As irritated as I was at Brad Friedman for coming out of the gate with what I saw as a conclusion unsupported by specific evidence, I fully share his discomfort with the current technology and processes used in voting in New Hampshire.
Now, the first rigorous study I’ve seen of the voter data has come out – and it supports him. Chris Chatham at ‘Developing Intelligence’ writes:
To my complete (and continuing) amazement, the “diebold effect” on Hillary’s votes remains after controlling for any and all of those demographic variables, with a p-value of <.001: that is, there are less than 1:1000 odds for this difference occurring through chance alone, and that's after adjusting for variability in Hillary's votes due to education, income, total population, and population density.
Go read the whole thing.
Kucinich is paying for a recount (the questionable machines were optical scanners, not DVR touchscreens – in which case no recount would be possible). If there were material discrepancies, the ‘Vince Foster was murdered’ crowd are going to have a field day, and the Democratic nominating process will be more fun than the first episode of the Sopranos.
We’re not the “Vince Foster was murdered” crowd. We’re the “Leave Elizabeth Ward Gracen the hell alone, you greedy rotten lying restroom-defiling power-crazed fascist bastards.”
Also we’re not a crowd, but a league.
Brad’s Blog is well worth reading for coverage of this issue and links to more.
The first, absolute requirement is having paper ballots, so that the “something” that is recounted is worth tallying. New Hampshire has those as the ground truth for the questionable Diebold machines.
A desire to do the counting is also needed; New Hampshire’s election officials lack that. Instead, it’s being infused by Kucinich and the Integrity folks like Brad.
So far, this is an illustrative dry run for the shortcomings of the notion of computer voting. Imagine if there was no paper record–as is the case for the prevalent touch-screen systems!
What do they do if the paper ballots match the electronic counts?
To where do they look for fraud next?
Don’t miss an important point: It’s not necessary to prove that there was a purposeful or directed effort to skew votes toward a particular candidate for this to be highly troubling. What we could be seeing is simply the product of a wildly unreliable and inaccurate (and, of course, unverifiable) voting system.
For all we know, someone with access to the raw data decided simply to “have some fun” with the numbers, or perhaps there was data loss and they thought “guestimating” the results would be ok. Whatever. This is intolerable in our society: it shakes the very foundation of our Democracy to think that the will of the people cannot be accurately or reliably recorded.
Heads should roll for this, at minimum.
Wolf Pangloss #3 —
Consider New Hampshire as dry run for how to handle elections where questions about validity of results arise. Remember that statistical treatment of a set of 100 elections may yield about five with a P value of about 0.05 (by convention, the threshold of significance). In other words, five elections where the losers can legitimately state, “There’s only a small chance that the observed deviation from the expected was due to randomness!”
The vote-collecting and vote-reporting system ought to be designed to demonstrate that such results are not due to fraud. Then we can go on to discuss poor opinion poll design, push polling, last-minute changes of heart, citizens who don’t answer the phone but show up on Election Day anyway, voters who intentionally mislead exit-pollers, and the like.
By definition, systems without a voter-checked paper audit trail, like Diebold touch-screens, get an “F”. There’s nothing to re-count but electrons!
So far, we see here that New Hampshire’s AG and other officials lack the will to conduct a recount that would demonstrate the virtues of the Diebold OCR system they spent so much money to buy and install. We don’t yet know whether this system is designed to enable recounts that are meaningful checks on the instant electronic tallies.
But the Diebold OCR system as implemented in NH can’t be that good, or a (cheap, efficient, transparent) recount would already be under way.
_”We’re not the “Vince Foster was murdered” crowd. We’re the “Leave Elizabeth Ward Gracen the hell alone, you greedy rotten lying restroom-defiling power-crazed fascist bastards.”_
It will be a cold day in hell when i leave Elizabeth Ward Gracen alone. At least in my imagination.
