http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/16/clinton-does-best-where-voting-machines-flunk-hacking-tests-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/
"Of the nine places where the exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York), two-thirds are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For these six states the average initial exit polling miss is a whopping 9.98%. From my column on exit polling misses last week, the average exit polling miss in Clinton's favor is 5.1%. For the three states (Oklahoma, New York, Maryland) for which there is polling and for which all election jurisdictions use machines less than ten years old (gray in the map), the average is just a 1.67% miss in Clinton's favor. Now take note, this 1.67% average includes New York with its huge miss in Clinton's favor."
(Score: 5, Funny) by Geezer on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:08PM
exclaimed Captain Renault.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Walzmyn on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:10PM
US elections aren't secure and Clintons cheat: Film at 11
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:37PM
But, but, but...
The left has been harping about voter ID laws, with facts and figures show that voting fraud is infinitesimal. Shut up you right wing thug! Look at my diagram!
Now I don't doubt republicans would (do) cheat if they could, but at the moment they are the only visible party commenting on insecure elections. I don't know if the Clintons have enough pull to exploit such a circumstance as older election machines, but I also have no proof those machines are less secure either.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:59PM
The left has been harping about voter ID laws, with facts and figures show that voting fraud is infinitesimal.
On the other hand, the right has been pushing for voter ID laws, with feelings and hunches that show that voting fraud is a big problem. One side may be cooking the books, but the other is drawing on the walls with crayon, occasionally eating a stick or two.
What I'd like you to explain to me is, how exactly voter ID helps against voting machine hacking.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:17PM
What I'd like you to explain to me is, how exactly voter ID helps against voting machine hacking.
Aaaannndddd here we go.
The problem isn't "voter machine hacking" but election fraud, of which that is only one aspect. And while you're quick to criticize the right for feelings and hunches, you might re-read the story again- nothing is proven, it just looks suspicious.
But hey, your hunches obviously count more than their hunches, yet nothing is proven either way, and only one side is moving towards more secure elections.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:26PM
How do voter ID laws fix the problem of voting machines receiving suspicious updates?
The GOP loves fraud as long as they control it, the issue has never been fraud for them, the issue has been that people are voting for other candidates.
To date there have been no reports of individual voters choosing to commit voter fraud. The only things we have are things like the questionable patches only in Democratic leaning districts of Georgia to go on. We don't know that there's any fraud, but it does look suspicious when there's patches only being applied to machines in areas that favor one party or another.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:18PM
To date there have been no reports of individual voters choosing to commit voter fraud.
Bahahahahah!! Right. Sure, Mr. head-in-the-sand. Admittedly, it's rare, but it certainly exists. In fact throughout history there have been documented cases of not just individuals but organized conspiracies to commit voter fraud.
Let's see... we have 10 individual criminally charged in Milwaukee County in 2012 [jsonline.com]. There's the conviction of Chad Gigowski [jsonline.com]. And of Melowese Richardson for five years [wcpo.com], one of six charged in Hamilton County. And Sonia Leticia Solis [fbi.gov] of Texas.
I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:06PM
...and when it does happen, it's typically [google.com] Republicans [google.com] doing [google.com] it. [google.com]
So, why are all the voter ID laws constructed to make things difficult for students, the poor, and the elderly (people who are statistically more likely to vote for Donkeys)?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:56PM
Of course it exists, but is it so common that disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters is a reasonable solution to the problem?
I remember years back the GOP tried to challenge the gubernatorial results here in WA and they couldn't prove a single vote cast for the Democratic winner was fraudulent, they did however lose a couple dozen votes that were improperly casts because of affidavits filed during the proceedings.
10 individuals out of how many tens of millions of voters and votes? This is something that the GOP whines about because there aren't as many GOP voters as Democratic voters and they can't win elections without cheating on account of their message being so unpopular with such a large segment of the population.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:52PM
uhhh how EXACTLY is it "disenfranchising" for a voter to spend a whole 20 minutes getting an ID that most states offer for free? I'm sorry but that disenfranchising bullshit is just that, and if you are too fucking lazy to spend a whole 20 minutes getting a free ID? Then frankly the election process would probably be better off without your vote.
Geez what is next, voting by 1-900 number because it will be disenfranchising to make them get their fat assess off the couch?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @11:05PM
Changing people's registration on their behalf and not even bother to notifying them that they did it is only done to disenfranchise voters. I'm not sure why anybody would think that a Bernie delegate would be a registered Republican.
And it's disingenuous to suggest that it's just 20 minutes. It might be 20 minutes once you get to the place to get the ID, but it's probably at least another 20 minutes each way, at which point you're going to have to miss at least an hour worth of work as many of those places aren't open on weekends.
Just because you choose to pretend like this is reasonable behavior doesn't make it so. The GOP wouldn't be pushing so hard for these kinds of measures if it wasn't effective at disenfranchising Democratic voters.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday May 18 2016, @08:12AM
Voting isn't a right, its a civic duty and again if you are too damned lazy to spend a single part of your lunch hour in 4 fricking YEARS to get an ID, how good are the odds you are even gonna know shit about the candidates and issues?
And your argument fits just as well for them actually having to show up, wait in line and having to stand there and vote, so by your reasoning anything more than doing an American idol would be "disenfranchising".
Oh and as far as being listed as a D when you are an R or vice versa in a primary? You obviously don't know diddly squat about the issue because there are election officials on hand with cell phones more than happy to fix any and all issues you might have in that regard. We had a couple of those during our vote, a couple in the wrong district and a couple mis-registered...time it took the election officials to fix it? About 10 minutes, they even waited until a machine was open and handed it to them so they wouldn't have to go through the line again.
But the fact that you think its perfectly okay to require an ID to buy a pack of cigarettes but NOT okay to have an ID when it comes to making choices that can cost the lives of thousands and alter the very fabric of our country and the course of the nation? Is frankly really fucked up.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday May 19 2016, @03:12AM
Voting absolutely is a right. Where on earth did you get the idea that it wasn't a right? It happens to be a civic duty to make yourself and informed voter and cast and informed vote, but that's not a requirement to exercise your right to vote.
People saying otherwise have pretty much always been racists trying to figure out how to prevent people from voting against their preferred candidates as in the poll taxes and such in the deep south.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:53PM
So I started reading your citations and it sure doesn't look good for your argument.
The first one about 10 people starts off with a litany of things that barely rise to the level of "fraud"
‣ two felons lied about having clean records because felons are not allowed to vote,
‣ one guy went to three different polling places because he thought his votes had been rejected for lack of paperwork but it turned out they were accepted and ultimately used a DL with an old address.
‣ One woman wrote in her parent's names on a petition because they were out of town,
‣ One woman accepted those signatures on the petition
‣ 3 people voted in different counties than their current residence
None of these cases would have been fixed by voter-id. Only one multi-voted and he was stoned.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday May 18 2016, @01:00AM
First, you've cherry-picked and spun the cases to seem like they weren't criminal violations. You skipped the ones that were convicted and knew they were breaking the law. Some of the cases I posted resulted in jail time for the fraud (as it should).
But my point was not that it's a major issue (I guess you missed where I said it was rare) - the point is that it DOES exist, and the OP is full of it to claim that "There are no cases of individuals committing voter fraud". I found a whole bunch in a few seconds with Google, and posted a few. So I was right and he was wrong, but all any of you assholes can do is label me a "Troll" and dismiss the facts.
