Let the Election Fraud Begin!
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...301178_pf.html

Nice. So no big deal: the Democrat and one Independant only look practically identical on the confirmation screen... Oh, and they promise to have this all sorted out by next year's elections.

Your thoughts on this? Is this the Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot all over again? Or is this no big deal? Do you expect voting difficulties like those seen in the past? Or were those seen in the past no big deal either?

You mean the ballot designed by a democrat in a democrat controlled county that was somehow rigged to be bad for the democrats?

Its human error, when I want to see voter fraud I'll look in one of the Chicago voting locations after the polls close. This is just odd hysteria.

Isn't this how Robin Williams was elected in Man of the Year?

If you can't build a voting machine that works, then go with the normal way of voting. I see no sense in putting a machine that doesn't work into play.

Fraud?
Probably not. Although a suspicious eye should certainly be raised.

It is, however, a little inexcusable that the error was not noticed until absentee voters brought it to the attention of election officials. Did no one bother to check beforehand? Somebody's napping.

You mean there in incompetence in government?

I'm surprised the votes get counted period.

No, that was Eddie Murphy in the movie where he played a congressman. Good stuff :lol:

Amen. Assemble a counting committee with representatives from each party to oversee it. The only technology that would be useful is the satellite that will feed the monitoring of the count that should be televised to any American wanting to watch.

I believe that we need to incorporate technology into our voting system. We can do that and have a verifiable paper trail. That said, liberals will continue to kick themselves in the balls and lose if they think they have lost elections because of those Wascally Wepublicans.

huh.
i would have thought that even republicans would be concerned about voter fraud. i dont understand the cavalier attitude toward it on the part of the usual far right suspects above...o wait, i do: voter fraud is a problem when and only when it affects republican candidates. otherwise, its all paranoia and such.
well, i am sure glad i worked that one out.
and here i thought the rules of a democracy were different from that: you know, that all votes mattered.
i was obviously misinformed: the rule is that only republican votes really matter.
it's that "all animals are equal: but some are more equal than others" logic....

well thanks lads: if i hadn't figured out the real rules from reading your posts, i could easily have confused them with glib horseshit.
good thing that didn't happen.

Well holy fuck, if you can't figure out that the machine ask you to confirm your vote and you dont know who the hell "Maria Cantw[cut off]" is after you voted for "Maria Cantwell ", then by gods, you shouldn't be voting.

I think youre being too cavalier about this. Dead people often have a hard time distinguishing between two closely spelled words.

Machines are made by people; peple have agendas. IMO this is one area that old fashioned paper (not chads) under total public monitoring (not counted by private companies) which also has potentional for agendas to be set forth.
No assumptions made until all votes are in and counted.

I work every day building user interfaces. To be perfectly blunt, it's not that hard. This sort of blunder is either gross incompetence, or highly suspicious voter manipulation.

Voting machines are made by? Companies. Usually big-business style companies. Who's the big business buddy? Republicans. Who continually gets the short-end of "accidents" with voting machines? Democrats. Can you really ignore the coincidences here?

Of this rampant election fraud you seem to be so well versed about, have any of these "accidents" ever negatively affected a Republican?

I dont know, good question. Probably. It definately had positive effects in 2000.

One of the outcomes of the 2000 controversies was the enactment of the Help America Vote Act in 2002 with strong bi-partisan support.

Among its provisions are requirements that states must have a centralized voter registraiton database and Voting systems that produce a permanent paper record with an audit capacity that can be manually audited.

The effective date was 1/1/06 so this will be the first election where these new standards are tested. I suspect we will see more challenges then ever before from whatever candidate(s) loses close elections.

http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm

an addendum for NCB :)
In this current session of Congress, a Repub senator introduced a bill to amend HAVA called the Voter Protection Act of 2005. Among its provisions was the "removal of registrants from voting rolls for failure to vote"

One of those wacky bills that had only 4 other Repub co-sponsors and died a quiet death.....even other Repubs didnt want to take away a fundamental right, even if you chose not to exercise that right (for whatever reason).

