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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 7:31 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) by njs
Parent article: Video and photos show Linux booting on the Brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)

> 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.


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Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Oct 15, 2008 8:32 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #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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