Wisconsin aftermath: Voters in disbelief over Walker victory

[geefloyd46]

We need something radical like voting on a paper ballot and then counting them. How come my ATM machine doesn't seem to make mistakes but my voting machine does. I guess choosing your leaders aren't quite as important as get your fast cash from an ATM.

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[pacalo]

1. "The media thought it was going to be a long night & yet within an hour the computers declared

Scott Walker the winner."

Since 2000, there have been too many elections that have had people scratching their heads at the results.

[freshwest]

2. I keep wondering what made Barrett concede before the polls were even closed. A threat of violence?

It appeared Gore conceded in order to not have an insurrection. The fact that the media did not wait until the polls were closed was also very suspect.

I don't know what would have changed the outcome, and Democrats have been tearing each other up here, blaming Obama and all kinds of things. Some of the older hands say this was what they expected, and not because of fraud. That the logistics were wrong.

This has been a very disheartening thing, but those on the ground say the election should have waited until November when more people would have voted. We don't know, but there was a video posted with Brad Friedman on the Thom Hartmann show giving his explanation of the way those votes were estimated, as they were not counted.

Diebold was the standard for debits from the banks, but proven to be hacked in FL. So here we are. Take care, everyone.

[snot]

3. Just to be clear, Diebold machines provide paper receipts from ATM's, but for some reason

that's not possible with their voting machines . . .

[freshwest]

4. Yep, I always get a receipt... always. This voting thing... A slap in the face!

[Jim Lane]

11. The problem with the receipt is that it undermines ballot secrecy.

Boss's memo to all employees:

"As you know, I favor Mitt Romney in this election. When you come to work on the day after the election, please bring with you the paper receipt issued to you by the Freshwest Election Systems voting machines that our state has just begun using. Stop by the Human Resources office to have your receipt inspected and recorded. If it shows that you voted for the Muslim socialist Kenyan impostor, you will be escorted to your office and given thirty minutes to pack up your personal belongings."

Please don't tell me that we'll just make such coercion illegal. If it's illegal, all that means is that the boss won't send out a memo that would leave a paper or email trail. This kind of thing would still occur.

Setting up a ballot that's verifiable by the voter but not by anyone else makes the project a little more tricky than getting an ATM to work.

[freshwest]

12. What, no sarcasm smilie?

[pacalo]

17. It most certainly would be illegal for your employer to demand to see voting receipts...

at least until the day that Republicans take over everything & remove every semblance of integrity in our country.

[Jim Lane]

20. Under what law would it be illegal?

Can you give me a citation?

If an employer decided to fire all the Obama voters, you might be able to attack that under the Civil Rights Act under a "disparate impact" theory -- it's more likely to affect blacks than whites, etc. The mere demand to see your voting receipt, however, probably isn't covered by any existing law, just because no one or almost no one gets a voting receipt.

Of course, the more important point is that, even if the outright requirement were illegal, there would be abuses. When some employees proudly tape their Romney receipts to their office doors (without being ordered to do so), and others leave their doors conspicuously blank, the latter group is likely to feel disadvantaged. Good luck trying to prove in court that that's why you didn't get the promotion.

[snot]

28. Why don't paper ballots "undermine ballot secrecy," then?

[Jim Lane]

34. You fill in your ballot, you drop it into the slot, and you leave the voting booth empty-handed.

There's no way that an employer, a priest, or a local political boss can demand to see your ballot, because you don't have it. You couldn't provide proof of how you voted even if you wanted to.

[Xheralt]

6. touchscreen voting machines

But the WI touchscreen machines *weren't* Diebold, even! Free machines provided by Command Central, out of St. Cloud MN; an offer too good for cash-strapped northwoods communities to refuse. Command Central, whose mailing address is a PO Box, no actual office immediately visible or findable, a box out of a post office just a stone's throw away from Michelle Bachmann's offices there! I don't usually make a big deal out of coincidences, but this smells really suspicious...

[pacalo]

18. Welcome to DU, Xheralt!

[snot]

29. +1!

[Dustlawyer]

31. Why did this Corp provide the machines for free? Who checked them?

The corporations are not going to just give up the control they have been working to get since Reagan was in office! We are only going to see more voter purges, faulty or rigged voting machines etc.
The only issue to concern ourselves about until it happens, CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM!