I thought the Diebold excuse was for the 2004 election and that daddy and brother convinced the supreme court for GWB to win in 2000. Hard to keep up with all these excuses......

Hey, Diebold's chief executive has stated he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Shouldn't the CEO of a company that is supposed to hold honor, ethics, and integrity highly, not support the campaign's of political parties? Why can't a company who has ATM machines that run perfectly not get voting machines to work perfectly?

Not that I know of. Of the reports I've heard, every single one has hurt the Democrat. Actually, now that I think of it, this post of yours I've quoted here is the first time I've heard anyone even suggest that it might be negative for Republican candidates too. It seems to be common knowledge that the Dems are the ones most badly affected by it.

Naturally :lol:

Okay, look, I know it's not your default mode, but do try to add something to the discussion.

Have YOU heard of any electoral gitches that harmed Republicans? I'm actually interested in this.

Frankly, I dont buy into conspiracy theories, which probably correlates with my lack of black helicopter sightings around my house. I think the problem your side is having is not Kathy Harris, The Supreme Court, Diebold, or Halliburton, its your message. At some point you have to claim responsibility for your own failures and not blame them on this, that, or the other. Its a fairly simple concept, but its one that your people need to understand.

That said, have there been polling station issues? Of course there have been and its nothing new. There have always been sheenanigans at the polling booth pulled by both parties. But to point to this as the sole reason for your partys defeats is myopic

But who's doing that? You're putting words in the mouth of the liberals on this thread and elsewhere. I never said that electoral fraud was the only reason the republicans won in 2000 and 2004. I wish Kerry could have pulled the stick out of his ass for just a minute and started talking and behaving even slightly telegenically, for instance. And the Republicans definitely whomped the Dems at staying on message. But there's no denying that electoral "accidents" were a contributing factor, and, given how close the actual voting was, may well have been the final straw that tipped the result.

I ask again: can you point to an instance of electoral screwup since (and including) the 2000 election that didn't favor the Republican? I can't, but maybe you can.

If not, then black helicopters or no, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to connect the dots.

How to catch and stop some election fraud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaEECHjWptU

Video the vote. Bring cameras. Record what happens. Find out how to complain about problems, and do it ASAP.

How to hack the vote:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

A description of how to change the results of the next US election nearly untraceably.

Yes, the John Thune vs. Tim Johnson race. The viilage of Pine Ridge on a SD Indian reservation indicated that there were changed ballots. That county was the last to report and ultimately put Johnson over the top by about 500 votes. Thune, being the anti-liberal, decided not to put the state through a bitter recount and conceded the race. Two years later, he defeated Daschle

Ah, here is some details how someone using the most popular Electronic Submission voting machine in the USA can hack it:
Now, naively, that only gives you the ability to swing a single machine. And if you recorded 10,000 votes on that machine, someone might notice.

Really, why think small scale? Get a copy of the Princeston virus:

Install a Princeton virus, and you can easily turn an entire voting location's machines into voting for whatever candidate you want.

Every smart card that is used gets infected with the Princeton virus, which infects every machine at the location.

If that seems like too much work (I mean, you only get to swing the election by a few thousand votes!), you could try hacking the vote counting machine:

But why hasn't this happened?

I did explain that this is nearly impossible to detect. Here is a less credible report on some evidence if it actually happening -- not proof, because there is no way to provably detect this kind of intrusion:

Anyone want to make the state of Ohio have a huge happy face in the election results?

Interesting. I did some googling on this, not having heard of it before. Googling '"John thune" "tim johnson" election fraud' didn't turn up a whole lot, but there were a few articles--some that were during the allegations and several on the aftermath of them.

It appears that the claims were dismissed. There was another article that indicated that the fraud allegations were from a canned fraud complaint template distributed by the RNC.

I'm glad to have disproven this, but it's not really the partisan in me. I'd actually be very happy if somebody came along and dispelled other allegations of electoral fraud, including the ones that allegedly helped Republicans. If other fraud claims are as ersatz as this one appears to be, it would suggest that there may actually be a foundation of integrity underlying our government after all. I'd vastly prefer to lose honestly than to have the election stolen at the last minute by either party.

