Let's All Commit Some Election Fraud

[billroper]

shsilver reports here that an electronic voting machine reported a massively wrong total in an Ohio precinct in favor of Bush. I'm tempted to believe that this was a machine error rather than an attempt to cheat since the error was so large, but it never looks good.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, entertaining things were occurring with absentee ballots in Detroit. Here's the news report which emphasizes that the Republican vote challengers did something that they shouldn't have done and this is a report from a Republican who was actually there who claims that the Democrats were doing things that were much worse.

Do you think there's any chance of getting the sensible people together on both sides and producing a system that makes it a bit more difficult to cheat?

(Right now, the Votematic machines look pretty good to me.)

Comments

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm of the computer error opinion, but there is the nagging thing about the chairman of Diebold stated he would do whatever it took to win Ohio for Bush when he was Bush's Ohio campaign chairman (he resigned as chair after it was pointed out there might be a conflict of interest).

The way to do it with computers is to have the computer not record the votes, but rather to print out a ticket which the voter can then sight verify and drop into a box. Those tickets are theen counted (perhaps manually, more likely using a scan-tron type of software).

The sensible people can get together all they want, but it is the ideologues who are going to drive whatever happens.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

To be fair, what he said in his fundraising letter was that he was "committed to deliver Ohio to the President." Now, whether that includes illegal means is up to people to interpret - me, I don't think it does, it was just a poor choice of words to express an enthusiastic attitude.

But yes, there was a conflict of interest.

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

The Republican-dominated Legislature in Michigan has made the voting rules and procedures, and determines what equipment is to be used. Currently, Michigan is standardizing on mark-sense ballots. These work very well with "live" voting, as the machines will reject overvoted questions in the voter's presence.

They also allow for a paper trail.

Curiously, the precinct reporting here in the Western part of the state is performed by Republican dominated officials and poll-workers, including the counting of absentee ballots. Hmmm ... and the election results seem to be Republican dominated, all the time. I wonder about the honesty of my neighbors, sometimes.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You mean you in Michigan don't have to have an equal number of judges who are from the two main parties in each polling location?

K.

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

Nope.

Election inspectors/poll workers are appointed by the local city commission in my area, here in southwestern Michigan. Theoretically, it is on a "non-partisan" basis (one of the reforms back in the early 1900s was the institution of the progressive non-partisan Commission/Manager form of city government in many of the smaller cities in Michigan). In fact, it is because these individuals have been doing it for time out of mind. They are generally elderly ladies, who are our "guardians of democracy." They tend to be extremely conservative.

Curiously, I've never seen a poll-watcher (Republican or Democrat) at our general elections. Angela, our local city clerk, oversees the voting process in Otsego, Michigan. If necessary, she can shoo away any and all non-voters, at her discretion. Overall, general election tallies are overseen and compiled by the State, through County Boards of Canvassers (generally Republican-dominated in western Michigan) and the Secretary of State's office (a Republican in Michigan).

This does not mean that things don't go wrong; we just don't (want to) know about it around here.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You might consider working towards fair and honest elections where you live. I would.

K.

[jennlk]

The tricky part is finding people willing to be election judges. In small communities, it's hard enough to find people willing to be election judges without trying to make sure that you have an even number of Rep/Dem (leaving out the fact that most of the people in the immediate area are as likely to say no affiliation/independent as anything else).

This is the first election since we moved to Washtenaw County that there hasn't been a great cry from the County Clerk's office that "we need election judges!". (this includes the summer primaries of this year, and all the school and special elections, even the 2000 November election.)

In my personal experience, despite the fact that most of the election judges at the precinct are likely to vote Rep (at least based on conversations I've had with them outside of the polling place), the precinct as a whole has gone Dem (slightly) for the last bunch of partisan elections. It's more conservative than Wash County as a whole, but there's still a lot of farms out here. Our county clerk is Rep, but the county has gone Dem for the same period.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We here in Hennepin County Minnesota conduct fair and honest elections, with electronic vote tallying equipment counting paper ballots. We tend to side wtth enfranchising voters in all questions on the matter, rather than the opposite. (We have election day voter registration, for example.) I have worked as an election judge for several years here, and I have a great deal of confidence in the systems and procedures we use here. Thus, I think everyone should follow our model and do exactly what we do.

K. [if elections are better run anywhere in the country, I have yet to hear about it]

[patoadam]

Do you think there's any chance of getting the sensible people together on both sides and producing a system that makes it a bit more difficult to cheat?

See VerifiedVoting.org. It was founded by David Dill, a Stanford computer science professor who was a friend of the late Leonard Zubkoff.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

When it comes to counting ballots, if we could actually get everyone to really accept that the important thing is to get the right answer and getting the answer quickly isn't very important at all, we might be able to make some progress. The problem is that many people have become so obsessed with the idea of getting the results right away that they've forgotten that the results need be right. Once you have your priorities straight, and if you can get past the hangup that most of our population still seems to have that if a number is reported by a computer it is automatically correct, it's really a no-brainer that whatever system we use should produce paper ballots that can be counted by hand easily. Any system where the only record is in the machine itself (whether it's a Diebold touchscreen machine or a mechanical level machine) is just way too open to fraud.

The problems of registering and authenticating voters are much bigger than the problems with actually counting the votes, even though it's the vote counting problems that have gotten most of the attention. Again, I think we've gotten our priorities out of whack. The important thing is to make sure that each person who is eligible and willing to vote gets to vote, once, secretly, and have the vote counted -- not to make the process of voting as effortless and streamlined as possible. Eligibility and registration standards need to be made uniform and liberal, but registration and voting should both be in person except in truly exceptional circumstances.

On the other hand, we need to be sure we put enough resources into actual precincts on election day that if anyone ever has to stand in line for an hour to vote it's an outrage that causes some local officials to lose their next election. I think inadequate polling facilities in certain constituencies (which amount to under-the-radar election rigging: the voter may tough it out and wait three hours to vote this time, but he'll sure be less eager to vote next time if he has to, and it's much easier to get away with not counting the vote of the voter who never shows up than of any voter who does) may well be the biggest single problem in our elections system right now.

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

From a lot of articles we read and discussed in class before the election it really stood out to me how many of the systems have been programed so badly. And even worse they never correct this when it have been pointed out. I feel if this is so important they should hire folks who have a clue to do the programming (hmm... maybe a career path I should consider :)).

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Do you think there's any chance of getting the sensible people together on both sides and producing a system that makes it a bit more difficult to cheat?"

As someone who has been working on this issue for four years, I can tell you without hesitation that the answer is "no."

Sad, really.

B

[patoadam]

See http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm.