Think we don't need paper ballots?? Read this.

[RandomAccess]

I happened across this in my travels this morning --

From the November 2012 issue of Harper's

How to Rig an Election
The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red

As the twenty-first century unfolds, American politics continues to veer precipitously to the right, even as the demographic base for such a shift—older white conservative males—keeps shrinking. The engine of this seismic movement is a strategic alliance of corporate interests promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire and orchestrated by Karl Rove and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. And meanwhile, the American right has in recent years been empowered by a slew of upset victories that range from unexpected to implausible, and that have frequently been accompanied by technical failures and anomalies, which are swept under the rug as rapidly as possible.

In 2002, the G.O.P. regained control of the Senate with such victories. In Georgia, for example, Diebold’s voting machines reported the defeat of Democratic senator Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly popular Cleland a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian right, the NRA, and George W. Bush (who made several campaign appearances on his behalf). As Election Day drew near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who had avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland—a Silver Star recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam—as a traitor for voting against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election, a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point advantage with the same group.

Cleland lost by seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused computerized voting machines of being “ripe for fraud.” Patched for fraud might have been more apt. In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees, led by Bob Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May.

. . .

Late on Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest disparities were concentrated in battleground states—particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To quote Lou Harris, who has long been regarded as the father of modern political polling: “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.”

MUCH MORE AT LINK

https://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/6/

Remember, until the 2000 election and even now in other parts of the world, exit polls are used to identify potential / probable election fraud.

[kimbutgar]

1. 2000 was the year we stopped being a Democacy

Last edited Sat Mar 3, 2018, 03:48 PM - Edit history (1)

I will never forget how they manipulated Florida and 2004 was disgusting. We haven’t had a real honest election. Here In California we went bluer when we started making it easier to vote and paper ballots with verifiable results. The other states that make elections verifiable have stayed or become blue. We overwhelmed the cheaters I 2008 and 2012 but 2016 with Russia’s hell tue
Reed our tide. We need to overwhlem them so much they will be outnumbered and destroyed ny our voting numbers.

[RandomAccess]

3. Technically true, I'd say

Last edited Sat Mar 3, 2018, 11:14 PM - Edit history (1)

Here I California we went bluer when we started making it easier to vote and paper ballots with verifiable results.

And look what happened to Virginia with the combo of paper ballots and huge turnout!

[kimbutgar]

5. I hate auto correct

Here in California.

[diva77]

7. I can't say I agree with this. I think the increased blueness is due to a surge in the number of

Dem. voters v. rethug voters -- which creates the wide leads needed to overcome election fraud committed with computerized voting. We are still in trouble with voting systems -- most of the votes are tabulated with optiscans or central tabulators. If only we could get the SOS to stop certifying the vote-grifting machinery altogether and make citizen hand-tabulation mandatory via the jury duty system.

From Aug. 2017:
http://www.ppic.org/publication/california-voter-and-party-profiles/

California Voter and Party Profiles

Voter registration is up slightly; the share of independents has increased. California’s 19.4 million registered voters constitute 77.9% of eligible adults, a slight increase from the registration rate in 2013 (75.7%), the year preceding the last midterm election. The share of registered voters who are Democrats (44.8%) is up slightly from 2013 (43.9%), while the share of Republicans (25.9%) has declined since 2013 (28.9%). At the same time, the share of voters who say they are independent (formerly called “decline to state” and now called “no party preference”) has been increasing; it is now 24.5%, up from 20.9% in 2013. Our surveys indicate that 46% of those we consider most likely to vote are Democrats, 29% are Republicans, and 21% are independents. SNIP

[RandomAccess]

8. The paragraph about CA was from the 1st response -- not me

I was quoting it so my comment made sense. I've clarified in my post.

[OhNo-Really]

4. Ken Blackwell Ohio 2004.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Blackwell#Release_of_Ohio_Social_Security_numbers

[samnsara]

2. i cant remember anything but paper ballots in wash state...

..in fact I volunteered to count ballots for a few year..that was quite interesting...and totally tamper proof!

[RandomAccess]

6. BTW, SmarTECH is mentioned in this article

and has a starring role in THIS thread:


My head is exploding - Here's WHY Republicans won't go after Russia
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210314047

[mythology]

9. Why do people keep talking about the unadjusted exit polls?

I understand the allure of a conspiracy, but really the evidence is clear. The exit polls in the U.S. aren't conducted in the same way that exit polls looking for election fraud are conducted. There's a reason that there is no serious member in the Democratic party who talks about this. Because it's utterly unfounded and should be dismissed as such.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

And here’s the last nail in the conspiracy-mongers’ coffin: While exit polls are used to detect potential fraud in some countries, ours aren’t designed, and aren’t accurate enough, to accomplish that purpose. Lenski, who has conducted exit polls in fragile democracies like Ukraine and Venezuela, explained that there are three crucial differences between their exit polls and our own. Polls designed to detect fraud rely on interviews with many more people at many more polling places, and they use very short questionnaires, often with just one or two questions, whereas ours usually have twenty or more. Shorter questionnaires lead to higher response rates. Higher response rates paired with larger samples result in much smaller margins of error. They’re far more precise. But it costs a lot more to conduct that kind of survey, and the media companies that sponsor our exit polls are only interested in providing fodder for pundits and TV talking heads. All they want to know is which groups came out to vote and why, so that’s what they pay for.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/upshot/exit-polls-why-they-so-often-mislead.html

The problems begin early on election evening, when the first waves of exit polls are invariably leaked and invariably show a surprising result somewhere. You’re best off ignoring these early returns, which are unweighted — meaning the demographic mix of the respondents is not adjusted to match any expectations for the composition of the electorate. The first waves also don’t even include all of the exit poll interviews.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit/

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample — essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place — in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.

[TheFrenchRazor]

10. exit polls used to be accurate (pre 2000); now they need lots of "adjusting." nt

[RandomAccess]

11. You got anything to that effect prior to 2000??

If not, AFAIC, it's just rationalization -- intentional or not -- for stealing elections.