The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud 467
cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."
He Won! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Interesting)
The kind of "idiot" who wants a Democratic candidate that's sure to lose. The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway. Ok if we are going to be throwing conspiracy theories around, how do you know that this is not a scheme by the Democrats to create a scandal that they could blame on the Republicans?
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Move along: (Score:2)
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I also wouldn't put it passed the Republican party in SC to want to insure that DeMint beats down a black Democratic candidate by a very large margin. That would give him plenty of angles to spin this as an anti-Obama victory.
You're insane, you know that? The Republicans spin the loss of a black Democrat candidate as an "anti-Obama victory", and all it does is charge up the racist black vote that turned up for Obama last time around based on nothing but skin color.
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Informative)
Lamest troll ever.
Only in the Republican universe did 'Republicans' oppose segregation and 'Democrats' support it.
What actually happened, as anyone with an IQ over 80 knows, is that the South supported segregation, regardless of party, and North supported civil rights, regardless of party.
And this split was so large it ended up breaking both parties in half, and the Republicans all ended up in with the segregationists afterward. You know that 'George Wallace', that you point out was a Democrat? Well, no. After that little stunt, he had to run as a independent for president in 1968 (In which he came in at 13% of the vote, winning the south), and had to disavow his previous segregation stand in 1972 to run as a Democrat.
And that, of course, isn't even why people think the Republican are racist. It didn't end there. The Southern Strategy came next.
You can try arguing that racism has stopped, but the Republicans actively courted and actively supported racism from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, at least.
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Your little revisionist history, of course, falls down on a couple of points.
Specifically, the Republican party NEVER supported segregation and was founded as part of the abolition movement. Democrats...well, not so much. They actively supported slavery and/or segregation through their history.
The REPUBLICAN party was instrumental in ending slavery and ending segregation. It was Eisenhower (you know, the REPUBLICAN President) who desegregated Little Rock, not the great democratic emancipators Truman or R
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Ah, yes, please, continue to ignore the utter and complete restructuring of parties that I said happened in the mid-60, and pretend the Democratic party that the racists were forced out of in the 50s and 60s and the Republican party that they moved to are the same parties as back then.
It was Eisenhower (you know, the REPUBLICAN President) who desegregated Little Rock, not the great democratic emancipators Truman or Roosevelt or Kennedy. The Civil Rights Act was the first time the Democrats stepped on the s
The irony of GOP racism (Score:3, Interesting)
The Deep South voting bloc cares little about niceties like the Constitution if it gets in the way of them having power. They are a cohesive and crafty bunch of pol
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And no, this isn't a "Bush didn't really win" post, but just pointing out that if election issues were something that would ril
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It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway.
It would indeed be a silly scheme, which is how you know it came from South Carolina politics.
Ok if we are going to be throwing conspiracy theories around, how do you know that this is not a scheme by the Democrats to create a scandal that they could blame on the Republicans?
That would be completely ineffective and stupid plan: without a smoking gun, there's no way this would overturn the coming election. Which, now that I think about it, kind of adds credibility to your conspiracy theory.
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Maybe they wanted to make sure anyway, seeing how it's the middle of a huge recession and all.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it's actually the Republicans making a scheme to make us think that it's the Democrats trying to make us think it's the Republicans trying to make us think it's the Democrat candidate?
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Interesting)
Safe Republican seat? Yes and no.
He won his seat in 2004 by around 9%.
Back in December of 2009, he had a 9% lead against a generic Democrat. That's not a huge lead against a completely unnamed opponent. AND there a lot of people here in South Carolina who really like this whole "anti-incumbent" trend. (Enough to make a difference? Probably not. But enough to scare DeMint a bit.)
Alvin Greene ran no advertisements. He didn't attend the Democratic Party Convention in South Carolina. He had practically no name recognition when compared to his opponent, Vic Rawl, who at least was a state legislator. He was able to pay the filing fee for running for the Democratic primary with a personal check (the filing fee is over 10 grand), but he's poor enough to qualify for a public defender for the felony obscenity charge against him. (Also, please note, that the law being used against him is one that is generally only used for people who show bestiality, extremely violent porn, etc., not the simple hetero porn that Greene allegedly showed someone. So that too comes across as a bit hinky.)
