They Stole Another Election

[kster]

Saturday, February 24, 2007

They stole another election - the US Republican Party, that is.

This one was not quite the same as the last few - in 2000 the election was stolen in a variety of ways, from deliberately throwing minorities, especially Blacks, off the ballots, to deliberately keeping Blacks away from the polls, to the out and out stolen election in Florida, absolutely outrageously ratified by an utterly corrupt, vile and criminal US Supreme Court in the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.

At that point, America officially became a banana republic. Anomalies and out and out fraud were widespread in 2000, almost all on the Republican side, and repeated recounts have shown that Al Gore actually won Florida. The despicable US media refused to cover the story of the stolen election and the banana republic-style Supreme Court heist of the election.


SNIP... In 2004, we saw the same thing on a grand scale, followed by a crooked re-adjustment of exit polls by the exit polling companies to cover their asses, a refusal by the media to cover the story of the discrepancy between polls and results, and most disturbingly of all, the beginnings of an organized rightwing media campaign to question the science of exit polls - the theme being, "Exit polls are not reliable".


SNIP... Which brings us to 2006, when the Republicans hacked another election and stole another 3 million votes, just like in 2004. It looks like the software to rig the election was planted there about 3 weeks before the election took place in hopes that that would be enough to win. At the time, polls indicated that 3 million votes might be enough to swing it.

http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/2007/02/they-stole-another-election.html

[IntravenousDemilo]

1. Yes, well, Republicans have been stealing elections since Rutherford B Hayes. n/m

[Kurovski]

2. But now it's big business, election fraud is an actual source of income.

Time to crush fraud--all of it from all parties, and as much as is humanly possible.

K&R

[rumpel]

3. and he points to this article on 2006

a must read

"The voting equipment seems to be designed to support two types of vote count manipulation - techniques accessible to those with hands-on access to the machines in a county or jurisdiction, and wholesale vulnerabilities in the underlying behavior of the systems which are most readily available to the vendors themselves. Malicious insiders at any of the vendors would be in a position to alter the behavior of literally thousands of machines by infecting or corrupting the master copy of the software that's cloned out to the machines in the field. And the groundwork could be laid well in advance. For this election, it appears that such changes would have to have been done by early October at the latest," O'Dell explained.

snip

A separate "Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal," released by the University of Connecticut VoTeR Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering last month, concluded that Diebold's Accuvote-OS machines, optical scanners which tabulate votes cast on paper ballots, are also vulnerable to "a devastating array of attacks." Accuvote-OS machines are even more widely used than the AccuVote-TS.

and we now also know that even the voter registration database is under the control of the vendors with "24 hr support".

Great article, thanks

[OnTheOtherHand]

4. all that may be true, but

where the argument seems to fall apart is the notion that the Republicans decided by early October how many votes to steal, and then were confounded by a late Dem surge. It just isn't possible to find a surge over any plausible time frame that is more than 5 points on the margin:
http://politicalarithmetik.blogspot.com/2006/11/national-forces-in-flux-at-end.html
So, did the Republicans arrange to lose by 3 or 4 points?

The other big problem is that across all the House and Senate races that were polled, the average Democratic showing was within a fraction of a percentage point of the pre-election poll results. So in order to get the Massive Fraud argument off the ground, one has to posit a large underlying anti-Democratic bias in the polls. A bunch of folks have convinced themselves that there is such a bias, but they haven't doubled back to bring the political analysts along.

The nice thing about the parts of the argument you've quoted is that one doesn't have to read them as making claims about what happened in 2006, only what was technically feasible in 2006. Insecure is insecure. The dismal thing about the article quoted in the OP is that it seems to relay serially discredited quantitative arguments in the guise of independent journalism. Oh well.