Fraud and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Chase

Chase

CAGiversary!
Feedback
8 (100%)
Both sides have talked considerably about fraud. It was first reported in West Virginia that electronic voting machines changed Obama votes to votes for McCain right in front of the voter's eyes. It was also reported in several other states, including Texas. Republicans speak about ACORN and fraudulent registrations. However, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses, it seems Republicans are simply using ACORN to distract people and the media while Republican supporters attempt to suppress voters and force key states to render in their favor. Many people are convinced that, electronic voting systems company, Diebold will outright steal the election for John McCain.

How significant a role do you believe fraud will play in the election? Will it affect the outcome in any considerable way?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It's a little disturbing that there's people watching their own vote turn into one for McCain. Seriously? They could be a little more discreet if the system is going to be cheated like that.
 
I've said it in other threads, and I'll say it again. You can register 1000s of Mickey Mouses, but Mickey Mouse isn't going to the polls to vote.
 
[quote name='lordwow']I've said it in other threads, and I'll say it again. You can register 1000s of Mickey Mouses, but Mickey Mouse isn't going to the polls to vote.[/quote]

Problem is..half of the states DON'T require any form of ID to vote. You simply walk up and give them your name, scribble down a fake signature, and get a ballot. Any group with a list of registered voters could send dozens of volunteers to vote at multiple precincts under other people's names...stuffing the ballot for their candidate. If you had a list of voters and their precincts, you could theoretically visit 10-20 different places in your city and vote 20 different times. If they don't require an ID, how will they know you are committing fraud?

Answer: They won't. If Mickey Mouse is registered at precinct 232, and you show up claiming to be Mickey Mouse, you get a ballot like everyone else.
 
I don't think that all these accusations will amount to much.

In terms of campaigning ability: Obama >>>>>>>> McCain.

I doubt that Obama has to worry about electronic voting systems stealing the election from him. If anything, he should be concerned about the Bradley effect since, according to Mykevermin, we are all racists.

EDIT: Actually watched the video... nice... ;-)
 
A former employee of Diebold was just on the Thom Hartmann program, talking about applying mystery patches to machines in democratic counties and other shady stuff.

Theres no justification for having privatized the vote. Especially to a company whose president says he will deliver a state for a particular candidate (Ohio, Bush 04)

It only takes flipping a few key counties to flip the entire state. Its a very real threat.

The good part is that Obama has 260 something electoral votes in the bag and only has to win one of a whole bunch of states that he's favored to win anyway.
 
[quote name='BigT']I don't think that all these accusations will amount to much.

In terms of campaigning ability: Obama >>>>>>>> McCain.

I doubt that Obama has to worry about electronic voting systems stealing the election from him. If anything, he should be concerned about the Bradley effect since, according to Mykevermin, we are all racists.

EDIT: Actually watched the video... nice... ;-)[/quote]

I posted the wrong video. ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JESZiLpBLE

I meant to use this Fox News video where they show the susceptibility of Diebold voting systems to hacking.

And yes, I'm using Fox News for a reason.
 
Until you have a system that makes the code on the machines fully viewable, verifiable, and open for anyone to audit, we can never be sure.

Pvote is exactly the start we need. It is written in a language easy for non programmers to understand (at least relative to C or derivatives), and is by order of magnitude simpler. When the total code necessary to run the machines breaks down like so (according to Pvote):

Diebold AccuVote TSX: 64,000 lines of C++
Sequoia Edge software: 124,000 lines of C.
Pvote: 460 lines of Python.

you're always going to have problems. Not just with bugs, not just with the fact that you, I, the state, and nobody else actually knows what's in there, but with the basic incompetence shown by the inability to write clean, efficient code. Look at those numbers. If that's not seriously fucking whack, I don't know what is. 124 thousand lines of code to register a touch and +1 a table? You gotta be shittin me.

You wanna fix the problem of voting? Open source the process. The self interest of the parties, the opportunities for higher education to contribute and audit, and even Joe Everycoder's ability to personally verify what's going on is the key to a process that works for the people.

Oh, and it's free.

http://pvote.org/

If the system looked like this: http://pvote.org/review/, I'd trust that sucker in a heart beat. Those pieces of shit we run now wouldn't survive 5 minutes of the scrutiny pvote has already gotten. That says something to me.
 
[quote name='Capitalizt']Problem is..half of the states DON'T require any form of ID to vote. You simply walk up and give them your name, scribble down a fake signature, and get a ballot. Any group with a list of registered voters could send dozens of volunteers to vote at multiple precincts under other people's names...stuffing the ballot for their candidate. If you had a list of voters and their precincts, you could theoretically visit 10-20 different places in your city and vote 20 different times. If they don't require an ID, how will they know you are committing fraud?

