The indictment describes a conspiracy to exploit this ambiguity in the iVotronic user interface by having pollworkers systematically (and incorrectly) tell voters that pressing the VOTE button is the last step. When a misled voter would leave the machine with the extra “confirm vote” screen still displayed, a pollworker would quietly “correct” the not-yet-finalized ballot before casting it. It’s a pretty elegant attack, exploiting little more than a poorly designed, ambiguous user interface, printed instructions that conflict with actual machine behavior, and public unfamiliarity with equipment that most citizens use at most once or twice each year. And once done, it leaves behind little forensic evidence to expose the deed.
Best of all:
Count 9 of the Kentucky indictment alleges that the Clay County officials first discovered and conspired to exploit the iVotronic “confirm screen” ambiguity around June 2004. But Kentucky didn’t get iVotronics until at the earliest late 2003; according to the state’s 2003 HAVA Compliance Plan [pdf], no Kentucky county used the machines as of mid-2003. That means that the officials involved in the conspiracy managed to discover and work out the operational details of the attack soon after first getting the machines, and were able to use it to alter votes in the next election. Yes, the technique is low-tech, but it’s also very clever, and not at all obvious. The only way for them to have discovered it would have been to think hard and long about how the machines work, how voters would use them, and how they could subvert the process with the access they had. And that’s just what they did. They found the leverage they needed quickly, succeeding at using their discovery to steal real votes, and apparently went for several years without getting caught. It seems reasonable to suspect that if a user interface ambiguity couldn’t have been exploited, they would have looked for—and perhaps found—one of the many other exploitable weaknesses present in the ES&S system.
GHWB demonstrates onset of senility by pimping son Jeb for the WH before the Chimperor has vacated.
Prominent weblogs will no doubt upload the hegemon-pr0n video; we’ll settle for eroticism.
[Update: OK, the soft-core. “You can go back to your, your, your, what do you call it, your Google, and you can figure out all that.” Yours. The presidency is ours, Google is yours.]
Shirky: “Dear Mr. Obama was music to Republican ears while being inert in Democratic hands; expect it to be a template for 2010.”
Stalder preminds us: “To me, this is an indication of how constrained discourse has become, particularly in the US and particularly for the set of activist academics who like to think of themselves as progressives, yet covet their positions as consultants to conservative business and government.”
“There have been many times I’ve regretted it,” [Roger] Stone told me over pizza at Grand Central Station. “When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t have been a war if I hadn’t gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn’t have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn’t become president.’ It’s very disturbing to me.”
This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real mandate.
Well put. A mandate is defined not only quantitatively, by the margin of victory, but qualitatively, by the clarity of the contrast with the alternative.
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.
Louisiana has been a swing state for some time, in which Democrats were dependent on the black majority in the state’s largest city to win. It was not lost on Rove that all of those poor New Orleans African Americans—and their children—being dispersed throughout the nation could only be good for Republicans. As of now, only about 66% have returned, not enough to keep the state swinging (in more ways than one.) It looks very likely that the state will have a Republican Governor and two Republican Senators in 2008. Experts in the area estimate that the congressional delegation advantage for Republicans will be five to one by 2012. There is little doubt that the Katrina diaspora finally turned the state blood red.
Rove’s strategy according to Froomkin’s and Digby’s analysis certainly seems like it could be correct. Below is a detail of Louisiana: at left Katrina damage (from the State Library of Louisiana), at right party shifts (+19% GOP):
(Desperate and Reckless: Ramp up Georgia crisis for votes; call off half the GOP convention; pick a demonstrably unqualified freshman governor to salvage his campaign; call for firing head of the SEC; now ask to have presidential debates delayed or canceled so he can politicize the bailout debate...)
John McCain, on the virtues of presiding while seated:
Offshore drilling:
“I’m sorry Congress is gridlocked again on offshore drilling,” McCain said. “When I’m president, we’ll all sit down together and work this out.” [Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant, Columbus, OH, Jul ’08]
Palin:
“She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.” McCain said in introducing her to an Ohio rally. “She’s exactly who I need.” [AP, Ohio, Aug ’08]
Financing his campaign:
McCain: Right now I’m saying, though, we examine all the options all the time. Every few days we sit down—where are we going, what are we doing, like every campaign I’ve ever been in, what are all the options. [Fox, 21 Oct ’07]
Bipartisanship:
McCain: I know these people very well. I’ve worked with them for years. I’ve reached across the aisle to my favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman, Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, I know these people and I’ve worked with them. Bryron Dorgan on the Indian Affairs Committee, Carl Levin on the Arms Services Committee. I know how to work with them. I know how to sit down with them and get things done. And that’s been my practice and that’s—as long as there are 60 votes required in the Senate that’s what you have to do. I mean there’s no choice. So it makes for a lot of collegiality that otherwise wouldn’t exist. [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Jul ’08]
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:03:50 -0700
From: vim@duncan.cx
Subject: States throw out costly electronic voting machines
The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines.
Bad news:
Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries
but he can't pull out, so the next best thing was to let the fundies pick an Eagleton-Ferraro-Stockdale hybrid for him. He loses, their fault: win-win. (When did he change his mind?)
The entire world drafted an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today, asking him to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and concede the presidency to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois).
Scenario: McCain drops out of the election late, Obama wins uncontested, right-wing noise machine revs up the theory that “He isn't really the president because he didn’t win in a real election”—thereby undermining Obama’s mandate and continuing by other means the project of delegitimizing elections.
