Voting machine glitches in 2006 election

Given yesterdays posting, "Hacking Democracy", an HBO special looking into election fraud in the U.S.A., I want to do a compendium of voting machine glitches in todays election. This is the mid-term election in the fall of 2006.

Voting machine glitch causes big delays, county says problem fixed: "Encoder" problems in Utah County, Utah, caused long delays at all 118 precincts in the county.

Coffee spilled on voting machine, otherwise voting is smooth I think the title says it all, this is in MINNEAPOLIS. It caused a small problem at one precinct and the article reports voting elsewhere in Minnesota is fine.

Jean Schmidt's voting problem A Congresswoman, Jean Schmidt, filmed having troubles managing to vote for herself.

Voting machine problem reported at St. Antoine In Louisiana some mechanical problems.

Ohio, Indiana Source of Early Voting Problems; More Surface Throughout States A compendium of voting problems published by FOX News.

Voting Problems Reported In Allegheny Co. In Pittsburgh but the article doesn't say how many precincts nor the type of problem.

Voting Machine Glitches Found During Early Voting South Florida has some broken machines, and they're nervous about conspiracy theorists overreacting.

Glitch to keep polls open until 9 p.m. Lancaster County PA has widespread problems. They are planning to keep the polls open until 9 PM. The optical scan machines (eScan) are the ones with problems while the eSlate (touch screen?) are working fine.

Plan in place to address vote machine time glitch Volusia County, FL, the clocks in the voting machines were 6 hours incorrect. It leaves them scratching their heads, but apparently won't interfere with the conduct of the vote.

Voter advocacy groups report electronic glitches statewide (Maryland) "Poll monitors and lawyers in Maryland reported statewide problems with the electronic voting machines today, indicating that the machines sometimes failed to select the candidate the voter picked for U.S. senator or governor."

Some glitches on Election Day In Toledo Ohio they report it went well overall. The glitches were that in one polling place the workers overloaded the electrical circuits, and in other places they had to scramble to have enough printed ballots.

Diebold machine glitch fixed quietly In Maryland it's reported that Diebold repaired hardware problems, without telling Maryland officials about the problem.

Some Texans Won't See Full Candidate Name on Ballots and Electronic voting machines "hack" off Democrat Jim Webb's name from November ballot and F.C. Election Chief Says Problem With Voting Machines Identified a Year Ago The voting machines will be unable to display the full name for some candidates. In Virgina they reported the problem a year ago.

Will Your Vote be Counted? Not Necessarily, says Princeton Team A team of Princeton Univ researchers managed to create a "virus" which could undetectedly alter voting results. They claim this only requires a "good" but not "great" programmer to repeat what they did.

`Brave New Ballot' Author Attacks Electronic Voting: Interview Computer security expert, Avie Rubin, is interviewed talking about the dangers of electronic voting. He claims the danger is the results can be altered without it being detected.

Voter smashes Diebold machine as e-voting problems crop up nationwide A rundown by engadget.com of some voting machine problems. The title is a demonstration of conspiracy-minded thinking gone too far. A voter, believing the machines are a wide ranging Republican conspiracy, took matters into his own hands and attacked a machine.

HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America

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HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America

Description: 

HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America presents to the American people the work of eleven experts on the issue of electronic vote fraud, stolen elections, and best solutions to the crisis. It explains how electronic voting has stolen our democracy; how elections in American have been privatized by large corporations; and how imperative it is that Americans start TODAY to reclaim their elections.

Black Box Voting

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Black Box Voting

Description: 

A citizen activist group investigating the credibility of elections in the U.S.A. Black Box Voting investigates election problems, communicates the problems to the citizenry, and teaches citizens how to manage their own government -- which means teaching citizens how to identify elections problems and providing citizens with the tools to oversee elections. Black Box Voting takes the position that being a citizen means taking an active role in government oversight. Elections procedures must be fair, they must be inclusive, they must prevent voter disenfranchisement, they must protect each individual's vote by reducing the ability to tamper or miscount. Systems do not achieve quality automatically -- citizen oversight is the key ingredient to fair and accurate elections . Because We, the People are the owners of our government, we citizens should expect to take an active role in managing the quality of the government systems we have created.

"Hacking Democracy", an HBO special looking into election fraud in the U.S.A.