Answer: They won't. If Mickey Mouse is registered at precinct 232, and you show up claiming to be Mickey Mouse, you get a ballot like everyone else.[/QUOTE]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act#Voter_identification

Voter identification

HAVA requires any voter who registers to vote by mail and has not previously voted in a Federal election show current and valid photo identification or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document that shows the name and address of the voter. Voters who submit any of these forms of identification during registration are exempt as are voters entitled to vote by absentee ballot under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.
 
[quote name='Mike23']Why don't you guys just put a fucking "X" on a ballot next to someone's name?[/quote]

One word: Papercuts.

~HotShotX
 
[quote name='DJSteel']How much will this affect the election?? Hopefully not as much as 2000[/quote]
2008 definitely wont be decided by a vote of 5-4.
 
I'm with speed, I don't see how you can possibly fuck up electronic voting software. How the fuck do you do it? It's one of the easiest and least complicated things imaginable. It makes no sense.
 
[quote name='Mike23']Why don't you guys just put a fucking "X" on a ballot next to someone's name?[/QUOTE]
Coupla good reasons.

The defenses against paper tampering are minimal at best. The sophistication required to tamper with paper ballots are by orders of magnitude lower than what's necessary to defeat electronic measures implemented by even basic computer defenses. It also removes human counting, which will fail to X%(X>0) no matter who's counting.

I think paper should be used in conjunction with electronic. A receipt should be printed after the ballot is electronically cast for easy auditing should the electronic counting methods fail or are doubted. I mean really, if the black hole of shitty IT that is Best Buy can print a receipt showing what you bought with bar coding on there for easy computer reading for verification purposes, so can we.

Plus there's that whole hanging chad retardedness, or god forbid someone makes a check that touches another box.

Also, Hotshot is right. Think of the billions of dollars in lost productivity due to injury from the paper ballots.
 
I just see more benefits in simplicity with paper ballots.

That said, the receipt idea makes a lot of sense as well.
 
[quote name='SpazX']I'm with speed, I don't see how you can possibly fuck up electronic voting software. How the fuck do you do it? It's one of the easiest and least complicated things imaginable. It makes no sense.[/quote]

The machines have to count a lot of votes. They're probably using doubles instead of integers.
 
I just dont understand the facsination with touch screen voting to begin with. I also dont understand why some jurisdictions still rely on punch cards. IMO, the optical scan ballots are the most user friendly and proven technology. I mean, I know we still have some of the extra-elderly around, but pretty much everyone else grew up taking test in school on "Scantron" type sheets. The optical scan ballots work in much the same way, you just fill in the bubble. Then the ballots are counted, quickly and efficiently with a machine. But if there is some concern, there is still the paper ballot itself that can used hand counted. In my county in Virginia, and similarly when I lived in DC, the "bubbles" for the diferent candidates/elections were so spread out that there could be no 'Florida-2000-butterfly-ballot'-like confusion. You'd literally have to be an idiot to 'accidentally' vote for the wrong person (which begs the question, how *do* counties handle voting by the mentally ill?)

Also, please excuse my ignorance, but I fail to see how printing out a "reciept" enhances the integrity of the vote. That is to say, where is this "receipt" to be maintained? Does the voter review the receipt and then stuff it into a different box? I'm not asking a rhetorical question, I really just dont understand.

BTW: I've voted on punchcards, touch screens, and optical scan, and while I've had no *serious* problems with any, I much prefer the optical scan.
 
[quote name='fatherofcaitlyn']The machines have to count a lot of votes. They're probably using doubles instead of integers.[/QUOTE]
:D
[quote name='hostyl1']Also, please excuse my ignorance, but I fail to see how printing out a "reciept" enhances the integrity of the vote. That is to say, where is this "receipt" to be maintained? Does the voter review the receipt and then stuff it into a different box? I'm not asking a rhetorical question, I really just dont understand.[/quote]
This is just my opinion and certainly open to ideas. It's just what I've come up with.

The receipt would show only the people you voted for, same as a receipt shows what you've bought. At the bottom would be a bar code for optical scanning for quick checks against the machine numbers were one so inclined (which I would always be inclined). This would go into a good old fashioned ballot box. At the end of the day, the receipts would be scanned by something akin to a dollar bill counter (can it really be that hard to develop?) and compared against the machine tallies. If there is a discrepancy, we fall back on the good old fashioned printing on the receipt, checked by the voter beforehand, that clearly states vote choices. There are a host of security measures that can be introduced along the way. With inevitable failures, you have the vote on hand, human readable. Mistakes would be easily ferreted out by doing database table comparisons, and each iteration would make the process more efficient, rather than the current system of patching holes only to introduce more bugs.

