Florida Voting Machine Logs Reveal Anomalies 819
boot1780 writes "Having 'successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election,' Black Box Voting reports that the 'internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.' Besides the date discrepancies, they claim to have discovered countless other errors and anomalies, including a case of one voting machine being 'powered down 128 times during the election'." Given the findings here, can we have a do-over?
Oh, quitcher whinin' (Score:5, Insightful)
Take back our elections (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anybody still beleive that this election wasn't fixed? I mean, really. Of course it'll never be proven, but it's so freakin' obvious. Incompetence can only explain so many problems - I think we've passed that point a long time ago.
And once again - no matter what your political persuasion, you need to demand that your representatives introduce or support legislation that requires a voting machine to produce a paper receipt for each vote, or some equally verifiable and recountable paper trail. Any politician that objects to a fair election needs to be fired and replaced.
Coup_d'etat! (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop whining.
Bush stole the election fair and square. It's our (Americans') fault for not creating a massive landslide against him. The fact that a near plurality of people voted for the wanker created an opportunity for Bush 43, his brother, Kathleen Harris and the Republicans to seize power.
History will show that this election was a coup d'état [wikipedia.org], and that we were the fools who let it happen.
Want to prevent this from happening again? Andrew Tobias is the DNC treasurer: http://www.andrewtobias.com/ [andrewtobias.com], send Andy a message and he will tell you how to get involved.
Who counts the votes/Who decides what's important (Score:5, Insightful)
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
Or something like that. Since the media refuses to acknowledge that there are serious questions about legitimacy under electronic voting, pointing out the problems probably doesn't matter any more - any evidence of problems is perforce "nutty conspiracy theory material" and so is a non-starter.
Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors. Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer.
Um, election fraud is bi-partisan (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take back our elections (Score:5, Insightful)
Its an appealing thought. I mean, the alternative is to believe that more than half the country was dumb enough to believe that the same jackasses who failed to stop 9/11 and royally screwed up in Iraq were the best guys to protect us from further terrorist attacks and the best guys to fix Iraq.
There's something very comforting about conspiracy theories in general. I mean, if it's a conspiracy you at least have a chance to fight that; it's just the actions of a few people. But if the problems of the world emerge from the apathy, stupidity, ignorance, greed, and hate of billions of people, including ourselves... well, that's a little more difficult to tackle and a little more depressing to think about.
It must all be the CIA's fault.
Re:What's new... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How hard is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's massively inefficient, which is a good thing in elections. Efficiency only makes cheating easier.
Re:Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is that black box voting machines can not be checked and are open to fraudulent/faulty actions.
All these issues should have been identified on election day so that appropriate actions could be taken (revote, dismiss votes, no issue, etc...)
TRANSPARANCY is the key,
Re:Devil's Advocate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, quitcher whinin' (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the operative phrase here is "Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." These machines just plain don't work, like so many other system out there.
I do agree that a FOSS voting system would be the best way to ensure accountability and reliability of the software.
Re:ZOMG HAX (Score:5, Insightful)
If there were only one or two instances where people said "Hm, something slightly fishy seems to have happened..." then you'd likely have a point.
But when there are dozens of reports of voting machines not working correctly, and when each and every time the errors seem to be in favor of the party that won... Yeah, I'd say calling shenannigans is justified.
Maybe it'll turn out that the errors didn't actually occur - maybe it'll turn out that the tracking software is fucked, but the votes were counted correctly. Maybe it'll turn out that there was some vast conspiracy. Maybe it'll turn out that the Democrats would have gotten *fewer* votes if the machines had worked properly. Whatever the results, what's important is this:
The machines don't seem to be working correctly when handling a very important task. We need to investigate this, no matter what. It isn't a matter of sour grapes (well, except for some people, maybe) but it IS a matter of finding out what the hell is going on.
Surely you don't think that we shouldn't investigate anomalous situations?
Stop whining - indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Something many people here and in other predominantly-left forums seem to be missing is that many Americans truly, honestly believed that Bush was the better candidate. I doubt that your average Republican voted for Bush any more automatically than the typical Democrat voted for Kerry, and yet everyone seems to think that only Republicans were partisan voters. Well, guess what: there are sheep on both sides of the fence. Singling out one group of them will only alienate the bloc of voters you should be trying to persuade.
I voted for Bush for various reasons, but I would probably stand alongside you if a recall vote were held today. The time for partisan sniping is over. We need to work together if we want to make a difference.
