We Dems just need to be who we are

Did you mean new rather than knew?

by that. Be that as it may - there was voter suppression in other ways.

But that just means we need to get the 35% of Americans who stay home on election day - out to vote.

Then it doesn't' matter what the Rove WH tries. We have the numbers. If 70% of americans don't vote next time - no point in blaming anybody else - people have to show up to vote.

So that means we train each other and teach all Dems that the moment they say in their heads "aw - I'm too busy to stand in line for two hours today - I'm sure my vote will not count or make a difference" - the moment they have that thought.. they must know that it means they need to be doubly & triply sure to go out and stand in rain, snow, lines, cold, faced with mean ID checks, etc. THAT ALL DEMS HAVE TO GET OUT & VOTE.

....And your 35% is probably too low of a number. I've seen it rated as high as 50% of all eligible voters.

However, the original poster's point about letting Democrats be Democrats addresses this problem even MORE than it does voting machines.

It is because of the DLC and their attempts to turn the Democratic Party more to the right after each election that causes people to stay home, or to waste their vote on a "protest" such as Nader or whomever, knowing full well he can't win.

If even half the self-exiled voters had shown up in November and voted for the Democratic candidate, the margin of victory would have been large enough to make electro-fraud theft more than obvious. As far as I'm concerned, it's more than obvious now, since I cannot, for the life of me, explain how the Chimp gained votes, when there was documented defections from nearly every sub-culture of conservatism on the planet.

You'll notice I said "the Democratic candidate" and not specifically John Kerry by name. That's because the DLC deliberately manipulating the primary system to force their candidate AND Kerry's own refusal not to fight back against the Swift Boat Assholes (among other things) were part of the problem which caused non-participation. I'll admit, I seriously considered staying home. But I hate the Bush Criminal Empire too much.

So "letting Democrats BE Democrats" is indeed a huge part of the solution. But we have to start with the ones we already elected acting like Democrats. Or let them resign and replace them with those who will.

the neocon version of "trade". All the intellectuals in the less developed nations are for trade - of a fairer kind.

And as for the War in Iraq - most admit they were fooled into it and that we have to stay until that place has a chance. Or we will all be back there fighting WWIII in a few years.

The people who recently won the alternative Nobel (those two Canadians) looked at the trade issue for years and finally decided they had to be for fair trade around the world - and that trade was the only way to help places like Africa & others to participate in the world. Though they are for all manner of Independence in national policy & regulations for those countries.

Fact is that the only way to increase wealth in the world is to be trading with each other. Doesn't mean there shouldn't be universal health care policies across the planet or anything else. Just that barriers come down.

Think in 50 years when there is no more oil? Should Americans be relying on jobs in American factories that need oil? Or should our kids go into fields that not require Oil so much. Jobs perhaps that involved a computer.

And as salaries go down in the U.S., prices of consumer goods are falling. The only people who are not participating in this "change" are the elites who suffer nothing - not even fighting inflation like the middle class and the working poor do for America every day with slightly smaller salaries as the cost of shoes at costco goes down. The elites in the US also have not payed on bit for the War in Iraq. Dems are against both the rich not paying their share and not feeling any pain as the world changes.

What industries do you think will be big in the years to come? Nano-technology & computers & the like. All things that a healthy defense industry creates and has created. They created computers, nylon, plastic, etc.. the things that currently make jobs & work. In the future it will be possible to take on someone like Saddam with soft power of blowing up a nation's satellites. So that is why Dems are for that. And that kind of power over the internet & other soft power. Dems are not for War created by the MIComplex to make more profit.

Dems are against big Oil and funny funding of elections.

There are many more differences between the moderate Dems and the neocons than you portray.

They don't plan on controlling the voters using the hierarchy of the Christian churches.

Dems are for all manner of policies. Including your horrid health care.

You make it sound so simple. But trade and defense spending are important things for the future. Just so long as the nutbombs in the WH can take their Utopia and scurry away to "big houses in gated communities" and shut the **** up - the third way is not an awful thing. Third way will save more lives than anything else - if agricultural reforms and other trade deals are negotiated with places like South America & Africa..creating middle classes there finally.

India, Brazil, China & Russia will together have middle classes 10 times greater than the total of the West in 40 years. Do you want to be selling and trading with those markets or not?

