What if Diebold fraud was a myth

[cooolandrew]

I am looking at all the information that I see out there and begin to wonder is the diebold thing a myth. Yes, they maybe hackable but are they hacked? What is the need for purging registered voters if the machines do the job. Bev Harris found to be corrupt. Yes, folks say they are hackable does that mean they are hacked, my pc is hackable but not hacked. The republicans are putting up a fight so to me there is something to lose. Added to this even with this video the vote campaign you tube isn't overflowing with any video blogs of this, so I just wonder really. So, for at least the sake of optimism please vote, if favours the left if we get out the numbers.

ps. added to this I think there are precautions out there this time, giving up hope is always a dangerous thing is my main point. I think I am being misunderstood here I put it out as a 'what if', just something to consider not a right winger trying to confuse an issue, please don't get me wrong.

[ecstatic]

1. I still want a receipt in my hands by 2008

Regardless.

[Perky]

16. I have never understtod the value of a receipt

In ordet for it to be valuable you woluld have to bring all receipts back together to prove a fraud pcurred....njot a chance in hell of that occuring..



I too am not convinced that Diebold shenananigans are anythung more than conjured myth.

The idea that individual machines have the ability to flip votes is plausible I suppose butin order to do it in sufficient numbers to swing election requires a vast conspsiracy of players in order to change the election result. It would require that all machines to be tampered with before the election in order to guarantee the flip or it would require a very sophisticated scam that would flip votes at the point of collection of all votes in a county after the votes are tallied.......


The logical gaps are pretty substantial. But more importanty the number of people involved and the hatred of Bushco by the general population screams iyt for whistle blowers and yet none have emerged.

[Ravy]

22. A paper trail needs to be left at the election site.

It should be plainly readable-marked with the names of who you voted for, and be able to be hand counted if necessary.

[Old and In the Way]

27. Paper receipts are for random auditing purposes.

It really doesn't make any sense not to have them. Computer hard drives can get corrputed, even if there's no external forces doing it....so why not have them?

The fact that the indicted/resigned Bob Ney promoted HAVA without this obvious feature makes me suspect that they at least wanted to have the capability of election fraud available to them. I don't think they expected a seachange in voter's attitudes towards the Republican Syndicate. This year, the person's committing the crimes of election fraud have to dial in the fact that Democrats will probably win the House even if they are locally sucessful in gaming the results for their Republican candidate....would you want to go to jail if the House decides to investigate your district?

[casus belli]

52. You don't keep the receipt. It's locked away and used for verification of the electronic count.

So if a discrepancy is suspected, they can compare the two together to see if any vote switching has occured. In order for them to rig it, they would then have to not only rig the electronic voting machine, but make the handcount match as well. Since you have a paper copy of how your vote was recorded you can check to make sure that the machine printed you a receipt which matches your selections before putting it in the box.

Is it still unhackable? No. But, it would be exponentially more difficult for them to rig an election unnoticed.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

45. Your vote should create a ballot. You inspect the ballot for accuracy, then drop it

into a locked box.

The box is available for auditing the true (ballot) vote against the electronic count, and for recount if necessary.

If your receipt listed your actual vote on it, your vote could be sold, employers could put pressure on you to reveal your vote etc. and the foundation of the idea of "anonymous" voting would be gone.

[Atman]

2. Uh...welco tu DD

I think you're wrong...if your computer wasn't hacked, surely your keyboard was.

That was a hack post if I've ever read one.

.

[whistle]

3. Suggesting vote fraud might be a myth is a myth!

[Wonk]

4. What if unicorns were dinosaurs?

''I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year'' - Walden O'Dell, prior to the 2004 election, CEO of Diebold at the time

Read this too.
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

[niallmac]

5. Vote by all means by whatever means they offer you.

But I will always push to get the vote as simple and transparent as
humanly possible. Paper ballots with receipts.
I refuse to believe this country cannot clean this up by
2008.

[survivor999]

6. Your PC MAY be hacked.

There may be a Trojan in there sending info somewhere right NOW. Sure, you may have the anti-this and anti-that. However, there may be Trojans that are undetectable. Same thing. You don't know.

