DECONSTRUCTING the USA TODAY Front Page Article.

original link to USA TODAY thread: <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x419246>

OK, Let’s deconstruct USA Today. The message is: NOTHING HAPPENED OTHER THAN LACK OF HUMAN EDUCATION, AND WHATEVER IT WAS IS JUST A PROBLEM WITH NEW TECH GENERALLY; IT IS BEING MANAGED.

THE UNDER THE RADAR INFERENCE IS (AND THIS IS THE MOST POWERFUL ONE BECAUSE PEOPLE THINK THEY THOUGHT OF IT THEMSELVES SINCE IT IS NEVER STATED OUTRIGHT IN THE ARTICLE):

THESE PROBLEMS WITH HUMANS USING NEW TECH SHALL PASS, AND SOON.

ok, the paragraph by paragraph breakdown showing how often this theme of "blame the humans" and "new tech goes through a phase" are repeated:
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USA TODAY'S HEADINE: Primary voting-machine troubles raise concerns for '06

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The USA Today article starts with this sentence:

Quote: “WASHINGTON — Problems using voting machines in the Texas and Illinois primaries this month have reinforced fears that the 2006 elections may be beset with glitches.”

TRANSLATION: Humans have problems, that lead to fear of neutral blameless “glitches” which may occur in the future, namely in Fall 2006 elections. Also, "beset" means "to have" but without attributing to a reason, just like "glitch" gives us no reason.

Next step: An Expert is then quoted that new tech often has problems. “Evidence” is connected to “fears” in the quote, not connected to malfunctions, and those fears are future-directed, not even admitting that they are fears attaching to present or past glitches, only future ones.

We then see the Repetition of “new” or synonyms of the concept of "new" including recent dates repeated no less than 5 times in two paragraphs in reference to voting machines. The Graphic is on huge NEW money for voting machines.

Then the article Cites trouble spots: Chicago: problem attributed to humans not trained for judging, jams and lost cartridges probably also human problems. Orr quote repeats the theme “expect it with new stuff”

Texas: contesting election again because of problems “using” the machines. Only one paragraph in the entire article arguably directly refers to machines, and I repeat it in full:

Quote: “In Fort Worth, an initial ballot count showed about 150,000 votes even though there were only one-third that many voters, says David Rogers, campaign manager for the candidate, Steve Smith. And in San Angelo, balky new equipment and a close local race led to a recount that was halted after it appeared some votes were missing.”

But, that paragraph is followed directly by another expert saying “human factors” are to blame “for any glitches”. ( ! ) “and they have been fixed.” (You mean the humans who caused glitches have been neutered?) (FIXED, so citizens need to do nothing)

What was our theme again, in case you forgot?? Oh yeah, another quote: Quote: "Anytime you are using a **new** system, officials have to get used to it," he says. "Our biggest focus now is to increase **training**." (Emphasis added to original)

What do we need to do to the humans?? Oh yeah, in case you forgot the next sentence helps us out again on what the humans need:

Quote: “The next test: 10 states hold primaries in May, including Pennsylvania, which is scrambling to **train** voters and poll workers.”

Is this training a problem? Heroic John Gideon is said to be from a “skeptical” organization and says it’s a “disaster waiting to happen” but we nevertheless close with a final note of reassurance from the masters of technology, again emphasizing the theme started at the beginning that new tech has problems but they are readily solved:

Quote: “The task is **manageable**, counters Michelle Shafer of Sequoia Voting Systems, an equipment maker that has customers in Pennsylvania and 19 other states. "We have **seen this coming** and have ramped up as best we can," and will be ready by November, she says.”

In conclusion, the article says Americans can all go back to sleep now, even if you read a local Chicago paper in the last few days. It's all about dumb humans and new tech.

The real message, which is never expressly stated because then it would be examined by the intellectual portions of the readers' brain is: "This too, shall pass. Don't worry." And besides, it's the elections in FALL 2006 that matter, not these piddly rehearsals!!!