It supports which of his arguments? Initially, he complained that the results were inconsistent with certain pre-election polls and exit polls. Turning to the third argument, the discrepancy between the hand-count ballots and the optical scan, we get these “results”:http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/new_hampshire_2008_primary_analysis for hand-counts:
Clinton: statewide hand-count tally
16,767
46.75%
Obama: hand count
19,097
53.25%
These tallies are not only inconsistent with the overall result, they were inconsistent with the polls Brad initially relied upon. In other words, if the hand-counts are demographically representative of the state, then clearly Clinton did have a surge of support that was not being picked up.
Are the hand count districts representative? I’m not sure that’s been demonstrated one way or the other. I think political demographics are a little more complicated than the key figures relied upon by Chris Chatham, such as the cultural history of various towns and villages.
Also, its been argued that ballot placement would have given Clinton “at least 3 percent more votes than Obama simply because she was listed close to the top.”:http://www.abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/Decision2008/story?id=4107883&page=1 Is that an effect that would be more pronounced in optical scan ballots? Or new machines with which the voter is less familiar?
I’m not aware yet whether anyone has controlled for “first-time” voters. New Hampshire seems to have a quirky system whereby people can register as voters on the day of the election.
From what I’ve heard, you do not have to be a resident in order to register, only to declare your _intention_ to move to New Hampshire.
This may account for the unexpected surge in Clinton votes, especially in border towns — Which raises a different question, at least equally troubling.
Anybody remember the Concrete Blonde song, “Still in Hollywood”?
Still in Arkansas!
oh WOW! Thought I’d be out of here by now.
Still in Arkansas!
My, my I’m running on a wheel and I don’t know why
I don’t know why.
And of course, now we’ve got the Huck! to worry about too….
bq. #3 from Wolf Pangloss at 2:17 pm on Jan 16, 2008
bq. What do they do if the paper ballots match the electronic counts?
bq. To where do they look for fraud next?
Wolf – Yup, yup. They will look where ever they have to look to maintain the gloss over their world that “THEY” stole some election somewhere. I went to the “Bradblog”. The place reads like some sort of conspiracy theory site. Goodness! Between the ‘Progressives Handbook’ ads and:
bq. Election season is officially underway, and the bad guys want to win no matter what the voters think! This year we expect to see more dirty tricks like we saw in Florida and Ohio. If you have information on vote theft or election fraud, we want to know about it: Call our tip line at 1-800 VOTE TIP.
Which assumes the only voting fraud was in states that Bush won in 2000 & 2004. What about all the Democrat vote fraud that has occured though the ages? I am not saying that we should not monitor our elections, we should, but I am saying that there is not a broad based conspiracy to steal elections from the ‘Progressive’ Left.
AL – You jumped on this guy rightly. Don’t break out tyhe knives and forks just yet.
But A.L. likes to eat crow; he makes a mean chilli with it.
I have to agree with Robohobo and disagree with AMac; the Bradblog is way too conspiratorial and the blog is still smearing Hajjar for a 20 year old drug misdemeanor. Ugly. It appears personal. And I think its pretty clear from earlier statments that a recount will not resolve anything from that p.o.v.
Chris Chatham, OTOH, has linked to this “response from Mike Dunford”:http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/01/machine_votes_handcounted_vote.php to his analysis:
bq. _I took some of the data that Chris Chatham has available through his blog post on the machine votes question, and looked at who was more likely to win in larger areas._
. . .
bq. _I did a rough hand count, and found that Clinton beat Obama more often in precincts where more than 2000 people voted than she did when fewer than 2000 cast ballots. There were 25 precincts that fell into that category, and Hillary received more votes in 18 of those precincts. All 25 of those precincts were machine-counted. She also beat Obama more often than not in precincts where between 1000 and 2000 votes were cast, winning in 44 of 72 precincts. The majority of the ballots in this category were counted by machine, but Clinton won 2 of the 3 that were hand counted. Obama, on the other hand, won more than 2/3 of the precincts where fewer than 250 people voted (all of which were hand-counted)._
I think there is a methodology distinction between the two which will be interesting to watch.
So….
apologise to Brad, already.