[Fredda Weinberg]

7. Hackable, yes. But experts are being shouted down

It was interesting to watch C-Span 3 this past week; they've been replaying hearings and panel discussions on voting mechanisms. An audience member asked about the vote switching - selecting one candidate then seeing another at the confirm screen - and Dr David Dill gave the same response I had: if you're going to conduct fraud, this is no way to do it. And it didn't matter that the professor from MIT pointed out there were reports of Republicans having their votes switched as well ... the audience would hear none of it.

So I thought, "I'm in good company" and am willing to leave it at that.

As for Bev Harris, few know how closely I worked with her pre-Diebold. But when I found nothing nefarious in the source code, her accusations were picked up by many here. Of course, no one else has found anything except understandable mistakes and weaknesses.

It's a shame we can't have a serious discussion of the issue. We should have thrown our support years ago to an open source solution.

[GregD]

8. Even if the intentional fraud aspect were a myth...

all you have to do is look at the news (like at www.votersunite.org) and see all the problems with the systems. These machines are shit. They are built with crap components and bug-ridden software and they constantly fail. That alone is a huge problem.

[FogerRox]

9. Then the House will go 300 "D" to 135 "R"

While the Senate will be 58 "D" to 42 "R".

[TheBaldyMan]

10. Have you any proof at all that Diebold are honest?

theres a lot of evidence that suggest that they not only turn out faulty systems they are in bed with republican party officials at all levels.

Please could you provide me with some kind of evidence to support your supposition.

[TahitiNut]

11. It completely misses the point.

The "burden of proof" in ANY balloting process is upon the process itself. It cannot be and must not ever be upon the people whose lives, property, and liberties depend upon the integrity of that process!

So, quite frankly, I don't give a FUCK about 'proving' Diebold corrupt or 'proving' any particular instance of fraud. It cannot be regarded as reliable when the (electronic) recording and tabulation is not open to surveillance and scrutiny. Absolutely nothing in the balloting process can be kept from public view other than the individual vote itself.

Unless and until there is a verifiable paper ballot subject to audit and recount, this nation's democracy is not even close to being secure.

[robertpaulsen]

30. Best post on this thread. Thanks for prioritizing correctly, TahitiNut. n/t

[stepnw1f]

46. Right On (nt)

[The Magistrate]

12. It Could Be A Myth, Sir

All that is proved is that it is possible, not that it has occured.

[Wonk]

19. -16,022 votes for Gore on a Diebold machine in Florida in 2000.

That's *negative* sixteen thousand and twenty two votes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/arts/television/02hack.html?ref=arts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error

[The Magistrate]

26. That Incident Certainly Occured, Sir

It was also something outlandish, that was noted pretty quickly and corrected. It does not demonstrate purposeful fraud, certainly not competent purposeful fraud, though it certainly is part of the proof that fraud is possible.

It is beyond argument that the machines are unreliable, prone to glitch and error in a manner no commercial firm would ever tolerate in its dispensing or production machinery. My own view is that they should be dispensed with, that ground alone being sufficient to do so, and the simple making of marks on paper restored to pride of place.

Though it is not as if there was never fraud practiced with paper ballots. Among my books is a set of volumns that were the required reading for a course in political science in the twenties, and the ingenuity of the ancients is, as always, astonishing....

[foo_bar]

29. is that an example of fraud?

Eventually the error was fixed, and the correct vote count discovered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error

As Bev tries to explain:

"A memory card is like floppy disk. If you have worked with computers for any length of time you will know that a disk can go bad. When it does, which of the following is most likely? In an Excel spreadsheet that you saved on a "bad disk," might it read a column of numbers correct the first time: "1005, 2109, 3000, 450…" but the second time, replace the numbers like this: "1005, 2109, -16022, 450…" Or is it more likely that the "bad disk" will…fail to read the file at all, crash your computer, give you an error message, or make weird humming and whirring noises."

