2008 Election: Anyone Concerned with HOW Votes are Tallied?

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defjon

New member
I've been spending more time here in L&P lately, and find all the threads about the potential candidates extremely interesting. This is a very important election, perhaps maybe one of the most important in history. I really believe that. This country is on a path that many do not agree with (see the top news stories of late, mostly having to do with DOMESTIC spying). My father was in the National Security Agency for 25 years, retiring in 1998. He said during his stint nobody would've allowed the things that have been going on post 9-11. Domestic spying, especially all this warrantless stuff, scares him.

At any rate, I see things I like from a lot of the people you guys have posted about- Paul, Huckabee, Tancredo, etc. Some seem to really have some good ideas.

The problems? I don't own TV, but when I do watch at my friends or families houses, all you hear about is Hillary, Obama, Rudy, Mccaine, Romney. By word of mouth, nobody is I know is even talking about these people. Nothing they say is interesting. But they have all the money and all the air time.

What I see is a divide...a divide against what people really want and what the federal government wants in a president and a cabinet. There was a lot of hoopla about how the votes were tallied in the last two election (Diebold machines).

Do you all have faith that an electronic vote counting system is fool-proof? Do you believe your votes will go towards who you want, on a mass country wide scale? If people want to elect someone that wants to change things, while the media is pressing these BIG FIVE names into our heads, is there a conflict of interest?

My question is if anyone else has noticed this, and is at all concerned with how the votes in this next election are going to be tallied. After all, as the saying goes, its the vote COUNTERS who decide elections.

Is it all above board?
 
Back in the pre-digital Diebold days, vote tally corruption ran two ways. Votes were counted locally, by local volunteers. If one particular district or county swept strongly for one candidate, then the vote counters could nullify returns on the opposing candidate or even lie about their counts.

And over in another part of the country, the opposing party with strong support for their candidate could get away with the same thing. Corruption existed, but was nullified by counter-corruption.

But... with one company counting votes and a small number of IT staff to perform that operation across thousands of servers in the US, you now have a situation where Diebold CAN decide who's the next boss.

In short, yes. I'm terrified of electronic voting. I'm a database admin, and I know what I'm capable of doing to the back end database of any front-end application. I know what is possible in a paperless tracking system with no audit trail.
 
With your typical IT nerds counting votes, we are assured a Libertarian or Green candidate! Wonderful!
 
But... with one company counting votes and a small number of IT staff to perform that operation across thousands of servers in the US, you now have a situation where Diebold CAN decide who's the next boss.

In short, yes. I'm terrified of electronic voting. I'm a database admin, and I know what I'm capable of doing to the back end database of any front-end application. I know what is possible in a paperless tracking system with no audit trail.
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The idea of paperless electronic voting scares the everliving crap out of me. When your only option for a recount is to hit the "tally" button and see the same number pop up again, and when not one voter saw hard evidence that their vote went into the machine's database as entered....yeah.

There have been several demonstrations of how these machines could be compromised in a variety of ways (with a variety of effects on the tally), many of which are irreversible (and some undetectable) without a voter-verified paper trail. Anybody who trusts electronic voting machines without voter-verified paper trails needs to go beat themselves to death with a ball-peen hammer.

Obviously paper voting systems (and electronics with VVFP's) can be gamed as well, but letting all the magic happen inside a black box where bits can easily be overwritten is just asking for trouble. No need to make election fraud easy.
 
kjm, I have to respectfully disagree with you based on the ownership of Diebold, and even the results of the last elections.

With no way to verify the votes, as was above stated, how did the system ever pass the "DUH" check? It seems ripe for the abusing.
 
Also, it's not necessarily the IT nerds counting the votes...they write the code to do so, which in theory can be inspected to ensure it counts them accurately. It's the people with access to the machines at the local level (either election workers or in some cases even voters) that can really mess with them...and those people are going to be plain old Republicans and Democrats, more than likely.
 
Normally, I'd be one of the first to yell, "conspiracy theory!" or "tin-foil hat!" but I'd much rather prefer a paper trail for the votes. Bring on the dimpled chads.
 
Normally, I'd be one of the first to yell, "conspiracy theory!" or "tin-foil hat!" but I'd much rather prefer a paper trail for the votes. Bring on the dimpled chads.
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See, and to me this doesn't fall anywhere near the "conspiracy theory" umbrella. You want to claim the government flew planes into building to kill thousands so they could start a war, now that's a conspiracy theory. But history has shown that not only do elections get rigged, but it happens often. These systems (without paper trails) make it even easier to do. There's no leap of faith required there...it's common sense.

Now, if I started claiming that the 2004 or 2006 election in a specific state or district was rigged because of a given machine, with shaky evidence at best to back it up, that'd be a different story. But one need not fashion a tinfoil hat to believe that these machines can, and likely will (and possibly have) been used to swing elections.
 
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Do I think there's a Vast Shadow Conspiracy? No. That's silly.

Do I think they suck at security, and someone can mess with individual machines to play personal politics? Of course. It was already shown that the machines' lock can be opened with the key from a hotel minibar.

It's sheer sloppiness.
 
Hopefully Jim March will ride by and post. He can literally write books on electronic voting fraud.

What we are doing now with electronic voting, databases, and a lack of a paper trail scares the snot out of me. Once the voting process is compromised publicly the republic loses legitimacy. And once that happens. . . . . what's next.
 
Yes, I didn't mean to suggest a shadow conspiracy with this thread...but like I said, it certainly does seem to make the voting process ripe for abuse.


A hotel mini-bar key, huh?
 
A hotel mini-bar key, huh?
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You'd probably be surprised. Stories about how easy these are to tamper with in various ways (all of which could affect an election) have been common in tech circles for years now. Even assuming they're grossly exaggerated, it's still pretty scary.
 
Let's see...start here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7262269533321066760&hl=en

Then for examples of what sorts of squabbles are going on...

http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/pima-county-ele.html

Be sure to check the comments.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org
Technical consultant to the Pima County Democratic Party (yeah, strange bedfellows and all that but to their credit, this chapter officially supports the 2A and deliberately does NOT ban CCW at the party HQ building...)
Member, Libertarian Party

PS: look, no joke here, the AZ Dems are far more "libertarianesque" than the California *Republican* party. Since election observation in AZ happens via party structures, and since the LP doesn't have much resources...I end up hanging out with Democrats so much, I enjoy gun show visits around here just to be with my own species once in a while...:)
 
I have no faith in pure electronic systems they are just too easily hacked or gamed. We use a hybrid system that prints out your selections on paper so that there is always a paper trail. I trust that systems a bit more. The problem is that votes have always been rigged. Lyndon Johnson (later President Johnson) was elected to the US Senate by a huge grave yard landslide. In California there have been several get out the illegal alien vote efforts over the years. Ballot boxes used to get opened and ballots tossed. This last one I know for a fact.
 
Democracy absolutely depends on free, fair, open, *credible* elections.
We need a paper record for auditing if for no other reason than people are questioning the legitemacy of e-voting.
This is the United States. Our voting must be above reproach.
 
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