I appreciate that you have witten this…but he has gotten beaten up by so many – you, too – over this ….and he is RIGHT in his concerns.
At this point the only thing we know is that we don’t know. So I’ll be sitting tight and waiting for the recount results; regardless, the election was badly handled, and Brad would have been better served to have challenged them in a more measured way.
Then again, I’d have been better served to have bought Google at 65…
A.L.
In a more measured way?
He has been right…and he is right, now, in his concerns about the chain of control of the ballots.
Further, I am astounded by the State of New Hampshire making it as difficult and obstructive ( and expensive!!) as possible.
We are supposed to have free and transparent elections.
We do not.
Barbara – we never will have truly ‘transparent’ elections; there will always be error, fraud, and confusion. The goal is to have trustworthy elections – and we’ll both agree that we don’t. I’m happy to say that I was one of the very early people making the point that the ‘new’ election tech was horrible, and nothing I’ve seen has changed my view.
Having said that, Brad and I have bickered for more than a year about approaches; I respect him, but respectfully disagree about how he’s going about things.
The facts – as best they can be discerned – will come in and we’ll see how it unfolds.
A.L.
And more important than having Danzinger eat crow (maybe allow Brad Friedman to feed it to him?) what do we, as citizens, do IF (and it is still an “if”) the recount DOES alter the outcome of the New Hampshire balloting?
How do we:
(1) Get the national media to pay appropriate, accurate attention to the fact?
(2) See to it that the cause(s) of the first miscount are determined, and the appropriate causes corrected/responsible parties held to account?
(3) See concrete changes in the way that New Hampshire conducts future elections? and
(4) See concrete improvements in the way the FEC provides actual oversight to other elections across the nation?
“Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything.”
J. Stalin – Diebold Muse?
Barbara, Is Brad right that we shouldn’t trust anybody who has admitted committing a misdemeanor drug offense?
I see some broad agreement on several key points:
1. Diebold sucks.
2. The Clintons eat babies.
3. Let’s have fully accountable voting systems, and crack down on all forms of electoral fraud, even if it means bringing back public hanging.
Still trying to get everybody together on that third one.
One thing I didn’t hear in this thread. (This seems to be a recurring problem within various blogs, and the corporate owned media.)
Chain of Custody of the paper ballots vs. electronic vote tabulation devices.
Knowing physics and electronics we know that the moment the paper ballot is scanned that the chain of custody becomes vapor, which is why all electronic vote tabulation devices must be outlawed; because these electronic vote tabulation devices use invisible electronic signals that can no longer be validated. But the one thing we CAN validate is paper ballots, if they exist, and if they have been secured via a proper chain of custody.
(Note: that I SPECIFICALLY didn’t say electronic devices shouldn’t be allowed to PRINT a paper ballot to be hand counted with public oversight.)
Hypothetically, Think of it like this.
You have two boxes that contain classified materials (you swore an oath to protect) and you are alone and must move them one mile in order to sign them into a vault. How do you do it?
You pick up one box, carry it 50 yards set it down (keeping the other box in your direct line of sight) then go back pick up the other, always keeping both boxes in your direct line of sight, repeat, rinse. If anyone attempts to mess with one of the boxes you warn them to stay away, if they refuse, you shoot them, and continue moving your materials.
So if the ballots have gone missing.. Or more ballots are added.. The Chain of Custody is broken. Go watch the movie Zorro for a near perfect example.
I hope you all understand this CLEARLY now.
I hope you enjoyed my hypothetical story, and completely random way to explain it.
I hope you understand that we also don’t know what will happen until the ballots are counted one way or the other.
I hope you don’t think I am wasting my time here.
Hopefully if anything this is a litmus test and a wakeup call as to what will be needed to validate the 2008 presidential election. Spread the awareness, and volunteer as a poll watcher. Support folks Brad, and Bev.
Everyone everywhere needs to come together to regain our right to vote, it don’t matter who you are or what political party you belong, or don’t belong to.
Thanks for your attention.
~phil
Marc said:
bq. At this point the only thing we know is that we don’t know.