(page 239, Chapter 11, "Black Box Voting in the 21st Century", per http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm'>althecat)

Placing aside the differences between solid state and a floppy (mainly the whirring noises and the whole analogy), it is quite likely for corruption or a bug to cause "1005,2109,-16022" in light of what's known as the sign bit:

In the C programming language, for example, signed integer overflow causes undefined behavior, although arithmetic on unsigned integers, however, is reduced modulo a power of two, meaning that unsigned integers "wrap around" on overflow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_overflow

Since I'm nitpicking, it wasn't Diebold's fault either, it was Global Election Systems (which Diebold acquired a year later). But yeah, when a small number becomes a large negative one, the first thought is usually "overflow" not "OMG the fix is in!", which is a hack's intuition, not a hacker's. According to a guy with a pony-tail:

Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting experts disagree, but I think we’re all much better off listening to the computer security experts. The problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application.) As for the hackers:

1. DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn’t take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold. One, it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended. And two, it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine.

2. Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions. One, it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected. This public analysis improves security. And two, it increases public confidence in the voting process. If the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code. (Companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don’t believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security.)

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_wit.html

It sounds like a radical position compared to Ned Ludd's Boston Wang Party, but I'm not sure a time machine is the answer to our problems.

[The Magistrate]

31. The Solution, Sir

Proposed by your gentleman with a pony tail, though certainly a good one, does raise the question of why the machines should be involved at all. They become little more than devices to print a ballot sheet on the spot, and the whole thing becomes an exercise in over-engineering: they do nothing of importance that a print shop, some trucks, a pencil, and a passel of humans sitting at a table cannot do, and at less expense.

[foo_bar]

38. and DU might be conducted on tin cans

Computers offer potential security advantages, along with some intrinsic risks even on a "perfectly" designed system. The present batch appear to be designed for convenience over accuracy, insofar as the two exist in eternal tension (http://www.mintruth.com/wiki/index.php?Crashed%20Diebold%20ATM), but internet voting would be nice for Dem turnout. Consider the Motor Votor bill, which the GOP decried as an instrument of computerized fraud:

Mr. Chairman, judged by its purposes, the National Voter Registration Act should be judged a failure. The Act has brought about a substantial increase in the number of registered voters. However, that increase has been bought at a high price. Specifically, the Act has made it difficult if not impossible to maintain clean registration rolls, a major purpose of the law. Moreover, the inaccuracy in the rolls caused by the Act has thrown into doubt the integrity of our electoral system.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-js031401.html

By which he actually means:

Since last fall, "Operation Big Vote" has been active in the St. Louis area as part of a national campaign -- promoted by Democrats -- to register more African-American voters and get them to the polling booth. This effort delivered 3,800 voter registration cards to the St. Louis Elections Board on the February 7, 2001, the deadline for the March mayoral primary in that city.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-js031401.html

I don't think Dems benefit from Diebold DRE machines, but if there's something more convenient, secure, and integral than scraps of paper, who are progressives to oppose progress?

[The Magistrate]

42. Not Really, Sir

Having concocted as a boy several of those tin-can and string devices, my recollection is that transmission is spotty at best, and networks of them quite impossible. Nothing like these electronic forums existed or was possible before these machines and their interconnection, but elections were being conducted reasonably thousands of years before the invention of these machines. Whatever else might be said, they are hardly essential to conducting one.

It remains unclear to me what actual advantages of security and convenience the machines offer. Certainly for the voter, it is no more convenient to touch a screen than to mark a paper: it will take about as long, and require about the same effort. The bulk of paper ballots generated at a busy precinct will not be beyond the capability of a fit young fellow with a two-wheel dolly to trundle about. There is no great benefit from a near instantaneous count over one that takes several hours. None of the handling savings are worth any appreciable sum of money to avoid, and the retention of a permanent record of origional articles has itself a sort of worth to set against this.

So far as security goes, security is never actually reposed in any mechanism or procedure, but must always rest with the persons who supervise and maintain the devices, and execute the procedure. If these are determined on fraud, fraud will occur, just as if they are determined on honest dealing, honesty will shine forth. It is true enough that machine error is generally human error, but until machines create and program themselves, this will always be present, and so the use of machines prone to human error in their manufacture and programming and maintainance and use will hardly eliminate that factor, and so can show no clear superiority over a number of humans directly handling the raw materials of a process, in which certainly they will make some errors.

