read are news stories in the popular press, so I can't comment on how airtight their analysis was. My own analysis of northern Florida voting patterns, over which I slaved for an enormous number of hours before concluding that the null hypothesis was the correct one regarding opscan voting machine fraud, may be found here (I'm sure I've posted this link here before, but that was a long time ago): http://physicsinsights.org/elec04.html I only wish it hadn't taken me so long to catch onto the Dixiecrat factor, since it appears that the grand theft of votes actually took place in areas where I didn't look, because I wasted too much time looking where there weren't any woozles. (Any kind of careful analysis of this sort of thing takes a horrible amount of time to perform, or at any rate that's how I find it to be.) Do you think the people running the Diebold company at the time the machines were designed did not see the connection between helping the Republicans and their product? To me, this is the most obvious effort to steal an election that I can imagine and, what is worse, it helped Bush win. Will it work again? Ed On Oct 17, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: It couldn't be easier! See: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/how-to-steal-an-election-with-a-diebold-machine-200693.php - Jed
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
Edmund Storms wrote: Jed, do you still think these flaws were accidental, a result of incompetence, or just sloppy design? Well, naturally I have my suspicions. Who wouldn't? But I still think that I cannot know the answer to this question without evidence. I mean evidence that would stand up in court: testimony, incriminating documents and the like. The only way to get such evidence would be to have the powers of a District Attorney or a Congressman holding a Congressional Investigation. I doubt that a reporter could dig up anything definitive. In other words, I would have to be able to compel witnesses to tell the truth, and I would have to have warrants to look for documents inside the company. There have been such investigations by D.A.s and the Congress. In a sense, it does not matter what brought about this situation. Whether it was stupidity or deliberate, the effect on elections, and Diebold's legal responsibility is similar, although I suppose a deliberate design would be a criminal offense. Knowing that the machine is faulty and not doing anything about it probably also a criminal offense. I wouldn't know about that, but if I worked there, I sure wouldn't keep it secret! You can bet that if anyone goes to jail, it will be some lowly programmer. Here is 2004 news report: A California court has approved a $2.6 million settlement between Diebold and the State of California and Alameda County. The state and county had sued Diebold for fraudulent claims about the security of its electronic voting machines. . . . The settlement is the fruit of a suit filed in September by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who argued that Diebold was not truthful about the security and reliability of its electronic voting machines. Lockyer, who earlier dropped a criminal probe into Diebold, claimed that Diebold provided Alameda County with software that was not certified by the government. . . . Apparently Attorney General Lockyer decided there was not enough evidence for a criminal case. That does not prove there were no criminal offenses! It could just mean they are good at covering them up. Do you think the Republicans are not out to steal the election if they could? I think many of them would if they could, but who knows if have the guts to do it. A lot of Democrats would steal elections too. Not Obama as far as I know. Maybe some of his misguided supporters would . . . Recently, I had a discussion with a Democratic party election official from Iowa. That is, a party member delegated to run the primary caucus. She and the others selected for this job are supposed to be neutral between Clinton, Obama and the other candidates, and to enforce fairness, the debate rules of order, and so on. She told me appalling stories of misbehavior by Clinton's supporters. They used old time techniques such as stuffing ballot boxes, or locking the doors and turning off the lights and then telling Obama supporters the meeting was cancelled (or 'it is already over -- you missed it, go home!') and then holding the meeting with their own supporters only. She was astounded at their chutzpah. After the caucus she was a firm Obama supporter. I heard of New York City districts with thousands of black residents that somehow did not tally a single Obama primary vote. To me, this is the most obvious effort to steal an election that I can imagine and, what is worse, it helped Bush win. Will it work again? Probably not. You can't steal an election if the vote is high enough against you. People will figure out what you are up to. Take, for example, the New York City districts that supposedly recorded no Obama votes. People shrugged that off during the primary election because everyone knew that Clinton would take New York no matter what. It has a bad smell, but you can't fight every injustice. On the other hand, if those same districts in the General Election show only McCain votes, and not a single Obama vote, you know there would be outrage, and probably widespread rioting in the streets. People would not stand up for that! Obama's lead in New York is so large, I am sure there will be no Republican vote theft in New York in the General Election, and the Democrats wouldn't bother. They are sure to win. There may be theft in states with close elections, such as Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. Between the Bradley effect and likely vote theft in places like Ohio, I think there is a good chance that McCain will win. Obama has only a thin lead in any case. He is ahead by only 2% among likely voters (traditional). In other words, when they give weight to the poll data to make the distribution equal to the usual turnout, taking into account that older white people nearly always vote, and young black people seldom do, then Obama's advantage is only 2% with 2% margin of error. (This a perfectly legitimate statistical analysis technique. It isn't as