Voter fraud exists. There should be rules to help prevent it. None of this even addresses the fact that the way the vote is handled in some places it's IMPOSSIBLE to even catch anyone committing voter fraud. Instead, all you get are irregularities ("Gee, that seems like a pretty unlikely random occurrence")... It's necessary to TRUST the integrity of the process, or our PEACEFUL transitions of power will turn into VIOLENT ones.
Mike Drop
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2016, @04:10PM
> First, you've cherry-picked and spun the cases to seem like they weren't criminal violations.
Not the point. They were indeed felonies and some of them were convicted.
The point is that they are not examples of bogeymen trying to corrupt the electoral process AND none of cases are applicable to voter-id.
When the OP said there were no cases of voter fraud it was the context of voter-id. That you had to expand the context to any kind of voter fraud to find examples actually reinforced his point.
> Mike drop
get over yourself
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 18 2016, @05:23PM
Please explain to me how requiring identification to vote would prevent people who voted under their own name in multiple precincts, or people who voted under their own name when they weren't legally eligible to vote? In fact, in some of the cases you cited, the people allegedly committing fraud were *already showing ID*!
There's virtually zero cases of election fraud occurring in the verification of a voter's identity. It's almost entirely problems in the government infrastructure behind the elections. And they respond to that by...making it harder for individuals to vote by requiring them to obtain and present ID, while they continue to neglect the infrastructure that's actually causing the problems. And in some cases, representatives have actually stated in interviews that they expect the ID requirements to change the outcome of elections. Not because they're preventing any fraud -- they have no evidence of that -- but rather because they're preventing people from getting to the polls.
Not everyone has a driver's license. Not everyone has a car. Not everyone can take a day or two off work to travel a few hours to the nearest DMV that often may only be open one or two days a week or four hours a day. And even where they're open your normal 9-5 M-F, in my experience (in RI) even if you arrive at 9am the line may already be so long that you have to return the next day. And if you didn't take off work two days? You've gotta start from the beginning next time.
So if the people pushing these bills are actually concerned about voter fraud...why would they start with the fraud that's least likely to occur with a solution most likely to prevent millions of citizens from being able to vote instead of focusing on fraud that occurs every year that can be prevented in the backend without affecting legitimate voters at all? For example, adding communication between precincts so that when you register in one, you're de-registered anywhere else. THAT, unlike voter ID, would prevent most of the fraud in the cases you linked to. Without voters doing anything different. But nobody involved wants the elections to be fair, they want them rigged in their favor.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday May 18 2016, @09:32PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 19 2016, @02:22PM
It's only "moving goalposts" if you assume I'm under some obligation to pursue someone else's argument. I wasn't trying to; I was trying to make a slightly different point -- that there's no logical basis behind these laws.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday May 18 2016, @09:34PM
a solution most likely to prevent millions of citizens from being able to vote
There have been no cases of an individual denied a vote because they were unable to obtain an ID.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 19 2016, @02:20PM
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article59695406.html [charlotteobserver.com]
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Thursday May 19 2016, @08:37PM
That's nothing but a mistake by a clerk. And she had several other options for obtaining an ID. In fact, she could have gone straight to the local registrar and gotten an ID directly from them.
And even though the headline SAYS she was denied being able to vote, in the end she wasn't. She was put off by the process (but who is NOT put off by dealing with the DMV and other bureaucracies?) - and says she "might not bother to vote". But she was NOT denied the vote, and nobody else has been, either. The whole propaganda campaign claiming that "millions will be denied the right to vote" is not only propaganda - it's false.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:18PM
It seems that the subtext of your "But, but the libtards!" rant is that there is actually a difference between Clinton and "The Right". Hilarious.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:15PM
In that case, they both need to see spinal specialists.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:58PM
What I'd like you to explain to me is, how exactly voter ID helps against voting machine hacking.
Its two topics with the same result (vote suppression) that need some statistical analysis. I'll try to explain the situation for our foreign readers:
Its a white privilege to assume all people have govt issued ID. I know it sounds strange to white people because it sounded very strange to me when I learned about it, but a small fraction of (traditionally democrat) minority groups often don't have govt issued ID. Some of it is mental competence (addiction?, stupidity?), some is legal issues, sometimes its finance, honestly I don't think anyone really understands why those people don't have papers beyond sloganeering. In my state, a drivers license is "poor people expensive" although when I was poor I somehow paid it, and I could pay for a couple with my wallet today in cash, however its state policy that an "ID only" card that looks and works like a drivers license is free from the DMV. Not cheap, but $0 zero dollars free no charge no bill nothing no money, free handout. Then the "debate" begins where if you don' t have a birth certificate to present to the DMV, a certified birth certificate may not be available at all, or a BC may cost like $200 from the county courthouse and require receipt of registered mail (and if you're homeless?). Not to mention any time you talk to a leftie you'll get lectured on how its impossible for political party apparatus to provide a free ride to the local DMV office (which is only a long walk away) or a friend provide a free ride, transport is always budgeted as tuxedo-class limo rental costs just to visit the DMV thats probably only five miles away anyway. Also I think there's an element of apathy, lack of agency as a cultural thing, etc. Some Laotian dude fresh off the boat with no legs, no money, and no English, will none the less still find a way to get valid legit ID and vote, but no amount of shaming works on some other groups for cultural reasons. So its "impossible" for a significant fraction of non-Asian minorities to get voter ID, so they can't vote if there's voter ID laws. So when voter ID laws are passed, some percentage of the minority population no longer votes. This is observed fact from historical results.
The left freaks out about it on a regular basis (minorities are near 100% left wing so its seen as their issue), however our election system is so corrupt that we gerrymander the epic hell out of our districts, not to mention segregate our housing, enough such that eliminating 10% of the black people vote merely means in black people districts the final vote changes from 99% D and 1% R to maybe 98% D and 2% R or where I live it changes the result from 75% R and 25% D to maybe 76% R and 24% D. In other words none of this matters, its just something fun to fight about in a very theoretical sense. No possible outcome would change the results of anything.
The right freaks out about voter fraud, as if thousands of people vote dozens of times or whatever, but outside some hypercorrupt areas like Chicago, New Orleans, Alaska, NYC, its not quite that bad and basically never happens as the left often sloganeers back at the right. And its true. Most of the fraud seems to happen at higher levels like votes are counted multiple times or ballot boxes are stuffed. Its hard to implement a conspiracy of 300M people. Or 150M or whatever. Its pretty easy for one crooked bastard to shove 500 prepared ballots into the machine when the other party's election site overseer is on a potty break and traditionally our election overseers are 85+ years old, partially deaf, and partially blind, at best case, so pulling a fast one isn't all that hard anyway. So thats just sloganeering.
The right loves the idea of meaningless arbitrary hoops for minorities to jump thru that accomplish nothing despite virtually no one participating being a criminal, because they love the analogy with gun control, which lefties love, and is similarly a pile of meaningless ineffective hoops to jump thru. Why should it be significantly harder to buy an air rifle or a target pistol than to vote? Isn't voting much more important than the shooting and hunting hobbies? Shouldn't voting be as hard as getting all the permits and taxes and legal stuff lined up for a machine gun? If right wing white people have no problem jumping thru a hundred hoops can't left wing minorities jump thru one simple little hoop one time? If a simple concealed carry permit requires training and classes and tests, shouldn't voting? Its not asking that much you know, not compared to gun control legislation. So the right loves sticking it to the left with this issue. I admit I love this aspect of the story.
Also the left and right love to fight and if there's nothing "real" to fight over, this topic is always hanging around like the smell of rotted garbage that can't be cleared from the air. Both sides love it because it rallys the troops and gets great journalist coverage. You can't talk in a circular manner about abortion or gun rights forever... toss voter ID into the rotation as a filler topic.