Paper is good, don't get me wrong, but fallibility is built into the system. I think we should do better.
 
@speedracer: That seems overly complicated as now you have the votes stored in two different locations and while the receipt might show the correct vote, the "bar code" you are using for counting could show otherwise. Moreover, if you allow the voters themselves to check via bar code, you'd have to have either two sets of machines (one to vote, one to scan) for about every voting booth (increasing cost and complexity) or you risk the ballot being 'secret' as the voter has to ask the pollworker to verify it for them.

[quote name='speedracer']
The defenses against paper tampering are minimal at best. The sophistication required to tamper with paper ballots are by orders of magnitude lower than what's necessary to defeat electronic measures implemented by even basic computer defenses. It also removes human counting, which will fail to X%(X>0) no matter who's counting. [/quote]

I'm not sure what tampering you are expecting with paper. The ballots are numbered and, at least in my county not touched by anyone other than the voter after the ballot has been marked. The ballots are machine counted and the paper ballot itself serves as the "reciept".

If you are talking about wholesale replacement of a paper ballot with a differently marked paper ballot, I'd proffer that the size of the ballot (about the size of a "legal ruled" sheet of paper) makes that much more difficult than switching out one of the memory cards (about the size of a PCMCIA card). Plus, each of the memory cards hold multiple votes so you could flip several with a single switch. Much more difficult with the paper.
 
[quote name='hostyl1']@speedracer: That seems overly complicated as now you have the votes stored in two different locations and while the receipt might show the correct vote, the "bar code" you are using for counting could show otherwise.[/quote]
Sure, but the sophistication required would be much higher than say, replacing, adding, or subtracting a ballot box. In my mind, the point is to make it more difficult, but not impossible.

Moreover, if you allow the voters themselves to check via bar code, you'd have to have either two sets of machines (one to vote, one to scan) for about every voting booth (increasing cost and complexity) or you risk the ballot being 'secret' as the voter has to ask the pollworker to verify it for them.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's necessary to require each person to rescan them upon completion, though I don't think it's a bad idea now that I think about it. And we use machines that are anything but secret. Anyone walking by can easily see our votes. The important thing (in reality) is that it can't be tied back to a person at a later point.

I'm not sure what tampering you are expecting with paper. The ballots are numbered and, at least in my county not touched by anyone other than the voter after the ballot has been marked. The ballots are machine counted and the paper ballot itself serves as the "reciept".
Click to expand...
We Americans are amazingly innovative concerning rigged elections. You wouldn't believe the stuff we think of. I just think a multi-pronged system is best. I like what you have there and think it would be most of what I consider to be tamper proof "enough".

If you are talking about wholesale replacement of a paper ballot with a differently marked paper ballot, I'd proffer that the size of the ballot (about the size of a "legal ruled" sheet of paper) makes that much more difficult than switching out one of the memory cards (about the size of a PCMCIA card). Plus, each of the memory cards hold multiple votes so you could flip several with a single switch. Much more difficult with the paper.
Click to expand...
I think the "big" paper idea (for lack of a better way to put it) is a good idea. I think removable media is an absolutely disastrous idea. It shouldn't be anywhere near the firmware or the votes. I don't know how we transmit data, but this is probably the single most vulnerable part of the process. I'm open to the ideas of brilliant people here.
 
Anyone know if it is illegal for me to sneak a camera into the voting booth and videotape myself voting?

I wanna see if this shit will go down 'round here, and I'm guessing it will.
 
I don't understand why they can't create a voting system that adds a vote to McCain while displaying to the voter a vote for Obama.

It's just piss poor GUI design.
 
[quote name='Strell']Anyone know if it is illegal for me to sneak a camera into the voting booth and videotape myself voting?

I wanna see if this shit will go down 'round here, and I'm guessing it will.[/QUOTE]

Do it anyway.
 
[quote name='fatherofcaitlyn']I don't understand why they can't create a voting system that adds a vote to McCain while displaying to the voter a vote for Obama.

It's just piss poor GUI design.[/QUOTE]
:rofl:
 
Yeah. I never understood that. If you really want to steal the election, cover your tracks a little better. For as nefarious as the Republican Party is made to seem, most of these problems seem to be just faulty screens. Or they're using it for a much broader conspiracy, who knows?
 