That’s what we ALWAYS didn’t know. Which is largely the entirety of what I said in the first place (and what you called me “Tawana Brawley” for, deserving of a “boot to the head”, and claiming a “Diebold conspiracy” about. All without substance to back up your outrageous (and self-destructive) claims.
At least it helped to inspire this post: “[Eternal Vigilance: Not Just for Founding Fathers Anymore]”:http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5542
…in which you are featured quite prominently.
bq. Brad would have been better served to have challenged them in a more measured way.
Please point to a single “unmeasured” challenge of mine, rather than clinging to your original claim, in order to avoid the retraction you should be issuing.
(And if you believe I should have been “more measured” I might remind you to look back at “your original post on this,”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/diebold_tawana_brawley_and_the_brad_blog.php which I note you forgot to link to.
…Please go read it, and get back to be with your lectures about being “more measured”.
bq. we never will have truly ‘transparent’ elections; there will always be error, fraud, and confusion.
With folks like you as our “watchdogs”, my friend, we probably won’t have transparent elections (no quotation marks needed for “transparent).
That said, having transparency is a completely separate idea from whether we’ll have error, fraud and confusion. The reason you MUST have 100% transparency in every aspect of every election is precisely so that you can CATCH error, fraud and confusion, as much as possible.
You need to get these concept straight, Marc. Not sure why you’re engine continues to misfire so much on these points. It seems like you used to “get it”. Now, not so much.
Now go read what’s *really* going on, as opposed to reading Marc’s conspiracy theories about what he *claims* (without evidence) is going on. The numbers from the first day of counting (not re-counting, but counting) the 80% of ballots that went uncounted in NH are “now coming in.”:http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5568
[ URLs reformatted — M.F. ]
PD Shaw asked:
bq. Barbara, Is Brad right that we shouldn’t trust anybody who has admitted committing a misdemeanor drug offense?
Here’s a tip for ya, PD. We shouldn’t have to “trust” _anybody_ in American elections. Period. And that goes for the greatest election registrars in the country. Folks like Ion Sancho of Leon County, FL and Freddie Oakley of Yolo County, CA, who will tell you themselves that _they_ shouldn’t be trusted, and shouldn’t have to be. Period.
(If you need quotes from them on that, let me know. Or just go to Bradblog.com and search on their names and you’ll find ’em)
Our system is not built on trust. It’s build on transparency and checks and balances.
And when you remove the transparency, you lose all checks and balances, and end up with the “faith-based” elections that we now have, and that folks like you seem to be arguing for.
Sorry. It’s my government (“of the people, by the people and for the people” remember?) Not Diebold’s or Sequoia’s or ES&S’ or LHS Associates. And if you don’t start recognizing that, you’re going to have Elections where the person who
receiveddidnt’ receive the most votes gets declared the “winner”.Oh, wait…that seems to have happened a few times recently. Hope you’re cool with that. I’m not.
So get over it. Democracy will return to America. Whether you like it or not.
[ Typo corrected per comment #22, transparently — M.F. ]
ERRATA: From previous note, should read…
…”if you don’t start recognizing that, you’re going to have Elections where the person who DIDN’T received the most votes gets declared the ‘winner’.”
Good thing I was able to see what I wrote and correct the error immediately. Transparency is nice that way.
Brad:
No, you get over it. Al Gore lost. He lost Florida, and he lost the election. The nation declined to abolish the Electoral College for his convenience, so he lost.
But because he could not lose gracefully, we had weeks of hanging chad hysteria, and thanks to that we have these stupid f–king machines. Way to go, Brad. I hold people like you personally responsible for that.
Democracy and America are still together – you guys are the ones who’ve gone to pieces. It’s still Democracy even if you don’t get to win every time, and it’s still America even if you don’t get to run it.
_Here’s a tip for ya, PD. We shouldn’t have to “trust” anybody in American elections._
Nor trust someone who’s reasoning faculties are muddied by smears and innuendo.
_Democracy will return to America._
Do you know how crazy you sound?
