Does your vote count? (How many times?)

[BB]

To resurrect this thread... From California:

Calif. secretary of state bans electronic voting in four counties

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Citing concerns about security and reliability, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned Friday the use of touchscreen voting machines in four counties.

Shelley said he may expand the ban to 10 other countries if they do not meet a score of conditions.

The ban immediately affects new computerized voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, the leading touchscreen provider. Many of them were used for the first time in the March primaries.

...

The decision follows a series of failures of touchscreen machines in primaries this year.

Computer experts have criticized the machines, primarily because they provide no paper record, saying they are susceptible to hacking and malfunctions.

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-Bill

 

[jayflash]

No matter what method is used, we ALL should have a paper receipt for our ballots. Hard copies could provide the necessary paper trail to determine fraud.

 

[Bravo25]

Absolutely right. Otherwise politicians might be able to do something like steal an election in Florida, and then lose the count!

 

[Sub_Umbra]

The first time I heard the term "vote fraud on a Third World scale" was right after the '92 elections. There are far less people who care about vote fraud than those that vote -- so it's really not very many.

The talk in the press of going to a standardized system after the Florida fiasco was ludicrous. The Constitution says that the individual states shall decide the time, place and manner of holding the important elections (Senators and Representatives).That is, IMO, wise. If there were a standardized system nation wide it would just be that much easier to fix an election. Even the Federal government isn't crazy enough to implement a nation wide system just for an election where the the votes of the masses don't even count. (Presidential)

I think it was Charlie Wrangall who said, "I'm going to be buried in Chicago so I can continue to serve the Democratic party after I die."

 

[BB]

Those wascally wepublicans--all by themselves by only stealing Democrat votes in heavily Democratic counties, with Democrat election commissioners, with Democrats who created the "butterfly ballots", with Democrat appointed local election auditors, with a media that is heavily Democrat over watching (who, in most scenarios, estimated that Bush got the most votes in Florida), and Democrats who initiated recounts only in heavily Democrat precincts, and Democrats who only worked hard at scrutinizing absentee/overseas/military ballots, and Democrats who took first took the cases to court, and 9-0 and 7-2 decisions by the US Supreme Court that the Florida Supreme Court was not correct in its decisions (the 5-4 ruling was about whether or not December 12th was the last day for results to be counted).

Come-on man--get over it. You are better than that.

-Bill

 

[Bravo25]

The fact is the ballots were wrong, miscounted, and disappeared. Funny thing that the governor was a Bush. Democrat?

 

[Avix]

"I don't care who does the voting as long as I do the nominating"

"no mater who you vote for, the Government gets elected".

most of goventment is run by the same people no mater who wins the elections. unelected Buro-crats makeing policy decisions (example, Dept policy overriding state law)

 

[stockwiz]

Well I am a firm believer that at least the federal level, there is no difference between voting democrat or republican, the republicrats rule. At the state level the corruption is less and candidates tend to make more of a difference.

With that said, Doyle, the governor of the state I've resided in my whole life until this coming Tuesday, Wisconsin, vetoed a bill to require photo ID when voting. Gives you an idea where the democrats get their votes from.

 

[MichiganMan]

[ QUOTE ]
Bravo25 said:
The fact is the ballots were wrong,

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Designed and approved by local Democratic election officials AND publically released in local newspapers as examples in the weeks before the election.


[ QUOTE ]
miscounted,

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by machines operated and maintained by local Democratic election officials and volunteers supervised by them.


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and disappeared

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from voting locations supervised and entrusted to local Democratic election officials.


[ QUOTE ]
Funny thing that the governor was a Bush.

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Very, especially if you truly think he was able to get all those Democrat election officials to do what they needed to do for this to happen. Its even more funny that the Democratic party, somehow, had a large polling company from another state up, running, and ready to call Florida voters in these counties to suggest that they "possibly may have been confused by the butterfly ballot (wink wink)" before the polls had even closed. Speed like that almost makes it look like it was planned.