[99th_Monkey]

13. Just what we need: a corporate creature of the Banksters

like Diebold, et. al. counting our votes in total secrecy,
with no transparency or accountability, all "for our own
good" of course.

fuckers.

[freshwest]

16. But another poster claims paper receipting is inherently dangerous. See #11.

Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 12:34 PM - Edit history (2)

So, our future will be like a poem by Richard Brautigan.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Or not.

[Jim Lane]

21. No, I didn't say it was "inherently dangerous" -- just that the problem is tricky.

Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 02:01 PM - Edit history (1)

An ATM-style receipt won't work. That means a solution must, alas, be more complicated.

Maybe the voter makes choices on a touch screen. The machine then prints out a paper ballot corresponding to those choices. The voter checks the ballot against the screen. If the paper ballot conforms to the voter's wishes, he or she feeds it into a slot in the machine, the act that finalizes the vote and adds the vote to the overall tally. If, instead, the voter leaves the booth with the paper ballot, the vote won't be counted.

What about people who mistakenly walk out with the paper ballot? What if the machine prints the ballot and it doesn't correspond to the voter's wishes? I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but they'd have to be dealt with. The company that produces the "good" electronic machines will need to hire some first-rate IT people.

Yes, I know that the low-tech solution of old-fashioned paper ballots would also work. It involves a LOT of tedious tallying work, though. What we need is to combine the speed and convenience of electronic voting with the accuracy, reliability, and verifiability of paper ballots.

[freshwest]

36. I'd appreciate you not naming something after my screen name and making a post of what I did not say

In response to another poster. He mentioned Diebold, and I mentioned getting a receipt. I responded to that with the name you'd given the idea you were opposed to, out of proportion to what I said to a poster in passing.

The idea of getting something after voting has been kicked around While I get the point, I wish you would edit it and not do what I feel is a call out on what you thought I was talking about, which I was not as I was only expressing my routine with banking receipts. And frustration with what the interview on another thread said was a problem there, calling the election before the actual votes were tallied, it appeared on a percentage basis. That is not respectful of the individuals who took time to vote.

Your case is well made, but I'm not part of the case, and did not advocate what you are concerned about. I've edited my post to delete references, please don't make DU suck because it did when I read that last night. I wasn't sure if your reference meant you were a troll, so I want to your profile and you are not.

Your profile says that you are editing Wikipedia which is necessary to prevent the kind of disinfo being inserted there. It's getting so bad on the internet, that it's a great problem getting information to use in discussions. Thank you.

[Jim Lane]

37. I intended it as a compliment, not a call-out.

You and I are among the people who care about this issue, and I wish there were more of us. I was striving for a bit of levity by jokingly suggesting that you might be starting a company to compete with Diebold/ES&S and make machines that would combine the convenience of e-voting with the reliability of paper ballots. Heaven knows, somebody should do that.

Apparently my little joke was open to misinterpretation, so I've deleted it as you requested. (I have to admit it wasn't exactly a DUzy candidate anyway.) Thanks for your restrained and civil response.

[freshwest]

38. And thank you very much for that and your other work.

[99th_Monkey]

40. For me, it's not about "receipts"

it's about having privatized our entire public elections system
into the hands of the wealthy elite corporate titans.

and then these same wealthy elites have the gall to launch
voter suppression crusades against imaginary abuses that
no one can provide any significant evidence that there are
even any abuses under the current voter ID laws.

We do not even have a real democracy unless and until we get
paper ballots, that can be counted by hand and recounted as
needed.

[freshwest]

41. Agreed totally. And with supervised counting, too.

[shcrane71]

5. I know. Also odd that so many people want to discuss this on DU, but they're

inevitably called a whole host of names. One would think that on DU people could tolerate free speech.

[rhett o rick]

7. Please tread lightly.

Some people employ a mechanism to maintain their sanity. It's called denial. They dont want to know that Republicans might actually cheat and steal an election. Personally, I feel Republicans, esp Rove, will cheat all the time.

[snappyturtle]

9. +1 nt

[shcrane71]

26. You can't fight a bully when you're in denial that you're getting bullied.

Denial is self-destructive.

[rhett o rick]

27. I agree. I was doing a bad job of being facetious. nm

[shcrane71]

30. lol... I need coffee, then I may catch onto the sarcasm.

Whew. Sometimes I need things spelled out.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

8. Absolutely right.

[pacalo]

15. As rhett o'rick said, tread lightly.

There are many Wisconsinites here who have put their hearts & souls into getting rid of Walker & they are heartbroken, so go lightly on the subject.

