2016 Elections

[bannination]

GOP Website Announces Mike Pence Debate Winner...Before Debate Begins

"Whoops!"

That was hilarious... my wife actually beat me to finding that piece of news.

.... but I mean, it's not like they'd admit that ' yeah, Mike Pence got his ass kicked.... ' -- someone will still probably lose their job over that! I'm sure the DNC has the same articles prepared in advance....

[bannination]

Which, BTW, Mike Pence is currently getting his ass kicked.

What about Donald's support of nuclear proliferation? Pence: "arghldafjdsaf;asdfhsbalashdfashdfdslafdsaflds" whew, ran out the clock.

[O Really]

Republican party in Minnesota sends out flyer "Would you trust someone who didn't pay his taxes to protect our tax dollars? We wouldn't" Opps.

https://thinkprogress.org/minnesota-rep ... .h6ohfjdkv

[Vrede too]

I think it's likely more methodology than bias. Thinking Trump is doing worse then 538 and the GOP Senate doing better doesn't fit with bias.

[rstrong]

Also:

FiveThirtyEight: Who will win the Senate?

An interesting section on that page: How much each race matters

If you were to move now from North Carolina to Florida, you'd lose two thirds of your voting power and ability to tip the outcome of the vote.

This is important in another way: It's a measure of how much the federal government will "play nice" with a state. The closer the tipping point for a swing state, the better it will be treated by BOTH parties - getting more pork projects, disaster relief etc..

[rstrong]

Last October Memphis voters elected a mayor...

Shelby County uses a GEMS tabulator—for Global Election Management System—which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the county’s election headquarters. The tabulator is the brains of the system. It monitors the voting machines, sorts out which machines have delivered data and which haven’t, and tallies the results. As voting machines check in and their votes are included in the official count, each machine’s status turns green on the GEMS master panel. A red light means the upload has failed.

At the end of Memphis’s election night in October 2015, there was no indication from the technician running Shelby County’s GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadn’t checked in or that any votes had gone missing, according to election commission e-mails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smith’s poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters.

You can remove the Diebold name from the voting machine company, but you can't remove Diebold from the voting results.

[Vrede too]

Thanks. The rest of the article is worse, both locally and nationally.

The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete
Remember when everyone hated hanging chads and wanted computerized voting? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I lived in a county - and state? - that stuck with paper. We never regretted it. Though it's largely to avoid having to go do it on certain days and times, another reason I always vote absentee is so that my vote, at least, will be on paper. Not corruption proof at all, but better.

[rstrong]

Invoking "hanging chad" is a bit of a cop-out for the article writer. That was simply a spectacularly awful ballot design, with spectacularly bad leadership not fixing it after the previous election's fiasco.

I saw the article in yesterday's Risks Forum digest. These digests are must-read for anyone in I.T.. It's a mailing list started on Usenet about dangers and unexpected consequences of new technology.

Except of course when those on the list are predicting and expecting those consequences. Volume 2 - Feb-May 1986 - has a dozen posts on computer voting. (Plus a couple more posts on the Quebec election - the paper voting was accurate but the software used by two TV networks led to wrong winners being announced.)

Over the decades the posts on computer voting look like this:

- If they do computer voting, they need to take THESE precautions or they'll have THESE problems.
- They're doing computer voting. No word on whether they took those precautions.
- Oh crap. They're not taking those precautions.
- Aaaaannd there's the problems we predicted.
- NOW maybe they'll take those precautions, before the next election.
- Nope. Here we go again.
- And again.
- And again.
- Funny how Diebold isn't...
- And still not...

One of my IT nightmare stories bounced around Usenet before making it into The Risks 19 years ago. A couple more of my posts have made it in since then.

[Vrede too]

Sometimes, the Luddites are right.

[rstrong]

Nah. A bad computer voting system is to computer voting what a bad paper ballot design is to paper voting. Both cases had easily predictable problems with easily recommended solutions. Both were put into place regardless with the predicted fiascos. Both were left in place anyway, and the fiascos repeated.

The Palm Beach County ballot design led in 1996 to Bob Dole having 14,000 ballots tossed out because of double-punching, and God knows how many more lost to punching the wrong name. "Luckily" in 1996 it made no difference in the election results. In 2000 it did, and the bad design was tossed. It's the same for computer voting. No fix until one day the problems make an obvious difference in an election.

[Vrede too]

My bad. I guess that it technically is, but I wasn't thinking of punchcard voting when talking about paper ballots. I meant the traditional fill in the square next to a name.

[billy.pilgrim]

I keep hearing about early votes are thrown out when someone decides that the signatures don't match.

Or is it that they can toss votes they don't like

[JTA]

Thoughts?

[Boatrocker]

Thoughts?

GoFundMe account, to raise money for a permanent move to a place that is already such a libertarian paradise. No coherent country- especially one the size of ours- can function as an anarchy. Not logically possible.

[Boatrocker]

I have a question, myself (which I posed on another board and copy here), in regards to conjectured wins by Hillary Clinton and enough congressional wins to either nullify the TeaOP constipation in both houses or even establish a majority, as well as add oxidizer to the funeral pyre of the GOP.