There’s two ways to break down the legitimacy of a democracy. One is to tamper with the machinery of elections. The other is to cast aspersions and doubt that the votes are being counted. One method is cheaper than the other.
Brad wrote (#20) —
bq. Please point to a single “unmeasured” challenge of mine.
In his original post, A.L. objected to the tone you used in one of the BradBlog posts he linked. Going back to it, I “read (emphasis added)”:http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5530
bq. As you’ll note, the numbers in Zogby’s latest polls, for all but Clinton and Obama, seem to have been dead-on the money for both the Republicans and Democrats. Edwards, for example, was polled at 17% in Zogby’s poll, and he received exactly 17% in the MSNBC numbers, with 63% of precincts reporting. So are we to believe that only those voters who preferred Obama previously, decided to change to Hillary at the last minute? I suppose so.
bq. This election was regarded as do-or-die for Clinton, after most in the media had already written her off after her “thumpin'” in Iowa. But Tim Russert just agreed with Brokaw and Matthews that “this was the most stunning upset in the history of politics.”
bq. They are already grasping for reasons that this happened: the crying; she found her voice; the women turned out; oldline Dems showed up, etc. All reminiscent, if you ask me, of “the evangelicals who turned out at the very last minute to vote for Bush in 2004” as the Exit Poll apologists wrote in what would become conventional wisdom at the time. (Where did they get that info? The Exit Polls, they’ll tell you. The same ones that they will also tell you were wildly wrong on every other count, apparently.)
So elsewhere in the post, you explicitly state that you are not claiming fraud by one candidate or another, rather, you’re focused on process. But then, as quoted above, you invite the reader to understand that you believe (believed?) the Clintonistas won the primary through fraud–that vote theft is by far the best explanation, and perhaps the only plausible one.
In the comments above, you focus again on Transparency.
Brad, you’re advocating Transparency. Discussing Chains-of-Custody and Verifiablity.
Your blog posts developments in the NH case in near-real-time.
You and co-bloggers are highlighting screwups major and minor in the NH recount.
So you are one of the Good Guys.
But that does not make you immune from criticism.
Brad, your “unmeasured” claim would be where you imply criminal conduct without any evidence. At best, you are just discrediting the arguments of sincere people that these systems should be replaced with ones that are more trustworthy. At worst, and far more likely, you are contributing to the atmosphere of partisan bile and conspiracy thinking.
bq. There’s two ways to break down the legitimacy of a democracy. One is to tamper with the machinery of elections. The other is to cast aspersions and doubt that the votes are being counted.
Another is to cast aspersions on those who are exercising their rights as Americans to question the actions of THEIR government in the hopes of silencing them.
bq. At worst, and far more likely, you are contributing to the atmosphere of partisan bile and conspiracy thinking.
Oh, Lordy Lordy! Someone save us from this horrible nasty mean criticism! If you have voted for or supported Republicans in the last 12 years but still feel justified in making this comment, I question whether you’ve been paying any attention at all to the discourse in our congress or over the airwaves of America.
Wait Alan, are you casting aspersions at me for exercising my Constitutional right to say “humbug”? Why do you hate democracy so?
BTW/ I agree wholeheartedly with what you wrote earlier: “What we could be seeing is simply the product of a wildly unreliable and inaccurate (and, of course, unverifiable) voting system.”
Maybe I’m slow, but I like to have the less contentious causes explored before going straight to criminal conspiracy.
_” And if you don’t start recognizing that, you’re going to have Elections where the person who received didnt’ receive the most votes gets declared the “winner”._
_Oh, wait…that seems to have happened a few times recently. Hope you’re cool with that. I’m not.”_
If its a choice between that and arbitrarily overturning the Constitutional system we have in place without so much as a ‘by your leave’ to the people, I’ll live with the former. For all those so angry about the electoral system I have seen precious little being done to advance a constitutional amendment to do away with it. Oh, thats right, its always easier to find a friendly court to enforce your bidding rather than allowing the people to decide for themselves. You live by the courts, you die by the courts, thats about the only lesson Gore can draw from 2000. Maybe next time he wont go running to some friendly judges to allow him to pad his vote count in friendly districts. Had he asked for a statewide recount (as any fair minded person surely would) he might be president right now.