According to the FEC, at least through May 19, DeMint had around $3.5 million in cash on hand for this election cycle. Greene has $0.
Now, as to your last question, could this be the Democrats up to something instead of the Republicans up to something? I don't know. But the whole damn thing smells to high heaven.
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With all due respect - what the f@@k are you talking about? I don't know where to begin... "law that is generally only used for people"? Because no one has ever abused a good-intentioned law far beyond the scope it was intended? I am a little to lazy to look things up, but check "war on dru
Why is the filing fee so high? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems quite undemocratic that the fee is so high that you'd *have* to have external support just to throw your name into a hat.
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway.
You don't practice and hone your skills on the important 50:50 battles, you practice and hone your skills on the pointless irrelevant battles. Since this is an irrelevant battle, it doesn't matter so much whom is to blame for this individual irrelevant battle, so much as it matters that someone out there is preparing for the big one...
The simple explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
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In a PRIMARY, you generally have people who actually care about the outcome going out to vote. The people who would just pick the first person on the list are the ones who stay home and don't vote at all in the primary.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a silly scheme, but from what I have read this is business as usual in SC politics. Republican operatives sometimes pay entry fees for black candidates just to "stir the pot" of racial division among the Democrats during the primaries so that blacks will be less likely to vote in the general election.
I have also read that this is often not much more than a practical joke, especially in this case when the candidate did nothing but pay the entry fee and did not even have campaign signs up in his own yard. I think the Republicans really don't want these candidates to win because it would bring national attention to the way SC politics work, and they were probably just as shocked that Greene won as everybody else was.
This exact same tactic has been used before in SC (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 1990, Rod Shealy [wikipedia.org] used this exact same tactic in a Lt. Governor race in SC. He recruited a homeless black guy with a criminal conviction in an attempt to take out the Democratic frontrunner, so his sister (a Republican) could win. It was a crass attempt to play on the racial prejudices of SC (both for blacks in the Democratic Party and against blacks among the general populace) to get his sister elected. He almost succeeded to. And he is still working in SC Republican politics (most recently in the Bauer gubernatorial campaign).
All of you who are saying this is a preposterous idea have obviously never been involved in SC politics. This isn't even a particularly nasty tactic by SC standards.
Re:This exact same tactic has been used before in (Score:4, Insightful)
So, you're saying that Democrats in SC are so racists that their whole party platform can be brought down by having someone running that is ostensibly on the same side but of a different heritage?
Damn. Just, damn.
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Well, no, it didn't work. Read the post.
Republicans have a theory that black people vote for black Democrats over white Democrats, no matter how incompetent they are, or how much they are 'real' Democrats. Ergo, they think if they run incompetent black people as Democrats, they will split the vote. Or at the very least, have some black people, disgusted at the primary outcome, not vote in the general election.
They also think the same thing about women. (Re: Sarah Palin and the whole PUMA thing they invent
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes no sense. Even the left-leaning fivethirtyeight blog [fivethirtyeight.com] listed the South Carolina Senate seat as safely Republican back in late April, with a 95+% chance to be won by the Republican candidate.
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It's not a scheme to get anyone elected, it's a scheme to screw with the Democrats by introducing racial divisiveness. Republicans appear to believe that the entire left operates on identity politics. (Vote down a woman for president? We'll collect the female vote by having one as a VP! That's not why people were for Hillary, you asshats.)
In South Carolina, as is pointed out,t he scheme is usually done by throwing a clearly unqualified black guy in the Democratic primary when there's no serious black candi
The seat is considered safely Republican (Score:2)
so what would they have to gain by doing this?
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to TFA, these voting machines have a large number of problems and no audit trail. Who's to say this wasn't just a fuckup, rather than deliberate malice on anyone's part?
If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting. I don't find it odd-I know exactly how easy it is to manipulate data on a large scale, even data that's supposedly secure and tamper-resistant. It's a whole lot harder to tamper with thousands or millions of paper ballots than it is to tamper with thousands or millions of electronic records.