Just a couple days ago, i wrote "Glitches as Bait": <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=418342&mesg_id=418342>

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"x's" on sheets of paper and add them up. Throw the fucking machines out and hire folks with a "C" average or better in GRADE SCHOOL to count the goddamned votes. What the hell is the problem here? REPUBLICANS AND CORPORATIONS, in my opinion.

nobody's fault. An act of God?

So, just more rethug spin on what's going wrong in our elections? :grr:
I hadn't read the article yet. Thanks for posting this.


R'ed

official saying, ...but it wasn't enough to change the outcome of the election."

They will be shamed they ever printed such a worthless piece of trash.

Did they ever mention the billions of dollars thrown into the glitch?

All they do is make excuses, oh well, first you ignore them, then you laugh at them..... they are laughing, now.

It is kinda funny, eh?

The Glitch that stole Democracy! Hahahahahaaaaaaa

is very reliable every bit as much as a public count because when it's only YOU voting in "private" the only one you can screw is yourself!

So basically, even with the secret ballot the whole damn thing is public in the sense that 100% of the places where things can go wrong is open to public observation.

Assholes.

"And besides, it's the elections in FALL 2006 that matter, not these piddly rehearsals!!!"

The worry, again, is future-directed. So nothing has happened today or yesterday, it is merely fear of the future going on here. The important election is the Fall 2006 one, these recent ones really don't matter..... (that's another good, under-the-radar conclusion that is inescapable from the oft-repeated theme as to "fear of 2006")

USA TODAY READER: Fear is cowardly don't you think? I sure ain't cowardly. Hmmm....I think I'll believe in those new machines, myself....

They should be ashamed. Their article is full of "glitches."

accent. Indeed, the use of 'ashamed' as well seems slightly more british.

Holes in the software, holes in the system, holes in the security, holes for votes to fall into, holes for people to get into the system, holes in the ability to verify the totals.

Holes: they wreck your tires, your pants, your socks, your roof, your yard, your alibi, your explanation, your bucket, your air mattress, your heart.

Glitches can be "ironed out", but even when holes are patched, they're still weaknesses.

Holes are suspicious.

BLACK HOLES. They're not just suspicious.... Literally even light can not escape. Sunshine? History...

Nothing escapes those corporate black holes except magic election results numbers.

You explain it real good.

That's why I could not K&R that thread even though I believe the person who made it had good intentions.

Thanks Landshark........

it's not a secret message, it's just that a lot of people are openly saying the problem is because the machines are new.

You think it's not because the machines are new, you think the machines are inherently untrustworthy. The people they spoke with disagree. It's not a conspiracy, they just disagree. And not in secret, they openly disagree.

It may have come from the fact that elections officials and vendors all send out similar press releases and say the same things, I'm sure that is true to a large extent

WHY IT HAPPENS is totally irrelevant to me. I'm just looking at the text itself, and no further.

It's not a simple open disagreement when facts are (not so) openly ignored. The facts were cherry picked for glitches, probably, since you want to speculate, by the officials and vendors quoted.

But the newspaper article is not supposed to have a point of view that takes sides in the debate, but it Does. ANd that is the problem. The news is supposed to report all the facts and let ME or the READER decide. Instead it is guiding the reader in what to think for some reason. Again, who cares where this bias came from, the fact is it beats a couple of points to death and ignores others. Your point that others "openly disagree" on the subject is irrelevant to my point which is that points of view are being totally excluded by the article, and others beaten to death.

when there is a plethora of screwed up primary's , and the news articles all reflect the same exact verbage, quoted by multiple elections officials, in multiple counties, in multiple states.

just like people each sense what they think are the best arguments for their side and tend to filter and gravitate toward similar arguments over time... no agreement necessary it just evolves that way

Many activists have thought that the debate should be about whether a particular election was tampered with. Ernest Partridge has a new Crisis Paper out where he flames the Democrats for not facing the truth that the Republicans have rigged every election since 2000 at least. ("The election results are simply what the GOP wants them to be, as they were in 2000, 2002, and 2004....") Well, dammit, that is a losing argument, and it has been lost over and over again, but some people keep wanting to believe that victory is just around the corner.