Here's the clearest piece I found about the Thune case, btw:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411010001

Sorry if I dont find this site anything more than a smear site dedicated to advancing liberal causes

... Was it the word "progressive"?

That wasn't the only article stating that the SD incident was a non-event. If you run that same google query, you'll see that.

There are a number of other issues of potential concern being reported:

Link

Dont assume because someone disagrees they are automatically a liberal or "your side" which you seem to be saying alot.

Going off of your black heliocopter statement; I'm curious to what source of information (outside of being present at the place of any occurance) do you use to gather the data that formulates what you interpret as being real and factual?

ratbastid considering you think that the Flroida ballot was somehow fraud despite it being a democrat designed ballot in a democrat county, I don't know how anyone could convince you that this wasn't just a mistake either.

Want to hire consultants to do the grunt work for you?

http://fixavote.com/

They even have a 1-800 number.

Actually, I do think the Florida ballot was a mistake. It was a harmful mistake that quite possibly gave the presidency to the wrong candidate. (Either that or Palm Beach County has a HELL of a lot of Pat Buchanan fans!) But a mistake.

I'm not so generous in my view of Diebold and their "built-to-be-hacked" voting machines. Nobody has successfully demonstrated to me why a voting machine can't be secure, or why it can't include a voter-verifiable paper trail. Nobody has successfully demonstrated why a corporation whose CEO declared his commitment to "deliver Ohio for the President" should be trusted with our voting infrastructure.

If the 2004 election had taken place in a third world country under the eye of international observers, it would have been thrown out. How can this not be a major concern? Here's how: the errors almost universally benefit the (current) majority party.

The other issue that came out of Florida in 2000 was the sloppy way in which the state attempted to purge the voting registration records to ensure that person with criminal records were removed from the list as eligible voters. The problem was they purged people with the same name, people with misdomeanor convictions, and others. No one really knows how many eligible voters lost their voting rights, but the evidence suggested that most were in the minority communities in Florida.

Hopefully, the new law that mandates provisional ballots when a person's voting rights are questioned when they attempt to vote will make this less likely this time around.

It would be better if a write in candidate won, who didn't even know they were running. Let's say if Jim Tressel (OSU football coach) wins the governorship in Ohio.

What the government should have done, was in 2000 or so, make a X-prize type competition that colleges, companies, and individuals could have entered to make a perfect, hacker safe, easy, cheap and reliable voting system for 300 million people. And then offer a prize for who ever could figured out a way to hack it.

I know that electronic voting has problems now, but it could work.

Well, this isn't an "electoral glitch," but it sure smells bad. No doubt it won't be a problem for the same people who consider a Democrat-designed ballot to be a Republican plot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/us...gewanted=print

If cutting off the last few letters of the candidate's name is a plot, you should have nothing but contempt for the people behind this despicable tactic.

If a group of Dem computer nerds are manipulating Google, absolutely it should be investigated, althought it is hardly a violation of election laws.

But at worst, it is moving stories up in Google, and not creating false stories. I dont find it nearly as despicable as directly trying to influence voters with false information like the letter to hispanic immigrants in Calif...and not nearly as serious as flaws in the actual ballots or equipment.

Edit: (the next day)
I changed my mind....forget the investigation.

Let this "despicable" :eek: battle of Google Bombs rage on!
Hopefully, this silliness will keep these passionate partisans on both sides from doing real harm in the last week before the election.

Okay! Here's the first wave of early-evoting machine "glitches":

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...s/15869924.htm

http://www.kfdm.com/engine.pl?statio...ortvideo.shtml

So in Florida and Texas counties' early voting, votes for Democrats are being turned into votes for Republicans. Surprise, surprise.

Stay tuned to this thread, kids. I'll keep you posted of every voting irregularity I can--especially those related to electronic voting. I promise to be non-partisan about this; I'll put it here no matter whose vote turns into whose.

Thank you, rb. So far, the "irregularities" are getting little national coverage that I have seen.