19 Responses

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   Dredd said on 6/24/2006 @ 4:50am PT: [Permalink]

   John, you said:

   Qualifications of the people who certify our voting systems have now been questioned and rightfully so it appears. Why is it that some will listen to people with experience in bars and restaurants but not listen to computer scientists and elections experts?

   And so it seems time to look at the qualifications required to know how to certify electronic election machines.

   Would it be asking too much to require that such individuals have a degree in computer science, or equivalent practical on-the-job experience (e.g. 20 years software development), with a specialty in security practices?

   And for real there should be a hardware and a software division. These two worlds are so distinct that experts tend to focus in either but not both. The software development realm is very different from hardware development and manufacture.

   Your link (“Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group, Inc. – New Information about Paul Craft and Kate McGregor“) shows that the two people you mention in NASED are qualified in neither realm.

   And these certification officials are paid by those who are seeking certification. A classic conflict of interest where the fox is in charge of the hen house.

   The scenario is set up to turn into a corrupt process, where the election machine companies pass money under the table to buy certification, and once done, it can be used to blackmail those who took that money under the table.

   It then becomes more and more dangerous, and more and more corrupt. I see nothing of worth in that structure, and can only recoil in amazement.

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   Dredd said on 6/24/2006 @ 6:51am PT: [Permalink]

   John

   The Common Cause report (I noticed your name appeared in it) that you mentioned seems to be quite professional.

   It cites to many reference works, including the GAO report, which was well done as well.

   I hope you don’t mind me posting a quote from the Common Cause report, to wit:

   This report surveys four major studies that reviewed DRE voting machine security and reliability. Two of the reports involved extensive review of more than 80 academic, technical, and industry reports on DREs. Each report concluded that DRE machines to be vulnerable to malfunction and also to tampering in which a computer-savvy hacker with minimal access to the machine could introduce malicious code to the DRE software and change the results of an election. Such manipulation could be undetectable. In machines equipped with a modem, it could even be done from a remote location.

   (link here (2 meg PDF), bold added).

   And yet how many election officials post on this blog and still are saying basically “what problems”!!!

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   Joan said on 6/24/2006 @ 9:17am PT: [Permalink]

   So six people are indicted in Tennessee (and rightly so, if they’re guilty) because the GOP jumps on one instance of voter fraud; but Democrats, progressives, election officials–as Dredd points out–are still silent in the face of ever-increasing evidence that our entire electoral system is vulnerable to fraud on a massive scale. Absolutely stunning.

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   Ronald Wieck said on 6/24/2006 @ 9:28am PT: [Permalink]

   I have noticed that inconvenient truths tend to get branded as “disinfo,” and the writer gets banned. Naturally, no attempt is made to debate, to show why those terrible statements are wrong–that would require critical thinking skills.
   The combination of intolerance, stupidity, and contempt for reason has swept the left to one billowing electoral success after another. All lovers of liberty can only hope that the thought police keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing since they hijacked the Democratic Party in 1972.

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   Dredd said on 6/24/2006 @ 9:46am PT: [Permalink]

   Good sign … a troll has shown up … that is an indicator of a good thread John.

   Keep up the good work! They are having to go back to before civil rights (and before slavery was abolished, and other great american landmarks) to try to make their disinfo “points”.

   The new motto of the trolls is “a thousand points of darkness”.

   Hi Joan! The trolls probably don’t know that we don’t list the GOP convictions because Brad does not want long, long, long posts that take up several screens. 🙂

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   Joan said on 6/24/2006 @ 9:49am PT: [Permalink]

   #4
   And black is white & up is down, too.

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   Joan said on 6/24/2006 @ 10:02am PT: [Permalink]

   Dredd,
   “The trolls probably don’t know that we don’t list the GOP convictions because Brad does not want long, long, long posts that take up several screens”
   Exactly! lol

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   John Gideon said on 6/24/2006 @ 10:23am PT: [Permalink]

   Ronald #4 –
   I imagine you are the same person who has made the “banned” accusation previously. I might be wrong but let’s clarify for you that you made your comment on a blog that was posted by myself and not Brad. I don’t even know how to ban someone. If necessary I can learn real quick though.

   I can also say that I know of only a couple people that Brad has banned since I became a ‘Guest Blogger’ here. I’m actually surprised that some, like Ricky, have gotten away with saying just about anything they damn well please.

   So, unless you have something to back up your baseless accusations, let’s talk about substance.

   How do you feel about people with no more experience than working as a hostess in a bar and restaurant federally qualifying the voting system your votes are cast and counted on?