Dems are not for creating precedent for pre-emptive war. They do recognize that bin Ladin & his ilk want to take over all of the middle east, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and make one big country. So - yes - they are for long term stability in Afghanistan.
Dems would have taken Saddam's offer of an election in 2004 instead of going to war. And if Saddam lied - then the whole UN would have gone in with 600,000 troops - enough to win the peace..unlike that horrid Rummy who couldn't be bothered to see beyond his big flashy weapons and corporate profits for his pals.

IMHO

The media has been misinforming people on this for decades, announcing that voter turnout has been declining, and that only between 25 and 30 percent of eligible voters vote. That's false. About 60% of eligible voters vote, and it's been a steady number since the early 70s when it's been measured. In addition, that 40% isn't all one group who sits at home disgusted with the process. A lot of that number are people who vote in some elections but for various reasons--work, illness, forgetfulness, travel, disgust with a particular group of candidates, whatever-- don't vote in a particular election. So between 20 and 30 percent of eligible voters actually refuse to vote. That group includes the 18 - 24 group that has always voted lightly, and a diehard corp of maybe 15 - 20 % who refuse to vote for a variety of reasons.

The reason the stats have been off for so long has been because of demographic changes. The way voter turnout was measured in the 60s was by calculating the number of residents over the age of eighteen. Since the 60s, the number of ineligible voters in that group has grown, partially because of the growth in felons (ex felons can't vote in many states) and because of legal immigrants.

The Census Bureau now recognizes this flaw and counts only citizens in its figures, which improves their accuracy greatly. They still include former felons in their numbers, though.

None of this is speculative research, by the way. Check out the list of footnotes at this link.

http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm

Part of the Democrats' problem has been that we have assumed that we could mobilize this non-voting base, whereas the Republicans have been targetting the actual voting base. Turns out our targets are non-existent.

To win, we have to steal votes from the Republicans, whether by converting them to liberalism or by campaigning to the middle. That's a debate that will rage on.

I agree with you on the tabulators. I'm not convinced they are rigged. I've seen some races and elections where I'm sure cheating has occured (it always has before, there's no reason to believe it has stopped), but I haven't seen any evidence on fixed Diebold tabulators.

saying that Dems need to be just as sure that all of "theirs" go out and vote. And many dems don't have the luxury of cars or time off from work or the expense of a babysitter.

Your voting rates are the worst in the western world. They are pretty pathetic.

I'm saying we need to work on that - along with much else.

I know a lot of fundies who think all politicians are too crooked to vote. They think that voting is dirty business, and won't sull themselves. A neighbor of mine said that voting was for building up reqards on Earth, and no Christian should do that.

In addition to that kind, some fundies don't like Bush personally. Not all believed he was sufficiently racist or sufficiently pure. They stayed home.

There are always GOTV efforts to provide rides to every voter who wants one. Both parties recruit volunteers for just that.

I honestly don't know how to compare our numbers to other countries. We have had a roughly 60% turnout of eligible voters for many years. If that's low, it's low. Not voting is a vote in itself. Given how uninformed a lot of voters are, maybe we should have a lower turnout.

are so civic minded they vote upwards of 85%.

Come on! Even a 70% turnout would make for a Dem win.

The extra votes could as easily split, or even go Repub. Most of the serious non-voters I know are conservative minded. In fact, when polls switch from "eligible voters" to "likely voters" just before an election, the Dems usually get a boost.

to tell dems who stayed home - "stay home and don't vote - cause it doesn't matter"?

When there is a problem, like not enough young voters turning out then you try and fix it. You try and do better & better each time.

The poll numbers aren't anecdotal, you can see it every election.

relatively easily.

I assume that many people, maybe most don't understand enough of the problem to have an informed opinion about it.

I've already been on threads with you and argued about stolen elections etc, so without changing my opinion or asking you to change yours, I prefer to not engage again in such a discussion.

Because we are the party of rugged individuals and freedom lovers we do behave as cats- we have our own little prides and agendas.

Republicans are like big, dumb blankets of bison moving together in one direction. You see the cloud of dust on the horizon, then the thunder of the hooves,and then the herd. They follow the leaders without question.

I would rather be a tiger than a buffalo and a tiger will most likely win an individual battle with any buffalo, but if you had to bet on a group of tigers or a group of buffalo, where would you lay your money?

I think that there was more unity in the party this last election and other recent elections than there used to be.