If Scott Walker could install a secret computer system to run his campaigning business at taxpayers' expense, I couldn't trust him to run an honest election when his lust for power is on the line, either. Money can buy silence & computer expertise.

I still have a picture of Wisconsin's impressive turnout for a Kerry rally back in '04. If this many people were so enthusiastic to vote Bush out of office, why would they choose to keep a man like Scott Walker when he's just as bad as Bush?

[rhett o rick]

24. Bravo WI, however my post re. "tread lightly" wasnt to protect WI fighters feelings.

They dont have time to feel sorry for themselves. They, like all of us, have a big job ahead of us. They have the advantage of having organizations in place to go forward.

My post was a facetious jab at those with their fingers in their ears, murmuring over and over, "Republicans dont cheat, Republicans dont cheat." Their mental defense mechanism is denial. We dont want the truth to push them over the edge.

edit to correct spelling.

[shcrane71]

25. Tread lightly? What does that mean?

This election has far-reaching effects, and it broke the heart of Wisconsin progressives, the progressives in neighboring states, in the entire nation, and even Leftists in Europe are stunned and heart-broken.

How is wanting a review of how MSM covers elections, looking into who owns the voting machines, wanting a review of the election process going to hurt the already hurting folks of Wisconsin? It's not.

[rhett o rick]

32. My fault. I was trying to be facetious. See post #24. nm

[Lifelong Protester]

10. From my domicile in WI

I can tell you, I felt the same way. I don't want to get out the tinfoil hat yet, but...

[pacalo]

19. Lifelong Protester...

I have the utmost respect for all of you Wisconsinites & I'm sorry how this turned out.

This country has been turned upside down since 2000 &, at this point, it's just not unreasonable to suspect election fraud -- especially after adding up all the factors involved.

[Lifelong Protester]

39. Thanks for the hug, pacalo

It has been a really tough week here.

I, too, have begun to wonder if the machines are taking over, after all these elections that are going so wonky and not shoring up with the exit polls.
No lie, it literally went from "too close to call" to "Walker wins" in a matter of minutes, MINUTES.
Hell, people were still in line to vote and it was called.


Something is rotten in our system, here and all over the US.

But I certainly appreciate the kind people here who do realize that we Progressives fought the good fight.

[eridani]

14. How often do you vote? How often do you use an ATM?

The difference has a great deal to do with how much real world testing each gets.

WHY VOTING MACHINES ARE NOT LIKE ATMS

ATM software is open, but voting software is proprietary

Banks insist that all code in ATMs be fully disclosed to them and they won't trust their money or their depositors’ money with anything less. Voting software by comparison is considered proprietary by companies that make both ATMs and voting machines and proudly boast of their open source software for the former. This situation could conceivably be changed by demanding that voting software also be fully disclosed, but there are other reasons why open source code is not by itself sufficient to make voting machines like ATMs.

Individual ATM transactions can be tracked, but individual secret ballots cannot be tracked

Every transaction in an ATM is completely tracked with redundant account numbers traceable to the account holder, and your transaction is photographed for security purposes. In contrast, a secret ballot cannot possibly be associated with such an identifying number and still remain secret. The very secrecy of the ballot creates a virtually untraceable system that is wide open to both fraud and the cover-up of material irregularities. It is not feasible to provide a receipt in elections to prove a transaction because of concerns about using it to sell votes.

To make voting perfectly analogous to using ATMs, you'd have to have every account holder at a bank make a non-traceable cash deposit on the same day (election day) by dropping this anonymous deposit (ballot) into a large bin. Bank officers would then calculate the total amount of money deposited in secret with no public oversight. The account holders would then come back at the closing of the business day with media in tow asking for reliable bank totals and overall account results.

ATM errors have no consequence for users, but ballot tabulation errors have very serious consequences

With banks, you have at least 60 days after receiving your statement, if not much longer, to contest and challenge the transactions involving your account. With voting, there is no possibility at all of correcting your vote after you leave the polling place. In fact, voters are considered legally incompetent to contest their ballots with extrinsic evidence. At any rate, you couldn't locate the specific ballot anyway, and some elections officials cite academic research purporting to prove that voters can not correctly recall their votes after having voted.

Broken voting machines have disenfranchised many, many people who have had to get back to work or school before a functioning one could be made available to them during limited voting hours. A broken ATM just means that you have to go to another bank branch or supermarket, at any hour of the day or night.

