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Aftermath Of Failed Electronic Voting

Slashdot are pointing to a story in the CS Monitor and NPR concerning electronic voting:


A combination of human error (setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes when eight thousand people voted) and a software malfunction (the machine kept accepting ballots after its memory was overloaded) resulted in the loss of 4,500 votes in an election decided by only 2,300 votes.

2004 Election Weirdness Continues

Alot of these stories have been discounted of late, but still worth a look at with regard to the whole subject of e-voting.

I’ve read dozens of submissions about election anomalies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I’ve decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report that shows that optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry. Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters; that machines in LaPorte, Indiana discounted 50,000 voters; in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes; in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards; Lastly, precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.

Paul Krugman: A culture of cover-ups

Krugman’s pre-election thoughts on the lost munitions at al-Qaqaa, and provides yet more food for thought:

The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed another report that Bush officials tried to suppress – this one about how the Bush administration let Abu Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an “NBC Nightly News” report from March that asserted that before the Iraq war, administration officials called off a planned attack that might have killed Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the mayhem in that country, in his camp.

Citing “military officials,” the original NBC report explained that the failure to go after Zarqawi was based on domestic politics: “The administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq” – a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein – “could undermine its case for war against Saddam.” The Journal doesn’t comment on this explanation, but it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that Zarqawi had been targeted before the war, administration officials denied it.

What other mistakes did the administration make? If partisan appointees like Goss continue to control the intelligence agencies, we may never know.

This isn’t speculation: Goss is already involved in a new cover-up. Last week Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times revealed the existence of a devastating but suppressed report by the CIA’s inspector general on 9/11 intelligence failures. Newsweek has now confirmed the gist of Scheer’s column.

The report, the magazine says, “identifies a host of current and former officials who could be candidates for possible disciplinary procedures.” But although the report was completed in June, Goss has refused to release it to Congress. “Everyone feels it will be better if this hits the fan after the election,” an official told the magazine. Better for whom?

What really happened on 9/11, or in Iraq? Next week’s election may determine whether we ever find out

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Stand and Fight

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes an effective call to arms for Democrats everywhere, after their defeat in the elections this week.

The debacle in Iraq that Bush created will also be his to face. At least half of the country understands that the war in Iraq is unwinnable. The most immediate need, perhaps, is for a revived antiwar movement, which not only calls for a withdrawal from Iraq but opposes and prevents new bloody adventures.

The Democratic Party is not the only vehicle for change. Historically, that party’s finest moments have come when it was pushed into action from outside by popular movements, from the labor movement to the civil rights movement to the women’s movement to the gay-rights movement. Such movements–independent of the Democratic Party but powerfully influencing it–must foster and increase their strength. The Nation will support these movements.
We must all stand and fight.

And to make right wingers out there just a bit more angry:

We saw two turnouts and Two Nations last night. Both sides of the chasm saw a major turnout of its voting base. Karl Rove talked about creating a permanent Republican majority. But the truth is, he has a divide-and-rule strategy. And the electoral college amplifies the rural, socially conservative vote. (Twenty percent of voters considered “moral values”–eleven states had anti-gay marriage ballots–more important than the economy or Iraq in this election.)

Perhaps more astonishing than the polling on the murky issue of morality (why aren’t poverty and unjust war considered immoral?) are the figures reported in the New York Times: “Voters who cited honesty as the most important quality in a candidate broke 2 to 1 in Mr. Bush’s favor…” The most mendacious Administration in American history won the honesty vote?

Weblogs inundated

Foxnews, Sky news and BBC news are all reporting stories on how weblogs are likely to be the first news souces for many people during the election. You know things are really bad when this happens:

C:>ping www.instapundit.com

Pinging instapundit.com [63.247.138.238] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 63.247.138.238:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

Dailykos reports:

I’m averaging several hundred thousand pageviews per hour right now. Forgive this site, and many others across the web, if we flake out every so often.

It’s not a fun time to be a web server.

And it’ll only get worse as results start streaming in.

Update:
Dan Drezner’s blog is down.
Samizdata is down.
Wonkette is down.
Kevin Drum is reporting:

A lot of blogs are hard to reach today. I don’t think it’s a DOS attack or anything like that, it’s just very heavy traffic. Mine is running about double its highest ever, for example.

Update:

Glenn Reynolds reports:

TRAFFIC PROBLEMS: It’s really high, and it’s causing intermittent outages. The swell folks at Hosting Matters are working on it. If the site goes down completely, I’ll post on the backup site.

Update:

Wonkette
(on a weblog only occassionally working) reports:

:01am is reporting that several “conservative” blogs (perhaps properly warbloggers) are/were down or have suffered denial of service attacks. Great idea! Because everyone knows how quiet and reserved bloggers are. . . Is Instamartyr.com taken?

Blogs down [601am.com]

UPDATE: Retaliation or just bizarro-world Unabomberism? TPM also down. Thought it could be that Josh’s massive intellect just finally burned through the wires.

UPDATE UPDATE: Everyone’s down: Atrios, Little Green Footballs, Daily Kos. . . it’s an indiscriminate evil who knows know political boundaries. Kind of like herpes. Really: It’s Hosting Matters that appears to be problem. . .

601am reports:

Blogs down

Hearing reports that a number of “conservative” bloggers are down: “Powerline, Malkin, VodkaPundit, Captain’s Quarters”

Buzzmachine (not conservative), and other seem down. And my day job has seen 100% spike in last hour in traffic. Something is going on.

Update: just spoke with my host and we are indeed under dos… there goes free speech.

November 2, 2004 01:44 PM

I would be surprised if someone was DOSing right wing blogs, alot of weblogs on both side of the spectrum are down thanks to huge traffic.


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