Glitches are BAIT, Whether Intended to Be or Not Is Irrelevant

Mark these words: The Glitches will get Solved. Mostly.

What will be left are the unseen and undetectable glitches and fraud within the software, all wrapped sweetly in the appearance of a smooth election, with handshakes all around between vendors and elections officials, and pre-prepared press releases all going out on time with the magic numbers inserted.

If this industry was bold and visionary enough to come up with HAVA, a thing so radical that most activists are left suggesting helpful modifications of the basic idea, fearful (and with some good reason) that anything more appropriate wouldn't be "realistic". Victory to the visionary, at least for now.

So Thomas Friedman's article in today's or yesterday's NYT is most instructive: If you control the name (or the frame) you control the result. Friedman used the example of how big oil defines alternative energy as a frivolous unrealistic nice try, so that it is never seen as a necessary responsible matter of eventual survival economically and perhaps physically.

I doubt these machines are really this bad for this long through sheer negligence. It smells more like BAIT to me. BAIT for activists to invest all their eggs in the anti-glitch basket, so that the companies can then solve their software problems and pronounce victory, with the new electronic age of reliability fully at hand. They most certainly WILL do so, at the very first semi-credible opportunity.

But then the vendors will have what they really want: a fat contract that can never be allowed to fail (so the government must bail) and a product with built in lack of accountability through secret vote counting software.

Plus, the power to select any politician they want. Even if they never used this power, all politicians had best err on the side of caution and not cross these corporations, cause who knows?? But then, we have it straight from Diebold that Sequoia's parent got into elections for the express purpose of election fraud. http://legistar.county.allegheny.pa.us/attachments/3868.htm Takes one to know one?

It seems to me that these glitches are, in effect, bait. They'll be solved, and they'll function as bait regardless of whether they are intended to be such. Why? Because it's highly likely that beta test elections will improve reliability over time, wiping out the activist investment in anti-glitch information, and creating the illusion of progress. And progress is the very illusion that got them started in the first place. As if it's "progress" to eliminate most of the checks and balances in our elections, and hide the counting of the vote from the Public it is supposed to serve.

The computer is doing exactly what it's programmed to do. :)

Completely agree that any genuine mistakes are glitches, and pursuit of them is a red herring. The real problem is the privatized vote count, proprietary code, which in a democracy shouldn't exist in the first place.

Glitches are mistakes. While fraud, neither inside rigging nor outside hacking are mistakes. :hi:

:)

and i agree we shouldn't use the name glitch to describe intentional or even potentially intentional acts.

But if the act is intentional it is especially capable of being stopped, or made more secretive or without evidence.

You hit the nail on the head with "the real problem is the privatized vote count, proprietary code, which in a democracy shouldn't exist in the first place"

This is why I always advise against focusing on previous election results and the anomalies they contain. We only need to focus on the conditions known to be in place for the next election to reach agreement about what to expect from those conditions. By that I mean secret software with interpreted code will produce inconclusive outcomes every time and we will not have unanimous acceptance of the results because there is no basis for confidence.

See: http://guvwurld.blogspot.com/2005/08/why-old-election-numbers-no-longer.html

I was on solid ground. . . . It will be interesting to see which letters get published in the Shelley smearing Chron tomorrow. Mine was a bit late but I'm curious to see what my neighbors are thinkin'.

glitch stories.

Your point about the "illusion of progress" is key.

Opacity, or lack of accountability is a better long term message because those tabulators aren't going to become transparent, ever.

their attitude is not source code transparency ever, no way no how

there more I know they will NOT get away with it.

Because there will be failures. And there will be costs. And there will be competing for contracts and leaking your oppositions' dirty laundry. And there will be whistle blowers. And there will be disgruntled consumers accruing until there is critical mass.

And there will be that unique resentment that people achieve when they feel a machine is manipulating THEM.

I honestly haven't felt this optimistic since before I watched our election stolen November 2004.

/omission

i suggested the wording, but glitch knocked me out with this:

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=417025&mesg_id=417319>

GLITCH!

put glitch in instead of tread. I wish it were my artwork, but I suck at art, sadly.

how many would you like, what color shirt, golf-type shirt or t-shirt?

... because we allowed ONE DAMN LINE of software to be between a voter and a valid election.


Be The Bu$h Opposition - 24/7

and not the election itself: intensely unknowable and deliberately obscured?

I admit, I was unaware of the Diebold email you linked in the OP. :wow:

Would make for an interesting thread.

we use the word recount alot, we don't want a recount we want two counts of an election one with their scan machines (if they must) and one manual hand count to make sure that the machine count was correct.