It is not the least bit surprising that USA Today would devote all those column-inches to pointing out -- quite accurately AFAICT -- that innocent human error seems to account for the big problems in the recent primaries.

Determining that a problem is caused by "human factors" rather than technology shouldn't be all that reassuring. For instance, the miscount in Tarrant County seems to have been caused by a 7th-grade programming error at the tabulation stage. That doesn't necessarily have to induce the Tabulator Terrors -- we were perfectly capable of misadding numbers before we had computers to do it really, really fast -- but evidently the numbers do have to be checked. That implies, of course, that the election system should be designed in such a way that numbers can be checked. Hmmmm.

Ion Sancho has demonstrated that one can get very good press by focusing on winnable arguments. I actually think a lot of activist leaders are doing the same thing, although it would be hard to tell just by reading DU.

1. Never said no one had the point of view in the article. I'm saying that one point of view is "privileged" above all others: and hammered on. Don't you think that's a difference? Do you find that to be objective journalism?

2. I'm on a lot of other activist group lists and so forth, and active in them so you can't really isolate DU as the only place that sometimes thinks the media is too pro-corporate. I've had reporters in totally unrelated circumstances work their butts of on stories they thought were compelling and great only to find their editors kill the story because it's critical of a common news source that they get a lot of "reliable" stories from (read: makes their work easier, and afraid to be cut off info flow)

3. When it comes right down to it, everything is human. Every line of code was written by a human, etc. So the circumstances tell us only to what degree they are deflecting negative attention away from the corporate product and toward a human.

The Bush v. Gore Supreme court opinion together with the florida supreme court opinions basically break down on only one fundamental issue (I'm taking this from a learned law review that went into this in great detail):

The FL supreme court focused on MACHINE FALLIBILITY

THE US Supreme court in bush v gore focused on HUMAN FALLIBILITY

the background bias or decision on the fallibility issue dictated outcome, or can be strongly argued to have dictated outcome.

so when i see press focus exclusively on human fallibility, it comes down like an ANVIL on top of Wily Coyote in this debate. Whether it is intended to, or not, is irrelevant.

My question is why can't USA TODAY print ALL SIDES OF THE DEBATE IN A BALANCED WAY AND LET THE READER DECIDE?

let me repeat:

why can't USA TODAY print ALL SIDES OF THE DEBATE IN A BALANCED WAY AND LET THE READER DECIDE?

And OTOH, since you're such an academic, you should be forced to argue what you call the "DU side" in a convincing way, as an exercise. It would be good for you. In fact, I'll challenge you to a debate in which we switch places. Cause I don't think you can do it. but it would give you a chance to prove your name, On the Other Hand.

1. Your line of argument recently has been pretty postmodern, so I have no idea what you would construe as "objective journalism." From (3), we have "print all sides of the debate in a balanced way." But, as I thought I had pointed out, that skips the crucial question: what debate?

Journalists stereotypically choose one debate, with roughly two sides, per story. It therefore behooves activists who actually care about winning to think very carefully about what debate they want to have.

To the extent that some activists have pushed to make the debate about whether 2004 was stolen (as opposed to whether the voting system is secure, reliable, and transparent), they have pretty well set us up for bad reporting on things like the primary "glitches."

In the case of this particular article, the writer identified the debate as how smoothly the 2006 elections will go. I agree with you that that is not the most important debate.

2. Whence do you derive the inference that I was defending the media against charges of being "too pro-corporate"?

3. Please reread 1, then reread my preceding post several times slowly.

(Yes indeed, in the end everything is human -- although I take it that in saying so, you do not intend to side with SCOTUS over the Florida Supreme Court.)