That doesn't mean electronics have no place. An electronically generated human-readable ballot would be fine. In that case, the speed and reduced human error of electronic voting could be realized, but the voter would still have the ability to verify their choices after printing, and if wrong, go to an election judge, say "I didn't intend to vote this way", and have their ballot scrapped and recast. Backup paper systems should always be available at every precinct in case of a total failure of the machines, electrical failure, or just people who are not comfortable using them.
Having that type of mechanism in place would prevent exactly this type of scenario. It would allow for the result either to be overturned, or to say with certainty that, while unlikely, it is indeed the outcome.
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>>If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
Indeed. In fact, it has been demonstrated to be so easy to own some of the electronic voting machines (many years back) that the fact that people are still using these atroicities is a disgrace. My county (San Diego County) scrapped the electronic voting machines, or at least it looks that way. They weren't in exi
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
It is amazing how often people find that odd. But don't just tell them you're against it...tell them pretty much the entire industry is against them, because computers do exactly what you tell them to do, including lie, and then they can lie about being told to lie.
People need to hear this more from people they regard as knowledgeable about computers. Over and over. Computers lie if told to do so. This is not detectable because they'll just lie about their lying to the people checking them.
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The election of Greene is quite plausible.
All it would take is word of mouth among kinfolk, in churches, and other offline channels.
Voting is along racial lines (reasonable given history!) and actual qualification has never been relevant to either side. It's about race and
affirmation.
I live in SC and find this hilarious. Folks might as well vote for their homeboy. He can hardly do worse that what they have.
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I was surprised to see that listed as a theory without anyone providing actual statistics on how often the first guy on the ballot won.
Surely it's not that hard to figure out where candidates are listed in alphabetical order and how often the first name wins in those cases.
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Surely it's not that hard to figure out where candidates are listed in alphabetical order and how often the first name wins in those cases.
It is hard because it's not a fixed percentage of people who vote alphabetically, it depends on the demographic distribution that's shown up at the polls this year, how knowledgeable those voters are on the candidates in the race, what their present feelings are about their party (are they apathetic? are they voting for anyone who isn't the incumbent?) etc.
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a pretty dumb idea in a primary anyway.
Are people really going to all the trouble to go vote in a primary, and then just randomly picking people?
Checksum failures... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Checksum failures... (Score:5, Informative)
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
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What's that old saying?...Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty good.
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Donkey vote (Score:4, Insightful)
Was he listed under "A" or "G"? Were the other candidates listed around "Z", "Q" and "U"?
If you are going to cheat, at least be smart... (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the problem... if this was a "dirty trick" by the Republican side.... why in this much of an already red district? This was a safe seat that's now in jeopardy if this scandal goes much further.
Re:If you are going to cheat, at least be smart... (Score:5, Insightful)
People do weird things some times. Why did Nixon commit felonies in the 1972 race against McGovern (and thereby destroy his Presidency) when it was obvious to almost everyone that McGovern had no chance of winning anyways?
Re:If you are going to cheat, at least be smart... (Score:4, Funny)
10% chance? (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
Re:10% chance? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Significance at 10% is very significant for an election as closely monitored as first world elections are
No it isn't. If you test 10 elections you would expect one of those to fail this test *even if they are all 'good' elections*. There are more than 10 primaries aren't there? Nothing can be concluded from this result in isolation, however when taken with other *independent* evidence it can strengthen the whole case.
End-to-end auditable voting systems (Score:2)
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"In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time."
Problem: They are NOT "checking various machines and various elections over time". They are only checking this one, right now. In other words: Clue #1 was whatever caused anyone to investigate the fishiness of this election in the first place and decide to run this test. Clue #2 was this test then indeed coming back positive for non-randomness at the 90% confid
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...you'd need some pretty pliable sheep to believe that one.
Welcome to America 2.0, the result of 100 years of dumbing-down the populace.
Strat
Re:10% chance with no audit trail, NO AUDIT TRAIL! (Score:4, Insightful)
Of cause, if the other side won, it's still only 90% chance. I don't think 9 times the chance is sufficient to say that no tampering was involved.
