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Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)Posted Oct 15, 2008 2:58 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)In reply to: Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) by drag Parent article: Video and photos show Linux booting on the Brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)
It's vastly more expensive, inaccurate, and slower to count paper ballots. No, it's NOT. We have our election results in Canada within hours. We already know who will form the government with about an hour of polls closing. 6-10 hours later, all results will be in and finalized. The 2000 election in Canada cost about $200 million, or around $6 per Canadian citizen. Most of that cost was not related to the count, but to enumerating voters and reimbursing political parties for costs. And much much more complicated to coordinate. No, it is NOT. Elections Canada has been doing this successfully and efficiently for over 140 years. There has never been a federal election that was even remotely suspect in Canada, and certainly nothing like the fiasco in the United States in 2000. And, believe it or not; prone to fraud. You said that before. I asked for evidence. Well?
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Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) Posted Oct 15, 2008 3:15 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> You said that before. I asked for evidence. Well?
Every time there is a ballot recount the results come out different.
Organizations like Acorn are perpetrators of massive amounts of voter fraud involving fake people, dead people, moving people from different regions. This do it 'the hard way'.. that is getting and organizing people to commit multiple counts of fraud on a individual basis.
If your depending on individuals to do hand counts then how do you know that those people are trustworthy? It wouldn't take much orginization at all to get a few dozen people to nullify the results of many many thousands.
If you examine the sort of fraud the electronic machines are vulnerable too you'd realize that it's a game of percentages with them also. You won't be able to defraud a election more then a percent or two and get away with it. So election fraud from voting machines is only really something you have to pay attention to in very close elections. Which is the same thing from hand-counted ballots.
If you want to have the best 'proof' then you have to use both methods together.
> The 2000 election in Canada cost about $200 million, or around $6 per Canadian citizen. Most of that cost was not related to the count, but to enumerating voters and reimbursing political parties for costs.
Well in the USA we are much more hard-core about our politics. Also people are very paranoid and blow things far out of proportion. The Florida election issue from years ago is a HUGE example of normally intellegent people not understanding how election process works and problems being blown out of proportion for the purposes of bad politics.
(Hint: The president was never, ever, meant to be elected by popular vote. I'm convinced that politicians make a big big deal of the president to distract people from the elections that really matter; Senate and House of Representatives)
Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) Posted Oct 15, 2008 6:55 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] If your depending on individuals to do hand counts then how do you know that those people are trustworthy? It wouldn't take much orginization at all to get a few dozen people to nullify the results of many many thousands. The big advantage is that concerned citizens can come in and actually watch the ballots being counted. This is very different from an election official hitting a button and reading the counts off a little strip of paper that the voting machine spits out. Counting paper ballots is something that people understand intuitively. Nobody can vouch for sure that the voting machine does what it is supposed to be doing - well, maybe under ideal conditions they can, but there are lots of incidents where voting machines are basically left sitting out in somebody's garage overnight before the actual election etc., and of course nobody knows for sure that the correct software was on the machine when it was put in the garage, let alone taken out the morning after. Having said that, the paper ballot method seems to work very well for us here in Germany, thank you very much. But then again we tend to keep things simple; we don't elect the President and the municipal dog-catcher and everybody in between at the same time.
Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) Posted Oct 15, 2008 7:16 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
>Organizations like Acorn are perpetrators of massive amounts of voter fraud involving fake people, dead people, moving people from different regions. This do it 'the hard way'.. that is getting and organizing people to commit multiple counts of fraud on a individual basis.
Err, you just demonstrated a huge amount of ignorance on this subject, FYI. The conversation is about voting fraud, not voter registration fraud, and the two are totally different. If you don't even distinguish between them then it rather throws the rest of your thoughts into doubt.
(Quick catchup: ACORN is a voter registration organization who pays people to bring them filled-out voter registration forms; sometimes people bring them ones full of nonsense, but they are *required by law* to file those nonsense forms anyway; invalid forms being submitted to election officials just creates more work for them screening out the nonsense, it doesn't result in any extra votes being cast; in principle clever fakes could be created and people could vote multiple times using them, but in fact no-one can find any evidence of this occurring in the US recently, despite a lot of people worrying about it very publicly and using it to justify things like voter roll purges that do, empirically, disenfranchise people. HTH. I suspect our politics differ, but that's no reason not to work from the same set of facts.)
>If your depending on individuals to do hand counts then how do you know that those people are trustworthy? It wouldn't take much orginization at all to get a few dozen people to nullify the results of many many thousands.
Which is why such counts have always been open to the public and attended by representatives of the opposing sides.
Voting is an interesting problem, with lots of tricky aspects; it's a fun literature to read up on.
Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) Posted Oct 15, 2008 7:31 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Err, you just demonstrated a huge amount of ignorance on this subject, FYI. The conversation is about voting fraud, not voter registration fraud, and the two are totally different. If you don't even distinguish between them then it rather throws the rest of your thoughts into doubt.
Voter registration fraud _is_ voter fraud.
My point is that it's possible for people to orchestrate among relatively large amounts of people to defraud the voting system. In the case of Acorn it was on the voters side, not the counters side, but it's certainly possible both ways. Now they didn't get away with it in this instance, but they are not the only people doing very funny business.
It would be quite easy, if a voter official was not ethical, to 'stack' a group of counters to sway a local election. A unethical mayor or other powerful lower-level politician could sway the vote of a entire state in a closely contested area by putting like-minded people in charge and corrupting 10% or so of the counters in their county race.
And it's not something unique or new either. Some places, especially in Chicago, has been long notorious about people trying to get away with silliness on both sides. Going back many decades.
Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) Posted Oct 15, 2008 8:32 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
>Voter registration fraud _is_ voter fraud.
The examples of registration fraud that have been cited regarding ACORN have been multiple registration forms filed by the same person (i.e., putting their own name on multiple forms), or people filling in forms with nonsense like "Mickey Mouse".
Neither of these leads to fraudulent votes on election day. (Though I'd love to see the news clips of Mickey arriving to do his patriotic duty. --on second thought he'd probably vote for someone like Rep. Berman, so never mind.) Both are screened out by the registrar of voters before election day even arrives.
Even given the level of competence we've come to expect from some Democratic-leaning political groups, as a clever conspiracy this lacks a certain something.
We know how to do voting. Computers are not necessary or even useful, except in limited cases for accessibility. Still nice to see the ideas of openness gaining currency among election officials, though.
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