Interesting story in WaPo today

What do you think. This is why Kerry can't overpush the election thraud thing:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/24/AR2005042401545.html

...is that the article, towards the end, seems to suggest that it's OK to focus on voter intimidation, suppression, etc., but if you think that the machines are f*cked and you want to see that problem solved, you're treading dangerous ground, politically. I really don't like that and here's why.

Proving fraud in the 2004 election, and advocating reform and demanding open elections, with accountable and secure machines, are two TOTALLY different things, and they should be separated. One does not need to prove fraud on ANY scale in 2004 to realize the need for reform. Computer scientists and security experts have been upset about the state of the election system for years. The research indicating the problem is out there, and it has nothing to do with proven documented fraud, but potential fraud. BBV reform can, and (until fraud is proven) should, be billed as a preventive measure. It doesn't make one a conspiracy theorist to recognize that a problem exists and that bad stuff could occur -- whether it has occurred or not. That type of mentality is why 9/11 happened, people being presented with evidence of a looming problem and completely disregarding it because they saw it as unlikely or had an agenda of their own (called Iraq) that took precedence. Have people in the media learned NOTHING from that??

The media has to ramp up on some math, computer technology and statistics in order to understand the argument that there was a problem with the machines in the election and that they could have been hacked. I think they feel this is just too murky and too difficult and has no payoff in terms of getting average readers to understand the problem. (Hech, I have trouble wading through the problem, but I am a math-lite person.)

Is there a solution? Is there anyway that this info can be presented to a general audience and have that general audience comprehend it? Is there anyway that change to the present system can come if their is not wide grassroots push for it? How do you get a grassroots push for change if the issue is not widely understood? That is where I am stuck. Maybe there is a solution, but I don't see it yet. (But then again, who died and made me the arbiter of all knowledge.)

I saw Sen Kerry push for a grassroots movement to improve the election process. I think he is exactly right to focus on the parts that can be shown and understood rather easily. Even reporters can understand nightmarishly long lines, pamphlets that fraudulently tell voters the wrong day to vote on and so forth.

This is probably unfair. (Life is unfair.) There is a way to hack into voting apparatus and adjust the vote. You have proven that, as have others. But can this info by itself fuel the needed grassroots push needed to affect change or will this remain and academic issue?

They don't have to know the details of how each and every virus works, but they know that it's a bad program that causes their machine to screw up. And -- while many people DON'T take preventive measures -- they know what they SHOULD do to prevent viruses from infecting their computers. I'm not sure how to present BBV issues to the general public in an easy-to-understand way, but the virus analogy is a start, at least. I'm kind of trapped in the tech "box." Something that seems obvious and straightforward to me can be opaque to a non-geeky type. Non-geeks could give me some advice on how they'd understand this sort of thing. :)

Incidentally, though, it doesn't seem necessary to me that people understand this. That would definitely be nice, but what's more important is to get a national reform bill passed that addresses the problems. If I were drafting it, I'd require -- just for starters -- storage of individual votes on all electronic voting machines, encryption of same, secure connections whenever one machine communicates over the Internet with another, and third-party validation of program code. The intelligence agencies are required by law to use only validated (and highly validated, at that) software, and there are labs all over the place that will do it. (Common Criteria, for instance.)

I don't think most people need to know all of the details. They do need to know that somebody on the Republican side did something wrong and illegal, and it might have changed the election. If it is electronic hacking, people have a general idea what that is. If it is voter suppression, people can grasp that easily. We need to find the culprit(s) and name them, and bring it into court.

Two reasons we need to know what happened: one, so we can fix it before the next election and have more fair and honest results next time. Two, people need to know that Kerry and all the other Dems might not be the losers that they think they are! Right now the people and media see them that way, and may be more reluctant to jump on board. It's true--there are people who only want to vote for the person they think will win! They see it kind of like rooting for a sports team, nothing more.

It also gives Kerry (or Democrats) the high moral ground - Just knowing that you CAN cheat with the current technology, means you have to fix it.

Nobody ever wants to talk about New Hampshire. 14 points up in the poll, a squeaker win. And a recount, that backed up the squeaker win. No idea why that happened.

And, nobody ever pays attention to the difference between likely voter polls of last year, and all American polls of this year. Poorer people voted for Kerry, but weren't represented in the same percentages as they are in the general population. They also aren't likely voters so they weren't represented in polls last year either. But that doesn't seem to be a polling criteria this year.

We should have gone with Glitchgate, not election fraud. There were so many unexplained glitches, that alone would have been more than enough to get people to want to look at these machines. We didn't and so now it's an uphill battle to get people to pay attention because the machine problems are tied in with the unprovable election fraud claims.

Why did the overwhelming majority of the glitches favor Bush?

No. Because they weren't taking to that point logically. Besides, there are alot of glitches out there that had nothing to do with the Presidential election. Some people are so obsessed with Presidential election fraud that they're missing the more important point, the machines. Focus on the all the cases that had nothing to do with the Presidential election, call it Glitchgate, to get people's attention. Although I think it's too late now.

that in almost all elections, there were votes lost due to problems in the process and that they are always concetrated in the poorer areas. the article suggested that this was due to the elections being run locally.

Politicians in an inner city county can't allocate money to replace machines that lose votes because the choice to do that will take money away from social needs and usually the loss of votes doesn't impact the local officials. So they have fewer (per person) and less good machines.

In Ohio, they also said that in one inner city there were votes lost to people not using the machines designated for their precinct (which was key as the candidates were in different order), because the people running the poll let them. Also, in some precincts they had no one who could speak Spanish. It may be that in the suburbs you have plenty of people who can volunteer for the day and what ever time is needed to train them - while it may be harder to get volunteers in poorer areas.

If we can spend the money to set up voting in Iraq, we should be able to do so in Cleveland and Cincinnati.

For these reasons, I'm

There is the problem that election fraud to Rethugs mean too many Democrats are still voting and their solution is to make voters show an ID. This can dampen minority voters, as less minorities have formal ID's. (Less driver's licenses and so forth.) There is also an intimidation factor involved in this. This is what came out in the recent Baker-Carter hearings, we need more IDs.

How does Kerry or any other Dem go about advocating for reform in the process? I know that he (or any other Dem) has to separate it so that it isn't about him. They should be able to do this with the visual things that went wrong. Show the long lines in Ohio and ask people if they would like it if this happened to them. Is this the American way in action? and so forth.

But how do you leverage the machine reform? The Rethugs are in bed with the machine manufacturers. The Rethugs are getting some pretty good results with these machines in place. There aren't any visuals that you can show people. (Maybe there are.) Anyway, how do you engage the American people in this problem in such a way that it becomes a problem with our Democracy, not just a problem with the Dems?