Poor research (Score:5, Insightful)
The P value of this test is 0.1, pretty much all research I read demands a P value of 0.05 to justify a hypothesis. How many elections are there in the USA every year? By this standard even if all of them were not tampered with and totally legitimate 1/10th of them would be found to have been tampered with. That's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation.
Basically, bullshit, either do better research to get a lower P value or stop drawing such spurious conclusions.
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're picking unremarkable campaigns at random out of a hat, then yes, this result signifies nothing.
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
To put it another way: if the guy next to you at the blackjack table gets two blackjacks in a row, you shouldn't be alarmed, that happens all the time. But if the guy is also winking at the dealer and has a suspicious bulge in his sleeve, it's time to find another table.
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So you're not going to answer the challenge, then? Because I'd like to hear it, too.
So besides the way the voters voted, what are the "other irregularities"?
This is salient.
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but there is nothing else suspicious. this just sounds like bullshit to me.
Nothing else suspicious?! The "winner" of the primary is unemployed, is facing a felony charge, and made no campaign appearances! Does any of that sound suspicious?
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Informative)
but there is nothing else suspicious. this just sounds like bullshit to me.
Nothing else suspicious?! The "winner" of the primary is unemployed, is facing a felony charge, and made no campaign appearances! Does any of that sound suspicious?
In a poll taken approximately a week before the election, only 4% of the potential voters recognized the name of the "loser". So, no, none of that sounds suspicious.
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Informative)
Most? By what measure? Of the 80-something incumbents running in primaries last week, 2 didn't win. One made it to a run-off and one had a list of pending criminal charges as long as my arm.
Just because the news channels have a favorite narrative, it doesn't mean it's real.
Election process is not innocent until convicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
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Depends. I could walk around and see how much mess they made.
But in the voting situation you're trying to make inferences from a hidden process; you didn't actually catch anyone stuffing ballot boxes.
Re:Election process is not innocent (Score:3, Insightful)
Rawl didn't campaign either . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
South Carolina voter registration is close to 50% AA according to NPR. Greene is black. Greene had the first position on the ballot. Rawl did not raise money or campaign. Rawl did not do basic opposition research to find out Greene's shortcomings before the election. It sounds like Rawl should have lost because he is a terrible candidate and basically assumed he would just win because he was the "establishment candidate". In case people have not noticed the "establishment candidates" haven't been doing
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Rawl at least had some name recognition.
According to a poll in late May. he apparently had a 4% name recognition. I don't think that is enough to matter.
No (Score:2, Informative)
Just no. There's 10 percent chance of a type 1 error, assuming the null hypothesis (no cheating) is true.
I've figured it out. It's very simple. (Score:2, Funny)
Ya'll racists can't accept that Mr. Greene, a popular African-American, won the election fair and square so you guys undermine the integrity of our very system that is so great so you can throw out the will of the voters that elected him.
Why don't you guys put on the white robes, toss the bed sheet on the horse and chase this guy out of town you bunch of racists!
Refreshing (Score:2, Funny)
Open Source Government - Daily Voting... (Score:2, Funny)
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I... What.
This can't be a troll. Has anyone *seen* opensourceg.com? Not even /b/ has this much free time.
A couple of basic information pieces (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A couple of basic information pieces (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe you're being so negative about such a high voter turnout.
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>>>>he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60.
From TFA:
"The result in the Senate election is highly statistically significant: Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters."
In other words, not at all what you're talking about.
While an 11 point swing is interesting, it's not the smoking gun that TFA makes it out to be - absentee ballots are not an independent sample of an electorate. They're well known to
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Possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Wealthier - they're traveling
2. Military - stationed outside the state
3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee
4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Add that to the reports of widespread voter error in using the ballots perhaps resulting in mistaken votes cast for Green on election day and you've got a plausible explanation for the disparity. Actually, it is pretty shocking if the difference is only 11%, given the major advantage organization plays in casting absentee bal
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In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38433.html#ixzz0qvgQEa5m [politico.com]
Open Primary (Score:3, Interesting)
South Carolina uses an open primary system where any registered voter can vote in the Democratic primary, not just registered Democratic Party members.