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   Ronald Wieck said on 6/24/2006 @ 6:23pm PT: [Permalink]

   I realize that keeping track of everyone who drops in occasionally can be confusing, but I’m not the person who made the comment on banning. Comments I made on another thread were deleted and dishonestly labeled “disinfo.” While I am certainly capable of being wrong, I do not present as fact information I haven’t checked out. If I’ve made an error, show it to me and I’ll make the necessary adjustments.
   I believe that the participants in this forum are sincere in their desire to clean up the election system in this country. The Democratic Party, however, is not. Read John Fund’s ‘Stealing Elections’ to discover how little Terry McAuliffe cared about honest voting procedures. Republicans want to stop some people from voting who shouldn’t be stopped; Democrats want some people to vote who a) have already voted and/or b) who aren’t registered to vote.
   Neither party has a monopoly on honesty, but the Dems have pulled some truly egregious shenanigans.

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    Agent99 said on 6/24/2006 @ 8:42pm PT: [Permalink]

    Ronald

    Please cite for me something to support your contention that Democrats want people to vote more than once or who aren’t registered voters. I’m a Democrat and know a lot of them, and none of us want any such thing, even when kidding around. I’d ask you to cite something to support your allegation about Republicans, but we’ve got a pretty large sampling of that all over this site. Please don’t make this about stuff that happened decades ago. The concern is about election integrity in the 21st Century. The lack of it so far has gotten us into a really awful mess, and way too many people are DEAD behind it for you to be goofing off like this. It’s not funny, and it’s not a partisan issue.

    This issue is vital to all Americans, and, CLEARLY, now, to the whole world. It’s not a fit topic for bickering.

    THE PROBLEM HAS TO BE SOLVED, YESTERDAY.

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    Brad said on 6/24/2006 @ 11:54pm PT: [Permalink]

    If Ronald is using Fund’s book for his evidence of anything, I suspect he’ll be able to back up his claims about as much as he can re: people being banned here for their opinions. Which is nonsense of course.

    As to 99’s request for evidence of Ronald’s charge that “Democrats want some people to vote who a) have already voted and/or b) who aren’t registered to vote.” — I look forward to that evidence (HINT: You may not want to cite the work from the GOP front-group “American Center for Voting Rights” unless you wish to have your claims laughed off the blog. Just trying to help!)

    Good luck! Offer evidence for your claims, or yes, your baseless claims will be removed and eventually you will be unwelcome here.

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    Larry Bergan said on 6/25/2006 @ 2:56am PT: [Permalink]

    John Fund is terrible! He was on C-Span with Amy Goodman just after 500,000 people in New York marched in protest of the Republican Convention.

    Amy was angry because the media (as usual), ignored the march. Fund said he didn’t know why the media should cover “a bunch of people”. What a jackass! I wouldn’t read a book of his if you paid me! Ronald McWieck acts like his voting fraud book is some sort of Bible!

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    Dredd said on 6/25/2006 @ 4:31am PT: [Permalink]

    People voting twice is not a major league issue, it is T-ball, minor league for heaven’s sake.

    Take note of the Ann Coulter multi-voting case ongoing as we speak.

    Or the 100,000 votes cast above and beyond the number of people registered to vote in Tarrant County Texas.

    Note that the republican candidate in Tarrant County, Texas, is challenging the results because the election machine company admitted to a mistake, but the election officials felt that the machines were “fair” in that those machines miscounted everyone’s votes “equally”.

    Well, the republican candidate has it right … when the machine chain of custody, overall count, or anything else is abnormal, a hand count is the only solution. We need confidence in elections so there can be a return of confidence in government.

    Remember that the malfunctioning election machines can do in nano-seconds what it would take days for Ann Coulter type multi-voters to do.

    The Ann Coulters of the world are no threat to elections … malfunctioning, yet powerful, machines are.

    The Ann Coulters leave a trail and will get caught, the machines can go awry and it is undetectable.

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    Ronald Wieck said on 6/25/2006 @ 11:05am PT: [Permalink]

    The left’s characteristic debate technique is on display here: ad hominem attacks that ignore the issue. John Fund revealed strong evidence of Democratic vote fraud in Florida’s Palm Beach County in the 2000 election. To review, “Palm Beach produced 19,120 overvotes that night, a 4.4 percent error rate–almost ten times the error rate of 0.4 percent in the rest of Florida, or indeed of ANY other large jurisdiction in the country that used punch-card ballots other than Chicago.” To appreciate Fund’s argument, it is necessary to read the entire chapter devoted to the myth of the stolen election, but, briefly, Bush ran behind Bill McCollum, the Republican senatorial candidate who lost by almost 300,000 votes, in just this one county. He also ran behind the Republican congressional candidates there. It appears as though 15,000 votes for Bush disappeared. We’re not talking about magic computers or other imaginary critters. We’re talking about good old-fashioned fraud, where Democrat election officials using pin-like metal devices press them through the “Gore” tab on a stack of ballots. This procedure does no harm to actual “Gore” votes. A ballot cast for any other candidate, however, now becomes an overvote and is invalidated.
    The numbers are damning. “In EVERY precinct in Palm Beach where Gore got more votes than there are registered Democrats, Bush received less than 60 percent of registered Republican votes. In NO precinct in Palm Beach did Bush win more than 80 percent of the number of registered Republicans overall.” What many of you fail to grasp is that Bush was extremely popular among Republicans. For him to receive such extraordinarily low percentages is highly suspicious; it constitutes a genuine anomaly.
    We can continue the debate on vote fraud, if you wish. There is no need for incivility, but it is necessary to hear what the other side is saying. The statistician John Lott found that 24 of 25 Florida counties with the highest rate of ballot spoilage had Democratic election officials in charge of the county (the other county had an Independent, not a Republican, in charge). If you never come to terms with inconvenient data, political discourse is doomed to remain mired in its current bog, with the two sides screaming past each other.