By the way, as far as the contention that the 2000 presidential contest was won by Bush because Republicans cheated while Democrats played by the rules: in 2001, Jim Miller wrote an “overview of that election,”:http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/Cols/Q&A.html delving into the major controversies. It’s still a good read, 7 years later. Bottom line: there were irregularities benefiting both sides. Whoever lost–Gore or Bush–was going to be able to make a case that the election was stolen from them. It’s unclear at best that Gore’s (actual) contentions are more persuasive than Bush’s (hypothetical) arguments would have been.
All of which argues for better-run elections with more transparency.
bq. Wait Alan, are you casting aspersions at me for exercising my Constitutional right to say “humbug”?
I guess I am, as is within my rights….although it is not the “humbug” part that concerns me but rather the idea that a certain (very subjective) threshold of proof needs to be exceeded before one should speak out about a perceived problem such as this.
Having said that, and although I think there is a bit of a pile-on happening here and think Brad’s efforts are great, even with the hyperbole, it is certainly a possibility that loss of voter confidence in the election tallying mechanisms could lead to an even more pathetic turnout. Furthermore, demographically, this could potentially weigh more heavily against Dems than Republicans. This is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch-22 with regards to publicizing these issues.
However, for a number of reasons I side with those who are willing to raise their voice about a problem of this depth and magnitude, even as I might not always agree with their methods or specific charges. The potential positives seem to easily outweigh the potential negatives.
bq. …it is certainly a possibility that loss of voter confidence in the election tallying mechanisms could lead to an even more pathetic turnout.
I should point out that I don’t think this is a given, however, and therefore arguments about Brad’s “style” should not presume that this is/will be the case.
For example, despite the negative publicity that Diebold has received in the last 8 years, by every indication the upcoming election is likely to draw a significant voter turnout perhaps exceeding previous recent ones. At least on the Dem side…
Another downside to all these doubts- I have to think it will inspire more fraud. I’d like to think the number of people who would intentionally try to fix a fair election is vanishingly small (though not zero). But if either or both side has a number of the hardcore (who probably are more likely to be involved in election related activities) convinced the other side is actively cheating, they impetus to ‘counteract’ the other sides cheating will be strong.
This becomes a downward spiral. Its like playing a game of monopoly with a group of friends, once cheating starts it becomes rampant in a short time and the game quickly becomes a farce.
Alan writes: “Oh, Lordy Lordy! Someone save us from this horrible nasty mean criticism! If you have voted for or supported Republicans in the last 12 years but still feel justified in making this comment, I question whether you’ve been paying any attention at all to the discourse in our congress or over the airwaves of America.”
Alan, this is another of your failures to contribute to the discussion.
SPQR, I’m curious how quoting a paragraph that fails to contribute to the discussion is a contribution to the discussion.
bq. Alan, this is another of your failures to contribute to the discussion.
Only to the extent that the comment from you which prompted it was itself unproductive, in which case it only takes a little imagination to see how it positively contributes to the thread…
#34 — #35 — #36
OK, talking points exchanged.
Time to get back on topic.
I don’t know why there’s so much confusion about voting.
Voting has to be transparent, to hide the identity of the voter from his ballot.
Voting has to be validatable, to validate how many votes were cast on the ballots.
Voting has to be accessible, for the disabled to cast a ballot.
(If I was tasked to do this in my local neighborhood I could EASILY do it. Without all the bureaucracy and millions of dollars wasted.)
We’ve lost some transparency via bigwigs getting a hold of census data and mapping out caging lists. (this is yet another abuse of electronics technology)
The penalties for rigging elections are not harsh enough.
We’ve lost the ability to validate our vote because of electronics, and in some cases where there were paper ballots, by a broken chain of custody.