[quote name='speedracer']It's probably just not being calibrated by the AARP volunteers running them.[/QUOTE]

I saw a comment over on Digg:

"Why don't I have to calibrate my iPhone everyday?"

Seems like a good counter-question to ask. I don't own an iPhone so maybe someone can clear up the validity of the statement for me.
 
[quote name='Strell']I saw a comment over on Digg:

"Why don't I have to calibrate my iPhone everyday?"

Seems like a good counter-question to ask. I don't own an iPhone so maybe someone can clear up the validity of the statement for me.[/QUOTE]
In two years, it'll need calibration. If they were smart, they'd build it into the boot sequence.

If they were smart.
 
[quote name='mykevermin']Do it anyway.[/QUOTE]

Alright. If you hear about a crazed terrorist white American male with a camera-shaped bomb being arrested tomorrow, tell them my story.

[quote name='speedracer']In two years, it'll need calibration. If they were smart, they'd build it into the boot sequence.

If they were smart.[/QUOTE]

I think the point was that these thing should be calibrated at the beginning of the day, once, and it should be fine. Calibration should be little more than 2-3 steps at most at be idiot proof. But these machines appear to magically become uncalibrated within minutes.

So either the fix is in or the people calibrating it are idiots. And since the latter is most likely true, it still doesn't answer the former, and that's the part I'm worried about.

I mean honestly - there was a video of a guy hitting the straight Democratic ticket, and it chooses McCain? Really? That's not a calibration mistake. That would be like if you hit the start button in Windows and then a bear punches you in the nuts. A bear that simply didn't exist before, but was called to this material plane by way of the great gears of the cosmos being made out of conservative shit.
 
I don't get why people don't use the fill in the dot paper voting. People thought computers and old people was a good idea? Oh right... Bush 1 knows the computer polling guy. It's harder to set up elections when it's fill in the dot paper ballets.
 
[quote name='lordwow']http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act#Voter_identification

Voter identification

HAVA requires any voter who registers to vote by mail and has not previously voted in a Federal election show current and valid photo identification or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document that shows the name and address of the voter. Voters who submit any of these forms of identification during registration are exempt as are voters entitled to vote by absentee ballot under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.[/quote]
Hate to tell you this, but i registered by mail, i also voted for the first time this year, all i had to show was my voter registration card. No photo ID or anything.
 
Btw, the voting machines that were used here don't seem to match any of the ones i'm hearing about on the news. They weren't touch screen, they weren't optical scanners, they were designed like an ATM machine. You pushed buttons located on the sides of the screen and you saw an X put in the box of who you voted for. Then at the end there was a big red button on the right you pushed to make the final confirmation.

Seemed pretty foolproof to me, i had no trouble.
 
[quote name='JolietJake']Btw, the voting machines that were used here don't seem to match any of the ones i'm hearing about on the news. They weren't touch screen, they weren't optical scanners, they were designed like an ATM machine. You pushed buttons located on the sides of the screen and you saw an X put in the box of who you voted for. Then at the end there was a big red button on the right you pushed to make the final confirmation.

Seemed pretty foolproof to me, i had no trouble.[/quote]

Oh shit, you voted for Buchanan!
 
The fact that it shows the voter that their vote was for McCain and not Obama, makes me think that it's some type of programming or calibration glitch. Nobody who is trying to rig the presidential election is that stupid.
 
I can tsee that video above but if its the one I saw a week or so ago then I have a question. Their explenation was that the person touched Mccain or rolled their finger to Mccain by accident and thus that vote registered..

If thats the case when the finger first hits the screen why did it not register Obama? Nothing lights up at all when the finger is clearly on obama. it doesnt light until they roll up to McCain... and then when the "roll" down to Obama it still doesnt register obama... Seems a bit odd.
 
It's also bad design.

There are lots of people with poor eyesight or poor motor control who are voting. Shouldn't we make those buttons as big as possible (I mean like ridiculously big) to avoid these problems?
 
[quote name='Snake2715']I can tsee that video above but if its the one I saw a week or so ago then I have a question. Their explenation was that the person touched Mccain or rolled their finger to Mccain by accident and thus that vote registered..

If thats the case when the finger first hits the screen why did it not register Obama? Nothing lights up at all when the finger is clearly on obama. it doesnt light until they roll up to McCain... and then when the "roll" down to Obama it still doesnt register obama... Seems a bit odd.[/QUOTE]
Well, if you've ever used a palm pilot, I imagine it's like that. It's not the place that you touch that registers, but the place where you let off.

Also, I'm in favor of scantron sheets. Much easier and very low error.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top