[Kazan]

No "You lost, get over it" bull****.  This is a serious threat to american democracy and to simply dismiss it because your party won is myoptism as best - fascism in most cases.



http://www.harpers.org.nyud.net:8090/ExcerptNoneDare.html

And when, on March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.[9] The article included this response from Carlo LoParo, Kenneth Blackwell’s spokesman: “What are you going to do except laugh at it?”

In the summer of 2003, Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.) was interviewed by Alexandra Pelosi at a barbecue on the White House lawn for her HBO documentary Diary of a Political Tourist. “It’s already over. The election’s over. We won,” King exulted more than a year before the election. When asked by Pelosi—the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—how he knew that Bush would win, he answered, “It’s all over but the counting. And we’ll take care of the counting.”

[neo_hermes]

the republican party can't do anything secret anymore can they. they must have lost their touch after nixon left office.

[Ulala]

This isn't a "get over it message" but I'm curious.. what can you do about it?

[Styxx]

The whole election process in the US is screwed up. You can say whatever you want about Brazil - underdeveloped, corrupt politicians, etc., but our election process works. Our voting machines are simple, cheap and reliable (and allow voting for the blind, unlike some of the US ballots), lines on voting places are relatively rare, every party can have a supervisor on both the voting and counting spots, the staff for the polling places is chosen randomly from the pool of registered voters, and the voting results are usually made available on the same day of the voting, even on presidential elections. Damn, we have teams with "roaming" polling places going from village to village in the Amazon, and it works.

After the whole fiasco of the previous (2000?) election our government offered to sell the voting machines and counting system to the US, an offer that was immediately refused, of course.

[Unknown Target]

How do your machines work?

[Shrike]

They have a circus midget named Paco inside them who takes all the votes, eats them then scribbles a random response on a slip of paper at the end of the night.

[Ace]

At least it's more honest than the Diebold machines

[Styxx]

Har har. I actually wrote quite a lengthy post about it when I was at the lab, but the connection seemed to hit a snag and I couldn't post.

Basically, they're small self-contained computers with a greyscale LCD, a simple speaker and large keys with braille markings. Each polling table has one, connected to a small keypad where the chairman of the table types in the voter ID (well, it's a special document for voting, really, everyone must have one). Once the Id is typed in, the voting starts for that person - the machine will display the current vote (president, governor, senator, etc.) and the voter will type in the candidate number (all parties have a fixed number which doesn't change between elections, and all candidates have a number which starts with the party number - governor and president candidate numbers are simply the party numbers). Once the number is typed, the machine plays a distinct sound (of many), shows a photo of the candidate (only for president, governor and senator, I think - not completely sure, though), and asks for the voter to confirm or cancel the vote. If he confirms, it plays a sound and proceeds to the next vote on the list, if not, the voter can type another number. There's a special key to vote null, and a key to skip a vote (same as an unmarked ballot). Once all the votes are finished, another sound is played, the LCD shows "END" (in portuguese ), and it's over. The chairman then types the Id of the next person in line.

A few days before each election they put the machines with bogus candidates for the voters to practice, and this training is encouraged through ad campaigns on TV, radio, newspapers, etc. There are hardly any lines on the polling spots (I never stood more than five minutes in line), and the machines rarely break, even if dropped on the floor. Counting is done digitally - the machine prints the results (for conference by the party auditors) and records the results on a disk (encrypted, of course) which is read by a counting computer. Counting is over in the same day, even for presidential elections. Party auditors can monitor the whole process, from the voting tables, to the disk transference, to the actual counting, and they usually do, so there isn't much room for tampering. The machines themselves are sealed, and can be audited by party-appointed technicians. The staff for the polling tables is picked at random from the pool of voters (several friends of mine with no party connections and no interest in politics whatsoever were picked already, so it's pretty clear that it's actually random) - polling duty is mandatory, and if you're picked and refuse without a very good excuse you can go to jail.

Here's a picture of one of the voting machines:



And this is a simulator (in Java) from the official Supreme Electoral Court website:

http://www.tse.gov.br/eleicoes/urna_eletronica/simulacao_votacao/UrnaApplet2.htm

[Mongoose]

Kazan, you're always good for a laugh.  Don't go changing.

/wonders how badly Kazan will respond to this post...

That's an interesting system, Styxx, and I'll agree that it sounds a lot more organized than what we manage here.  In the US, every county of every state pretty much chooses which method they will use.  We've got everything ranging from old-fashioned paper write-in ballots to standardized-testing-esque fill-in-the-bubbles to the infamous punch-out ballots to touch-screen electronic systems to (what my own county uses) lever-style machines that require you to flip a bunch of switches and pull a big lever when you're done.  Each system has its own advantages and disadvantages.  For instance, while you might immediately think that the voting machines that my county uses are inferior to the electronic systems of the neighboring county, one of the advantages of the mechanical systems is that physical tumblers keep track of the vote counts.  The electronic systems around here, at least, don't have any sort of mechanical or paper trail and are thus far more prone to tampering possibilities.  Even worse than having a bunch of different systems is the problem of voter apathy; our federal elections usually generate not much more than 50% turnout, and more local elections get far less.  Still, even with all its flaws, we've managed to elect candidates for over 200 years.  Granted, the infamous case in 2000 made international headlines, but for the most part, most of the country manages to make things work year after year.