In summary, you vote untraceably (assuming that you aren’t turned away unable to access a functioning machine), you're not allowed to challenge or change even your own vote, you're not trusted to remember it, and then the elections officials will refuse to disclose their data (ballots) or their analysis methods (counting software) on the grounds of trade secrecy, but will only release their conclusions (election results). Such a system has absolutely none of the safeguards built into ATMs, which have quadruple redundancy. If you take out $100, you can count the five crisp $20s, check the receipt, cross-reference it with your bank statement listing individual transactions tagged with unique numbers, and if necessary, request the photo of you making the transaction.

ATMs have extensive real world testing that vote counting systems can never have

Principles of elementary systems analysis dictate that any complex system, whether mechanical or electronic, is highly unlikely to ever be free of bugs. Such systems can, however, eventually be made robust and reliable by banging them against reality hard and often. ATMs are part of a complex system that has had most of the bugs worked out of it by being constantly tested in the real world, billions of times an hour, 24/7, 365 days a year. If you run into one that isn’t working, it’s usually no problem to find another one.

In contrast, voting is something we do a couple of times a year, and letting machines with complex hardware and software do it for us must inevitably always be a beta test. This is why you rarely hear of ATMs that don’t work because of heat or cold or humidity, but commonly hear of voting machine breakdowns for those reasons and many others. If we only drove our cars for a couple of hours once a year, they'd suck pretty badly too. Beta test mode is absolutely unacceptable for something as important as voting.

We can safely entrust others with tracking ATM transactions, but we can only trust ourselves to supervise vote tabulation

The current situation is this. We now have no basis for confidence in election results because data and the methods of its analysis are never disclosed, only conclusions. Voters are considered legally incompetent to change or challenge their votes, or even to recall what those votes were. Therefore, we need to fight for democracy here in our time, meaning demanding vote counting methods that are transparent and public, as Thomas Jefferson anticipated every generation would.

[geefloyd46]

22. How bout a radical idea

Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 06:32 AM - Edit history (1)

1 Requirements:
Paper
Pencil (if you don't have a pencil a crayon will do)

2. You write a name on a slip of paper.

3. Then, count them.

This is a form of democracy that appears to have worked for generations before but just doesn't seem to work in the US.

[Do it Right]

23. This is totally amazing

You mean to tell me that after all the obvious cheating and stealing of elections by the rethugs....NO ONE CHECKS TO VARIFY IF THE VOTES ARE ACURATE??????????????????????????? What the hell is wrong with the democrats?????????????? You know the rethugs are going to cheat and yet again you let them doing it over and over again and again. Shame, Shame, Shame.

FOOL ME ONCE SHAME ON YOU.....FOOL ME TWICE SHAME ON MY STUPID ASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[sulphurdunn]

33. E-voting irregularities

are easily remediable. The machine would print a paper ballot that confirmed you cast a vote for whomever you intended. You would then drop that ballot into a lock box by hand. The paper ballots would be counted and would be the official vote tally. That tally would then be used to audit the voting machine that issued it. Discrepancies would then trigger a formal investigation of the voting places where they occurred by an outside panel of experts selected by a court and comprised an odd number of computer and voting expects with no dogs in the fight. If they determined tampering had taken place, they would turn their evidence over to the feds.

[Jim Lane]

35. I largely agree, but with a modification.

Your suggestion is similar to mine (see #21) except that you'd have the paper ballots always tallied and that would be the official count. In that case, why bother with an expensive machine? You could eliminate all discrepancies, and the need to have impartial experts investigate them, by dispensing with the electronic total.

The problem is that tallying can be a very arduous process when there are multiple offices on the ballot. You may deride this objection as laziness, but the fact is that that attitude is prevalent. A proposal to return to routinely counting all paper ballots for all offices in all elections would meet a lot of resistance, and not just from people trying to steal elections.

I would have the machine generate an electronic tally. The paper ballots would be counted only in selected races: when the margin is less than a certain percentage, when there's some reason to question the electronic tally (e.g., a discrepancy from exit polls of a specified percentage, or credible extrinsic evidence of tampering), in the top-of-ticket race, and in another race chosen at random. If the tallies differ, the paper ballots control.

[Mc Mike]

42. + 1 to Wisconsin Dems, the o.p., and the whole discussion. NT