As a side note to fellow Republicans, his closing advice is just as valid for us. Contact the RNC [gop.com] and make your opinion known. Write to your representatives [house.gov] and senate [senate.gov] and let them know that you disagree with executive branch policies. This is your party: step up and take charge of it.
If only (Score:2, Insightful)
That proves it (Score:2, Insightful)
If even the good ole paper ballot can't do it, exactly who thought something as complex (and programmable) as a computer could make any difference ?
Personally I'm not surprised, it was just waiting to happen.
Anonymous, but verifiable (Score:2, Insightful)
The voter should *not* get a "receipt", so that he/she can be paid/blackmailed to vote a certain way. However, the machines should produce a write-only-once piece of human (as well as machine) readable output, such as a paper or plastic card with holes punched or permanent OCR ink markings.
The use of a machine to make selections is OK, but under no circumstances should the "permanent" record of my vote be made on a piece of computer storage media such as a hard disk or flash memory card. That is completely insane.
Our elections MUST have an immutable audit trail, while remaining anonymous. Each voter (or a trusted friend/agent in the case of the visually impaired or otherwise disabled) verifies that the physical record of the vote is as intended, then deposits that record in a container kept under watch by multiple parties.
If the votes are tallied by computers (they're good at that), fine. BUT, a physical record is available for recounts and audits of accuracy.
Anybody wanting a system making auditing impossible must be assumed to be up to fraud. No other interpretation makes sense.
Is it too late? Would a voter initiative for auditable voting simply be rejected by the powers that be already put in place, even if favored by 75% of the public in polls? THIS is the gravest issue facing our democracy now, on which the fate of all other issues hang. It is a coup of horrific proportion. (though corporate financing of election campaigns is a close second to be sure)
Caution in your Commentary (Score:3, Insightful)
Virg
Re:Stop whining - indeed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who counts the votes/Who decides what's importa (Score:3, Insightful)
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
You've hit on something very interesting here, and at the risk of an aptly-modded OT ramble, I'd like to expand on it.
Do you ever pay attention to those 'News of the Weird' or 'Offbeat News' sections of your local website / newspaper? While some of it is truly in the oddball category, there is something else going on, and it's much more subtle.
From my perspective, many of these 'offbeat' news stories would fall under another category - "News You Did Not Expect To Hear". That is, the rest of the news is 'safe' news - news that you could have expected to hear, based on the ongoing conditioning by all of the other news you've heard recently. The 'offbeat' news is the unsafe news, that was interesting enough to make it to print, but is otherwise not part of the main program.
For instance, a woman might give birth to a 15 pound baby. This is very unusual, and also quite newsworthy. So why is it tagged as offbeat? Perhaps to prevent distracting the news consumer from the latest strife in the Islamic world?
Color me cynical, but the whole concept of 'offbeat' news seems to be about molding public opinion to the viewpoints of the newsmakers (whoever they are).
Inappropriate caution, IMO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Devil's Advocate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the outcome of an election is important. All the parties in the election have very strong motives to do whatever it takes to win, and they will all "adjust" the results if given the opportunity. There's just too much at stake to not do this. If there's anything "funny", the first assumption should always be that it's not an accident.
Yes, sometimes problems are just equipment malfunctions or incompetent users. But that should never be the first assumption. It should be accepted only if there's very good evidence that there wasn't interference by any of the people with access to the equipment.
This is especially true if there's any secrecy about the equipment's workings. If they're hiding something from the public, there's a reason. Nobody honest would want such things hidden. Anyone interested in an honest election would want to know what's being hidden.
Given the shoddy history of elections, tinfoil-hatism is the only rational approach.
So did Chile (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the more heinous human tragedies occured on September 11, 1973.
The democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvadore Allende was overthrown in a coup d'etat by General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime killed thousands of dissidents and other "enemies of the state".
The reason? Allende was a Marxist, and the CIA (and by extension, Richard Nixon) were keen to keep Latin America firmly in the American camp during the Cold War, even if installing fascist dictatorships was necessary.
I'm willing to bet anyone here that we'll attempt something similar in the Palestinian territory, so long as we can keep the Israelis from doing it themselves in some wickedly obvious fashion, like firing a rocket from a chopper, or hare-brained assassination attempts.
Of course, we're far more civilzed at home. We rely on factual information [anncoulter.org] reported in an objective fashion [foxnews.com] to an educated public [jamesfaqs.com].
Re:Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we'd be stupid not to at least consider the possiblity.
Look, if you've ever dealt with government contracting, you know that having friends in the right places is huge. Over the past decade or so it's gotten worse -- I won't say worse than ever, but the trend is definitely the wrong way. If you don't think that people go as close to bribery as they can legally manage you're naive If you don't think that some people when tempted to step over the line do it, you're a fool.
