Recent smiles by Bush imply the electronic machine fix for GOP wins is

[papau]

done - perhaps?. Perhaps there has been a report to Bush of the advanced stage of the vote suppression via problems with registration rolls, lack of working voting machines, etc. that might have put a smile on his face, despite the polls.

It is getting very close to the 68-69-70 situation where the rich had overstepped and the left of center anti-war violence began. But our left today make lousy revolutionaries, and that is a good thing. Attacking the government is pointless as the underpaid folks the left would fight are just doing their job - and the rich who are the problem live in gated communities with very good, high paid guards.

But perhaps Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged world will be here soon....

As the Princeton video shows, the coding to accomplish the fraud needed for a GOP win despite the polls is easily written, installed directly or as a fix or as a "virus", and would remove itself when told to report the totals so that there could never be proof beyond a statistical review of the exit polls - which our media and our courts will not accept.

The Venezuela electronic voting machines procedure of two receipts, one deposited at the polling place and one kept by the voter, with random audits of the polling places to prove electronic totals equal totals of deposited receipts, seems the only way to stop the GOP theft of election - since our media is not interested.

But it may be a while before we have as honest a democracy as Venezuela - even now our media calls Chavez a dictator!

And it made be a while before we have an honest media.

If we have exit poll problems again, will many folk conclude that politics, and political parties are pointless? That being a Democratic Party Member shows optimism, but not common sense. Perhaps conclude that if political change is wanted, a way other than the ballot box is needed - at least until we get an honest media?

We lost Habeas Corpus - the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty - in the Military Commissions Act - and there are no more Rights still left in the Bill of Rights. Is there any point in not admitting that the terrorists have won, and that via Bush we have become what they wanted - just another dictatorship of the rich that might be better off as a dictatorship of the religious? But the question is still is out on whether this situation is the will of the people.

Granted most folks will sell their first born for "order." Perhaps this is the natural result of majority rule. Perhaps our Constitution should be thought of as a nice experiment - but not the will of today's majority. Perhaps Scalia's and Thomas's gift to our justice system of ignoring precedent and always deciding in favor of corporations, the rich, the GOP, and the office of the President, via finding justification in random blogging of the 1750's, is what the people want. Perhaps this is the real definition of conservative - and is where the majority of America is at.

Sorry - no matter how many times our media tries to sell what is going on as no problem, I find I just don't believe.

The above Fraud can and will be stopped - and indeed we will win at the ballot box. The electronic machines indeed are Godsend and not a problem, as the folks on the left are the intellectuals - the hackers who can and will write and install code to fix the problem.

If 2006 goes GOP despite the polls, I'd expect a very interesting election in 2008.

[Benhurst]

1. If the Republicans are allowed to steal the fourth national election

in a row, the 2008 elections will be in the bag for them. Get ready for President Jeb Bush.

[liberaldemocrat7]

47. Until we get civil servants counting mail in paper ballots

and civil servants registering voters and keeping track of registrations


We should have a Democratic party group in every precinct to conduct an entrance poll
to count only Democratic votes. Each group would have Democratic voters sign a tally sheet before they enter the building to go vote. Then these votes get computed for each congressional district and then let the Republicans attempt to cheat on the election.


"What we only got 50,000 votes? No we have 70,000 votes tallied in this congressional district."

That will sink Diebold and ES&S and the police roadblocks in the South and Republican ballot security squads. As for the voter roll purge, that will still happen until we get civil servants taking over the complete registration process and the maintenance of these registrations.

[RestoreGore]

2. We Don't Need Code To Fix The Problem...

We need the machines GONE.

[aquart]

3. Well, we shouldn't bother to vote, then. Should we?

Thank you for your concern.

[papau]

5. I'm voting in 2006 in hope, and in 2008 as cover for what I know we will

be doing (God willing on being alive in 2008 and on there being hackers that can be made interested in solving the problem!)