But that couldn't possibly be because that would indicate that they would be willing to severely damage the trust in our democratic process just to cash in politically on the subsequent turmoil and doubt. That type of cynical opportunism would be beneath vile.

 

[JonSidneyB]

I do not know all that has happened or alleged to have happened in others locations. But I have seen voter fraud at work. There was a van full of voters that went in and voted, then came back out. Then they went to another voting site, and did the same thing. Over and over again this happened. Later there were complaints about that this that did make the news. The news showed both sides of the story but it was very brief. The people wanting an explanation of this irregularity was asked not in person but as a comment of the news person on TV something on the line of "Why would these people want to interfere with voters, whats there agenda" They didn't say it didn't happen, if fact they showed tape of it happening, but blew it off as a few people throwing a fit.

 

[BB]

I forgot to add that Bush stole the election under/after eight years of a Democrat President (and it was his Vice President that was running), mixed Democrat and Republican Congresses over the years, Democrat appointed Attorney General, and all Republican US Attorneys where fired by a Democrat President and were replaced with Democrats as US Attorneys (as far as I know, this was a first).

And the network news anounced that the polls in Florida were now closed--an yet in the Florida Pan-Handle (a Republican strong-hold--as I remember) still had an hour to go (because they are in a different time zone).

I guess that nobody was looking from the Democrats' side at this election...

-Bill

 

[stockwiz]

Although I don't like Bush or republicans any more then democrats, I am convinced that there was and will continue to be a large number of fraudulant votes on the democrat side in the last election and future elections. Whether they are bussed in from the inner cities, unions, or simply vote more then once, or vote under different identitys, I believe this happens much much more among democrats. They were caught bribing minorities with cigarettes here in Milwaukee the last election... it was on the news around here with video footage and everything... bussing in people, giving them cigarettes, and telling them to go in and vote for Gore when they otherwise wouldn't have voted.

 

[BB]

Want another "funny" voting machine article????

E-voting paper-trail bill tossed by Dems

[ QUOTE ]
Concerns about cost kill measure; safeguard for touch-screens may not be seen until after the 2006 primary

...

California stopped short of demanding a paper trail for November. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller ordered it for his state. Last week, Sequoia vice president and former California assistant secretary of state Alfie Charles was showing off the new VeriVote printer that his firm is supplying to Nevada when an astute legislative aide in Johnson's office noticed two votes were missing.

Charles tried again to vote in Spanish with the same result: He cast votes on two mock ballot initiatives, but they were absent from the electronic summary screen and the paper trail.

"The paper trail itself seemed to work fine but what it revealed was when he demonstrated voting in Spanish, the machine itself did not record his vote," Chesin said. "Programming errors can occur and the paper trail was the way we caught it."

Charles said his company's touch-screen actually did record the electronic votes in its memory but through an oversight failed to reflect the votes on its electronic display and printout.

"There's no problem with the way the equipment worked. It was a problem in the ballot setup," Charles said. "People do make mistakes and that's why you have ballot proofing. Because it was for demonstration purposes, we didn't put all the attention into it that we should have." ...

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Boy, I like these explanations... The machine actually worked just fine--but failed to report the votes correctly in two of three methods of displaying/recording the votes because of human error...

It looks like we will be able to customize vote fraud by language (Los Angles is required to have something like eight languages on the ballot). Computers open brand new opportunities in government operations!

-Bill

 

[MichiganMan]

The voting machine scandal is waiting to happen and is going to be a doozy.

The people that purposefully brought about the Florida election debacle for their own ends (yes, purposefully, let your biases lead you to the most likely culprits, I certainly have mine) did damage to the country that we haven't yet undergone.

Manipulating someone to falsely believe that they have no voice in a democracy... actually stealing their belief in their own country, simply so you can use them politically, is a terrible terrible thing that I doubt the perpetrators possess the decency to appreciate.