The left likes to sloganeer that making it require a microscopic effort to vote means lazy people are disenfranchised, to which most people shrug their shoulders and say "good". The extension of the argument is that lazy people not being able to vote is "the same thing" as messing with ballot boxes to add or remove votes. Well, that's a bit of a stretch.
Meanwhile the final note for international readers is every state regulates its voting its own way, and the stereotypes ring true that midwestern states full of organized German people with nicely maintained lawns invariably handle the whole topic quickly and professionally and mostly ethically whereas states that have a stereotype of having more than their fair share of con men and idiots and the senile like Florida or LA or DC or Illinois inevitably find a way to turn the simplest election into an absolute shit show of a circus. Specifically Florida's election laws and process and historical results are legendary and read like a parody out of MAD magazine, for example.
Anyway hopefully this clears up the voter ID situation for our foreign or confused readers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:09PM
The discussion was looking serious. Your post is a long one, and I was looking forward to learning something - maybe. But, you start right off with that "white privilege". Screw it - can't be bothered.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:21PM
Good grief! Please check your sarcasm detector in for repairs as soon as possible. If you would have bothered finishing the part about "white privilege," you would have realized that VLM was demonstrating out how stupid the D team is being every time they make obtaining a photo ID a matter of "white privilege."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:39PM
It isn't a case of white privilege, its a case of green privilege.
As in not having enough green to afford the cost of dealing with all the arbitrary hassles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:27PM
GP here. If you read VLM's comment you'll note that in many states getting a state-issued picture ID is absolutely free. I liked how he portrayed the transportation costs that the D team always drum up as "limo service" rates (or similar). I think where I live it's like $10. Getting a birth certificate reissued isn't that difficult either, but if you're a US citizen (which you are since you're voting, right?) it's somewhere between $50-$200 (VLM's $200 figure must be the high end since I've never seen it cost that much) depending on the issuing state and usually just involves sending the correct form and fee through the mail and waiting a month or so.
Really, I mean, come on. Way back when my boyfriend at the time and I were only making minimum wage we didn't have these problems. He grew up in the ghetto and my parents had just thrown me out so neither of us had anything. We moved at one point and discovered--not sure how it happened--that his birth certificate had gone missing. Somehow, on minimum wage (which is less than the benefits one receives from welfare, food stamps, et al), we managed to get it replaced. Having a birth certificate is just that important.
I mean, maybe somebody's parents lost theirs and never gave it to them. Parents do a lot of shitty things to their children. Knew one girl who moved into her first apartment only to discover that her deadbeat mother had used her social security number to ring up roughly a thousand dollars worth of electric service.
In my personal opinion, requiring picture IDs is just simply not necessary. One of the ladies at the polls crosses my name off a list when I vote. If somebody were going to try to commit voter identity fraud in any meaningful way, there would quickly be red flags all over the place.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:58PM
GP here. If you read VLM's comment you'll note that in many states getting a state-issued picture ID is absolutely free. I liked how he portrayed the transportation costs that the D team always drum up as "limo service" rates (or similar).
I've never seen a 'D' say that it is "limo service." What I have seen many 'Ds' say:
(1) Some counties don't even have DMV offices [msnbc.com]
(2) Cost for supporting documentation - all the states with real-id have requirements above and beyond a birth cert and being indigent makes it practically impossible
(3) Cost for taking time off from your job because DMVs are only open during working hours (many have even more limited hours [madison.com]) and can suck up hours of wait time.
And yes there are alternatives (in some states) like going to a probate judge but that's even more of a hassle and expecting the least among us to navigate an even more complex process is just raising the bar to the point where a reasonable person will just give up. And that is the goal. [billmoyers.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:26PM
(3) Cost for taking time off from your job because DMVs are only open during working hours (many have even more limited hours) and can suck up hours of wait time.
This one struck me as pretty disingenuous. How do you get a job without ID? And if you have a job, you should be able to pay the government fees like everybody else.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:33PM
> This one struck me as pretty disingenuous. How do you get a job without ID?
Are you kidding me? That really is green privilege talking.
Unless you are working for a big corporation, you don't need id for a job. They ask for your SS# and they use whatever you tell them.
> And if you have a job, you should be able to pay the government fees like everybody else.
Even more green privilege. When the choice is between your kids going hungry for a week and you voting, you pick your kids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:57PM
Well now, we are going to have to have worker ID laws too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @05:39PM
Not a chance, then we'd lose our cheap illegal immigrant labor force.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:58PM
The cost for taking time off your job isn't about the fees, it's about not getting paid while you aren't working and possibly losing your job outright.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday May 18 2016, @06:12AM
So there's a company that prohibits its employees to pause their work for an hour to go voting in the school 3 blocks away.
So charge that company's directors with attempted voting fraud, and send them to jail for 20 years. Problem solved. Caution the other companies' directors to not try that kind of shit.
It's VERY important that nobody can keep you away from the ballot box, not even your boss.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 18 2016, @03:07PM
The law requires they let you go vote. It does not require they let you go wait at the DMV to get a license or ID.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:22PM
I have worked for big corps and little corps and startups and shady dudes.
Every one of them except the shady dudes had that lovely prove-you're-entitled to work form, and took copies of government-issued ID that proved my legal right to work in the US of A. Even the shady dudes did it when prompted. Because the INS loves shoving people in jail.
I take it you work for only shady dudes. Not a good strategy, amigo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:01PM
You are talking about the I9 form. The list of things that qualify as ID for the I9 is way more lax than what any voter-id law requires.
For example a voter registration card and a social security card. Neither of which are photo id.
So yeah, yet more green privilege. Amigo.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday May 18 2016, @12:46AM
This is bullshit. If you hire someone without ID, you're breaking the law. Federal law REQUIRES form I-9 for ALL employees - part time, full time, any type of job, even migrant farm workers. Here is the link to the rules [formi9.com]. Notice the penalties for employers that fail to comply.
You guys are all living in a fantasy world. Go out and see how the real world works one time.
Even more green privilege. When the choice is between your kids going hungry for a week and you voting, you pick your kids.
Fuck you and your trust account, you little snowflake. I've LIVED on the streets. My kids NEVER have, because I did what was necessary, including navigating bureaucracies as necessary.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2016, @04:16PM
Get off your high horse because your head is in the clouds.
I9 does not require photo-id. And the vast majority of photo-ids that are acceptable for i9 are not acceptable for voter-id.
Just because you grew up poor doesn't mean you are still connected to the way modern poverty works. The rules keep getting ratched up.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:14PM
Alright - I can be wrong sometimes. VLM deserves another look . . . .
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:13PM
Are you saying you don't enjoy any advantage whatsoever as a white person in the US? Because that's simply not true.
Some examples of advantages I've experienced as a white person:
- I can walk through a store without employees following me around to see if I'm stealing something. This helped me a great deal when I was flat broke, because I could then steal something (in my case, food so I could continue eating 1 meal a day. I don't feel bad about that.)
- I have not once been denied a job I was qualified to do, nor paid significantly less than my qualifications warranted. Whereas I and other white friends of mine have been present when employers have denied people jobs because they were black, Indian, and Hispanic, and black friends of mine were routinely denied promotion and raises without explanation that they were more than qualified for.
- I've been pulled over a few times in my life. Not once was I ordered from my vehicle, nor did the police attempt to search me or my vehicle. My black friends, in the same jurisdictions, are routinely pulled over, ordered out and searched for going less than 5 mph over the speed limit.