Thats checks and balances not a recount, Should we look for a better word to use other than "recount"?

1. It makes perfect sense that they would create strawmen glitches so they could "solve" them, declare victory, and take the air out of the arguments against e-voting. These crooks are the masters of strawmen.

2. I'm also suspicious that, from a technical standpoint, the complexity may in fact continue to make unintentional failures inevitable, and that every fix will engender other problems. This may work to keep the fallibility of machines in the public eye.

One last suspicion: out of the desperate need to retain the majority in both houses of Congress (and to further consolidate a growing hold on the judiciary), Rove et al are now rigging Repub primaries to make sure the "right" Repub. candidate advances to the general election. This may result in more R's challenging the machines, another result of the law of unintended consequences that will work against them.

like a well oiled machine, I think the Republican winner and loser are selected from the start so that ,the loser won't challenge the result.

2. "I'm also suspicious that, from a technical standpoint, the complexity may in fact continue to make unintentional failures inevitable, and that every fix will engender other problems. This may work to keep the fallibility of machines in the public eye".

Number 2 is what I hope for.

"...there will be competing for contracts and leaking your oppositions' dirty laundry. And there will be whistle blowers. And there will be disgruntled consumers accruing until there is critical mass.

And there will be that unique resentment that people achieve when they feel a machine is manipulating THEM."

Once you start screwing your own, things begin to come apart. We're seeing it with Abramoff and the Libby trial. There's a good chance we'll see the same thing here, but damn, we've gotta keep the pressure up.

:thumbsup:

You could win $100!!

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=739414&mesg_id=739414>

"Officials warned that glitches were likely. What a quaint notion that turned out to be."

- The Chicago Tribune

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1112&Itemid=113

by which the Corporate Rulers and War Profiteers stay in power, no matter what. I think I sniffed out an election reform 'glitch' in the phony Baker/Carter Commission on their own preparing a "report to Congress," and acting all official-like, the threat being Congress using that report to federalize our election system, which would, of course, destroy the grass roots election reform movement at the state/local level, and, even if the federal reforms appeared benign, could be changed by a Diebold/ES&S-selected Congress at any time, to, say, mandate electronic voting in all states, and even mandate the vendors (only donors to the Republican Party and rightwing causes would be permitted to tabulate votes in secret--oh, gee, that's what we have NOW), or to take away paper trails, or anything else that is convenient to the selection of Bushites and warmongers for higher office.

I had thought that federalizing elections, and HAVA itself, violate the Constitution, but I've just re-read the Constitution, Article 1, Section 4, and they do not.

Here's the wording:

"Clause 1:

"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."

No help there.

---------------------

And your worries, Land Shark, tend to be the kind I have on my darker days--that people will be tricked (say, with a Hillary Clinton "victory" in '08), and other pitfalls and earthquake zones and swamps and delusions and war profiteering corporate news monopoly illusions and lies, and that they will be led down garden paths and into deep dark forests (if there any of those left) to where witches and goblins and monsters eat good little democratic children.

Bad witches, I mean. Good witches are okay, and much needed. (Goblins and monsters, I don't know. Depends.)

Anyway, your post (which I just read--got pointed at it by sfexpat2000) gave me that kind of fearful bottomless feeling that I sometimes get, that we are in a Corporate/War Profiteer-designed MAZE, and will never get out of it. They have us totally boxed in, cut off. Every democratic institution has been hopelessly corrupted. Everywhere we turn, we see lies, deceit and the "iron curtain" of Corporate Power locked securely against every truth. American democracy is over. There is no getting it back. Etc. Etc.

I think your post is fair warning--and more than credible. It is VERY POSSIBLY a corporate voting system strategy, to retain control over our elections. But--trying to think a little less fearfully here--it could go the other way, and very much backfire on them. That is, the more 'glitches' people hear about, the more suspicious they become of these machines, and the less gullible as to explanations that the 'glitches' have been 'fixed.' And with every 'glitch' battle, there is the opportunity to apprize the voters of what the REAL problems are--'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming, and inadequate audit/recount controls for speed-of-light transactions.

I remember when the 'paper trail' battle started (or somewhere near the beginning). It was one of the first things that caught on with the public. No paper trail? How can you have a recount? They 'can't do' a paper trail? What about ATMs? It wasn't the whole story (paper ballots are what is needed, not just some flimsy, ignorable 'receipt'), but it got people to thinking and asking questions.