Majorities in the Senate and House are great, but . . . I still see a larger problem looming, even if the trumphole and a batch of TeaOP congressional toads go down the crapper next month. Namely, we as a country will still have all those deplorables- all the idiot, white supremacist, unwashed, uneducated, spit-spraying, redneck trailer trash assholes that are trump supporters. They'll still be here. They'll still be abysmal, backward idiots. They'll still have sexual relationships with their firearms. They'll still be racist and misogynist. They'll still be 11's on a Dunning-Kruger scale of 1-10. And they'll only get stupider and wingnuttier and more violence-prone in defeat.

Now, what kind of pure, unimaginable fucking horror will these sub-humans be drawn to in 2020?

Perhaps it's just my cynical nature in an election climate that no one alive today has seen on a national scale, but I am truly concerned about this.

[O Really]

All those people have always been around, but Trump let them out from under their rocks, similar to George Wallace in '68. They'll still be there after the election, but without their loud, rich, and very unusual mouthpiece will likely go back under the rocks after a while. Whatever Trump does after the election won't be staying around as a "leader" of a "party" that's a loser.

[rstrong]

Thoughts?

Childish fantasy.

Whether the author likes it or not, he was born into a civilization. The people around him have decided that they LIKE the benefits and protections of civilization. That means some form of government.

Having said that, it's not all bad for the author. If he's lucky enough to live in a western democracy like the US, he gets a say in that government. And he can get a far greater say if unlike most people he participates in that government - as a candidate, activist, journalist etc.

Even better, he'll have a bill or charter of rights and other safeguards to protect him from "the tyranny of the majority."

And if that's STILL not enough, he's allowed to leave. There's at least 192 other countries out there, plus a few micro-nations. A few places have effectively no government. No-one is demanding his consent to be governed; they're only demanding it "if he lives *here*."

He sounds like the usual "sovereign citizen" type: Insisting on not being governed by the rules of the road (like having a driver's license) while still insisting on using the road that others via the government built. Declaring that courts have no authority over them while using the courts to endlessly attack others. And far worse.

Like it or not the roads and hospitals and infrastructure has been built and are maintained, by others via the government. Declaring your yard a micronation simply isn't practical. Sooner or later you - or goods and services - will have to cross the border. If you have the right to block that, then so does the country surrounding you.

[billy.pilgrim]

Thoughts?

I worry about these people you hang with. Utopians and libertarians sure talk a warm and fuzzy life, but both have a similar inability to deal with consequences.

Better to work within the fucked up system we have to limit government; I don't mean the crap we get from republicans and their insanity at public bailouts because their deregulation went wrong.

User fees would go a long way toward a free market value of goods and services, while allowing a non user to skip taxes on that particular service. It wouldn't work it many areas, epically social services, education, etc, but why not fund every government service associated with air travel and fright through users. Same for highways. There are so many areas where this could be used and it JTA's friend pays a small gas tax to run his vehicle and doesn't have to subsidize walmarts trucks, trains, ships and planes.

I really don't like the idea of making libertopians pay for my plane ticket.

[billy.pilgrim]

I have a question, myself (which I posed on another board and copy here), in regards to conjectured wins by Hillary Clinton and enough congressional wins to either nullify the TeaOP constipation in both houses or even establish a majority, as well as add oxidizer to the funeral pyre of the GOP.

Majorities in the Senate and House are great, but . . . I still see a larger problem looming, even if the trumphole and a batch of TeaOP congressional toads go down the crapper next month. Namely, we as a country will still have all those deplorables- all the idiot, white supremacist, unwashed, uneducated, spit-spraying, redneck trailer trash assholes that are trump supporters. They'll still be here. They'll still be abysmal, backward idiots. They'll still have sexual relationships with their firearms. They'll still be racist and misogynist. They'll still be 11's on a Dunning-Kruger scale of 1-10. And they'll only get stupider and wingnuttier and more violence-prone in defeat.

Now, what kind of pure, unimaginable fucking horror will these sub-humans be drawn to in 2020?

Perhaps it's just my cynical nature in an election climate that no one alive today has seen on a national scale, but I am truly concerned about this.

Agreed. This is different than wallace; this thing lives and breathes and its name is destruction of anything in its way by whatever means necessary.

Roger and Donald and the Trump Network is just around the corner and will make this sick damage Fox did to our country look like the good ol days.

we have become an increasingly divided country since reagan and his crew ended the Fairness Doctrine. I don't care who says it is unconstitutional, it gives people less access to lies

[Boatrocker]

All those people have always been around, but Trump let them out from under their rocks, similar to George Wallace in '68. They'll still be there after the election, but without their loud, rich, and very unusual mouthpiece will likely go back under the rocks after a while. Whatever Trump does after the election won't be staying around as a "leader" of a "party" that's a loser.

I am unconvinced they will return to their rocks. I find the Wallace similarities to be much different and I don't see them letting go of their new "freedom" to come out of the closet and be openly, proudly hateful, regressive and volatile. They have a collective attention span no longer than trump's, but I fear the monster has been fed too well for too long to just lie down.
I'll be quite glad to be wrong, but I fear these rabid Neanderthals. It's hard to unmake a monster.