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    Ronald Wieck said on 6/25/2006 @ 11:09am PT: [Permalink]

    A typo made the penultimate sentence unclear. It should have read, “…Democratic election officials in charge of the counting.”

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    Brad said on 6/25/2006 @ 3:30pm PT: [Permalink]

    Thanks, Ronald, for at least providing information instead of attacks, and out and out disproven information.

    Perhaps we can at least start by agreeing that when all ballots were counted in the state, it was found that more votes existed for Gore than for Bush. By every counting standard. That evidence is documented clearly and transparently here:
    https://web.archive.org/web/201...atingPaper.pdf

    With the agreement, hopefully, that the ballots as they ended up (however they ended up that way) favored Gore over Bush, we can then move on to your charges.

    One point on them, btw, I suppose one of those “Democratic officials” you refer to, the one in charge of Palm Beach County, by the way, was Theresa LePore who only became a “Democrat” just before the 2000 election, and changed her party affiliation to Republican shortly thereafter. I’m sure you know that, right?

    And with that said, the information you provided, is a small sample of the MASSIVE similar type of information provided to suggest REPUBLICAN fraud in both ’04 and ’00.

    So why is it that you selectively only look at what you *believe* (no actual evidence to prove it, just to suggest it) that Democrats committed “voter fraud” in those areas, but fail to recognize the same — and far more damning and documented — evidence that exists to show that ’04 was gamed in Ohio by the GOP?

    As I recall, you simply dismissed *those* charges as “long ago debunked.” Despite the fact that, indeed, they never were.

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    Ronald Wieck said on 6/26/2006 @ 10:22am PT: [Permalink]

    Your purpose in mentioning Theresa LePore is to confuse the reader. Her design of the infamous butterfly ballot has no relevance to the issue of vote fraud.
    The information presented by John Fund revealing Democratic fraud in Palm Beach County has no counterpart in the 2004 elections. Your “documented” evidence of GOP fraud in Ohio simply does not exist. Farhad Manjoo exposed and refuted (try reading what he wrote) all of the spurious claims recycled by RFK Jr. Fitrakis could not interest the professionals in the Kerry campaign for an excellent reason: he had nothing. Again, there were exactly TWO counties in Ohio that used Diebold machines: Kerry won the larger and the results in both were perfectly normal.
    The idea that it is an anomaly when the candidate leading in the polls actually wins is something the people who fabricated this vote fraud nonsense have yet to deal with. To repeat for the fifth time, think about that sentence from the Kennedy piece, the one that talks about the exit polls showing Kerry running neck-and-neck in Virginia and North Carolina. That means they were wrong.

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    Dredd said on 6/26/2006 @ 10:58am PT: [Permalink]

    John. I don’t know it this thread is turning out to be who can be the most historical or who can be the most hysterical.

    I bring up Orwell and 1984 for the troll (obviously one of the Smith Matrix clan), and offer this link.

    You can shock the hell out of the electronic election machine audience with these quotes from a 1988 official report:

    4.13 Summary Of Problem Types

    4.13.1 Insufficient Pre-election Testing
    4.13.2 Failure to Implement an Adequate Audit Trail
    4.13.3 Failure to Provide for a Partial Manual Recount
    4.13.4 Inadequate Ballots or Ballot-Reader Operation
    4.13.5 Inadequate Security and Management Control
    4.13.6 Inadequate Contingency Planning
    4.13.7 Inadequate System Acceptance Procedures

    …

    Concern had been heightened by a series of articles published in the summer of 1985 in the New York Times. The articles cited statements by two computer experts reporting that a computer program widely used for vote-tallying was vulnerable to tampering. Several elections were identified in which losing candidates claimed that it would be possible to fraudulently alter the computer programs that were used in their contests.

    (link here, bold added).

    And ask why did the NY Times stop writing articles about insecure voting systems after 1985 “¦ is there any relation to Orwell’s book 1984 perhaps?

    Perhaps Orwell was closer than we first imagined???

    Things are getting curiouser and curiouser “¦ or is it Matrixier and Matrixier?

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    Larry Bergan said on 6/27/2006 @ 2:50am PT: [Permalink]

    Dredd
    You said:

    “And ask why did the NY Times stop writing articles about insecure voting systems after 1985”

    Yeah! And why John Fund STARTED writing books about it in 2005! Maybe for that ever-important, (no matter how bad it is), opposing point of view!