I think the questioning phase is at a roar right now--a fire that is being fed by every Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld unlawful act, arrogance, power grab, and notch down in the polls. (32% approval in the latest, I think. How DID these people get elected? How can they go on ignoring public opinion like this? Aren't they afraid of losing Congress in '06? Hm-m-m.) The fire is among the people, not the war profiteering corporate news monopolies; some sparks in the latter; they can hardly ignore all these 'glitches.' I think we have to have some patience (before we despair!), because this truly is a nearly word-of-mouth campaign, and it's taking time.

Another possible scenario, re: the 'glitches' being a ruse, is that they are NOT a ruse, but due to these Bushite corporations really not giving a crap about the machines they are peddling, because they have already done their work. They kept the Bush junta and its 'pod people' Congress in power--despite a huge turnout against Bush in '04 (20 million new voters, most of them motivated to oust these bastards), and corporations, and the rich, and the war profiteers have gotten everything they could ever have conceivably desired, by way of looting the American people, and utterly demoralizing the American people, and destroying our democracy. There is almost nothing left to loot. And they had to do this very fast. Two years--the HAVA timeline to 2004--was NOT enough time to test out a whole new election system nationwide, or to develop adequate software, or to train election officials, or to do anything right. It was very, very rushed--very hastily thrown together stuff, much of it using Windows, for godssakes. In fact, 2004 WAS the first nationwide test of these machines. All very sloppy and half-assed, lavishly larded with money (never a boon to efficiency or competence)--a real mess. And they've only had a year since then. So what we may be seeing is just the real big mess that Tom Delay and Bob Ney WANTED--much like the mess in Iraq. Both, looting opportunities. And I frankly think the electronic fraud didn't work as well as expected, and Ohio and other blatant vote suppression had to be added in.

They may now be USING the 'glitches'--or trying to use them--opportunistically, to hang on to the central tabulators, as election officials and others come under increasing pressure to get rid of the touchscreens, and as the optical scans come under more scrutiny. I've noticed a Bush junta phenomenon of PR-ing by the seat of their pants. I noticed this in the Wilson-Plame scandal, and also during Katrina--not very well thought out cover stories, easily taken apart, sloppiness, lack of attention to detail, probably the result of hubris (or in the Plame thing, real panic). These people--and all who serve them--are fundamentally liars, deceitful to their very core. They don't care how anything WORKS, except as it can be twisted to their own ends.

So I don't know that there is all that much of a fascist political PLAN to use the 'glitches' to keep these systems in place--any more, I guess, than the pharmaceutical companies have a PLAN for when their pregnancy drugs cause birth defects. Oops! Trial and error--but trust us next time. We're fixing it. Typical corporate PR behavior, the point of which is to MAKE MONEY, no matter if anything works right.

I tend to think they're in more of a tangle and a panic--and are doing seat of the pants PR to salvage as much as they can, mainly to retain enough control over elections to keep some kind of lid on investigations of the junta. I just don't think their "trade secret" thing is going to hold up, as more and more people learn about it. I mean, it's ridiculous--it's utterly absurd.

And also bear in mind that MONEY-MAKING is the main goal, of the Bushites and their voting machine shills, and all who travel with this criminal gang. Money, money, money. They've squeezed us nearly dry--taken our money decades into the future, with an $8 trillion deficit (that we know about). They can relent, just a bit anyway. There isn't such an all-fired panic to keep the junta in the White House. They can afford a little charity for the population, say from Hillary, as long as she keeps the war money flowing, and consolidates Corporate gains, and prevents any serious investigations.

The political climate is very changed from 2004. The election fraudsters went all out for that. Not to say, they won't try to keep the system in place. They are. But going to such conspiratorial lengths to do it may not be necessary, in their minds. They have things sewed up for a while--not just the election system, but everything else--the Supreme Court, the corporate news monopolies, the military and intelligence agencies cleansed of dissent, their own coffers BULGING with our money, and the country's ability to fight back has been crippled (not dead, though). Why would they bother with such a Byzantine strategy NOW?

And THAT may be our wedge. Anyway, that's one way of looking at the 'glitches'--as a wedge, a weakness, a way to educate the public, a way to drive these criminal companies out of the business of elections, a way to ultimately get rid of their damnable election theft machines.

I would be more wary of some of our apparent allies--as to a 'glitches' strategy. Suspect groups. Corrupt election officials and legislators.

But yours is a wise warning, Land Shark. I'm not saying it isn't. In fact, I've even half-thought of it sometimes, when the issue of "trade secret" programming is left out of news articles, or left out by supposed election reform advocates. It's worrisome. And I think we need to devise a strategy against it.

address the INVISIBLE glitch of secret vote counting, and the "errors" that happen in their secret programs.

In other words, tie the presently visible to the permanently invisible.