Voting is still not completely accessible (As was shown with wheelchairs unable to park under voting tables)
Just because corporate media posts results of elections don’t mean they are correct.
When they are not correct bad things happen and there is no sanity check to undo measures, propositions, or remove candidates already sworn in. (They specifically fly the candidates in to swear them in before the vote is even counted!)
What’s wrong with this picture? First of all the corporate media has not covered this problem in depth, at all whatsoever. Then we have sworn in officials who are breaking their oath of office.
You can no longer call the United States of America a Constitutional Republic with these forces in play.
There’s right and there’s wrong. This is wrong. It doesn’t matter about what party you are in. What matters is you integrity, common sense and patriotism. There could be an argument that folks that do not understand programming, electronics, physics, transmitters and receivers, and networking are pretty much out of the loop, but that doesn’t mean they are correct. That doesn’t mean they don’t need to be corrected.
I’m sorry if someone somewhere got stuck in a loop here and made a mistake. Hell I will apologize for you. SORRY.
Even I have made serious mistakes coming up to speed on the situation of America in 2008. There’s no need for writing folks off because of that. We are all in this together, look around at what is happening in America right now. It absolutely defies everything we were taught. Unless of course you want to live in a stealthy corporate dictatorship, lots of people seem to be happy with that in China. But let me tell you I didn’t serve in the USAF to watch America go to hell in a decade or two.
This is a national security problem. You can’t tell if the Chinese are voting for the American people, you can’t tell nothing when there’s no chain of custody of paper ballots and the rest of the system runs off invisible signals.
Look in your server log files, you know I am right, there are folks trying to exploit electronics in every way possible. Electronics can not be trusted to tabulate votes. It’s all about physics. Forget the software for a moment, it all runs on hardware, that’s physics. Those electronic signals are invisible, and nobody can keep oversight on something that is invisible.
Both bradblog and windsofchange seem like really nice blogs, packed with concerned folks, but to blame one blog or the other is insane, we all need to come together. This stuff all came down from corruption at the highest levels. In order to root all that out, we need to have our constitutional right to vote restored.
It’s really that simple.
It’s not my intent to attack anyone here. I am just telling you what is in my heart as a veteran.
It’s my hope that common sense will click in fast and action will be put in play to end this insane way of managing elections. There’s a lot of problems. Seems like an overwhelming amount. Seems like if you really care, it eats at your soul slowly over time.
I am here following a thread from Bradblog, not to defend him, he’s well capable of that himself. I saw patterns and tried to help bring clarity.
#3 from Wolf Pangloss at 2:17 pm on Jan 16, 2008
One of my favorite Reaganisms was “Trust, but verify. I think it is extremely naive assume that any election is without fraud. By this mean, like Reagan, verification is better than trust. I do not mean that all elections are fraudulent. The rules are that he can have the recount on his nickel.
He put his money where his mouth is and I don’t think that you can reproach a man for doing that.
What I was getting at in #3 is the same thing that Bart Hall was saying in #8. There are all sorts of ways to cheat the system.
1. Manipulate the vote counts.
2. Add, remove, or change vote records after voting has completed but before the counting is done.
3. Fool voters into voting for something other than their intentions.
a. through electronic trickery.
b. through tricky ballot design
c. through tricky wording on ballot measures (double and triple negatives, etc).
4. Allow people to vote who should not be allowed to vote.
a. don’t perform any prudent voter identity verification, for instance by checking a photo ID.
b. don’t purge the voter rolls of dead people, convicted felons, and those who move and register somewhere else.
c. don’t perform a reliable check of citizenship or residency at registration.
d. don’t perform any kind of duplicate records check during the count to prevent cheaters from casting multiple votes.
So far Brad only cares about 1 and 3a. Phil cares about 2. I have never heard of a Democrat caring about 4a-d. I care about all of them.
By the way, A.L., have you thought about deep frying that crow in a popcorn popper this time?
Well, tastes in election fraud like everything else runs along political lines. So, anytime that any of it is scrutinized along any of the lines you mention, I am for it.