Thats "ky-uh-HOH'-guh" to you, pennsylvania.
Are there people who pronounce it differently?
When I moved here from DC, I initially pronounced it "Coy-uh-HOH-guh".
Seriously, this is the thing -- one of the reasons that the e-voting people come off as unhinged is that there's a great deal of vote fraud in the system that doesn't depend on computer tampering. (This fact makes it absurd that our e-voting machines are so poorly designed, of course. A nation that took the mechanics of governance seriously would laugh at us -- I imagine that, say, the Dutch are sniggering right now.) Ignoring the now-unemployed Ken Blackwell's active malfeasance in 2004, what you saw in Cleveland and Denver last November was what happens when underfinanced municipalities (Cleveland is desperately poor, Denver less so but hardly Beverly Hills) have to adapt to new procedures that require expensive training. The fact that voting regulations are often handled by some of the slower ants on the banana plant comes into play, too -- I think that half of the problem with the Maryland purchasing fiasco was that the Sec. of State didn't understand computers, and was honest enough to risk her career by admitting that she had bought crappy, nigh-useless machines nor smart enough to figure out a way to back down.
But I spent a lot of time groaning at jackals who liked to scream DIEBOLD DIEBOLD while preparing for an amazing come-from-behind Republican victory. The Republicans don't need to do anything as telegenic as have someone exploit crappy Windows-based code; simply making sure that the voting machines are plentiful in the suburbs and scarce in the cities is often enough.
It's not that you're wrong, it's just that with the computerized machines without a paper trail, there'd be no way of ever knowing what happened, which is curiously disturbing. But of course just stacking the number of voting machines works fine as well, and it's not as if it can be fixed after the fact.
Oh, there are lots of ways to mess up an election without any active cheating at all, even with paper ballots, if you know what you're doing.
Ballot design, for example - not just the butterfly ballot, but who gets their name at the top. Say you want to unseat an incumbent whose name is "Ziolkowsky" - hey, isn't plain old alphabetical order fair? And we just won't tell anyone that the name at the top of the ballot always has an advantage. (In Florida, the rule was that candidates in the governor's party got to be at the top of the ballot.)
That's why some states have the rule that the arrangement of candidates' names isn't standardized on all ballots (say, if you have three candidates, a third of the ballots will be printed with candidate A's name on top, a third will have candidate B's name on top, and a third will have candidate C's name on top).
Of course, the fact that Diebold employees came in and told election workers how to get the "right" result from the spot recount doesn't make them seem all that trustworthy....
Hey, hi! I don't know why I'm surprised when people show up after being linked -- I do that other places -- but it always throws me. But your blog is great.
5 & 6 - Oh, you're both absolutely right, and it's, if not actually criminal, ludicrous that we have our elections running on machines less secure than a well-designed cash register. The DIEBOLD DIEBOLD DIEBOLD monomania from the feverswampitariat really did start to grate after a while, though, and I thought was generally counterproductive in terms of bringing a real, (theoretically) bipartisan problem to the nation's attention. (The truth is the truth no matter how many d.f.h.s repeat it, but that's obviously not how CNN's editors think.)
Said swampitariat does not include you two, of course.
"The Republicans don't need to do anything as telegenic as have someone exploit crappy Windows-based code; simply making sure that the voting machines are plentiful in the suburbs and scarce in the cities is often enough."
Sure, either option works. But the fact that Republicans have been exploiting the one opportunity doesn't persuade me that they wouldn't explore the other. And the e-voting stuff is scarier because one could, potentially, acheive a lot more fraud that way.
and how did this swamp get so feverishly warm today?
some of the slower ants on the banana plant
This is all kinds of awesome.
It's not that I think they wouldn't cheat by diddling results in an unlocked SD memory card; it's that I think they haven't.
12 - I always thought of LB as more of a desert lizard, maybe that's it.
The Republicans have a longstanding campaign to make voting difficult and discourage voters. (Turnout works against them.) This can overlap with election fraud. The Diebold fixation was excessive, but I really doubt it was all imaginary,
Anyway, I do think that Avedon Carol and our own froggybreath are doing God's work on this one, so I'll shut up and go back to hammering F5.
Well, I dunno. Back when it was southern Democrats (the old-fashioned, Strom Thurmond kind) who were the ones doing the cheating, no one up north doubted for a minute that it was going on - even northern Democrats admitted it. And today's Republicans still repeat the meme that Democrats cheat, because, back then, Democrats did cheat.
But today, those people are Republicans. So why is it so hard to believe that they are still cheating, even though they have changed party affiliation?
The thing is, we know that given the opportunity, people will cheat. The voting machines present an unusually good opportunity, so why assume that an unusual amount of integrity has grown up among the people who control those machines at the same time?
And why assume that these Republicans, of all people, would be so uncharacteristically honest about this, when they have been so consistently dishonest about everything else?
Just sayin'.
(PS. Hi back. I usually stay out of comment threads, but this is a hobbyhorse of mine, as you may know.)