[ShadowWolf_IH]

Your party lost....get over it.  

There are always people on the losing side who cry "nuts and bolts, we got screwed".  But really Kazan....do you think that the republican party is so all powerful that they can bury things like this?  Are you that paranoid about conspiracy theories?  You are much much smarter than that Kazan, please don't let your temper get the best of you and cloud your judgement, or feed it,
whichever may be the case.

I guess, when it comes to freespace, or really....any kind of programming, you are someone whose abilities i wish i had a tenth of.  But if you find something that feeds your opinion about something, you tend to present your opinion as fact.  Sorry if you take offense, but that's my opinion on the matter.

Please Kazan, it's one article, that doesn't make it true, or buried through conspiracy.  Don't let your intelligence in these matters be clouded by something that feeds your opinion.

Most people will confuse want with need, somehow what they want translates into what they need.  Not you though.  You are always one to say "this is what i need" and "this is what i want" in your programming, and you are very effective at separating the two there, can you do it in belief matters which there is no right or wrong answer, but simply a matter of opinion?

Not trying to slam you bud, but that's just how i see things.

[.::Tin Can::.]

ShadowWolf put it... quite well, in fact.

[Styxx]

Just to make it clear, I have no opinion on the possibility of fraud. I just bugged in because I see the whole american voting system as a total mess organization-wide, and because of that it seems to be a lot more prone to errors and tampering than the standardized and proven system we have here.

[Bobboau]

principal problem is we were origonaly suposed to be a confederation, and a lot of our foundations are built for that, origonaly the federal government was suposed to only manage interstate disputes and foregn affairs, as a result a lot of things are set up so that states have a lot more say than you would think given how the government works currently, voteing laws fall under this.

[redmenace]

Kennedy's win against Nixon was a great threat against democracy, for the record.

[Grey Wolf]

All those dead people voting on both sides, though primarily on Kennedy's side. Let's face it: You wouldn't really want to turn your back on either Nixon or Kennedy.

[IceFire]

Next US election should be run by Elections Canada.  , the entire voting system should be overhauled by Elections Canada. Then you guys would have real democracy.



Its actually very straightforward here and we usually have results within a few hours of the polls closing.

[Grey Wolf]

If you can convince them, go right ahead.

[Mongoose]

More federal control in federal elections might be a good idea, although  most of the state governments probably wouldn't like it too much.  A standardized voting system would be a big improvement, but transferring over to one presents problems well beyond the issue of federal control.  As I said above, pretty much every county of every state has been left to do things their own way, and so we've got several general voting systems, with dozens of variations on each.  If you try converting them to one standard, who's going to pay for that?  Remember, we're not talking about a small country with only a million or so registered voters.  There were about 142 million registered voters in the US at the time of the 2004 election; getting all of those voters onto a standardized system would cost billions.  Who's going to fit the bill: the feds, the states, or the taxpayers?  I'm not saying that it can't, or shouldn't, be done, but it's something that would require a lot of planning.

[Grey Wolf]

No matter what, it comes back to the taxpayers to pay for it.

[Kazan]

ShadowWolf you are so predictably a partisan hack it's laughable.

You didn't even read the article I cited in it's entirely for you to make those claims.  That article wasn't an opinion piece - those are factual infractions it cited as producted by multiple independant investigations including the particular senate investigation.

Deny it all you want ShadowWolf - Election fraud did happen.


To deny it is to be myoptic at best - more likely it is fascist.

I'm placing you in the second catagory - you're like one of the poor excuses for people who simply follow The Party propaganda in 1984


-------------------------------------------------

Ulala make strict certification standards for electronic voting machines including

• Non-shared strong encryption keyed intermachine communication
• non-rewritable EEPROM contains software - software is certified by a panel of non-partisan security experts from universities (such as CMU) - software can only be upgraded in all machines simultaneously with only new approved versions: version A will not communicate with version B
• Voter-vertified paper audit simultaneously printed with filing of vote

Several other technical features - get voting machines that fit the criterea and force EVERY PRECINT IN THE UNITED STATES to use them

From the legal side

• STRICTLY enforce election laws for random-sampling of precints to detect irregularities
• Raise penalties for election tampering
• Bring charges up against individuals (such as Blackwell) who have been shown to have knowingly caused election irregularities