Once you've stepped over that line, you've accepted doing business illegally. The question is what is the most economically way to deal in corruption on the scale you practice it.
Only partisan pinheads automatically believe every accusation or conspiracy theory that comes up, but these accusations and theories serve an important purpose. Sometimes that creaking sound you hear downstairs is a burglar.
Re:What's new... (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone believes that these sorts of discrepencies are new, or limited to computer voting, he is hopelessly naive. And the assertion that computer voting will make these disrepencies harder to uncover is pure bullshit, as proved by this episode. If a bunch of paper ballots were filled out before election day, or dumped in a river, how would anyone ever know?
Re:So did Chile (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm actually writing an article for my website (no, you can't have the address. It's a very cruddy site), where I've been posting editorial-type writings for years, about these elections. I mention that the neocon record re: supporting dictators and such isn't one to be proud of and include Pinochet and the Shah of Iran.
I look at it this way: If we or Israel go after the democratically elected leaders of Palestine then neither country can whine or complain about others trying to do the same to them. You can't have it both ways. Either one has to accept that in democratic elections things don't always turn out like you want them to (witness our recent elections) or it's acceptable to go after the elected person(s) so you can get you want despite there being democratic elections.
Re:Uhhh... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I applaud you for trying to maintain a sane and rational outlook and avoid falling into these conspiracy theories, this issue has far too many coincidences for you to dismiss like that. What would it take for you to change your stance from "no biggie, just a little smoke, no fire" to "fuck me, that's an awful lot of coincidence, maybe I should entertain the possibility that something is wrong here."
Hell, even assuming there's zero conspiracy, just a lot of blunders, should still make you nervous as it still means there's been a perversion of democracy.
crime/motive/opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, just imagine,if the scumware guys OWN the computer that you and everyone else uses. Now imagine the scumware guys are looking at CONTROLLING THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT by OWNING that computer.
How much is that worth? Really, how much motivation is there to control TRILLIONS of dollars, not thousands, TRILLIONS and the largest war machine on the planet? Do you see any incentive there, or is all this just another series of "coincidences"? Coups don't happen around the world all the time? Where's the magic document from the truth fairies that says the US can never fall to coup plotters?
Now look at the track record so far of what we have found out these folks, how many lies have been drug out of them? How many people have perished based on the lies, how may large corporate insiders connected to the government have profitted immensely?
You can't do the math on this? What's it going to take, them coming on TV and just announcing it? You fail to be able to take into account all the other information out there? This latest is just another large chunk of evidence, look at ALL of it together, what do you see? I see some serious crimes right up into treason,and the probable perps with the clear motive and the clear opportunity.
Re:How hard is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Pen, Paper and Box combo is the most transparent system there is. America, ditch those stupid machines and quit being a high-tech banana republic.
Re:Take back our elections (Score:2, Insightful)
It's in interesting form of solipsism: a conspiracy theorist believes,not that the truth only exists in his mind, but that there IS an objective truth, but ONLY they can see it.
Life's tough all over (Score:3, Insightful)
Paranoia??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"nor that faulty voting machines would have changed the outcome of the election"
Try telling that to the QA people for an air traffic control systems or something more serious than life and death, somethinggggg, something like a stock exchange. We have systems across a large chunk of the planet that do a very good job at preventing planes and stockmarkets from crashing. People would also get pretty fucked off if the gazzillion dollar lotteries or even the local bookie had "disconnected anomolies".
Maybe it was "fool play" rather than "foul play" but whoever is in charge of running the election should, at a minimum, step aside until the negligence (or otherwise) is investigated with the rigor a technological disaster desrves.
Even if the GP is making heavy use of a "conclusion mat", nobody has "stolen the thunder", it's just can't be heard over the noise of the media steamtrain as it endlessly wizzes past.
Re:Guinness Voice: Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, how exactly would you make 65,000 pieces of paper disappear without anyone noticing? I think you could probably hide a few in your pockets, but what about the next few thousand pounds of votes? You certainly couldn't do it in a few seconds or without a lot of accomplices.
I appreciate you trying to put things in perspective -- but the entire point of electronic voting is that it was supposed to be MORE secure and MORE fraud-resistant than paper. What we have right now is, if anything, the worst of both worlds -- just as tamper-able as old voting machines, with the added bonus of being able to magically change thousands or millions of votes with no more skill than it takes to do a basic card trick.