[foo_bar]

43. and elections were conducted millennia before paper-as-we-know-it

Certainly for the voter, it is no more convenient to touch a screen than to mark a paper: it will take about as long, and require about the same effort.

There isn't much going for touch-screen interfaces in general, at least the current crop; even the ATMs have calibration problems when not continually wiped down by a handler (not to mention hygiene, but the greasy pen isn't mightier). But why is Gutenberg's flammable invention the only tool for the job?

Of course, if the kleroterion had been used only for shaping up juries, it would remain no more than a curio -- a cleverly Flintstonian tool for a job still widespread but not exactly central to the life of modern democracies. In ancient Athens, however, selection by lot was anything but peripheral. Politically speaking, in fact, the lottery was just about the only game in town. Aside from generals, who were chosen by election, all public officers from high to low were selected by random drawing. Sometimes a jar filled with white and black beans served the purpose. But often as not -- and especially when members of all tribes were needed to fill the powerful ten-man committees that oversaw the treasury, granaries, ports, and other key public resources -- only the sophisticated mechanisms of the kleroterion would do.
(...)
"But does your interest go further?" he inquired. Did I agree "that the use of the lot and rotation of offices is a form of democracy that we could aspire to? That the much-vaunted electoral democracy, which produces oligarchy and lays itself open to manipulation by the power of corporations, is NOT the last word in democracy? Do you agree that we should advocate true Athenian democracy with the lot and rotation?

"If the answer to this is 'yes,'" he asked finally, "have you tried to advance the cause?"

http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/49/498.html

There is no great benefit from a near instantaneous count over one that takes several hours.

Agreed, mainly 'entertainment value'.

The bulk of paper ballots generated at a busy precinct will not be beyond the capability of a fit young fellow with a two-wheel dolly to trundle about.

Why has the Big Apple used lever machines since the Industrial Revolution, other than Tammany Hall (correction: in spite of Tammany Hall)?

The machines swept through New York state but were kept out of New York City by the Tammany Hall Democrats.

"Democrats were paranoid that Republicans were pushing these machines, that they had been secretly designed to record more Republican votes," Pfaffenberger says.

When they were finally used in the 1926 city election and Democrats did just fine, opposition ceased.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/ideas/bal-id.vote22oct22,0,6810213.story?page=2

Not to delve into the machinery of The Machine, but there are advantages to getting people through as quickly as possible ("early and often"). Levers don't leave paper trails, so they're hardly ideal to audit, yet the mechanical controls appear to keep error rates almost identical to paper ballots, while facilitating shorter lines and more voters.

It remains unclear to me what actual advantages of security and convenience the machines offer.

Multi-lingual, Handicap Accessible, and Ready for Non-Traditional Voting: Unlike most voting machines and systems, the OVC system can be easily adapted for ballots in multiple languages. The OVC system also provides for the capability for sight impaired or blind voters to have their votes played back to them through headphones at the ballot box. Old voting machines and systems can't accommodate non-traditional elections like proportional representation, but these changes could be easily accommodated with the OVC system.

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/our_solution

I don't know if that's vaporware, but Maxine Waters pitched in. But convenience in this case means extending the vote to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible (the voting not the counting), although at this stage of the tech (infancy) it tends to backfire (sometimes on purpose, based on the pattern emerging from Florida's "Are you super duper sure you want to vote for the Democrat?" (non-Diebold) DREs).

Improvements to voting machines and election administration saved a million votes that otherwise would likely have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections, with states and counties that made the most comprehensive upgrades recovering the most votes, a new academic analysis says.