4a. What on earth does this mean? Where did I call anything "the 'DU side'"?

I certainly do not consider myself as opposite the DU side -- on the contrary, I think I am in the mainstream. I don't think that, say, Ernest Partridge is more on the DU side than I am when he derisively describes Democrats as "useful idiots."

4b. What is it that you want to debate? And whatever it is, what makes you think that I have set out to see or to portray only one side of that issue? That's not what OnTheOtherHand means, and I think you know it.

LS, I am one of the few people here who respects you enough to disagree with you -- directly. Why does that bother you? I can point you to plenty of posts (and maybe hundreds of e-mails) where Febble and I tried to work out how Kerry could have won. Where are the posts where you took the side opposite your predilections? How many people here who say Kerry won can honestly say, "I spent months trying to convince myself that Bush won, and it just didn't work"? How many can even honestly say that they tried to convince me?

No, I have no interest in "debating" some proposition -- this list has seen too many stupid debates already. If you want me to lay out both sides of a debate as fairly as I can, I will do that for you, and then you can chip in.

probably 5 or more in the average case, though I imagine you know this. But not all equal, and that's what our processes are for, whether they be elections or trials, to reconcile competing views of facts or policies, as appropriate to each institution.

this weeks column by bob koehler of the chicago tribune services will be about my core arguments and quoting me several times. So you can train your sights on that one. www.commonwonders.com It will be posted by thursday, perhaps tonight

you may find to be hyperbole, we'll see, but I'll want specific facts for that

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x419605>

Or I might put it this way: "debates" by construction have two sides, an affirmative and a negative. "Issues" generally have many sides. Journalists, but not only journalists, characteristically simplify complexity by reducing issues to debates -- and the proposition that they choose to debate may not be what any of us would have chosen. Yet we often can influence the choice.

Although George Lakoff is no longer flavor-of-the-month, this is why his insights about framing are genuinely important.

I can't say my typical experience of the Election Reform board is that it offers much more nuanced, multivalent explorations of serious issues than one encounters in the reductive, pro-corporate MSM. But then, you didn't assert that, either.

I don't really understand the point of participating in a thread on the proposition that the Hursti hack (or more likely the security hole exemplified by it) is the "neutron bomb of election fraud." Such a thread was predestined to attract many K&Rs and few substantive comments. As a meme-launch, hey, it may work. I don't especially like the metaphor myself, but if it helps to focus people's attention on the security problems, probably we could do worse.

Did you flight-test the meme with relevant experts? Computer security experts are more qualified to judge the strengths and pitfalls of this rhetorical approach than I am (or than you are). Or, rather, they may not be qualified to offer a final evaluation -- experts often get hung up on the wrong picky-pickies -- but they will be able to anticipate what will happen if reporters start calling other experts asking for comments.

In that vein, I find it very predictable what will happen if reporters call around asking for comments on the proposition that "the election was stolen." Not that anyone needs my expert insight on this point: we have seen the outcome over and over. So, if you find yourself complaining about journalists who reduce the debate to whether there is proof that the election was stolen, and then kicking threads that advocate that meme, you might stop to ask yourself whether you are being the change that you want to see in the world. Or not. It's your call.

You know how serious discussion works. If you disagree with something I have written, state the nature of your disagreement and support it.

Fitrakis and Wasserman are headed down the same hole all over again, see the recent new thread. AFAICT they aren't even interested in using questions about the 2004 election to motivate reform, because they don't have questions about the 2004 election -- they think they know the answers. Good on them. But there is no logical way to get from the glitches (or fiascoes or travesties or whatchamacallums) of the recent primaries to any conclusion about the 2004 election. It may please the audience they are writing for, but that is the problem in a nutshell: they have chosen to write for too small an audience. Or rather, I suppose it serves a legitimate purpose to write for a small audience, but one should no more rely on their political analysis than one should believe that 'the rotten edifice of evolutionary theory is about to crumble.'