When an entire city's electorate is represented on a chip the size of a postage stamp, the requirements for physical secrity are much greater than they ever were for what was literally truckloads of paper. And the requirements for auditing and athenticity verification are that much higher.
Re:Uhhh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's new... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Caution in your Commentary (Score:2, Insightful)
All those conspiracy theorists are just talking' crazy!
Re:Guinness Voice: Brilliant! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I'm going for paper as being more 'secure' from a practical standpoint (compared to the current machines).
Re:Caution in your Commentary (Score:5, Insightful)
While I applaud you for trying to maintain a sane and rational outlook and avoid falling into these conspiracy theories, this issue has far too many coincidences for you to dismiss like that. What would it take for you to change your stance from "no biggie, just a little smoke, no fire" to "fuck me, that's an awful lot of coincidence, maybe I should entertain the possibility that something is wrong here."
Hell, even assuming there's zero conspiracy, just a lot of blunders, should still make you nervous as it still means there's been a perversion of democracy.
Re:Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
You know as well as I do that this isn't so.
I don't know it at all, and I posit that you don't, either. Everything I've read from Black Box has been focused entirely on the machines, without respect to which race or who won. They've published as much about congressional and even city council races as they have about the presidential election. If you have some evidence that they have a political agenda beyond making sure the voting is honest, cought it up. Innuendo is just a waste of time.
The flaw with 'conspiracy theorist' (Score:4, Insightful)
By definition, to not believe in conspiracies would mean that you don't believe illegal p2p filesharing takes place. So, lets see who seems more logical.
Person A: Believes that a machine who's design should be extreamly simple consistantly makes errors in favor of the group who is most adament about using them indicates likely fraud.
Person B: Believes that illegal p2p fileshareing does not happen.
(Now, if your going to argue that you DO believe that p2p filesharing exists, then you too are a 'conspiracy theorist', and your post becomes totally nonsensical.)
...think Paris Hilton (Score:2, Insightful)
But he has powerful backers who don't give a shit about what will happen 50 years from now because they are rich enough to protect their own families and ride out anything bad that happens. Saudi family, "I'll give you Ohio" Diebold, evil Cheney, evil Rove. BushCo has a strong record of cronyism, both as a recipient (those companies he was gifted and failed, the national guard schitt), and as a giver (Energy company meetings, Pharma-friendly health care reform, FEMA's Brown, Harriet Myers, and way too many to mention).
Starting the Iraq war took a single-mindedness to invade Iraq. It took a lot of propoganda, funded by the taxpayers and thought up by Rove et al. It required hammering the CIA for shreds of evidence to support their wish, and ignoring all the analysis that Iraq was NOT a threat to the US. Outing Valerie Plame, lieing to the UN, more propoganda to frenzy Americans into a war fever, lieing about the costs, lieing about the insurgency and the possibility of civil war. More propoganda. Politically based classification and leaks.
This was idiotic. Iraq is worse off than before, and America is worse for the change. We have 17,000 dead and wounded soldiers, the Army is seriously weakened, our great-grand-children will have to pay back the debt for this war. There are now MORE terrorists, with better reasons to hate America and Christians.
Does any of this affect Bush? Rove? Cheney? Fox News? Only if they cared about Americans. Their own families will be fine. Their own families will always have roofs over their heads, excellent health care, and very rich contacts.
Yes, they are idiots, and also crafty. It doesn't take James Bond skills to stage an "elaborate" take over of a US election when the voting machines don't have paper records. Just knowledge of which few precincts to do it in, getting your political contacts to approve the machines, and enough money to the right hands. Which are they missing?
Re:Stop whining - indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
What does that have to do with anything? Many Americans believed Ross Perot was the better candidate, but nobody argues that he deserved the job or - if he managed to force his way into office - that we should shut up about it.
I voted for Bush for various reasons
Ahh... now I see where you're coming from.
The fact is, about a half-million more Americans voted for Al Gore than for George Bush. As for who was more partisan, consider the relentless smear campaigns carried out against Bush opponents Anne Richards ("she's a lesbian!"), Al Gore (everything you can think of from "he claims to have invented the Internet" to "he grew up in a fancy Washington hotel"), and John Kerry (the Swift Boat liars).
Consider the shenanigans carried out in Florida in 2000 that exposed the weaknesses in American democracy and showed just how open to abuse the system is. The Republicans were simply more partisan, beating on the system without regard for the spirit and principle of the rules to get the result they wanted.
