But dead people voted for Kennedy!
You could go down the page and join the chorus making fun of my dog.
I think Standpipe was making a joke about fraud; it's well known that s/he doesn't, in fact, like fat chicks, but that claiming otherwise is useful to his/her real ends.
Meanwhile, voting machines in that contested House district in Florida may have been exposed in a serious security breach (though what the breach indicates about the security stance of their IT staff is way more troubling to me than the breach itself likely was) and nobody gives a shit. LB, is there room next to you on the "Nobody Cared About Outrage 1,000,000, Why Will They Notice 1,000,001" bus?
Possible. I just wanted to complain about people making fun of my dog.
I don't really have much to say about the post, except that the linked Slate article is worth reading -- we've talked about all the issues at length before.
6: Got a link? That one is big -- if the security breach leads to the, what was it, 18,000 missing votes, then that's a clear "Poor security on electronic voting machines actually flipped a Congressional election" story.
This is a pretty old trick of theirs, though, isn't it. Didn't Rehnquist famously make his bones by trying restrict the number of minorities who would vote in AZ?
The article itself is pretty amazing. Is the rise of faceless and scrutiny-soluble organizations a new thing? I'm thinking of groups like the Swift Boaters and ACVF and Concerned Women for America and other groups that clearly exist simply as outraged press release factories with fancy names. I have a feeling that they rose anew with the advent of 527's but my sense of that is really vague and uninformed. Of course there have been groups like the Moral Majority and the like but those at least seemed to have real people involved in them; I'm talking about obvious facades.
(On preview: I'll take a look at Clownae's link and try to dig up one of my own if that's not what I'm thinking of.)
On a quick scan, Clown's link looks to refer to a worm affecting the voter registration database -- ugly, but not the missing votes.
10: Yes, that. The thing that tweaks me isn't that there was any risk to the voting machines from Slammer; Slammer is a pretty stupid worm that just spreads and then spreads again. I'm sure someone could make it do more ominous things than that but really it's just a crude irritant. The problem I see here is all the piss-poor stewardship on display: patches for the vulnerabilities exploited by Slammer have been around for years, they didn't report or disclose it as they should have, they explicitly decided to leave themselves exposed until after the election, etc., etc. It is a shining example of very poor decision-making, lousy prioritizing and the absolute absence of transparency in a process that is supposed to be open and documented.
As LB said, we've covered this before. Checking IDs is probably pretty low grade intimidation, along the lines of that letter about illegals voting in the last election. But ballot security is an issue, if the WA Gov. race informs. I mean really, literally finding uncounted votes days after the election, and just enough to win the recount?
I take a minority position on the election of '60: to compare the newsreels of the young John F. Kennedy walking the streets of Boston and, judging from the reactions of infants, old ladies, pets and house plants, bringing the light of a new sun with him, and images of the hunched, trollish fgure of Richard Nixon is to wonder how many corpses had to vote Republican even to make the numbers look competitive.
? Haven't you just described any recount that changes the initial result? If that looks problematic to you, what would any recount be for?
12: True. It's worth noting, in relation to the missing votes, that one of the things that came out in the course of the discovery of the Slammer incident that the county ignored a bug report from ES&S themselves that may have led to people's votes not being recorded and for a few hours on the first day of no-excuse voting people were turned away from the polls because the Slammer infection rendered the polling places incapable of verifying voter registrations.
Overall, I don't know their network at all so can't legitimately opine as to whether the sort of exposure they apparently found acceptable in one area would apply to all other areas, as well, but organizations generally are terrible at prioritizing. IME, people are either security-minded or they aren't and an organization in which some resources are at risk is likely to have many, perhaps most of their resources at risk. It doesn't draw a direct line to the missing votes but it does further lower the odds I'd give that the county ever manages to sort out those missing votes.
Ballot security is an issue, and so are voting machines, but the Republican legal assault was not aimed at those. It was fraudulent and intended (and worked as) as voter intimidation, and it was not "low grade" in any reasonable sense of the word. It was real voter intimidation.
16. No, I think most recounts are tabulation errors. IIRC, the WA Gov race recounted twice and found for the R, but then two boxes of ballots were found and changed the result. Chain of custody issues would be my question, but I really don't have enough dog in this fight to question the people on the ground.
I just did a quick google to remind myself of the story, and I may still be confused, but if you're talking about the 700 absentee ballots described here it doesn't look as though they were physically unaccounted for, just that they had erroneously failed to be totalled in with the rest of the votes. As you say, a tabluation error.
yeah, too lazy to google it myself. It struck me funny at the time, but if there was no chain of custody issue, then it was just a tabulation error. Probably why I didn't hear any more about it, because there was no there there. Personally, all this nibbling at the margins is a load of BS. Find somebody I can be proud of voting for, as opposed to the lesser weevil.
21 - Except that failing to prosecute anyone for voter fraud in Washington State because there was no evidence of voter fraud in Washington State is apparently what got John McKay fired. There is a multi-pronged Republican effort to get people to just accept, on little to no basis, that there is constant low-level cheating by Democrats (particularly minority Democrats). Tim Johnson's election in 2002 and bullshit allegations of fraud on the Indian reservations in SD is the first time I noticed it, not counting the special case of Florida 2000.
11: there have been a number of posts on Making Light documenting the rise of astroturf (=fake grassroots) organisations.
Is the rise of faceless and scrutiny-soluble organizations a new thing?
When one of my close college friends ran the College Republican organization on our campus, he talked endlessly about the importance of front groups to engage in whatever skullduggeries of the moment were necessary. That's one of the things the CR workshops--directed by the likes of Morton Blackwell and Jack Abramoff--taught their students to do. This administration seems to run things straight out of the College Republican Technology Manual. But I don't doubt that the rise of 527s (as well as internet lists, blogs, and a compliant media) have made these even more effective.
re: 25
Just without the money and influence.