[helderheid]

8. typical non thoughtful response from those with their heads in the sand

Of COURSE we should vote. We need the largest numbers going out and voting but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware that they stole the last three elections and there is nothing stopping them from stealing this one too - but we need to be as far ahead in the polls as possible so that the exit polls show such a huge discrepancy when they steal it that it will be so fucking obvious to everyone.

GET YOUR DAMNED HEAD OUT OF THE SAND.

[IndyOp]

16. GET YOUR DAMNED HEAD OUT OF THE SAND.

See helderheid's post immediately above.

:kick:

[helderheid]

17. thanks IndyOp!

:hi: :hug:

[leftchick]

20. will there even be exit polls?

:shrug:

[helderheid]

21. that's a good question.

[cui bono]

23. I took aquart's response to mean that the OP implies that voting is

irrelevant. The OP says that if things don't go as expected, according to the polls then the left will just get hackers to fix the problem in 2008. This leaves us accepting bogus 2006 results and subverting democracy through hacking in order to win in 2008. What kind of plan is that???

[papau]

29. No - the intent was to vote and hope-and plan what's next - and guess what

may be next - nothing more.

But if we get another "exit polls imply fraud in all other countries except the US" media explanation for the 2006 election, as exit polls again show a Dem win while the counters of the votes tell us the rich and corporate and corrupt have won again, what will our response be.

Only a fool sees a consistent result coming from a given set of actions, and then believes that maybe the next set of such actions will have a different result - someone said that or something close to that thought - but I forget who it was.

I am hoping our media changes, that the GOP election judges and the GOP Sec. of State and the GOP voting machine makers find ethics and morals. Until the 2006 result shows me that they have not, my plan for the future is on hold.

Does anyone else expect to hear the media say that elections are a blood sport - or that both parties suppress vote in order to win, or that both parties do anything they can to win, or that Dems are losers and whiners, or that anything goes in an election unless a RW Judge or a RW Court says otherwise? Does anyone really expect our media to tell the truth, about anything that bother an advertiser or a source of news (read the GOP in that phrase)?

The exit poll analysis of 2004 showed that GOP election theft, relative to exit poll data, only occurred in random spots - enough to win in my opinion - but not enough to say that all machines were fixed or that all GOP election officials are dirty..

I am hanging my hat on that last item. And indeed while I believe that we will need to win by more than a narrow margin if we want to be declared the winners, I do believe the basic honesty of the majority of folks in the GOP will allow us to be declared winners if we win by a reasonable margin.

But if I am wrong - I was just thinking ahead as to what 2008 might hold as a solution - a non-violent solution.

[blue cat]

9. No

We need everyone voting, for evidence if this happens. Sooner or later this will come to light and the MSM will have to report on it. The guy who made the movie with Robin Williams thinks that there will be problems this election since the problem was never addressed. The way the GOP will finally get in trouble is when they over reach.

[helderheid]

10. exactly.

[bdamomma]

39. I am convinced there will be problems with those stupid machines

and stopping people thru voter registration, so all the more reason we have to get out there. We are hip to how they want to steal another election, but we have to get out there and vote.

[irislake]

26. I will never understand why

Americans would stay away from voting in the belief that the game is rigged. Isn't that a very passive, wimpy, defeatest reaction? I would be mad as hell and rounding up friends to vote and being very ready to question the exit polls and every other thing. I am really amazed that this would keep you from voting. Where is your fighting spirit?
And---- given what they have got up to so far --- why wouldn't you think they might try to tamper a little again? It has worked before and they are desperate. What have they got to lose? They still have the manistream media on their side. You always under-estimate how evil and devious they are. And they aren't even subtle about it. It boggles my mind what they get away with.

[slackmaster]

46. Few of us fall for the black propaganda telling us not to bother voting

Most people who fail to vote do so because they haven't made it a high enough priority among the daily drudgery of working and caring for their families.