I can't tell whether you and I actually disagree about this, or whether you just think I should stop quarreling in front of the family, or what. (Hmm, that can't be it, since you started the fight.) What part of my post #25 do you in fact take issue with? Do you think that howling that the 2004 election was obviously stolen -- and complaining about all the media sources, from USA Today through Mother Jones, that can't seem to get it right -- is on the verge of yielding some spectacular victories? Who do you think actually seems most effective in moving the debate right now, and how?

Now, this thread is mostly not about 2004, but it has a whole 'nother surreal twist. You seem to have convinced yourself that a story under the headline of "Primary voting-machine troubles raise concerns for '06" is first and foremost a story that reassures the reader that the problems are being worked out. Even by my standards, that is too clever by half. You might as well "deconstruct" the weather.

....in such a way that numbers can be checked."

Good idea, we should try that sometime.

In 2004, the system was not designed to be checked, nor were the numbers allowed to be checked. In fact, it was designed so that the numbers could NOT be checked. That design is not a glitch, it was not human error, it was made that way. On purpose.

What USA today fails to grok is that it is designed to be the way it is. Then you had the certifiers passing the system on without really testing it. Was that part of the design, too? I think it is, so do most activists.

So, if someone thinks its all just one big human error, one big, huge, mass glitch, then the credibility of that person must be called into question, no question about it.

It seems the naysayers are hiding behind the mass glitch theory, and not doing the simple addition, but instead continue to just subtract one from one to come up with zero, zero, zero.

The simple math - which escapes USA today - adds up to incompetency and a whole host of other derogatory words to describe the election system used in 2004 and about to be foisted upon us again in 2006.

Therefore, while the claim the election was stolen in 2004 has a limited audience, such a claim has more truth in it than the contrary. It is about the truth, not what the majority believes.

It is, simply this: Could the election of 2004 been stolen? Yes, is the only true academic answer possible.

The contrary: Could it have been as accurate as possible? No, it was not. The testing of the system has proven that, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Therefore, adding up the characters involved, with the history of the system used, the equation concludes: the election of 2004 was stolen.

(1) Whom are you trying to convince of what?

(2) Do you have any evidence that it is working?

I don't think what you are saying is "the truth" at all -- in fact, I can't entirely tell what you are saying. "such a claim has more truth in it than the contrary"?

Just trying to educate. And learn more. It is a fascinating field, this mish-mash of voting systems, eh?

You ask: "I don't think what you are saying is "the truth" at all -- in fact, I can't entirely tell what you are saying. "such a claim has more truth in it than the contrary"?"

Such a claim (that the election was stolen) has more truth in it than the contrary (that it was not stolen.)

You'll have to pardon me... I've almost never been paid for writing, so I do make lotsa' mistakes... like this one below from my post above:
The contrary: Could it have been as accurate as possible? No, it was not. The testing of the system has proven that, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Should have been written like this:
Was the election system we used as accurate as possible? No, it was not. The recent testing of the system has proven that it is very inaccurate.

Now that is much more easily understood, yes?

As election reformers, we have to send the mixed message that even though there's no basis for full confidence in the system, it would be a mistake not to vote. To stay home would just skew the results toward those who continue to have confidence in the system and continue to show up at the polls, and THOSE are most likely to be Republicans, since they've been winning a lot of federal elections lately.

So bash the machines, bash the process, but remind everyone to vote anyway because it's harder to rig the thing if the margins aren't so close.

users will be scared away by all the dang difficulty with humans voting on the dang machines. Do you want to make a fool out of yourself at your local election place in front of your neighbors? No? Then stay home and don't vote!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2192147&mesg_id=2192177

But then, have you noticed how neocons are distancing themselves from the war they created.

This also reeks of middle managers playing CYA, perhaps with a dose of denial. "Glitch" being one way to do that.

frig it, why bother...(sarcasm)