Is it possible that thousands of Republicans decided to vote for Alvin Greene not because they want him to be their next Senator, but because he is such a hopeless candidate that he will be crushed by the Republican nominee?
On the face of it, this open primary system seems open to abuse. If you vote for candidate A in the primary, and he wins the primary to move onto the general election ballot, shouldn't your vote be "locked in" to support him in the general election?
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Sorry to repost, but this seems a better place. If you look at the election results [enr-scvotes.org], you'll see that 424,893 people voted for the Republican primary while 197,380 voted for the Democrat primary. The electorate there is so strongly Republican that if 30k Republicans crossed over to giv
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Re:Open Primary (Score:5, Interesting)
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Mod parent up, all signs point to this; both parties play this game every election. Heck, a good percentage of Hillary's support in 2008 [boston.com] was from Republicans voting against Obama. Democrats play the same game (remember the South Carolina Bush vs McCain primary in 2000?).
But why pull this trick in SC when the Republican seat is safe? Simple, neither side would ever pass up an opportunity to embarrass the other.
Not "Fraud" (Score:4, Insightful)
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else. Not to mention beating 1 in 10 odds isn't that suspicious.
Re: Not "Fraud" (Score:3, Insightful)
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else.
Yeah... it's fraud on the part of the people who make the machines.
Funny (Score:3, Interesting)
typical politician (Score:4, Funny)
So not really any different from the typical politician.
Apart from being broke, but I'm sure that'll fix itself soon enough.
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Typical politicians don't get charged. Everyone might be equal before law, but the pigs are more equal than others.
Well, the first use for money would be some actor lessons [youtube.com].
Let us democratize you (Score:2)
Snow Job (Score:5, Informative)
Hanlon's Razor (Score:3, Insightful)
The ballot entries were listed in alphabetical order. Green comes before Rawls. Both were relatively unknown quantities. People are stupid.
I think, as I heard someone on NPR say this morning, people just choose the first guy on the list.
Interesting how these stories come up (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems like we only hear about election fraud when the Democrat National Committee gets a result they don't like.
But in this current political climate, what's so hard to believe about an unknown outsider at the top of the ballot winning?
The only ones who can't believe it are the ones heavily invested in forcing the outcome to what we're led to believe is the "predictable" outcome.
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Re:Voting machine = Perpetual Motion machine (Score:5, Interesting)
I had an in-depth discussion with several people years ago about doing electronic voting. That was before the whole electronic voting fiasco started.
On the site that I was the Sr. SysAdmin for, and I did a good bit of programming for, it had a voting system. The original programmer couldn't handle the number of votes coming in, so he randomly took 1 in 10 votes and counted it. Sampling is fine and dandy, but in my world I like completely accurate numbers. The final system stayed in place for years. It very typically maintained millions of votes for thousands of items. It had some primitive components, but that was by design. The votes were stored in flat files, as it would bog down the database server trying to insert the votes in real time. The end user submitted their vote, and it was counted immediately (like milliseconds). The entire vote database was retabulated every 15 minutes. Two people had root access to the server, and it required root access to be able to view the voting information.
In that system, it wasn't a simple "pick a candidate". It was a scoring system (1 to 5) for the item being voted on. For years, one lonely dual 400Mhz machine with 512Mb RAM handled the tabulation and reporting. We did on occasion have someone question the results. It was usually on something that they were responsible for. "Why did my score drop from 4.5 to 3 in a hour?" It was simply that as the voting numbers rolled in, it adjusted their score. The preliminary numbers were favorable, but subsequent votes weren't so favorable. I could generate reports off of it for that specific item (it took about 10 seconds), where you could see the votes, and how it adjusted the score.
After a while, we had more robust equipment, and I began storing the voting information in a database. A replica of the database was used for tabulation, so the tabulation machine didn't slow down the vote recording process. That, and a better tabulation machine, brought processing tens of millions of votes down from 5 minutes to less than 1 minute.
