Reply #37: Too time-consuming to respond to all this but...

[Bill Bored]

Dude, I already told you there aren't going to be HCPBs in NY. Not even just for Federal elections; not even for a statistical audit! We've been there and NOT done that. The choice is: levers or computers.

The rub is, you don't seem to know the first thing about lever machines, NY's Election Law, or procedures. ALL the lever counters have to be checked to be sure they are zeroed out before every election. There can be NO stuffing of votes for Bush or anyone else. You can't do this reliably with computers though. Harri Hursti proved that with his optical scan hack in Florida. The software-based counters are meaningless! The mechanical counters are not.

And besides, as the EIRS indicates, no Democrat is going to vote on a machine that's "stuck on Bush" without wanting to vote for Bush. They would wait for a paper ballot. And if they leave before they get one, it would NOT show up in an exit poll!

You still haven't come up with the number of machines it would take to account for the exit poll discrepancy. And you now admit they don't allow vote switching. So I guess that's progress.

But you should know that Richard Hayes Philips is a lever supporter. He thinks the levers matched the exit polls. He's wrong about that, but he's correct about everything else. Maybe you should actually read what he says about lever voting machines. See:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/In-Defense-of-Levers-by-Richard-Hayes-Phil-080727-985.html

Oregon's voting system is one of the least verifiable ones because it's 100% vote-by-bail, which means there can be no real ballot accounting, and it's also 100% central count, which means there can be no meaningful observation either. And of course the counts are all software counts as well, so none of them can be trusted. And BTW, it's not the only state that's 100% paper ballots either. Not sure where you get that from, but you ought to check your sources. They are obviously not informed.

With so many strikes against Oregon's voting system, all you can say is they had an "exit poll" that matched their vote counts, and because of that, we should try to emulate them? That's way off the deep end. You need to start thinking about the voting systems -- not just the damn polls!

If you're going to make an argument that an "exit poll" conducted in a vote-by-mail state is accurate, because exit polls in general are accurate, it's completely specious because with vote-by-mail, it's NOT even an EXIT POLL! It's a telephone survey.

None of the arguments about how exit polls are so accurate, because they ask people randomly leaving the polling places how they just voted, apply to Oregon. There ARE no POLLING PLACES in Oregon!

And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think all the telephone polls were closer to the vote counts than the exit polls, weren't they? (You already said absentees were closer in NY, right?) So what does that say about exit polls? Uh, maybe that not everyone wants to take them? Maybe that those who did weren't selected at random after all. Maybe that they are LESS accurate than telephone polls.

According to you, the whole country should vote by mail so you can have a more accurate poll! I don't think so, because absentee voting is extremely fraud-prone.

What I hear from you is that no matter how f'ed up a voting system has the potential to become, all that matters to you is how it performed vis a vis some poll. That's not how we go about designing a secure voting system. Not in the least. In fact, it's a MAJOR distraction, which is something that Rove would be interested in as well, don't you think?

A culture of fraud never developed with the lever machines, because it would be too difficult to pull off large scale fraud with even the simplest of checks and balances. That's the bottom line. You might find a few problems here and there in places like FLORIDA (surprise, surprise!), but in a State like NY that had the Tammany Hall experience, they've known how to prevent that kind of mischief since the 1890s.

Only computers can send us back to the 19th century now, because our election officials and lawmakers haven't a clue how to deal with the kind of fraud that they enable. Those of us who live and vote here, and have been watching the story unfold for the last 6 years or more, know this only too well.

Exit poll true believers are no friends of election integrity in New York at this time. Frankly, it raises questions about there motives overall, and who they might be working for, because NY is the only state not to computerize its voting system and subject its voters to all the inherent risks of doing so -- which can NOT be mitigated with exit polls. Most New Yorkers want to keep it that way, despite what the officials are saying and doing.

Oh, and the 80 machines with zero Obama votes? There were actually a lot fewer than that:

A subsequent investigation by the city's elections board found that Mr. Obama received no votes cast in voting machines in 27 election districts, many of which saw few votes cast on February 5.

A spokeswoman for the board, Valerie Vazquez-Rivera, said an investigation found that inspectors in 35 election districts were responsible for the error showing Mr. Obama winning no votes, and that members of the police department, who help tally the votes on election night, were responsible for the error in 20 election districts.
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/official-tallies-released-for-clinton-obama/71941/

So why perpetuate the myth that there were 80?