I recall a time when I was so pleased that many factions came together and at least publicly buried the hatchet.

But a cat is a cat is a cat, and if we try to change too much then we become big dumb dinosaurs.

They're extinct anyhow so I don't mind picking on them. I like the bison, buffalo, elephants etc too much.

Risks to the public

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes archive
Volume 30 , Issue 4 (July 2005) table of contents

COLUMN: Risks to the public table of contents

Pages: 19 - 35
Year of Publication: 2005
ISSN:0163-5948
Author Peter G. Neumann SRI International Computer Science Lab, Menlo Park CA

Publisher ACM Press New York, NY, USA
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Page 27 July 2005 Volume 30 Number 4

My note: excerpt related to voting systems, pages 27-28

Election Systems

Seven voting machines under scrutiny in Wayne
County (R 23 90)

The accuracy of some Republican votes cast 17 May 2005 in
seven voting booths in three Wayne County (Pennsylvania)
voting districts is being investigated, potentially affecting the
outcome of two township supervisor races. For example, in
Lehigh Township, 163 Republicans voted, but 211 votes were
counted.

Multiple vulnerabilities in Diebold Optical Scan
(Bruce O’Dell, R 23 94)

A technical report published by BlackBoxVoting.org (4 Jul
2005) details multiple critical security vulnerabilities in the
Diebold Optical Scan voting equipment that was used to tally
approximately 25 million votes in the 2004 US election.
Harri Hursti, an independent security consultant – with the
consent of election officials in Leon County, Florida – was
able to take full control of the Diebold optical scan device
and manipulate vote totals and audit reports at will.
The Diebold Precinct-Based Optical Scan 1.94w device accommodates
a removable memory card. It had been believed
that this card contained only the electronic “ballot box”, the
ballot design and the race definitions; astonishingly enough,
the memory card also contains executable code essential to
the operation of the optical scan system. The presence of executable
code on the memory card is not mentioned in the of-
ficial product documentation. This architecture permits multiple
methods for unauthorized code to be downloaded to the
memory cards, and is wide open to exploitation by malicious
insiders.

The individual cards are programmed by the Diebold GEMS
central tabulator device via a RS-232 serial port connection
or via modem over the public phone network. There are no
checksum mechanisms to detect or prevent tampering with
the executable code, and worse yet, there are credible exploits
which could compromise both the checksum and executable.
The report notes that this appears to be in violation of Chapter
5 of the 1990 Federal Election Commission Standards for
election equipment, and therefore should never have been certified
for use.

The executable code is written in a proprietary language,
Accu-Basic. Accu-Basic programs are first compiled into
ASCII pseudocode, which is then executed by an interpreter
residing in the optical scan device. Hursti located an inexpensive
device capable of reading and updating the memory cards
advertised on the Internet, and using a publicly-available version
of the Accu-Basic compiler (found on the Internet, along
with Diebold source code and other documents, by Bev Harris
in 2003) was able to exploit these vulnerabilities – and publicly
demonstrated the ability to modify vote totals and audit
reports at will.

According to the report:

Exploits available with this design include, but are
not limited to:

1) Paper trail falsification – Ability to modify the
election results reports so that they do not match
the actual vote data
1.1) Production of false optical scan reports to facilitate
checks and balances (matching the optical
scan report to the central tabulator report),
in order to conceal attacks like redistribution of
the votes or Trojan horse scripts such as those designed
by Dr. Herbert Thompson.(19)
1.2) An ingenious exploit presents itself, for a
single memory card to mimic votes from many
precincts at once while transmitting votes to the
central tabulator. The paper trail falsification
methods in this report will hide evidence of outof-
place information from the optical scan report
if that attack is used.
2) Removal of information about pre-loaded votes
2.1) Ability to hide pre-loaded votes
2.2) Ability to hide a pre-arranged integer overflow
3) Ability to program conditional behavior based
on time/date, number of votes counted, and many
other hidden triggers.

According to public statements by elections offi-
cials(20), the paper trail produced by the precinct
optical scan has been placed into the role of a vital
safeguard mechanism. The paper report from the
optical scan machine is the key record used to con-
firm the integrity of the central tabulator record.
The exploits demonstrated in the false optical scan
machine reports (“poll tapes”) shown on page 16
do not change the votes, only the report of the
votes. When combined with the Trojan horse attack
demonstrated by Dr. Thompson, this attack
vector maintains an illusion of integrity by producing
false reports to match the contaminated
central tabulator report.