The report released Monday by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project looked at a key measure of election integrity – residual votes, or ballots cast during an election on which voters failed to mark a choice or machines did not record it.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20050214-1340-electionchanges.html

From an earlier study:

Votomatic punch cards have consistently high average residual vote rates. In 1988, 1996
and again in 2000, punch cards had substantially higher rates of over and under votes
than other available technologies. This is of particular concern because approximately
one in three voters use punch cards. If election administrators wish to avoid catastrophic
failures, they may heed the warning contained in this table and the last. It is the warning
that Roy Saltman issued in his 1988 report. Stop using punch cards.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:1NuSuIFKkYsJ:www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/CalTech_MIT_Report_Version2.pdf+error+punch+dre&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=7&client=firefox-a

If Florida 2k was any indication, we have more to fear from The Machine than the deus ex machina itself, as seemingly foolproof "raw materials" left us with hanging chads and the Palm Beach butterfly ballot, and Rorschach tests on whether chads were dimpled or detached, with the status often changing depending on how roughly the ballots were transported.

It is true enough that machine error is generally human error, but until machines create and program themselves, this will always be present, and so the use of machines prone to human error in their manufacture and programming and maintainance and use will hardly eliminate that factor, and so can show no clear superiority over a number of humans directly handling the raw materials of a process, in which certainly they will make some errors.

"This sort of thing has cropped up before."

[Lars39]

44. Our elections should be transparent...there should be no doubt.

[Red Right and BLUE]

13. What if your post is repugnant? nt

[cooolandrew]

14. 'what if' folks have over-reacted. I dunno jumping the gun is an issue with america really'

[Red Right and BLUE]

24. What the hell does that mean?

Try not to be so ambiguous. If you have a point, make it.

[951-Riverside]

25. What if not finding WMD's in Iraq is a myth?

Hmmm?

I dunno maybe Bush hid them away so the democrats can win, maybe he's secretly working for the democrats so they can maintain power. :silly: :tinfoilhat:

[Richard Steele]

33. And "what if" reading your post made monkeys fly out of my ass?

Would you think it reasonable for me to insist that the
onus is upon YOU to prove that they didn't?

[cooolandrew]

39. OK, I have said the wrong thing sorry

It's just can america afford not to vote, surely you at least have try and demand a provisional ballot or something.

[sandnsea]

15. Not enough precautions

All the machine companies have problems. I think trying to prove Republicans are stealing elections with machines has actually prevented us from enacting the legislation and processes to guarantee future elections can't be stolen. It also, imo, diverts from where the elections are really lost, voter suppression - which didn't get fixed either. If we keep ranting stolen election every 2 years, with absolutely no evidence of one precinct being stolen, we're never going to get to the work that will actually get every vote cast and counted.

[Kerrytravelers]

17. But... but the voting machines go beep... and boop.

How can anything be wrong with that? :shrug:

[seabeyond]

18. taking a dem vote and switching to repug in front of voter eyes is very real

there is no question to that one. what if a person doesnt review. what if a person gives up on the fourth or fifth time trying to correct the wrong vote and the machine doesnt do it. is it every 3 straight dem vote that it switches to repug, ever 4th, every 8th?

this is real, if nothing else

[Kerrytravelers]

20. Question: You provided a link to Save Our Votes.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2559127


But you're not sure there have been voting irregularities recently? :shrug:

[magellan]

21. How can you possibly look at the vote-flipping from D to R

...going on in several places, with no reports of the reverse happening, and think the "Diebold thing" is a myth?

[MADem]

23. Sit down and watch HACKING DEMOCRACY NT

[ngant17]

28. counting votes should not require computers

to do the adding.

Yes, a computer is just an adding machine, but it's overkill. Too elaborate. Unnecessary. You can hand-count with paper. What's the hurry? The problem is that we are in a hurry to get results. And we are being sold the idea that computers are needed to expedite that process.

We need to slow down in this respect. No one or no group should try to demand that we have to have results of the voting right away.

Don't forget exit polling. It's a form of quality assurance/quality control. If exit polling doesn't reflect the results of the official vote counts, within statistical margins of errors, then alarm bells need to go off and we need to start monitoring the situation very closely.

The problem with the Diebold machines is that they did NOT reflect the results of random exit polling. But the press never set any alarm bells off so it can be assumed that they were negligent in their duties to the American public.