[kestrel91316]

50. I always vote absentee anymore, so the daily drudgery

doesn't interfere with my voting. I do it at a time and place of my convenience.

[Cameron27]

51. I know people who don't vote

because they don't want to be dumped into a jury pool. Idiots.

[Cooley Hurd]

4. In order for them to perpetrate fraud, it needs to be close...

...and by many accounts, it's gonna be a BLOWOUT for us.:thumbsup:

If they try to cheat, they'll have to cheat big - and that will expose the cheating apparatus to all.

[TheDebbieDee]

7. I agree.....all these propaganda polls and spewers

of right-wing talking points that insist there will be a backlash against the Democrats over the Foley scandal are just setting the table making it possible for the republican'ts to steal another election!

[joeunderdog]

53. Ya mean like Max Cleeland who had an 8-10 pt. lead election nite?

He's the Bin Laden look-alike who lost that election 6 years ago. No one even looked into it.

[Skink]

6. Don't audit printed ballots count all of them.

I'd rather use the machines. They take care of the chad problem. Of course people would actually have to look at the receipt.

[helderheid]

11. someone put this on the greatest

[KittyWampus]

12. Let's just hope Jenna isn't wearing her green shoes this time

[jody]

13. Bush's smiles could mean he's on happy pills. n/t

[helderheid]

14. how do you explain Hastert's and Cheney's smiles then?

[LeftCoast]

18. Crocodiles smile...it's what they do

:)

[jody]

33. That's the Devil smiling cause so many people fell for the neo con scheme.

:hi:

[demgurl]

15. One thing I noticed about * was.....

that I have heard of several speeches he has given for fund raisers on behalf of Republican candidates. He *should* be saying why they should o vote and why they need to get their friends out to vote. Instead, I noticed he has been stating why they will win the next elections. Each time he has said that when voters go into the booth they will vote on their security and so they will vote for Republicans.

Maybe I am over analyzing things but it almost seems as if he is providing reasons to explain their stealing of the elections. You should be trying to get people out to vote, not explaining what will happen and why you will win. The content of his speeches really have me on edge.

[cui bono]

19. We The People better have a fucking reaction if election results

go against all these polls showing Dems ahead.

You would really settle for"a very interesting election in 2008"??? :wtf:

That kind of complacency is astounding to me. We better get nothing short of a revolution if it happens AGAIN. If people aren't out in the streets, blocking gates to the WH, causing such an uproar that government is effectively shut down until the election is made right well then everyone deserves what they get.

As to "The electronic machines indeed are Godsend and not a problem, as the folks on the left are the intellectuals - the hackers who can and will write and install code to fix the problem."

How do you propose these hackers are going to do their work? Get hired by Diebold? I don't think so. Also, you really think intellectualism is owned by the leftists? I don't think so. I think this is a pretty naive and misguided idea of "solving" the problem. Exactly how does this "solution" restore our democracy?

[papau]

31. I am working the non-violent & optimistic side of the street - having seen

how useless violence was in the 69 to 73 period.

[slackmaster]

22. Still no word on how the machines know which candidate is Republican

Sure, you can possibly hack them to flip-flop votes or weight Candidate A over Candidate B. But when the machines are deployed they get configured at precinct level, with potentially a different set of offices and issues at stake in each. Properly configured ballots randomize the order in which names appear.

So one big hole in the giant conspiracy theory is how the software can be programmed in advance to know which candidate will be assigned to which position. Not to mention the other big holes like the lack of a captured piece of documentation explaining how to implement a hack in the field. Or lack of a real whistle-blower after all these years - Not just someone who can tell you the machines are vulnerable, but that they have actually been used to alter outcome of a real election.

I remain highly skeptical of claims of actual election theft via machines. Vote suppression, registration fraud, old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, sure. We know those have been going on since there have been elections.

As the Princeton video shows, the coding to accomplish the fraud needed for a GOP win despite the polls is easily written, installed directly or as a fix or as a "virus", and would remove itself when told to report the totals so that there could never be proof beyond a statistical review of the exit polls - which our media and our courts will not accept....