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
Whoa - Do you think the Republicans are not out to steal the election if they could? Why them and not the Dems? I do not think either party has a monopoly on dishonesty or dirty tricks. Now that the machine has been reversed engineered, etc. and done so at Universities - (where there is a decided liberal bias) I would actually suspect that it would be far more likely that the bad-apples among young Dems would try to steal votes - ... and might even use the assumption that Diebold was possibly at blame in Ohio, years ago for the other side to either get revenge or to play a kind of sneaky double-cross. I know lots of IT professionals and programmers, and can say absolutely and without question that most of them are strongly for Obama in this state. The boss may be for McCain, or the guy who signs the checks, and that creates an unusual situation. This may not be true elsewhere, but an election official who allowed the memory card in a machine to be switched, even if it was supposed to benefit his choice - could never really know who it might favor in the end .
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
Jones Beene wrote: Do you think the Republicans are not out to steal the election if they could? Why them and not the Dems? Well, in recent history going back to Nixon and the plumbers, Republicans have been more inclined to cheat than Democrats. Or at least, they have gotten caught more often. Of course there have been many corrupt Democrats and Democratic machine politics. This is very broad sociological generalization -- and such generalizations always have many, many exceptions -- but modern Republicans tend to be authoritarian, and authoritarian personalities tend to be more open to making their own rules, which the rest of us call cheating. They do not see it that way. See: The Authoritarians http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ This may not be true elsewhere, but an election official who allowed the memory card in a machine to be switched, even if it was supposed to benefit his choice - could never really know who it might favor in the end . It should not be difficult to arrange a test. You put the card in a regular computer to program the bias. You command it: shift 3% of Obama votes to McCain. Then you run it in a dummy election to be sure the bias you programmed in takes effect. Of course you can fake the program and verification too, but the person writing this program would presumably be a co-conspirator. Or a well-paid Russian hacker who doesn't care who wins a U.S. election, but who does want the last installment to be paid in full after the election. Plus he doesn't want the Russian Mafia contractors coming after him. You can probably detect computer voter machine fraud accurately with exit polls. If the programmer played games or did not implement the program as agreed to, the person paying for the 3% bias would see that it did not happen. Or he would see it go the other way toward the rival candidate, and he would get upset. Even though most intellectuals and programmers probably support Obama in this election, there are plenty who do not. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:How to steal an election with a Diebold machine
On Oct 17, 2008, at 3:52 PM, Jones Beene wrote: Whoa - Do you think the Republicans are not out to steal the election if they could? Why them and not the Dems? In this case, the owner of Diebold was a strong supporter of the Republicans. This requires the Democrats to use other methods because their people did not built the machines. I do not think either party has a monopoly on dishonesty or dirty tricks. No, but the Republicans have shown a greater tendency to use such tricks in recent times because they could get away with doing this. The issue is not who is more honest, because both parties are equally corrupt. The issue is what will happen during this election. The Republicans are still operating under the moral principles of Carl Rove, which makes them more likely to go dirty. Now that the machine has been reversed engineered, etc. and done so at Universities - (where there is a decided liberal bias) I would actually suspect that it would be far more likely that the bad- apples among young Dems would try to steal votes - Perhaps ... and might even use the assumption that Diebold was possibly at blame in Ohio, years ago for the other side to either get revenge or to play a kind of sneaky double-cross. Now we are talking about karma. Ed I know lots of IT professionals and programmers, and can say absolutely and without question that most of them are strongly for Obama in this state. The boss may be for McCain, or the guy who signs the checks, and that creates an unusual situation. This may not be true elsewhere, but an election official who allowed the memory card in a machine to be switched, even if it was supposed to benefit his choice - could never really know who it might favor in the end .
