EU Profiler: the authors of Kieskompas, a "Vote-O-Mat"-style tool for the undecided Dutch voter, following up on their adaptation for the US Presidential election (previously on MeFi), will launch an EU-wide version for the European Parliament elections upcoming in June. So Europeans, urge your political parties to register! The tool itself will launch in May.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Mar 29, 2009 - 6 comments

Project Vote 2008 aims to repair "vote caging" [discussed previously] by compiling Google spreadsheets of affected households. Check your own status, and alert friends or neighbors you find there that their voter registration status is at risk for "alleged or actual deficiencies." [more inside]
posted by jayCampbell on Oct 3, 2008 - 27 comments

Had enough election coverage this year? If not-- or if you forgot that countries besides the USA have elections too-- you can see details of elections the world over via Electoral Geography 2.0. Browse elections in chronological order or by country, or read scholarly articles on various elections. Not comprehensive (yet!); in general, the more recent, the more coverage.
posted by Rykey on Mar 9, 2008 - 4 comments

Pennsylvania polling places regarding September 08 elections to have everything but voters.
posted by duende on Oct 26, 2007 - 31 comments

The Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his "impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted by jonp72 on Aug 27, 2007 - 43 comments

California Restricts Voting Machines: after a source code review of voting machines turned up "significant, deeply-rooted security weaknesses" in voting machines by Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia, the California Secretary of State decertified all three vendors' systems. These weaknesses have been well covered here at MeFi, but some are bad enough to shock even the well-jaded, including the revelation that Diebold "uses at least two hard-coded passwords -- one is 'diebold' and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8." Time to think about open voting?
posted by jacobian on Aug 5, 2007 - 48 comments

The Polling Place Photo Project is an experiment in citizen journalism that intends to collect photographs of every polling place in America next Tuesday.
posted by coudal on Nov 2, 2006 - 19 comments

Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. ...A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said. ... Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. ... Early voting problems already in Florida.
posted by amberglow on Oct 30, 2006 - 107 comments

Mexico's election: now being recounted, but some are saying it was stolen with our help. Many countries in Latin and South America have been moving to the left lately, following in the footsteps of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile. Argentina actually caught us messing with things during their election, too. Exit polls in Mexico (as in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004) showed a lead for the more leftist (relatively) candidate, and for those who scoff at using exit polls as evidence--in 2004, US Republican Senator Richard Lugar, in Kiev, cited the divergence of exit polls and official polls as solid evidence of “blatant fraud” in the vote count in Ukraine. As a result, the Bush Administration refused to recognize the Ukraine government’s official vote tally. So, honest election, or what?
posted by amberglow on Jul 3, 2006 - 65 comments

E-voting systems hacker sees ‘particularly bad’ security issues ...On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs.... More from the Washington Post here, where ... Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. ..."Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no. ... Verified Voting and Black Box Voting have much much more on all of this.
posted by amberglow on Jan 23, 2006 - 58 comments

Site Bars Black Box Voting Head "A politically progressive website at the forefront of discussions about electronic-voting machines and election irregularities is barring Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris from posting to its site. In a written statement, site administrators said that they barred Bev Harris because her postings on the site 'have made positive discussion of verified voting increasingly difficult.' .... 'We no longer believe that it is productive to allow her to use DU as a platform to promote herself while simultaneously trashing us, our moderators and others who have been previously supportive of her cause,' site administrators wrote in the statement."
posted by ericb on Dec 7, 2004 - 23 comments

In sworn affidavit, programmer says he developed vote-rigging prototype for Florida congressman; Congressman’s office silent - Will this go the way of the Wayne Madsen report? Perhaps this is, as some have noted, just another Rovian Hit. At this point in time, I keep my tinfoil hat ready. Even if it were true, I doubt the Republican-majority-ed House and Senate are can hardly be expected to investigate themselves. For now, I just keep laughing at HERCUBUSH (Quicktime) (Real) and trying to convince myself that we are all in Bush now.
posted by jackspace on Dec 6, 2004 - 35 comments

Florida is the New Florida Although many discussions of voting anomalies focused on Ohio, a statistical analysis of Florida voting patterns performed by sociologists at University of California, Berkeley suggests that electronic touch screen voting in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade may have credited George Bush with up to 260,000 extra votes in Florida. The discrepancy is not enough to change who won Florida, but it could have narrowed Bush's lead to 90,000 votes instead of 350,000, highlighting the need for better auditing of elections with electronic voting.
posted by jonp72 on Nov 18, 2004 - 33 comments

Yale Law School Dean : "I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud" Ian H. Solomon's belated realization : "Could we have been so naive?....by my presence, along with other Democratic lawyers, I lent an air of legitimacy to the voting process....We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step....I realized that I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud....The time is now for voters from all states that used electronic voting machines to request an audit of results and a manual recount of ballots if possible."
posted by troutfishing on Nov 16, 2004 - 41 comments

Robert J. Vanderbei is trying to show us we're not as divided as it seems.
It's not quite the City Vs. Country conflict that you may have understood it to be in this years election. Methinks, perhaps, this extends to other political opinions as well.