Hacking Democracy is an HBO documentary showing the work of Black Box Voting to investigate the reliability of elections in the U.S.A. The special has been posted, in its entirety, on video.google.com which you can get to on the above link or view below. The special shows several astonishing things about electioneering in the U.S.A. and shows that the vote can be changed (hacked) surreptitiously. And the special shows suspicious behavior on the part of certain election officials.

If we wish our Democratic system to remain true to the will of the people, our elections must be fair and honest. We've seen time and again that in countries where elections are not honest, the people routinely are suppressed and abused by their governments. It is our duty as citizens of a Democracy to ensure the system represents our will.

In the 2000 election one astonishing result was in Volusia County, Florida, the election showed a negative vote total for Al Gore. Negative! That's ridiculous, the count should only come out positive because when a vote is cast it can only increase the total. How could one end up with negative numbers? But because the vote recount was ended in Florida before the recount was finished, that anomaly was not investigated.

In the 2004 election Black Box Voting filed Freedom of Information requests for the polling records from across the country, so that they could investigate the results in detail. One county they especially focussed on was Volusia County, and they found strange happenings. First the results "tapes" they were given were not the official record, but were printed two weeks after the election. They demanded the original results tapes, and were told those were at the County warehouse. So they went to the warehouse, and found that the workers there were in the process of throwing out some trash, trash that contained votes, election material, and the original results tapes. By federal law the results tapes are supposed to be kept preserved for 22 months, so why were they throwing them in the trash? More astonishingly the results tapes they found, in the trash, differed from the results tapes which the county claimed were the actual results.

In other words, Volusia County was at it again, apparently, reporting fraudulent results.

The documentary showed several ways which, on the Diebold voting machines, the vote results can be easily changed without any hint of tampering.

One way is to change the results database on the central tabulator computer. The votes are stored onto memory cards which are collected from precincts. On the election night the memory cards are then read into a central tabulator computer, and software on that computer tallies the results and reports the totals. This is pretty straightforward in concept. While the tabulating software has several checks and boundaries that prevent tampering, there is nothing to prevent tampering with the data files from outside that software. The data files are just some kind of database file, probably built around Access. One can double click on the database files and edit the results tables directly. Or one can write a program that directly modifies the file contents. Both methods were demonstrated in the documentary.

Another form of tampering is to rig the memory cards ahead of time. The documentary showed a small test election conducted by Black Box Voting using the voting machines owned by a different Florida county. They set up a test election, used a rigged memory card to record the election results, filled out a known number of optical scanned ballots with known results, ran the ballots through the machine, and ended up with a fraudulent result.

Re: Neo Culpa

Neo Culpa is a Vanity Fair article giving voice to some "neoconservatives" who are having regrets about this illegal and stupid misadventure (war) in Iraq. It is by David Rose, having had several weeks of conversation with these people, who is reporting that many of them regret the nature of their involvement, and are pointing the finger of blame at the Bush Administration.

One said he assumed that the "most competent national security administration since the Truman administration" would be able to pull this off. But instead they were unable to work together and did the most incompetent job imaginable. Another said the issue is GW Bush was not a decision maker (despite his recent declaration that he's the "Decider"), and instead the government machinery he supposedly ran was really running him.

Hurm.

"Tag Cloud" of U.S. Presidential speaches

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"Tag Cloud" of U.S. Presidential speaches

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This is an interesting way to browse the history of statements by U.S. Presidents through history. A "tag cloud" is a technique for visually presenting the frequency of keyword use. With a given set of text, looking at the frequency of use for the key words, if you enlarge the most commonly used ones then it's visually obvious the thrust of the text.

For example the State of the Union Address
George W. Bush, 31 January 2006 the most common word was Terrorists. In that speech GW Bush wanted to again drill home to the population the fear mongering stance he's taken since September 11, 2001 to convince us we need to support his cause because we're in fear of the Terrorists. And the relative size of the words makes this obvious with Terrorists being most commonly used, and Iraq next so.

Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

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Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

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This is the full text of the Habeas Corpus law. The year given is 1679, and I know the concept goes back several hundred years before then. This is an ancient concept in European culture, and for GW Bush to throw it away just because it smells bad to him is ridiculous. Why did Congress go along with it?

The text of the law is very interesting, as it clearly is meant to avoid abuses by government officials in the form of holding prisoners excessively long without just cause.