- White friends of mine who have been caught with dope have either been completely let off with a verbal warning, or asked to do rehab with their record expunged afterwords. Black people in the same situation go to jail and live the rest of their life with a drug conviction on their record.
- I and my family can live in a nice neighborhood without being shunned by my neighbors, even though I'm not the best at keeping up the landscaping. That meant that growing up I was able to get a good public education, which meant I was more qualified than most when I applied for college.
- When a white Canadian immigrant friend of mine travelled to Arizona, he was never harassed or asked for proof of citizenship by police. His travelling companion, a Hispanic citizen, was. Both were well-dressed, driving in a well-maintained car, respectful, and speaking fluent English with a dialect suggesting education and wealth.
Neither of us asked for any of those advantages. In some cases, we can't even be sure it's happening. And if you never really talk to non-white people you might not realize the differences between your experiences and theirs. But just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:25PM
> Are you saying you don't enjoy any advantage whatsoever as a white person in the US? Because that's simply not true.
Its like trying to convince a fish that water isn't everywhere.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:34PM
- store owners tend to watch shady looking people who look desparate - black or white.
- I'm pretty white, and I've been denied jobs because I'm not an insider who enjoys the fruits of nepotism
- I have had cops want to search me, and my vehicle. I have NEVER granted permission, but that doesn't change the fact that they asked to search. (my youngest learned from Daddy - he forced the cops to bring a dog out to get "probable cause" - then the asshole cop pulled out a ball to get the dog to jump up beside the window that the dog had no interest in"
- the dope heads in my family have served jail and/or prison time for their infractions. According to your story, I should chalk that up to the Native American ancestry? But, few of us "look Indian".
- I'm the one who shuns the neighbors, so I wouldn't know if I'm being shunned in return - WTF, who wants to sit around and sing "kumbaya" with every retard within a mile?
- I can't count the times I've been asked for identification. Seriously, I can't begin to count them. WTF? Adults carry ID. As a child, I didn't worry about carrying a wallet, but as an adult, I've always carried one. Is it that hard to keep your ID on hand? The bank requires it, the tobacco shop requires it, the liquor store requires it, and the cop who pulls you over requires it. The little old ladies at our polling locations also require it. It's funny as hell, because it goes like, "Mr. Runaway, do you have your ID with you?" (Never mind that some of them are old enough to my mama, they call me "mister" - it cracks me up) Carry your wallet.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:47PM
Similar experiences here. White privilege certainly exists. Racism certainly exists. I'm just having trouble figuring out how that applies when trying to get a photo ID at the DMV. I wasn't aware there was much wiggle room for the DMV clerk to deny/approve. If there's a situation where somebody shows up with the correct paperwork* and fee but is turned away at the DMV or their number isn't called or something, then we'd better start ringing the alarm bells.
Something else that might be more productive to focus on. When I vote, having two people ahead of me is a line. Before they moved the polling place from a cramped church to a high school gym, maybe 10 people constituted a line. I hear about people, mostly in impoverished areas waiting for hours to vote. For somebody who's never been partial to big cities like me, I find it overwhelming imagining what that must even be like or the problems it must create, especially for 2nd shifters. If the D team wants to own the issue of disenfranchised voters, I think it would be good to turn the R team's nonsense on its ear and focus on solving the problem of two or three hour waits and massive lines.
Of course, that might entail the use of simpler technology that can be bulk ordered like scantrons to massively increase the number of polling locations available instead of these unaccountable, expensive touchscreen or else software-defined, hackable voting machines.
* Birth certificate can be a hurdle for people who grow up in poverty. That's not insurmountable either even if living thousands of miles away from the jurisdiction where it was issued. I'm trying to remember what documentation my ex had to provide when he got his reissued, maybe social security card and pay stubs or similar?, was a long time ago, but was easily obtained from a state bordering Mexico via mail despite his Hispanic-sounding name. It's probably different for every state.
Maybe things were different back then, less extremism, less fanaticism, less hysteria. Quite sad to observe civil rights issues backsliding, but maybe it just took a black president to shed a light on the full scope of the problem.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 18 2016, @01:47PM
Here's how it's an issue:
1. Non-white people have a much harder time finding work, and when they are working are paid less than white people. This is totally illegal, but also definitely happens.
2. That, and the fact that minorities are much more likely to live in the middle of major cities, mean they are significantly less likely to drive. That means that they don't already have what is considered a valid ID for voting already in their wallet.
3. Many DMV offices are far from where minorities live. Indeed, many states that have been adding voter ID requirements have been simultaneously closing DMVs that are near where minorities live. That means that getting a voter ID is likely to take the better part of a day or two just to go to the DMV, not an easy burden for anybody to manage, but especially those on a limited income.
4. As you mentioned, the documents that are prerequisites for getting a voter ID, like a birth certificate, are much easier for you or I to come by than a poor minority voter in the inner city.
5. When they're picking out the list of valid IDs for voting purposes, they don't include government-issued photo IDs that minorities disproportionately have at their disposal, namely military and VA ID cards. That to me is a huge indication that this was about making it so people who should be able to vote can't.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:36PM
Since Blacks are cheaper to hire than equally-qualified Whites, why there's no company that hires exclusively from this pool of cheap qualified employees and wipes the inefficient companies off the market? There are plenty of markets where the barrier of entry is low enough that your Black Corp could easily become a major player. Unless the premise is wrong.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:10PM
> why there's no company that hires exclusively from this pool of cheap qualified employees and wipes the inefficient companies off the market?
You might as well be arguing that racism can't exist because markets.
Humans are not computers and do not make coldly rational decisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:27PM
I'm not disputing your post but ask yourself whether your "white privilege" should really be called "American white privilege". That or I am just an ignorant Canadian who has never heard of such thing as happening here.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:36PM
Your choice to trivialize all sides of the argument does not help.
It obscures the truth by trying to present a false balance of everyone being disingenuous.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:34PM
false balance of everyone being disingenuous.
In this specific issue I don't feel that's a false balance. Both sides are using that issue as a human interest filler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2016, @04:20PM
Even if both sides are 'just' arguing for their own benefit one side is using the truth for their benefit and the other side is using lies for their benefit.
That's what your false balance obscures.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:59PM
And its all pointless because in the end both parties are essentially different voices for the same interests.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:31PM
"Its a white privilege to assume all people have govt issued ID. I know it sounds strange to white people because it sounded very strange to me when I learned about it, but a small fraction of (traditionally democrat) minority groups often don't have govt issued ID."
Ok, I'm not in the US either, but I used to live there. I call BS on this being "white privilege". It's more like a test: "I participate in civilization". If someone is incapable or unwilling to get any of the myriad possible pieces of government ID (some of which are free) then perhaps they don't need to be voting.
Skin color is irrelevant here. If it happens that more of some ethnic groups have this problem, I'll go out on a limb and say that we are talking about the same ethnic groups that have much higher rates of violent crime, drug addition, and so forth. It's not about skin color, it's about being civilized. If barbarians don't vote, I don't see a problem with that.
Frankly, I would support much more stringent testing for voters. There never has been a pure democracy. Not ancient Athens, not modern Switzerland. It's just not a sensible or practical form of government.
Originally, in the US, there were pretty tight restrictions on who was allowed to vote. At the time, it was tied to owning property. That's probably inappropriate, but the idea isn't bad: limit voting to people who "have skin in the game". A better version might be: To vote, you must pay more in taxes than you receive in government payouts (including government salaries and pensions). It's easy to vote to spend someone else's money; people who are spending their own money may just think about their votes a bit more.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:38PM
> then perhaps they don't need to be voting.