Note that the Princeton researchers who made that video have stated they do not believe any elections have actually been stolen via the kind of machine manipulation they demonstrated. See http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/faq.html

:tinfoilhat:

[papau]

32. Is there proof that party affiliation - which is shown on Screen - is not

known to the computer program.

The line on the ballot assigned to a candidate does get rotated through the names so in that various parts of the state folks vote GOP on different lines, but so what?

Who is kidding who by pretending that a piece of data like party is not known to the database program? Again -party affiliation is printed on the screen and is in the data put in the machine for each election for touch screen voting machines.

On scanners you have a point, and as we saw in Florida in 2000, the GOP solution is to turn off error checking in minority areas -allowing a 8 to 10% error/not counted rate compared to the white GOP areas 1.5% - and to set the scan area for Dem vote's "X"'s to not be where the ballot's area to mark X for the Dem is located.

And never an audit of scanner votes makes the paper trail useless.

[slackmaster]

34. Asking me to prove a negative?

You go first.

I suspect that the party affiliation shown on the screen is free-form text, as is the candidate name. If the software is written like most UI code I've worked with, all it knows is positions and literals.

Who is kidding who by pretending that a piece of data like party is not known to the database program?

If I were designing it, the database program would have no reason to care. New parties might be created at any time. The software needs to be flexible for it to be useful. Making it do some kind of analysis on the literal text would involve extra work, extra testing, etc. The "cheat" code that recognizes the word "Republican" would have to be documented and tested just like everything else. Someone would need to be able to turn it on and off at will, or the software would have to be able to recognize the difference between a real election and a functional test - If not, then detecting the malicious behavior would be trivial. Lots and lots of people would know about it. Where is the documentation? Where are the whistle-blowers?

[papau]

41. To steal an election we'd need only one programmer to write &

debug this simple a code. With only one person writing the code we would be unlikely to have a Whistle blower. But we might get Whistle blower reports because of weird update procedures or tests of machines just before the election, or unusual precinct choices for pre-election tests. As I recall the State of Georgia had such a comment about "weirdness" about last minute "fixes" to the software (which is illegal for obvious reasons), and Ohio had comments about election machine Techs wandering about the machines in storage and at precinct locations without being invited in or being announced or anticipated.

Nothing in the theft of election code would be documented as it would be inserted as was done in the Princeton video as a self-destructing worm that restores everything back to the original virgin state after "fixing" the database so as to report the wrong - biased to the GOP - totals. The software would recognize the difference between a real election and a functional test because of the way it is set-up - - - based either on code of the person turning the machine on (election official or tech), or based on a code entered to tell it this is a test.

The tech simply slips in a test memory card as per instructions, notes proper response, removes card and replaces with correct blank card and moves on. And the game is now fixed. And the tech does not know what he did. The Texas fellow that was a tech described the last minute delivery of test cards and test instructions in 04.

Programing in the pre-history (the 70's) of personal computers, I recall a public domain program written in the language "C" that was used to detect a given word within a given number of spaces of another word or field. Granted it was not setup to work with a user interface (UI) - it treated the screen crudely - but today's tools make the application to a screen a rather simple rewrite of that old code.

But why worry - our media will expose any wrong doing, and our Courts will accept the statistical evidence that proves that wrong doing and make things right. The fact that the GOP just happen to control all 3 companies that provide electronic voting machines, and the guarantee by the Bush backer - and controller of a voting machine company - that Bush would carry Ohio, was just a positive outlook - like Bush smiling now in the face of very bad polls. One should not assume that there are folks in the GOP party that put winning above all else and would cheat.

Heck, next folks will be telling me some GOPer would hide the fact that a GOP Congressman was a child molester because they put the election above all other things.

