How to rig an election
If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win, I wouldn't do something easily detectable like changing 2% of votes to be for my candidate or making some machines break down at 5pm to give the the working class a difficult time. Instead, I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts.
With this scheme, blame for any election-tipping would mostly go to "user error" rather than poor design. Even better, the voters who committed the errors will mostly be democrats, which will make democrats look dumb once again.
May 25th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Genius!
How long is it going to be before the gov’t realizes if we can just use an ID # (social security # or maybe something intergrated with the new RealID cards) and then just go online, choose everything, see like 3 confirmation screens to make sure, and then our vote would be counted. I know- there’s a lot of things that could go wrong or be hacked and such, but still, imagine how much money they would save, and then this way people without an internet connection could just go out a vote regularly. It would make the polls less crowded, easier to vote, and more $$ for machines (since an internet way would be cheap, if they did it right).
Just my opinon.
May 29th, 2005 at 2:46 am
Because it’s easier to believe that a chain of elections were rigged than it is to believe one party may actually have consistently lost major elections over a two decade span.
Come on, at least put the political viewpoints into a non-technical blog.
May 31st, 2005 at 8:26 am
> Because it’s easier to believe that a chain of elections were rigged than it is to
> believe one party may actually have consistently lost major elections over a two
> decade span.
Just like it’s easy to believe exit polls to be way off target for the first time in…well…recorded history.
Interesting take.
May 31st, 2005 at 12:54 pm
I didn’t follow the 2004 election closely enough to say whether this happened in 2004, but I do think it could happen in the future.
July 25th, 2005 at 1:02 am
Jesse,
Although we have (very) different takes on politics, I visited your site looking for FF/Moz “Security Information” and you do a great job providing that.
I’m used to hearing the kind of partisan ideas that you espouse, and of course you’re wrong and I’m right ;) (OK I’m “Left”, but I digress), but I’m thinking about the people who are new to FF (or thinking about using it) and might stumble across your site.
Do you think it’s appropriate to mix technical information with your *personal* political views?
Have you considered that you are probably alienating potential users?
OR, maybe you feel that only “Conservatives” should use Mozilla products?
I doubt that’s the case, but when so many of us are trying to get new people to try/use FF (especially right now with all the issues w/ the latest version(s)), ANYTHING that could [unecessarily] turn off potential users should be avoided. If not, what that says is that you feel your political views are more important than Mozilla/Firefox.
Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but I (and others whom I’ve shown this site to) feel that this is NOT the appropriate place.
We ALL want to “Spread Firefox” right?
I really hope that you give this some serious thought.
BTW: If you visit my web site, you’ll notice that I don’t have a “Spread Firefox” [button] there. I [tried] adding one to my Blogger “template”, but not really knowing what I was doing, it wouldn’t show up.
I thought I followed the instructions on the FF page, but I must have screwed something up. If you have any links or suggestions that might help me add it correctly I’d really appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Tom D.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:24 am
By my count, three people have accused me of bringing partisan politics into my blog with this post, with two people thinking I’m a republican/conservative and one person thinking I’m a democrat/liberal. I don’t know whether I should be offended or amused.