On the contrary, in a representative democracy it is the people who have the least access to the conveniences of society who need to vote the most because their interests are the least represented in the normal machinery of society. Its why taking the vote away from ex-cons is especially pernicious to the way we operate our justice system - the people who have been through it personally know the most about its problems.
It is why we eliminated poll taxes and property ownership requirements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:37PM
Nonsense.
I'm not in the US
Where you are (in Switzerland), a very wealthy woman experienced racial profiling. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by naubol on Wednesday May 18 2016, @11:33AM
The word barbarian has been frequently used to suggest that we should be callous towards a group of people. If you had been born into a lord of the flies situation, would you be a barbarian? If a barbarian had been raised by cultural elites, would they be eligible to vote?
Does voting and particularly having representation have a long term positive or negative influence on the barbarianism of some group? Do you want those you consider barbarians to 'convert'?
Barbarians don't have skin in the game? Is it really a binary state?
Your last bit seems to apply to the wealthy and special interests. How do you prevent them from using a litmus test for voting to screw the middle class? How do you know various forms of government assistance affect the amount of 'barbarianism'?
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Tuesday May 17 2016, @06:58PM
with feelings and hunches that show that voting fraud is a big problem
Senator Franken 'won' his first election by fraud. That is not an accusation, it is a statement of fact. More people were convicted in a court of law for crimes related to casting improper votes than the final margin in the election, which was itself all but certainly a result of rampant fraud but nobody was actually convicted for any of that because... Democrats. Most serious scholars now admit President Kennedy more than likely won election due to rampant fraud by the political machines in IL and TX (home of his most corrupt veep and on the short list of most conspiracy theorists for organizing the assassination). So we have a President and a Senator, how many more examples do you need?
Care to revise and extend your remarks? Of course not, Anonymous Coward means never having to be held accountable for saying stupid crap.
As for todays story, I'm sure Mrs. Clinton's machine is just practicing for the general election. Looks like they are going to need it. She just better not expect Trump to sit there and take it in stoic silence like the normal cucked Republican.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:23PM
Cool beans bro. I'll take your word on all of that because... Democrats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:43PM
Pop quiz: what was the final margin in Franken's first election, and how many people were convicted in a court of law for crimes related to casting improper votes in that election?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by snick on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:01PM
How would Voter ID impact voting machine manipulation?
The point about voter ID being nothing more than vote suppression is that a particular type of fraud - a person physically showing up to a voting place and falsely stating their identity so that they can cast a fraudulent vote - is rarer than unicorns.
Jumping on Voter ID when the subject is machine vote security is as stupid as invading Iraq when we were attacked by factions from Saudi Arabia.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:02PM
I have personal knowledge of voter fraud.
An ex of mine lives in hollywood. She married a guy who worked on the campaign for Bush in 2004. He was mid-level in the campaign, more than enough to get invites to some of the inauguration balls.
Living in California, voting republican has no impact on presidential elections because the democrats dominate at the ballot box. So when Obama was running they registered to vote at a relative's address in a swing state and they voted by mail in that state. I know this because after a casual conversation with her about the election I sensed something was up so I checked the public voter registration data for that state. Sure enough, it was there for anyone to see. When I told her that evidence of their felonies was right there on the web, she was pretty unhappy about having been roped into it. They are just lucky that no one with an agenda has done a Big-Data cross-reference between voter registration and other residency databases like from the DMV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:18PM
Nailed it.
That's why we need sweeping reforms to crush voter fraud. At a minimum, we need to institute fees for voting as a disincentive for fraudulent voters and we need on-site finger printing probably run by the TSA. You should also have to register your fingerprints by overnight Fed Ex within 1 week of the voting day with a $100k deposit refundable as a tax credit on next year's tax return. Lastly, any change of address, job or tax status must be registered by sending the original documents 6 months ahead of time (by overnight Fed Ex obviously). Documents will be returned within 6 months. Each change requires a separate submission.
Couldn't be easier.
(Score: 2, Informative) by IndigoFreak on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:06PM
Rarer than unicorns? Hardly.
The short version. Illegal alien steals someone's identity and votes in 2012 elections.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/illegal-alien-mexico-pleads-guilty-iowa-passport-fraud-identity-theft-harboring-and#wcm-survey-target-id/ [ice.gov]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:29PM
Its called hyperbole. Learn it.
Meanwhile the fact that you could only cite one case proves how rare it is.
And even then the guy got a real passport issued to him. That's enough to pass all voter-id requirements so far.
So... try again?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:00PM
Hyperbole is useful for sounding funny when you don't have anything witty to say, but bad for communicating information to other humans. Overstating the rarity of something makes anybody who replies with facts that contradict your exaggerated statements informative, even if they don't provide evidence that the thing in question occurs frequently enough to matter in the context of the larger discussion. He didn't have to cite more than one case, because the line that you drew was based on the frequency of unicorns.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:07PM
I'm sorry that you are unable to recognize a reference to unicorns as hyperbole and are apparently also unable to understand how hyperbole works. You must have a hard time at parties.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:07PM
Err, I guess you're probably not snick.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:12PM
Ooh, got your feelings hurt.
Thin skinned and socially inept.
The classic internet twofer.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:30PM
You're reading this interaction wrong, troll. Correcting my own bad assumption about authorship != getting my feelings hurt. You'll have to troll harder next time, or just grow up and join the civil discussion going on around you.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:26PM
Your logic is lovely:
We don't check ID or do much of anything to detect this kind of fraud. We aren't even looking. Hey, we didn't find anything! Obviously, this kind of fraud does not exist (because we never find it), so therefore we have no reason to look for it!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:32PM
If you want to argue about evidence, well doing nothing because we have no evidence is a lot more sane than going all out because we have no evidence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:37PM
If you want to argue about evidence, well doing nothing because we have no evidence is a lot more sane than going all out because we have no evidence.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, friend. Just because we have no evidence doesn't mean that all "those" people aren't spending every waking moment trying to kill and defile the good, decent christians who directed the building of this country by "those" people.
That's why we have drug laws, because the black will rape white women if they do cocaine. Mexicans will rape white women if they smoke marihuana.
It's why we have the surveillance state, because every muslim is a terrorist
The jews run the banks and the media and drink the blood of christian babies at their evil temples. We need some laws to deal with that too!
The catholics will do the bidding of the pope, including assassination, gang rape of good (real) christian women, poison the wells and corrupt the morals of our children.
The (asian) indians and their lackies corrupt climate data to promulgate the lie of climate change. They seek to drive us insane with terrible customer service at their call centers. They invented H1B visas to emasculate us too.
Good, decent, god-fearing protestants are the only real humans, so we need to make sure that the "other" doesn't gain any power -- because they will kill us and rape our women. They dream of a world where we're all caramel colored and worship the evil god of Mohammed.
Evidence is unnecessary because it's so completely obvious.
I'm going to vote (at least 40 times) for Trump, because we need to kill, imprison or deport all of "those" people to make America great again.
'Murica, fuck yeah!
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday May 17 2016, @05:33PM
the kind of voter fraud that would be addressed by voter ID laws is infinitesimal. voter ID laws won't do a damn thing about voter fraud via hacking voting machines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:09PM
Shocked? Rusty, surely...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:34PM
When a winning presidential campaign costs a billion+ dollars it is inevitable that some campaigns will decide to spend the money on hacking voting machines, its cheaper and more effective than buying advertising.