[slackmaster]

44. One person can keep a secret

Two cannot. I note that Paupau has side-stepped nearly all of my technical points, but I very much appreciate the civil tone he has taken.

There are two basic strategies for dealing with logical challenges to a conspiracy theory - Expand the conspiracy, or contract it. Paupau has chosen to do a bit of both here: The conspiracy is divided into two groups, an inner ring of just one person, so the secret is safe; and an outer ring consisting of an army of hundreds or thousands of unwitting dupes. Servants so trusting that not one of them has actually run a controlled functional test on a machine that has been prepped for an election to make sure that it is working properly, or done a test after the election.

And still not a shread of actual evidence that the kind of tampering documented by the Princeton researchers has actually occurred in the wild. Researchers who themselves stated that they do not believe software trickery of the kind they demonstrated has been used to steal an election.

Have the vote-stealing methods you discuss ever been used in real elections?

Probably not, but we don't know for sure. We haven't seen evidence that these attacks have been used, but one lesson of our report is that the design of these voting technologies makes attacks relatively easy to cover up.

Do you think any recent major U.S. elections were stolen?

No. We know some people are claiming this happened, but we don't find their evidence convincing.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/faq.html

Relatively easy to cover up, but only when nobody is actively looking for it. Paupau's scenario does not in any way preclude the capture and discovery of a rigged machine. I sincerely hope that enough attention is now focused on the known vulnerabilities with the machines that it will not be possible to cover up any skulduggery, but it's a safe bet that no matter what happens in the elections next month we will not have heard the end of the conspiracy theories.

[papau]

48. If there is an adequate testing of the machines the day of the election -

all is well.

That means turning the machine on and telling it that this is a real election and test recording faked votes that are in total the number of votes expected at that location.

If all checks out, all is well, erase the results of the test election and go on to record votes in the real election. But I understand this is not possible.

The machines have a test mode, and an election mode - and not erasing the results of the real election is (at least I am told it is) part of our "protections" provided by the GOP owners of these companies.

I would appreciate it is someone could find the actual instructions to the precinct worker boss that sets up the machines so that one could see if a proper test could be run.

While the test would not mean the memory card virus/worm game was stopped, it would mean the last minute software change approach that occurred in 04 is stopped, at least on a mass basis.

Techs doing Memory card insertion tests that did the worm could be prevented by rule - don't do such tests - but no election worker is going to stop such "tests" if the instructions do not say stop any such "test", especially if the company's tech says to allow it.

I agree it is not hard to stop the "skulduggery" - but I do not believe any effort is being made to do so. So we would be back to exit polls if there going to be any in 06 - but there will not be any exit polls for the Congressional races so we can only compare public polls to election "outcome".

The analysis of the 04 exit polls showed that there was no mass fix to all machines of a given type, or even all machines in a given area. The data was too limited to tell if a large number of machines in a given area were "fixed". As the quote you lifted from the URL - "we don't find their evidence convincing" - says, the exit polls data points were too few in number to "prove" theft. But they - the exit polls -most certainly strongly suggested theft. And then as was documented in the Rolling Stone article, in Ohio theft was proven -over and over again - albeit not with regard to fixed electronic voting machine results. But then Princeton showed that electronic machine vote theft can be done without leaving any evidence behind for anyone to find.

So we are back to "not proven" - and exit polls when we have them. In 06 if the GOP "wins" with public polls saying it was unexpected, you will indeed get folks like myself saying "election theft".

As an aside, I "side-stepped nearly all of my(your) technical points" because as a former programmer from the 50's, 60's and 70's I know that your technical points can be overcome.

[slackmaster]

54. Yes, I'd very much like to see the instructions as well

If every possible means of performing an objective functional test of the machines is "not possible", then the theory of elections stolen through electronic means becomes unfalsifiable. I don't buy that.

