Ohio and Diebold Strike Again

Folks, it’s really time to start making a fuss. The basis of our democratic system is being stolen out from under us, and we’re not even blinking.

I’ve written before about how last year in Ohio (and other places), George Bush surprisingly won the election after all of the polling leading up to the election and the exit polling DURING the election pointed to his clear defeat. I’ve also written about how the Diebold voting machines can be hacked undetectably in about 30 seconds from one of the central tabulator machines. And I’ve mentioned the fact that this is the first time the exit polling has been more than the “margin of error” away from the facts.

Note, I’m not saying it’s the first time they’ve been WRONG. When the end results of an election are so close as to be within the margin of error, races have been called incorrectly. Just ask President Dewey. But this is the first time that the actual results differed from the poll results by a statistically significant margin.

OK, so maybe it happens. One of the problems with statistical random sampling is that occasionally you can get weird results. If you try enough times, eventually you’ll be able to flip a coin one hundred times and get one hundred heads, leading to the experimental result that “coins land heads up 100% of the time.” The problem with it happening just one time (even if it was in polls all across the state) is that it is statistically possible.

But it happened again a few weeks ago, interestingly enough on propositions designed to challenge the use of these voting machines. The propositions were winning in every poll coming into the election, by as much as 2/3 of the voters in favor, and yet the propositions were defeated. Interestingly, the SAME polls called the results on the other elections on the same ballots correctly.

How odd that a vote taken on an easily hijacked voting machine challenging the use OF that voting machine, would fail to pass in spite of overwhelming support.

Wake up and smell the election theft, folks. Free and fair elections are at the core of our nation. They are the bench mark we often use when declaring one country or another an honest democracy or a sham pretender. It looks like our elections are being stolen, and the will of the people is not being accurately represented in the final counts.

It is time for election reform. We need some form of hand-countable paper ballot as an audit trail for recounts. We need some sort of ballot receipt for voters, so that if someone suspects fraud and can find enough voters with certified ballot receipts indicating a suspicious vote count, there is evidence to file a challenge. Perhaps we even need some form of double check in our elections, with voters casting their ballots on two different systems which would be required to act independently, and only if both came up with the same results (within a certain statistical margin of error as long as the net popular result wasn’t different) would the results be certified.

But there is very real reason to suspect that our votes are being hijacked. Even if they aren’t, just the fact that there’s sufficient reason to believe they might be should scare the pants off of everyone who takes the time to vote.

Liam.