But we shouldn't jump to conclusions either. For one thing, newer machines aren't necessarily hack-proof (no system that stores votes electronically is hack-proof). This is definitely one case where "correlation is not causation" needs to be taken seriously.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:39PM
What is this crap doing on Soylent? Very low quality politically motivated submission.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:41PM
The headline should be "Hillary: Bad for You and America".
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:57PM
Electronic voting isn't nerdy enough for you?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:13PM
There is indeed a political slant to the summary, but to tell the truth, there is also a technical aspect to the problem. It would be fair to present the results of a similar study for the republicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:09PM
A significant number of the machines of this vintage will be Diebold stuff.
In 2003, Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold (a Republican and an Ohio elections official) made the vow that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President [Dubya] next year." [google.com]
Is that enough of a smoking gun for you?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:59PM
Took me a while to figure out why you linked that as a google search.
It is a New York Times article, so if you come from a well-known search engine, you avoid the pay-wall.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bobs on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:45PM
Regardless of your party affiliation, whether this incident happened or not, trust in election results is critical.
We need to replace these crap systems with something transparent and reliable.
More at: http://blackboxvoting.org [blackboxvoting.org]
This is worth taking the time to contact and educate your local electorate, local officials and higher. It is a non-partisan issue and situation can easily be fixed.
If not, the election can easily be fixed: http://blackboxvoting.org/new-hampshire-election-credibility/ [blackboxvoting.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:37PM
Replace the machines with something we know works perfectly well: A piece of paper! You know, something we can actually count by hand if we need to.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:13PM
But, but, but - paper is so first century - B.C!
http://quatr.us/literature/paper.htm [quatr.us]
Technology, man, we got to ditch that obsolete stuff, no matter how reliable it might be!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:08PM
> Replace the machines with something we know works perfectly well: A piece of paper!
Use the machines for:
(1) Well-designed user interfaces that handle non-mainstream users too (sight impaired, non-english, etc)
(2) Printing completed ballots that are so clean and exact that the human readable choices are also easily machine readable (no barcodes, just text in big san-serif fonts) that only list the chosen candidate rather than a series of checkboxes, include a checksum of the votes if there are multiple elections on the same ballot
(3) Instant tallies and double-checking (compare the results from the voting machines with the results of optical scans of the paper ballots with the results of 5% random hand-counts)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:09PM
Maybe in the USA you have some areas where you don't have enough people who can count properly? ;)
Seriously, in my corrupt 3rd world country I think the normal paper ballots are counted fine[1] and most aren't rigged. Where the elections can be rigged significantly are via gerrymandering, postal votes and by keeping voters in some areas poor and uneducated and then bribing them with small sums of money. Or somehow there are enough magicians placed in critical areas? I doubt the magician bit. But the postal votes could be moved to places where they are more "needed"... Maybe we have some gerrymandering, but it's more a rural - urban divide thing, nothing like the ridiculous bullshit electoral boundaries the US has.
The advantage of doing it like this without involving "blackboxes" is that it more easily satisfies an important requirement of any election system: convincing enough of the losers that they lost!
Even if your system is 100% verifiable and anonymous ( there are some fancy systems that use cryptography in clever ways), it might be too fancy and complicated for the losers to understand or believe.
If your system is not convincing enough you might get mass riots or even civil war. In which case the elections become worse than a pointless waste of time and resources.
There's nothing like seeing most votes being for the OTHER PARTY shown right in your face to convince you that you've lost that seat. The different parties can have their own observers observing. So when your own observers tell you, "it's looking bad, most of the votes are for the other guy" and it stays that way, you know you've lost. If it's close you can ask for recount and get them to observe more carefully.
[1] The way we do it is each ballot paper is shown to the observers and counters and they agree that it's a vote for A/B/C/etc, or it's a spoiled vote (someone protesting or incompetent). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWotTHJIZ7g [youtube.com] (perhaps if you manage to train and plant enough magicians without getting detected, you could rig stuff, but like I said, the better way is via other methods like postal votes ).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:25PM
> Maybe in the USA you have some areas where you don't have enough people who can count properly? ;)
You are correct, we do not have enough people. I dunno what it is like in your country, but american elections frequently include tens of different races on the same ballot. You've got president, congress, state & county judges, county & city sherrifs, local district attorney, local tax assessor, local registrar, etc, etc. Counting all of that up by hand is a sonofabitch.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday May 18 2016, @06:02AM
If somebody tells you that paper voting works fine if you have one, up to maybe three election ballots on the same day, and you believe that election of the rulers of the richest and most powerful country on the planet is important, then you have two options:
(1) switch to paper voting and simplify your elections (do the Wizard of Oz assistant dog-catcher election another day), or
(2) stick to a provably TEMPEST-vulnerable, one-Diebold-programmer-corrupts-all, who-controls-the-municipal-storage-shed-the-other-1460-days, "modern" electronic vote system, and whine when corruption has happened. Because it is so important that everyone votes for "president, congress, state & county judges, county & city sherrifs, local district attorney, local tax assessor, local registrar, etc, etc.". And that the counting is cheap and doesn't tire the pensioners out.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...
http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/other/strip/ [wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 18 2016, @06:40AM
We have this technology called scanners -- they've been using it for testing for decades. The machine results can then be compared with hand counted results if it looks like there are shenanigans. The paper ballot is the backup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:17PM
Wow. I scanned through the fraction magic series there and that's some serious shit that needs to be on The Daily WTF. Using DOUBLES?! To count votes?! Microsoft Access?! Fucking hell. Something tells me that somehow when it comes to ATMs, Diebold's (Premier's/whatever) programmers know fucking better than to use doubles and MS Access.
Humanity doesn't deserve technology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:45PM
As you surely know, doubles have 53 bits of precision which are capable of representing contiguous integers from 0 up to 9e15. That's about 1e6 times the population of Earth. Pretty neat huh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2016, @07:39AM
They shouldn't be allowed to use any proprietary software at all. We need to know exactly what the software is doing, so we need software that respects our freedoms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday May 17 2016, @01:40PM
"Of the nine places where the exit polling has missed by more than 7% [snip], two-thirds are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater.
Well, yes... but then a quick look at the handy map in TFA suggests that about two-thirds of all states have a majority of machines ten years old or more... so presumably 2/3 of the states where the polls didn't miss also had ancient machines.
Not that major discrepancies between exit polls and actual results shouldn't raise a red flag and be investigated (as TFA said) but that investigation should be open minded - there's more than one way of rigging a vote, and even more ways in which opinion/exit polls can just be wrong (e.g. voters lying to pollsters because of peer pressure).
I don't disagree with more transparency & open-sourcery around voting machines. though.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:21PM
In every other article about statistics, you can bet that one of the first comments points out that correlation is not causation. Here, that comment is conspicuously missing (well, no longer ☺),
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:33PM
It is just a correlation, however Clinton and the DNC are already notorious for rigging things in her favor. She's literally going to take down the Democratic party on her way to the Presidency if she has to.
Between the lack of early debates to ensure that none of the other candidates could build name recognition, the victory fund that's zapping the state Democrats ability to fund raise for down ticket candidates and her army of paid trolls, I'm not sure how anybody can be particularly skeptical when news of her people cheating comes to light.
Obviously, she and her people might not have done anything here, but given that the DNC committee handling the convention has only 3 Sanders supporters to 11 Clinton supporters, it wouldn't surprise me at all if she was behind it.
Right now we have the precise situation that super-delegates were envisioned for. There's a candidate that's likely to be nominated who can't even win over the Democrats without rampant cheating and whose poling numbers are barely any better than Trumps. This right here is the reason why the super-delegates exist in the first place and whether or not they choose to correct the other problems in the primary or not, they need to be disbanded permanently afterwards.