Lots of great voting result visualizations are available at this blog. Including my favorite, state results, with electoral votes dictating the relative size of the state. I'm not explaining it well. Go look here.

I *promise* this'll be the last political post for a while. I know we're all wretchedly sick of it.
posted by Parannoyed on Nov 7, 2004 - 24 comments

A bizzare pattern of impossible anomalies This has long been known : the welter of financial ties of Diebold and ES&S to the radical religious right (with stakeholders currently, it seems, on the secretive CNP) and Bob Fitrakis notes : "Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow." Howard Ahmanson was the original funder for Bob and Todd Urosevich's Data Mark,which became ES&S, Bob later left to head Diebold ,maker of HAVA Act mandated touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere....Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist (a form of Dominionism ) who has talked of imposing Biblical law on the US - including the death penalty for gays and drunkards - and is also a main funder of the Chalcedon Foundation. However, the most bizzare patterns of anomalies in Florida came not from touch-screen but optical scan machines. Florida's central vote tabulator also is Diebold made, raising questions on the a bizzare pattern of anomalies in which a large number of counties in Florida had increases in Republicans votes over expected levels - by an overall average of 50% to 100% and - in one county, as high as 700%. Meanhwhile, here are graphs of variance between exit poll results for battleground states.
posted by troutfishing on Nov 5, 2004 - 85 comments

As the polls close election results come in. (A full list of official election result websites inside.)
posted by calwatch on Nov 2, 2004 - 441 comments

Counting the Real People’s Vote. A motion for the electoral college, a separation of voters into "real people" and the "secular urban base."
posted by four panels on Oct 27, 2004 - 43 comments

Rock the Vote last month sent out about 600,000 emails to prospective voters regarding the possilbility of a draft. Now GOP Chairman Ed Gillespie has sent a cease and desist letter to try to get RTV to stop. You can read Gillespie's letter(pdf) as well as Rock the Vote's head Jehmu Greene's response(pdf).
posted by bitdamaged on Oct 25, 2004 - 22 comments

Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.
posted by Skygazer on Oct 22, 2004 - 94 comments

2 Percent: Original recipe.
Extra crispy.
It's not that tough a choice.

So, what's up with those undecided voters? A slightly more polite version of Samantha Bee's "How the f*** do you dress yourself in the morning?!" question.
posted by GriffX on Oct 20, 2004 - 36 comments

Operation Clark County "Remember that it's unusual to receive a lobbying letter from someone in another country." The Guardian takes an initative for those of us overseas wondering if there's anything helpful we can do about you-know-what. Write to a swing voter, explain how you feel. Some samples are on offer, their hectoring tone could have quite the wrong effect. If you were a computer selected Clark County voter, what, from a foreigner, would change your mind?
posted by grahamwell on Oct 13, 2004 - 17 comments

The Afghans vote for Karzai.
All 15 of President Hamid Karzai's rivals said they were withdrawing from the election because systems to prevent illegal multiple voting had gone awry. The move effectively left Karzai as the only candidate in the fray.
posted by mr.marx on Oct 9, 2004 - 61 comments

So I saw this image online (of a Michigan absentee ballot...which arrow is for Kerry, and which is for Bush?) and it made me think, what the hell is going on with this election? On the one hand, I'm told your vote might just be worthless if you use electronic voting machines but on the other hand the alternative (in my state, at least) is to use an absentee ballot, which, according to some, might be easier, if only because I can have members of a political party help me fill it out.
posted by taumeson on Oct 1, 2004 - 49 comments

What Are You Voting For?
posted by Yelling At Nothing on Sep 21, 2004 - 23 comments

1,000 Reasons to Vote Against George Bush. Reasons are in alphabetical order, by category. Last updated Friday, August 13, 2004, 5:18 PM
posted by Peter H on Aug 13, 2004 - 60 comments

Florida county loses 2002 E-voting records in computer crash Ooooops. Do your Congresspeople and Senators support verified voting ? - Check the VerifiedVoting.org database (verifiedvoting.org previously mentioned here) to see if your political reps support H.R.2239 and S.1980, the tandem bills before the U.S. House and Senate which would mandate paper-trail voting. "Electronic miscounts of votes are a fact, not a theory...Technologists warn that electronic voting machines are flawed. They say we should "trust but verify." " Others disagree....with Democracy.
posted by troutfishing on Jul 28, 2004 - 26 comments

DOWN FOR THE COUNT At around 8:50, Soubirous’s campaign manager, Brian Floyd, received a call from an election observer in Temecula informing him that the vote count had been stopped – apparently by Registrar Mischelle Townsend herself. The reason was not made clear. So Floyd and another Soubirous campaigner named Art Cassel jumped into a car and drove to Townsend’s office to investigate. Sure enough, the counting area appeared to be near-deserted. But then they noticed two men huddled at one of the vote tabulation computers.
posted by jonah on Jul 27, 2004 - 53 comments

Punkvoter is about organizing the many diverse and regional movements into one voice of political change. Punkvoter is our way to educate today’s youth about what is really going on in Washington, DC and how we can collectively force change. This is our chance to be a strong voice against the serious flaws in the current political system. This is our way to talk about new laws and scenarios that could change our quality of life for years to come. Punkvoter is your organization. It will be run with the same energy and spirit of all punk efforts. With your help we will be a credible force to truly shape the future of our nation.
(Flash intro features tunes, main site is here, an impressive membership list is here.