Consider the (more subtle) shenanigans in the 2004 election, particularly in Ohio, where voters in Democratic districts had to wait as much as 8 hours to vote and had their right to vote challenged in massive numbers by Republican partisans at the polling stations. This was made possible by Republicans in the Governor's office and Republicans in control of the election. Voters in Republican-leaning districts did not face these modern-day Jim Crow measures.
Now, consider all the shady stuff that's so difficult to prove - it took years just to get logs from these electronic voting machines, and they're FULL of suspicious data. Consider the 11th-hour "correction" in the voting data on election night 2004 - we're asked to accept that the exit polls were way off for the first time in history, and somehow the numbers jumped just enough in just the right places (all at the same time!) to put Bush over the top. Yet anyone who talks about this is smeared as a "nutjob"...
Who is more partisan? Republicans. One of the great failures of the Democratic party in the last 5 years has been to underestimate the ruthlessness and lack of principle on the part of the Republicans. Anybody who claims "well, both sides do it, everybody is partisan these days, a pox on both their houses" has either not been paying attention, or has drunk the Republican kool-aid.
Democratic Socialism vs. Republican Facism (Score:5, Insightful)
The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.
The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.
I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day.
Re:Democratic Socialism vs. Republican Facism (Score:3, Insightful)
The Republicans tend to be better for the economy
Let's look at growth. The first chart here [heritage.org] shows quarter-over-quarter economic growth since 1992. If you take out a few quarters for each president (recessions happen), Bush and Clinton had fairly comparable growth.
What's the difference? Clinton achieved this growth while simultaneously *eliminating* the deficit he'd inherited from two prior Republican presidents. Bush achieved this growth through the largest deficits in the history of the world.
Clinton's economic policies set the US up for long-term success while enabling growth. Bush enabled growth through disastrous fiscal policy that will continue to damage the US economy long after he's dragged his incompetent ass into retirement.
The Democrats have too many people eating out of the taxpayer coffers
Let's look at job growth under Bush. This report [epi.org] from the Economic Policy Institute argues that essentially all of the job growth under Bush is due to his massive growth in governments. Get that? If Bush hadn't exploded the size of the US government, there would have been almost no job growth over the last 5 years. And of course, he's borrowing money to pay for it all.
So tell me again that *Democrats* encourage people to feed at the public trough?
Honestly, this sort of uncritical thought is destroying America.
Re:Democratic Socialism vs. Republican Facism (Score:3, Insightful)
in which case your statement about republicans being better for the environment is baseless.
It seems to me you simply have accepted that bit of dogma without any evidence and simply ignore any evidence which goes against your dogmatic belief.
Re:Inappropriate caution, IMO (Score:1, Insightful)
Do the views of republicans and their direct opposition to my views allow me to call them names? Surely not! I will, however, assault their logic and reason and arguments before I assault them for their views. When all you have left in your argument arsenal is name-calling, you have lost the debate.
To the parent tangent thread:
Anytime you talk about the psychology of extremists, it is important that you look at ONLY extremists as holding those opinions. If you want to talk about irrational extremism and which camp has MORE, and you go about deciding which camp has more based solely on the feeling of your views being 'sane, rational and absent of extremism themself.' It's impossible for someone to quantify which side is more extreme when opposing views are at the core EXTREME opposites.
To say that all share a mindset which you describe as 'knowing what is better for the rest of us', it is better to say you yourself hold your beliefs as inerrant , and if only the rest of the world would believe what you believe, the world would be a better place. Only a child thinks in these terms, it denies the very basic fact that humans will differ in opinions.
sp00n3d@(REMOVE)earthlink.net
Re:Democratic Socialism vs. Republican Facism (Score:3, Insightful)
That'd be true if Republican administrations actually created wealth gains all around. But the current one, at least, has enriched the lives of only the wealthiest Americans, and paid for it by cutting all the programs that used to help non-wealthy Americans live a decent life. As soon as it seemed we had a little extra money in the budget (and it turns out we never really did), Bush ignored the country's long term needs and instead paid off the wealthiest Americans with huge personal income and investment tax cuts.
And as for deficit spending... if I sold out the country to China, I'd have enough free money to make myself and my policies look good too. Wow, I can run a 400 billion dollar war AND cut taxes? The miracle of deficit spending! But as any credit-card waving American knows, the bill does show up in the mail eventually, and all that deficit spending catches up to you and your economy.
for a sheeplike constituency
More like a pride of lions than a flock of sheep. People were proud of the American way, and the American promise that we'd never let our poor and elderly go without. I'd much rather have a country where the "haves" help out the "have-nots" than a country of selfish people who'd would rather hoard their extra bread and let it rot than share a bit with a starving man. How can you be proud of being selfish?