But, they're probably going to go for Clinton for the same reason that she shouldn't be permitted to be the candidate. She's corrupt as hell and has no problem destroying people that get in her way. She's been doing that for long enough now that I can't imagine anybody trusting a single word that comes out of her mouth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:46PM
Right now we have the precise situation that super-delegates were envisioned for. There's a candidate that's likely to be nominated who can't even win over the Democrats without rampant cheating
Unless you define "rampant cheating" as working the system, then no. I will never vote for Clinton because dynasties are bad, but I'm not delusional about the fact that all of the evidence is that she is playing by the rules. She plays fucking hardball, just like any other successful male politician operating at the same level. She just gets more hate for it than they do.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:13PM
Unless you define "rampant cheating" as working the system
playing by the rules
Often what's legal and what's ethical don't fully overlap.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:30PM
True, but irrelevant.
The rules are what defines "cheating." If you aren't breaking the rules, you are not cheating no matter how machiavellian.
And I'm not just being an aspie pedant, this language drift gives false legitimacy to partisan accusations.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:59PM
But, she's not following the rules.
Her staffers are taking money that she's allegedly raise for the various state Democratic parties and funneled 99% of it to things that benefit her primarily. Her husband was caught campaigning in polling places during one of the elections.
None of that is legal. And yes, a lot of what she's doing is technically in keeping with the rules, but the scope of it is well above and beyond what any other candidate has done. The woman is a cheater and a fraud and the sooner she can be bounced from the party for good, the better we'll all be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:50PM
Her staffers are taking money that she's allegedly raise for the various state Democratic parties and funneled 99% of it to things that benefit her primarily.
[Citation Needed]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:15PM
> None of that is legal. And yes, a lot of what she's doing is technically in keeping with the rules,
Lol. The cognitive dissonance is strong in you.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 17 2016, @04:10PM
This right here is the reason why the super-delegates exist in the first place and whether or not they choose to correct the other problems in the primary or not, they need to be disbanded permanently afterwards.
Er, could you connect the dots for this slow pony? Reading your comment I was interpreting you to mean the superdelegates are necessary to flip the nomination to a candidate that doesn't suck when their primary opposition has popular support, but then you end by saying superdelegates need to go away.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole concept. Democracy is an NP-hard problem :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:52PM
The stated purpose of the super delegates when the system was created was to flip the nomination to somebody that was more likely to win. It was done as a reaction to candidates like McGovern that were trounced in the general election, but had popular support in the primary. He only managed to carry one state plus DC for a total of 17 electoral votes that election.
They need to be eliminated in large part because if they're never going to be used to flip an election where the Dems are in dangerous of nominating a weak candidate, which they are right now, then there's no point in having them at all. And if they do use them to flip the vote away from the weaker candidate, the super delegates need to be eliminated because they're undemocratic.
But, since we have them, this is really the time to use them. Right now HRC is barely beating Trump and he hasn't even really started targeting her yet. She's benefited a great deal from all sorts of questionable rules-lawyering and various stacked decks to benefit her and she hasn't yet been able to conclusively put away her opponent. What's going to happen in the general election when she's being attacked by somebody that's willing to go negative?
Part of the stacking of the deck was that all those super delegates pledged support for HRC even before anything had happened. The news media quoted the numbers like they were a given and it gave her a huge advantage when going out to fund raise and campaign because she already had hundreds of delegates before there was any real votes.
If the super delegates are about ensuring the strongest, best qualified and most likely to succeed candidate is nominated, then the clear choice is Sanders. He's beating Trump by a much larger margin than she is.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:15PM
They need to be eliminated in large part because if they're never going to be used to flip an election where the Dems are in dangerous of nominating a weak candidate, which they are right now, then there's no point in having them at all.
This I agree with. No point in having a mechanism if you're never going to use it for its intended purpose.
And if they do use them to flip the vote away from the weaker candidate, the super delegates need to be eliminated because they're undemocratic.
This I don't. The primaries themselves are *inherently* undemocratic. There's nothing democratic about them, unless you think that having a government selected by an election of elites is somehow "democratic". The primaries aren't much more democratic than the government of China, where party members vote for the leaders. If the primaries were truly democratic, *anyone* would be able to vote in them, *even* if they also cast a vote in the Republican primaries. But that's not how it is. In many states (closed primaries), only people who have pledged allegiance to the Party are allowed to vote in that party's primary. In other states (open primaries), anyone who's registered to vote can vote in the primary of their choice, but only one (R or D, not both). In still other states, there are no primaries at all, only "caucuses", where basically only people who have a lot of free time and interest are allowed to choose who wins that state's delegates by going to some select locations and standing around for hours and hours in some sort of convention. And then, the results of these primaries/caucuses are only the selection of "delegates", rather than directly choosing the candidate, and it all works through some byzantine system of rules set up by the Party.
I'm sorry, this isn't "democratic" in the least. It's a farce.
Now add to that that the election results are obviously false in many places, where the exit polls do not agree at all with the "official" results, and there are eyewitness accounts of actual malfeasance (see Illinois). It is plainly obvious that the whole system is rigged.
And of course, this isn't the end: the two party candidates go on to compete in the general election, yet another completely un-democratic selection process involving the "Electoral College" where your vote doesn't count if a slim majority of other voters in your state vote against you, because then all your state's "electors" have to vote for that candidate. And on top of that, different states have different proportions of citizens-per-elector, meaning that a vote in California or Texas counts much less than a vote in Wyoming or DC.
And on top of all that, we're stuck with a shitty "first-past-the-post" (plurality) voting system which doesn't capture the will of the voters at all if there's more than 2 selections. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with a minority of the votes, and Al Gore lost in 2000 because of "vote splitting" due to Nader, even though it's most likely that in a run-off contest between Gore and Bush, Gore would have won.
There is nothing at all "democratic" about this election system, so calling for one mechanism to be eliminated because it's "undemocratic" is pointless. That mechanism is clearly an attempt to patch up a completely broken system; the only reason you should eliminate it is because you're going to completely revamp the entire system, nationwide, into something that really is democratic, such as a single nationwide popular election for the President using an instant-runoff, approval, Borla, Condorcet, or other decent election system, where any candidate can run (given enough support to get on the ballot), and the *all* run at the same time in a single election without this primary nonsense.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:30PM
You have a strange definition of democratic.
Yes, there needs to be improvement, but anybody who doesn't care enough to participate shouldn't get a say. There's enough low-information voters supporting one candidate or another without encouraging more of that.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 18 2016, @03:01PM
but anybody who doesn't care enough to participate shouldn't get a say.
That's bullshit and it's downright stupid.
I shouldn't have to register as one of the Party faithful to get a say in who the President is. Yet that's what party adherents like you constantly regurgitate.
There's enough low-information voters supporting one candidate or another without encouraging more of that.
So you admit it: you're in favor of preventing people from voting. You don't believe in democracy after all. You sound like you'd be a great Republican, since they just love to throw up barriers to voting.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 17 2016, @05:07PM
This is awful. She's basically doing what the Dubya campaign team did in the 2000 election. I am an Independent, not a Democrat, but have usually given Team BLU my vote. At this point, the Democrat establishment is made of Republicans, and the Republican establishment is made of Theonomist whackaloons, basically the Christian analog to the Taliban but without the testosterone needed to grow facial hair.
I want off. I've had enough. Someone build a time machine, point it at Crystal Tokyo, and toss me in.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:32PM
In every other article about statistics, you can bet that one of the first comments points out that correlation is not causation.