[William Seger]

32. If they're hackable, they WILL be hacked

Whether or not they have been hacked in the past is an important issue, but not nearly as important as the certainty that if they can be hacked, they WILL be eventually. We just can't have elections that can't be trusted and still call ourselves a democracy.

[alittlelark]

34. I would Laugh and Laugh and

Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and Laugh and .... uh.... wtf stoooopid shit were you trying to spew?


Sorry, I was too busy busting a gut... what were you saying??????????????

[Name removed]

35. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

36. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[upi402]

37. Sanikans have paper. Why do ya think these machines don't?

hmmmm

maybe to subvert democracy
maybe

Choicepoint (DBT) ring a bell, from the 2000 "election"?
Greg Palast's book is a must read if you question that Republicans would hesitate to exploit a hackable weakness. The early ones seem to have be pre-programmed for corruption.

If one were a traitor and a betrayer of, then one would not be concerned about it.

[deutsey]

40. Check this out

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/the_importance_of_not_getting_over_it/

The authors of the Princeton study present three key findings:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses—computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects. … Once installed on a single “seed” machine, the virus would spread to other machines, … allowing an attacker with physical access to one machine (or card) to infect a potentially large population of machines. The virus could be programmed to install malicious software, such as a vote-stealing program or denial-of-service attack, on every machine it infected.

In other words, it would not take a “vast conspiracy” implementing “plans of inconceivable complexity” to steal the 2004 presidential election. It would only take a few Bush operatives in key states, with access to voting machines, who were armed with doctored memory cards and willing to break the law (with little chance of being caught, apparently).

[Vinca]

41. What is it about the Republican brain?

Did they miss out on the spelling/punctuation gene?

[Doctor_J]

47. What if George Bush wasn't a stupid lying coward?

We might not be in the mess we're in!

[helderheid]

48. ...

:spray: :rofl: GOOD ONE!

[Jeffersons Ghost]

49. kick he, he, he, GET OUT AND VOTE DU!

[DemBones DemBones]

50. It was very strange that when Georgia went to the new machines

across the state in 2002 we lost a Democratic governor, a Democratic senator, and at least two representatives who had dared to cross Bush** -- and one of them was the ultra-conservative Republican Bob Barr.

The moderate Dem senator who was defeated was Max Cleland, who, as I think everyone knows, lost both legs and one arm in Viet Nam. Southerners in general have always had a lot of respect for the military and for veterans. And incumbents always have an advantage unless they've done something really bad, and sometimes even then.

The polls showed Senator Cleland winning. The polls showed Governor Barnes winning. Sonny Perdue (R) was quite surprised to find himself the new governor.

Turnout was high, which always helps Dems. Yet Dems "lost."

Or did they? When you can't have recounts, no one will ever know. When people can cheat, they often will cheat, whether they're Dems or GOPs.

I say we should go back to paper ballots, hand-counted. It worked well enough for over 200 years.

[Quixote1818]

51. I looked into this extensively and the most glaring fact was

the exit polling correlations compared to districts using paper ballots (which were dead on EVERYWHERE). In chilling contrast, the exit polling was WAY, WAY, WAY off and tilted big time toward Bush in many, many counties where Diebold machines were used.

Statisticians did the calculations on these anomalies and the probability's of them being off like this were astronomically low. Like a trillion to one. Also, they ALWAYS made the mistakes toward Bush.

I have zero doubt in my mind the last election was stolen. ZERO!

[PermanentRevolution]

53. Okay, the thing about the "vote-flipping" that I don't get...

If we're saying that the vote-flipping occurances are proof that Diebold has programmed vote-stealing "glitches" into their software intentionally, then I have to point out that this is about the most idiotic way they could steal votes that I can imagine. I mean, programming it so that people can actually SEE that their vote is changing? How is that a good strategy when you can simply write the software so that every 20th vote is flipped WITHOUT displaying it on the screen?

I'm not saying that the software is flawless, by any stretch. I'm not even saying that there isn't a secret plan to steal elections. All I'm saying is that, if I owned a company that made voting machines and I decided that I would secretly program them to change votes, you can be damn sure I WOULDN'T program it so that it showed up on the screen for everyone to see.

I mean, that's just dumb...