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November 06, 2004
E-Voting Round-Up
So you thought that after the elections all this controversy surrounding e-voting would quietly die away? Not so fast, pardner. While very few of the major media organizations are keeping track of this sort of thing, apparently in the spirit of "healing" America, reports of e-voting inconsistencies and software glitches continue to surface. We here at i cant think persist in the antiquated viewpoint that "healing" means determining a root cause and correcting it, rather than simply looking the other way and hoping it goes away. With that in mind, we bring you this round-up of current e-voting snafus.
Randi Rhodes has an interesting graphical analysis of the disparity between exit polls and final tallys in states using electronic voting.
A report from Miami/Broward County concerning a software glitch in which the machines would tally votes up to 32,000 and then start counting down. (Extra credit for software professionals: what is the significance of the fact that 2e15 = 32,768?)
The machines in Franklin County, Ohio gave 3,893 extra votes to Bush.
The House Judiciary Committee request to the GAO to investigate the efficiency of voting machines used in the 2004 election, along with specific examples of errors.
Franklin County, Ohio pulls the 'Unofficial Abstract of Votes - General Election - November 2, 2004, Franklin County, Ohio Offices' from it's website with no explanation. Here's the page that was pulled.
BlackBoxVoting.org mounts the largest Freedom of Information action in history to secure the voting records of 3,000 counties and townships throughout the U.S.
Posted by bcoffee at November 6, 2004 06:55 PM
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Exerpt from "Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster"
By William Rivers Pitt
"A poster named 'TruthIsAll' on the DemocraticUnderground.com forums laid out the questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct fashion: "To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not tampered with in this election."
In short, we have old-style vote spoilage in minority communities. We have electronic voting machines losing votes and adding votes all across the country. We have electronic voting machines whose efficiency and safety have not been tested. We have electronic voting machines that offer no paper trail to ensure a fair outcome. We have central tabulators for these machines running on Windows software, compiling results that can be demonstrably tampered with. We have the makers of these machines publicly professing their preference for George W. Bush. We have voter trends that stray from the expected results. We have these machines counting millions of votes all across the country.
Perhaps this can all be dismissed. Perhaps rants like the one posted by 'TruthIsAll' are nothing more than sour grapes from the side that lost. Perhaps all of the glitches, wrecked votes, unprecedented voting trends and partisan voting-machine connections can be explained away. If so, this reporter would very much like to see those explanations. At a bare minimum, the fact that these questions exist at all represents a grievous undermining of the basic confidence in the process required to make this democracy work. Democracy should not ever require leaps of faith, and we have put the fate of our nation into the hands of machines that require such a leap. It is unacceptable across the board, and calls into serious question not only the election we just had, but any future election involving these machines."
Posted by: JT Frog at November 7, 2004 09:02 PM
