[lbo-talk] No, actually, I don't believe it.

[kjkhoo at softhome.net]

At 3:55 am -0500 3/11/04, snit snat wrote:
>At 01:50 AM 11/3/2004, joanna bujes wrote:
>>I don't actually believe that a big turnout is consistent with a 
>>Bush victory. There was a big turnout, particularly of minority 
>>votesrs....and a Bush victory.
>>
>>It's not that I overestimate the American electorate; it's just 
>>that it doesn't add up.
>
>
>i don't frickin' believe it either. 1/3 of the population was voting 
>early and it still looked like the turnout was up at the polls. Then 
>I read that, wherever there is an audit trail, the exit polls match 
>up, but wherever there isn't one, they don't?
>
>And, on the radio, people were reporting that they'd vote, check the 
>screen and see that everything had been changed to the republicans. 
>One woman tried three times and then complained. Sure enough, she 
>was doing it right and something was fucking up by the time it got 
>to the final page. The reporter--and they really stay away from 
>conspiracy theory on this station--said that they figure there was a 
>subtle mechanism to throw out votes every so often, drip-drip-drip, 
>and maybe no one would notice.

For some comfort, the ff. article appeared in the recent CACM Oct 2004 --

ftp://ftp.cs.yale.edu/pub/TR/tr1285.pdf

with abstract:

We examine the effects of a type of electoral fraud easily 
perpetrated by someone with access to the system software for a 
direct-recording electronic voting system. The hypothetical attacker 
modifies the software to arbitrarily change a small number of votes 
on each voting machine. We determine the effect of this manipulation 
on the electoral college results of the 2000 United States 
Presidential election. We conclude that changing only a single vote 
per electronic voting machine can change the outcome of the election.