I have a Canadian cousin. Actually, I have many Canadian cousins, but I was talking with this one last year. He said, “Here we take a pencil and mark a paper ballot. When the polls close people count the ballots. The results are in by midnight.”
It all sounds very childish.

Posted by: mistah charley | Nov 9 2005 14:14 utc | 4

Automation, your voting is done by a machine.

Posted by: ken melvin | Nov 9 2005 16:44 utc | 6

Illiberal democracy
… The term is almost always used to denote a particularly authoritarian kind of representative democracy, in which the leaders and lawmakers are elected by the people, but tend to be corrupt and often do not respect the law.
… The ruling party or leader—after winning multi-party elections that are mostly free and fair—behaves in a manner that violates the constitutional rights and liberties of the general population.
An illiberal democracy is marked by the tension between how a government is selected and how that government behaves. Illiberal democratic governments believe they have a mandate to act in any way they see fit, disregarding laws or the constitution if they desire, as long as they hold regular elections. They often centralize powers both between branches of the national government (violating the separation of powers) and between different levels of government and private associations. The former is more noticeable, the latter more common.

Posted by: Outraged | Nov 9 2005 17:11 utc | 8

My Canadian cousin is in Nova Scotia – less money there, so it’s less advanced than the big provinces.

Posted by: mistah charley | Nov 9 2005 18:51 utc | 10

From a recent open thread:

Why is this
story about the 2004 elections not getting way more noise and attention in progressive land?
~ catlady

Hope out of “The Land of Enchantment.”

Posted by: manonfyre | Nov 9 2005 20:16 utc | 12

Didn’t click through the first time but did now. Thanks for posting the info on the Diehard voting machine irregularities. So the Bum wasn’t even elected the 2nd time either. Do you think he’ll ever realize that?

Posted by: christofay | Nov 10 2005 9:39 utc | 14

if you scroll down on this link you will find a link connecting you to a video of bev harris from blackboxvoting demonstrating to howard dean how easy it is to program the diebolds. it is incredibly easy.
“… an unauthorized person with access to the GEMS server can access the database and change ballot definition files and election results.”

Posted by: annie | Nov 10 2005 11:32 utc | 16

a must readHas American Democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005’s referenda defeats?

Issues Two-Five were meant to reform Ohio’s electoral process, which has been under intense fire since 2004. The issues were very heavily contested. They were backed by Reform Ohio Now, a well-funded bi-partisan statewide effort meant to bring some semblance of reliability back to the state’s vote count. Many of the state’s best-known moderate public figures from both sides of the aisle were prominent in the effort. Their effort came largely in response to the stolen 2004 presidential vote count that gave George W. Bush a second term and led to U.S. history’s first Congressional challenge to the seating of a state’s delegation to the Electoral College.
Issue Two was designed to make it easier for Ohioans to vote early, by mail or in person. By election day, much of what it proposed was already put into law by the state legislature. Like Issue One, it was opposed by the Christian Right. But it had broad support from a wide range of Ohio citizen groups. In a conversation the day before the vote, Bill Todd, a primary official spokesperson for the opposition to Issues Two through Five, told attorney Cliff Arnebeck that he believed Issues Two and Three would pass.
The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided, an even broader margin than that predicted for Issue One.
But on November 8, the official vote count showed Issue Two going down to defeat by the astonishing margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor. To say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility is to understate the case. For the official vote count to square with the pre-vote Dispatch poll, support for the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with virtually all the undecideds apparently going into the “no” column.

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But the Sunday Dispatch also carried another headline: “44 counties will break in new voting machines.” Forty-one of those counties “will be using new electronic touch screens from Diebold Election System,” the Dispatch added.
Diebold’s controversial CEO Walden O’Dell, a major GOP donor, made national headlines in 2003 with a fundraising letter pledging to deliver Ohio’s 2004 electoral votes to Bush.
Every vote in Ohio 2004 was cast or counted on an electronic device. About 15%—some 800,000 votes—were cast on electronic touchscreen machines with no paper trail. The number was about seven times higher than Bush’s official 118,775-vote margin of victory. Nearly all the rest of the votes were cast on punch cards or scantron ballots counted by opti-scan devices—some of them made by Diebold—then tallied at central computer stations in each of Ohio’s 88 counties.
According to a recent General Accounting Office report, all such technologies are easily hacked. Vote skimming and tipping are readily available to those who would manipulate the vote. Vote switching could be especially easy for those with access to networks by which many of the computers are linked. Such machines and networks, said the GAO, had widespread problems with “security and reliability.” Among them were “weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management and vague or incomplete voting system standards, among other issues.”
With the 2005 expansion of paperless touch-screen machines into 41 more Ohio counties, this year’s election was more vulnerable than ever to centralized manipulation. The outcomes on Issues 2-5 would indicate just that.
The new touchscreen machines were brought in by Blackwell, who had vowed to take the state to an entirely e-based voting regime.

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And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling—dead accurate for Issue One—was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count.
If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.
And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION AND IS RIGGING 2008

Posted by: annie | Nov 12 2005 3:13 utc | 18