So we talked about what else we could do with such a system. Real political voting could be managed in such a way. We ran into the same problems that are being questioned with the voting machines in use. Only two people with no interest in the outcome of the voting had access to the system. To manipulate the votes would be a very cumbersome task (by design). What if we did the voting for real politics.
Problem 1) How would we prove to the voting public that the people running the servers had absolutely no interest in manipulating the votes. There's no way to prove that.
Problem 2) How could we provide for anonymity of the voters. We stored the IP and identifying information with the votes, so we could eliminate voting fraud. Those who voted multiple times on the same item were categorically eliminated from all voting. Their records were stored, but ignored for tabulation. Real political voting requires anonymity. We could provide pseudo-anonymity by storing an ID number with the vote, that would associate with the voters registration. It would then be traceable back to the voter, which is illegal/immoral/just bad. For our application, no one cared.
Problem 3) How would the general public know that our tabulation program gave an honest result. When the votes don't go your way, people assume there had been some tampering with the results. Really, it would have been easy to lower votes ($vote = $vote -1), and make someone score poorly. Who would you trust more, a couple computer experts, or the government. I know I don't trust the later, but the general voting public wouldn't know if we were trustworthy. If presented with $100 million in cash, who's to say we wouldn't subtly adjust the results in favor of the group who paid us. Again, I believe in honesty in voting, but the general public doesn't know I won't accep
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The problem is that these systems were sold by people with the right connections rather than the people who had the right employees.
Watching a company bail on a 2 million dollar project because of scalability issues caused by the programmers using MS SQL for a comms system because they didn't know about sockets convinced me that the vast majority of people who call themselves programmers .. well aren't.
What we have are hordes of people who's entire skill set is around building apps are either a combination
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It's not impossible to build a voting machine ; but it is impossible to drag the average high school graduate off the street and have him audit the thing.
In general, people understand ballot boxes but find computers to be a delirious mystery. Don't build voting computers. Use a pencil.
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How is it impossible to build a voting machine again?
The voting process has to be verifiable by the average citizen, when a voting machine is involved it almost certainly isn't. You could of course build a voting machine that prints out paper and make the process transparent that way, but then why would one want to go to all that trouble and buy a voting machine for thousands of dollars when a one dollar pen could make the cross just as easily.
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A voting machine provides a clear interface so the voter knows precisely his vote. He can go forward or back until final submission. At that point a printout is made that is very clear on the voters intents. You won't have any hanging chads or any impartially filled circles that will allow people to throw your vote out as unclear.
Re:Voting machine = Perpetual Motion machine (Score:4, Interesting)
It's possible to make a ballot-based voting system that's tamper-proof and simple enough that Joe Voter can understand it. It's not possible to build a voting machine that's tamper-proof and simple enough for Joe to understand, which means that Joe has to take your word on blind faith, and, well... it's always possible to get "experts" to testify for the quality of your product if you pay them enough.
Apart from this, hand-counting votes happens in the open, while a voting machine is a black box. Even if you had sufficient intelligence and expertize to understand how it works, you have no way to know whether a particular voting machine actually works the way you think it does. So even Joe Genius can't really trust them, and has to take their trustworthiness on blind faith.
Once people can reasonably suspect that any election that didn't give the results they wanted was rigged, and that any future election might be as well, democracy is dead. And that means return to violence as the only effective method people can influence their higher-ups.
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There are two problems with everyday voting, you are only trying to solve one: the technology. The other problem is that to make important informed decisions every day you need to do research and think about the issues. Most of us have jobs and family to keep us busy and many of us aren't really interested in "researching and thinking". The realistic expectation is that everyday voting would lead to ultra-low participation, rampant sensationalism (as that would be the only way to make people actually vote o
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if a Ficus tree can win an election then anyone can if run against the right opponent.
We had a plant (an actual plant, green leaves and stuff) win an executive position in student association elections at Victoria University of Wellington a few years ago.
The good thing about plants is that they say nothing, and won't blow money on stuff the voters don't want.
Re:Alvin Greene isn't unknown (Score:5, Informative)