The exploit demonstrated in the poll tape
with a true report containing false votes, shown
on page 18, changes the votes but not the report.
This example pre-stuffs the ballot box in such a
way as to produce an integer overflow. In this exploit,
a small number of votes is loaded for one
candidate, offset by a large number of votes for
the opposing candidate such that the sum of the
numbers, because of the overflow, will be zero.
The large number is designed to trigger an integer
overflow such that after a certain number of
votes is received it will flip the vote counter over
to begin counting from zero for that candidate...
combining the false report method (demonstrated
on page 16) with the pre-arranged integer overflow
(demonstrated on 18) seems to be an especially ef-
ficient exploit because it is a one-step process that
takes out both the actual process and its safeguard
at the same time, while surviving scrutiny of almost
anything short of a full manual recount.
Reportedly, at least 500 jurisdictions used the vulnerable optical
scan system in 2004; for example, the Diebold Precinct-
Based Optical Scan 1.94w system counted approximately 2.5
million votes in 30 counties, or about one-third of all the votes
in Florida, and nationwide, approximately 25 million votes.
(http://www.freddevan.com/blog/archives/00006724.html).
Although the exploits described in the report could be uncovered
if a full hand recount was performed, in practice, detection
is unlikely. Most jurisdictions limit the time frame
for contesting an election. For numerous reasons, both candidates
and election administrators are reluctant to question the
official tally, while hand recounts are expensive – with costs
borne by the contesting party. Few elections tallied by optical
scan equipment are ever fully recounted, and automatic
recounts legally triggered by a narrow margin of victory will,
of course, fail to detect large-scale manipulation that shifts results
outside the recount threshold. Finally, there are classic
problems with paper ballot chain of custody; the more time
passes, and the further a paper artifact travels from its point
of origin, the more vulnerable it is to tampering.
Therefore, the mere presence of a paper trail will not deter
or detect electronic vote manipulation by malicious insiders
unless the voter-verified paper ballot or optical scan ballot is
actually randomly audited – preferably, in-precinct, on election
night . Yet the cost and time required by a truly effective
and random audit protocol undermines the case for
electronically-assisted vote tallying. Therefore some analysts
now recommend US implementation of the Canadian system –
hand-counting of paper ballots in-precinct on Election Night,
with accommodation for the visually-impaired – as the best
countermeasure to systematic electronic election fraud.
Based on my experience in the financial services industry, discovery
of multiple security vulnerabilities of this severity in
equipment in use by any bank or brokerage house would trigger
an immediate shutdown of all the affected systems, followed
by a full internal and external audit, and, in all likelihood,
formal investigation by regulatory and law enforcement
agencies. We should accept no less from the election services
industry.

The affected Diebold optical scan equipment should be immediately
withdrawn from use in any election until independent
recertification is achieved, or a secure alternative is obtained.
All other election equipment – manufactured by Diebold or
by other vendors – should be examined, and if subject to the
same vulnerability, should also be withdrawn. An investigation
to determine how equipment with such serious vulnerabilities
to insider manipulation could ever have been certified
should also be launched, and certification and oversight procedures
enhanced.

Good people died to gain and defend our right to vote. Election
administration must not be exempt from industry best
practices for security, audit and control.
Stanley F. Quayle (R 23 95):

A $1 lottery ticket is serially numbered, with UV-encoded
information, on tamper-evident paper, and tracked with a
heavily- audited central system. Reasonable, since that ticket
could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Your ballot has a level of protection equal to its projected
value: Zero. Until votes are worth something, they will continue
to be worthless.

Electronic voting in the U.S. House – oops (Richard
Schroeppel, R 23 96)

Excerpting an article about the recent US House of Representatives
vote on CAFTA, which was preceded by some pretty
intense politicking:
Hayes switched his vote, and the agreement passed 217-215.
Hayes wasn’t the only North Carolina Republican voting for
CAFTA. Sixth-term Rep. Sue Myrick, who represents a safe
Republican district in Charlotte, announced her support for
the treaty several weeks ago. Rep. Charles Taylor, who represents
western North Carolina, also had pledged a no vote
but missed the roll call. Taylor said he voted no but that it
wasn’t recorded because his electronic voting card failed.



ACM COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Copyright © 2005 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.