Because the costs involved if anyone ever talked and was confirmed would be so very high*, and perfectly adequate forms of cheating like jamming fire station phone lines and throwing African-American voters off the rolls and refusing to accept voter registration forms from newspapers in cities with highly Democratic citizens and basic voter intimidation attract little attention and no real condemnation from the media.
Nonetheless, the machines suck, someone will eventually figure out a way to ruin a vote as a 1337 prank (if nothing else), and we've already seen the downside to not being able to do a real recount. And I'm sick of helping pay for them with my tax dollars. The question should be resolved by getting ones that are designed by people who actually understand how to design a secure voting machine, or we should go back to using pencil and paper.
* Or maybe not, since Antonin Scalia has not been struck by a thunderbolt for Bush v. Gore
Well the northern democrats were cheating back then too.
In truth I suspect that the HAVA push was meant more to sell big, expensive, required machines made by companies owned by huge Republican donors than anything else, but I don't doubt for a second that they could be used to cheat by anyone with real determination. What I find most bothersome about them is how they crank up the efficiency of effort at cheating; one person can produce huge results and never need the silence of another. I do not believe it has happened but I also see no reason to sit around and wait for it to happen when the system can be so clearly improved without making life worse for anyone at all.
Of course, I can't see objective reality for all the fever I've got in my swamp.
What I find most bothersome about them is how they crank up the efficiency of effort at cheating
Exactly. As my observations of corporate life indicate, it's the general power of computers. They enable fewer people to make more stupid decisions faster and to communicate those dumb-ass ideas more widely.
Now, the fact that they fixed the recount so that the totals wouldn't be re-examined certainly doesn't mean Kerry won Ohio, or even Cuyahoga County.
Er, I'm pretty sure he won Cuyahoga County
That should have been "by significantly more than the official results," if you see what I mean.
But can we please remember not to call people insane for being suspicious about this sort of thing? It happens.
The story that you link to -- you might want to check out the political affiliations of the specific Ohio election workers. For some reason, I doubt that they were Republicans who were trying to skew the Cuyahoga county recount so as to aid Bush. I'd give 95% odds that they're Democrats.
So if this is the best story you've got, then yes, it is a bit insane to think that a couple of Democratic county officials who tried to take the easy way out were really trying to steal the election for the Republicans.
John, Doe, the political affiliation is beside the point. What people are upset about is not that an election *was* stolen, but that it demonstrates how easily one *could* be stolen, and nobody on a governmental level seems to be addressing the holes in the system.
This post was titled, "Talking About Elections Being Fixed Is Just Paranoid." In my experience, someone who suggests that elections were "fixed" is trying to suggest that the elections were fixed *in terms of the results*, not just in terms of a couple of election workers who didn't want to bother with a weeks-long recount. I don't think this story demonstrates that an election could literally be "stolen" "easily." How would it do that? For the election to have been stolen, there would have to have been hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes or non-counted votes in Cuyahoga County that would swing the election one way or the other, and that isn't even remotely proven by the mere fact that a couple of election workers didn't want to put in weeks of work on a recount.
I don't think you understand the word "could". It demonstrates that an election could be stolen. It doesn't demonstrate that an election was stolen.
The Ohio margin was less than 120,000, so there wouldn't have had to have been hundreds of thousands of votes. Just switching 60,000 would do it.
I haven't put a lot of energy into this, but and active and organized voter-discouragement policy is pretty well documented, and it has lots of facets. A lot of Republican election day activities were of borderline legality or less, and in N.H. someone with strong White House connections has gone to jail, IIRC.
You don't have to say that any single form of malfeasance swung the election to believe that the cumulative effect might have done so in several close states.
There's also something shocking about there being ant questions at all. It's not rocket science -- there's no difficulty in running a good election, and if it's not done it's reasonable to suspect something fishy. I would call deliberate malign neglect across the board fishy.
It was James Tobin, New England regional coordinator for the Bush campaign (although this was during the 2002 Senate race in which Sununu beat Shaheen). McManlypants in 21 comes very close to my take on the whole thing, although you should insert more ranting about idiots designing security models and regrettable references to marsh wildlife.
Because, you know, nothing says "security" like keys you can make yourself at home using a picture off Diebold's website. Good fucking Lord.
The only problem with is--and I live in Cuyahoga County--is that the county is a Democratic County. From the prosecutor to the chief of the election board to the congressman (Kukinich) to the mayor--the last three--the Democrats run this part of the state. So, get your facts right before you think.
And another thing--since the Democrats won the last election, you notice how none of them are complaining about Diebold's technology. So, I guess that they only cry wolf--or like babies--when they lose.
Around here, we've all been decrying it before, during, and since the last election, greg.
Nope, we're still complaining. Note the comment thread above.
It's like we were meant for each other.
So, I guess that they only cry wolf--or like babies--when they lose.
I'm a Democrat and hate these machines. I really don't care what party affiliation a politician has when it comes to the credibility of the democratic process. Honest results are far more important to me than favorable results.
Where I'm looking, the people who were "crying wolf" about the machines are still doing it. There is still activism all over the country trying to get rid of the machines.
The silence you're hearing is from the media, not from Democrats.