Actually, the author of TFA was kind enough to remind us that correlation is not causation, so it wasn't necessary. What they neglected to point out is that "confirmation bias and cherry picking is not correlation", which is the problem here (basically, first picking all the states with high vote/exit poll discrepancies in favour of Clinton, picking from those the states with old voting machines, then averaging the discrepancies - then selecting a few counter-examples and rationalising them away).
Not that election fiddling is out of the question...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheB on Tuesday May 17 2016, @02:51PM
Democracy in the USA is a myth.
There has been accusations of massive election fraud across the country this year.
Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Navada...
In just about every state that has had a primary there have been reports of election fraud.
As far as I know Baltimore is the only place not ignoring all of the accusations, but investigating it.
The state has decertified Baltimore's election results and begun a "precinct-level review of irregularities"
In New York there was a massive purge of election rolls. Thousands of people were not allowed to vote.
The Board of Elections then confirmed that more than 120,000 voters have been dropped from the rolls in Brooklyn alone since November.
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/19/474896027/after-more-than-100-000-voters-dropped-in-brooklyn-city-officials-call-for-actio?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=politics&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews [npr.org]
Westchester County voter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided to check on the status of her voter registration last month, after hearing about problems in Arizona’s primary. She was dismayed to discover that, despite being a registered Democrat since 2008, her party affiliation had been changed to unaffiliated. She is now unable to vote for her preferred candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in the primary.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/04/18/3770355/new-york-voting-open-primary-lawsuit/ [thinkprogress.org]
http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/election-fraud-voter-registration-changed-suppression-party-affiliation-sanders-clinton-ca-ny-az-md-pa-what-to-do/ [heavy.com]
In Illinois a 5% audit of precincts found the machine count did not match a hand recount. Instead of acknowledging a possibility of election fraud the election officials erased their totals and wrote in the machine count. Poll watchers witnessed them changing the tally, and complained to the elections board.
However, as you can see at the 30 minute mark, the totals didn’t always legitimately match. Instead, the group says the tally marks were altered and were not a true representation of what was actually counted during the audit. One particularly concerning incident was witnessed by the speaker in which she details watching auditors remove 21 Bernie votes from the final tally while adding 41 tally marks to the Hillary Clinton total in order to force the audit results to match that provided by the machine. Therefore, the group says the audit is meaningless and not an audit at all.
http://www.inquisitr.com/3022058/election-board-scandal-21-bernie-votes-were-erased-and-49-hillary-votes-added-to-audit-tally-group-declares-video/ [inquisitr.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSNTauWPkTc&feature=youtu.be&t=24m37s [youtube.com]
They changed
Sanders: 223, Clinton: 177
to
Sanders:202, Clinton: 218
The Nevada convention was a sham. Roberta Lange DNC chairwoman gave herself unlimited power at the conversion, ignored the rules and motions, denied dozens of Bernie delegates , enough that Bernie would have won if they were allowed to contest being denied delegate status as the rules state is required. In short she stole the Nevada primary for Clinton.
http://heavy.com/news/2016/05/nevada-democratic-convention-what-happened-roberta-lange-delegates-election-fraud-videos-recount-denied/ [heavy.com]
You should read this article and watch the videos. Afterwards read the mainstream media's articles to witness how corrupt 'news' networks just parrot the BS that is given to them. They are outright lying to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_7c0I8ODKw [youtube.com]
Nevada Congressional candidate Don Rolle on the Nevada convention.
Never vote Democrat or Republican. It only perpetuates the fake democracy that we have now.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @05:55PM
This reminds me of an old quote.
' "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how." '
Joseph Stalin.
Yes he faced pandering for votes, While in his dictator controlled ussr there was no national voting. The communist party voted internally on maters.
In the united states it has been conflated that simply 'voting = democracy', but that's not the case. Voting is a tool and has been used by non democratic regimes past and present.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:40PM
As far as I know Baltimore is the only place not ignoring all of the accusations, but investigating [them]
"we have opened an investigation into alleged improprieties in yesterday’s voting."
--NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, April 21, 2016 [rt.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 17 2016, @03:53PM
I like counter-punch and all. They're fun for making big left oppression narratives the way the right wing has mastered over the last couple decades.
But 2/3rds of nine states is... well... not a statistically significant variation. It's an entirely expected variation. Exit polls in general are known to have problems, particularly when one candidates support is more vocal per vote. There's nothing here that constitutes a real measurable discrepancy that raises any actual eyebrows.
I like Bernie, I really do, I dislike voting machines, I really do, but there's nothing to be gained from supporting conspiracy theories with statistically insignificant data.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:11PM
You can have statistically-significant results with a small sample size. It is just that the results have to be much more dramatic to draw any firm conclusions.
In high-school physics, we measured acceleration due to gravity with only 10 data points (though that was more a proof-of concept than a serious measurement).
For Ogame (addictive, long-running), I was planning on working out the shape of the probability distribution for planet size with only 10 samples per slot (150 total). I never finished, having only gathered about 30 measurements.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:48PM
In high-school physics, we measured acceleration due to gravity with only 10 data points
...and, in the absence of more data, might have concluded that it was a constant 10 m/s^2 everywhere in the universe. Your sample size can be as big as you like - that doesn't mean that it is representative (especially when you don't know what it is supposed to be representative of).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @06:33PM
You gotta be kidding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:04PM
Somebody found an interesting relationship between two factors, but that's not enough to conclude a sinister plot. If you run enough stats you will find relationships, many of them coincidental or indirect. And the sample size is quite small.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday May 17 2016, @10:21PM
You mean: obligatory spurious correlations link [tylervigen.com].
(Score: 1) by mobydisk on Tuesday May 17 2016, @08:54PM
Correlating exit polling to *anything* is bad statistics. No matter what the results of the investigation were, someone could write the headline:
* [POLITICIAN] Did Better than Exit Polling Predicted Where Voting Machines were Vulnerable to Hacking
This entire topic is cherry-picking statistics at its finest. You cannot use exit polls as the basis for a criminal fraud investigation.
(Score: 2) by http on Tuesday May 17 2016, @09:20PM
Before the advent of hackable voting machines, exit polls had the highest correlation to vote tabulation of any polling method. You were, after all, asking people information about an action they had performed just moments ago, and the attitudes about privacy weren't that different between parties.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday May 18 2016, @02:48AM
Why? Election verification exit polling (EVEP) is what the UN and other organizations bodies use to determine voting fraud.
EVEP over a reasonable sample size (a few hundred) will land statistically within a percent of the actual vote cast on the same day.
Being off by more than a couple of % indicates that:
- The EVEP was corrupted in some way.
- The official ballot was corrupted in some way.
When the EVEP matches the official ballot it indicates that:
- There was no vote fraud.
So when an EVEP is off by 5 / 7 and 9+ % what that means is that there was fraud.
Either A) the party conducting the EVEP is corrupt, B) the people being polled were lying to the EVEP, or C) the ballots box was tampered with.
This being the US option B seems really far fetched. We really don't want to think that C is possible because ... well it's kind of the foundation of the country, and option A) is something we can rationalize.
If it's A -- well it's those none of the above supporters that just can't deal with the outcome so they are trying to smear their opponent.
But ya know what? It's not A.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2016, @12:18PM
It appears the November election is setting up to be a race between a crook and an habitual lier.
The sad joke is that it is impossible to tell who is who.
I think the way to make your $million is to import a bunch of funny glasses with a clothes pin over the nose for voting day.
At least that will provide a bit of humor to go with the reality of what we are doing.