I don't put much stock in exit poll analysis. The polls were never intended to nor were they designed to function as accuracy checks for the actual election; their sole purpose has always been to provide attention-grabbing fodder for the media. All the cable channels and newspapers want to be the first out with projected election results, so at their core the polls are designed for expediency. Accuracy is a secondary consideration. Why would a particular media outlet care if the results they first put out turn out to have been wrong, when using it as a headline got a large number of people to read and view their ads?

I took several statistics courses in my undergraduate years. I've forgotten much of the details. I was always good with numbers, but the analysis used to suggest that the election results are tainted doesn't impress me as sound. It rests on a lot of unprovable assumptions about the soundness of the methodology used to gather and interpret the data. There is too much fudging for demographics done in different ways by different pollsters, too much carrying over of insignificant digits for my taste.

[kestrel91316]

52. I'm registered as a Repuke at the moment - sort of insurance

in case some RW mole in the clerk's office tries to pull a fast one against registered Dems...............

[KingFlorez]

24. Get real

Of course he's not going to come out and say the Republicans are going to lose, nobody says that about their own party. A lot of states don't even have electronic voting, so what is Bush going to do in those states? This nonsense is not helping the situation.

[helderheid]

25. 80% of the votes will be counted by electronic voting machines. n/t

[stevietheman]

27. But many of those are scanners with paper backups.

They're not all touch-screen voting machines. Please don't mislead.

[helderheid]

28. what is the vote on record in those cases? The paper or the vapor?

[slackmaster]

35. Speaking for my precinct in San Diego

The backup is the paper. When we have had disputes, as in the mayoral election of 2004, recounts were done by counting the paper.

So, the official record is the electronic system's count of the paper unless it gets challenged by a qualified party. Then a human count of the paper takes precedence, if a hand recount was requested.

[papau]

30. Scanner votes are not subject to random audit ever in most states

And in the few audit states you have to be "close" and even then it is a call by some election official in some states.

We must have nationwide random audits to a papaer trail.

[patcox2]

37. And what percentage of elections are supervised by dems?

The republicans do not control the election process, far from it, its a state by state, county by county thing.

[WCGreen]

36. OMG.... I am not voting now, for sure.....

[Kansas Wyatt]

38. When in the hell is anyone going to challenge the validity of recounts?

If the law states that it must be a hand recount, then that eliminates electronic re-tabulations. Have all states eliminated hand recounts from the law?

[slackmaster]

40. California law still allows for manual recounts

The person requesting a recount has to specifically request a hand count, and is required by law to make daily up-front payments to cover the costs estimated by the registrar of the affected precinct.

If it turns out the initial electronic result was incorrect, you get your money back; and if it turns out the initial result was correct the registrar must refund you for any amount you paid that exceeded the actual cost.

[papau]

43. CAL is also one of the few states that require audits! No wonder Dems win

:-)

[slackmaster]

45. Democrats tend to win in California due to our demographics

Urban, college-educated, young; large Hispanic population and lots of recent immigrants.

But the Democratic Party here has become complacent and overconfident. As of September 8 Democratic voters account for just 42.7% of registrations, with Republican at 34.3%, Declined to State at a healthy 18.6%, and Other at 4.4%. California Democratics are bailing out and going independent at about twice the rate as California Republicans, and that trend has been going on for a long time.

See http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ror_09082006.htm

[papau]

49. That is party registration-but ability to chose logically usually mean Dem

vote - even if the person voting is "independent". People do vote in their own self interest - which for most people means Dem, regardless of how they are registered.

I grant you the good Demographics - but without honest elections protected by random audits that does not mean squat.

Ever hear of Rove being a great closer with great GOTV and motivated voters? All great cover for a stolen election in the face of demographics that favor the Democratic Party.

[Imagevision]

42. Be concerned if Dems walk away from a loss like Kerry did, Bush 04

election was clearly rigged, does anyone recall on election day 2004 Bush called a press meeting and they did was photograph barney the dog and bush & family seated watching results all laughing?? -- if there's a diversion this election day, you'll know the fix was installed, trust me.