There's a soundtrack to your demockracy.
posted by ashbury on Apr 7, 2004 - 16 comments

Graham to go out with a bang--will Diebold go out with a wimper? Senator Bob Graham, D-Florida, today introduced the Voter Verification Act, legislation that would require computer voting systems to produce a paper record.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly on Dec 11, 2003 - 46 comments

The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
posted by wsg on Oct 26, 2003 - 47 comments

The Abilene Paradox: A sunny afternoon, a family playing cards on a terrace. One of them thinks they should move - not that he cares, on the contrary, but he thinks the others want to - so he proposes a trip to Abilene. No fun, hot, bad food. Back home one of them admits that he had preferred to stay home. Everybody would have liked that, only they did not admit to it when it was still time to enjoy the afternoon.
Everyone talks about free speech, but it's surprising how few people (even its most vociferous defenders!) realize why it's so important. The Abilene Paradox -- which describes in familiar terms how entire groups can be motivated to act contrary to their own wishes -- can only occur when communication breaks down...or is broken down. Just a bit of pragmatism to start your day.
posted by effugas on Jul 21, 2003 - 8 comments

Are American elections fixed? This article discusses the possibility, particularly due to the influx of computer touch-screen voting. While the tilt of the writer is obvious, many valid points are raised. Whatever your affiliation, how can one be comfortable with computer voting? "It doesn't matter who casts the ballots. What matters is who counts the ballots."
posted by eas98 on Apr 4, 2003 - 28 comments

chip glitch Robbie Floyd - seemed agape even hours after learning of his defeat Wednesday. "It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened," he said.
posted by specialk420 on Nov 18, 2002 - 8 comments

I'm amazed. (And no, this isn't a Lone Star thread.) For all the politics fuss we've engaged in over the last 2 years, I'm a bit surprised that no one thought it a fit topic for discussion that Florida lost 100,000 votes this week. In Broward County. But of course, those are the *only* votes we lost track of, right...?
posted by baylink on Nov 8, 2002 - 5 comments

Are we using the worst voting procedure? "Voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices." Plurality voting, in which each voter selects one canidate, is vulnerable to a third party spoiler (Nader) or with many canidates can lead to the (near) election of a candidate most voters despise (le Pen). Some alternative voting systems include instant runoff where canidates are ranked by voters, a Borda count where voters assigns points to each canidate, or approval system where voters vote for as many canidates as they like. (via argmax.com)
posted by Quinn on Nov 5, 2002 - 63 comments

Florida Machine Records Votes for Wrong Candidate. OK, I know Matt Drudge isn't exactly a venerated news outlet, but he is in South Florida. And he's reporting that a West Palm Beach voter called in to a South Florida radio talk show to report that when he voted for McBride this morning the machine counted his vote for Bush. After he'd tried three times, the voter said, an observing poll worker finally acknowledged that the machine would have to be reprogrammed, since earlier voters had experienced the same problem. There is no official confirmation of this problem, but calls to the same radio show two years ago evidently foreshadowed the 2000 election debacle. I'll be keeping an eye on sites like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo as the day wears on. In the end, what should the electorate do (in addition to initiating lawsuits) if outcome-determining irregularities surface in yet another Florida election?
posted by maud on Nov 5, 2002 - 68 comments

Making Rehnquist Proud Just like Rehnquist and his earlier political service, Jim Crow is still hard at work. "Tim Hutchinson and the Republican Party have claimed that they want to reach out to African-American voters, but when election time comes they have nothing to offer but intimidation and harassment," Cook said. "We ask Tim Hutchinson and his party to stop disenfranchising African-American voters and obstructing the democratic process."
posted by nofundy on Oct 25, 2002 - 15 comments

Those who vote for Democrats only aid the terrorists. "In a series of TV and radio ads in each of five states hosting top Senate contests, President Bush utters the tag line to a narrated paragraph slamming the Democratic senator of that state for being partisan during a time of national duress." Has anyone seen any of these ads? What did you think of them?
posted by homunculus on Feb 17, 2002 - 27 comments

It looks like McGreevey Leads Schundler in NJ governors race and Virginia's race is too close to call. With election day just around the corner, which election races are you watching?
posted by Rastafari on Oct 25, 2001 - 19 comments

Should Election Day be a holiday? Vote, then do some barbecue and watch fireworks... Will this be the development that could increase voter turnout, or will people just waste the day away? How else could voter turnout be improved?
posted by owillis on Jul 30, 2001 - 63 comments

It's simple: Don't let the blacks vote, your guy "wins". "Florida's conduct of the 2000 presidential election was marked by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" that unfairly penalized minority voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded in a report that criticizes top state officials -- particularly Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- for allowing disparate treatment of voters."

"A computer analysis by The Post showed that the more black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes."

"No inquiry so far has been as broad as that conducted by the commission -- or as specifically focused on the rights of minorities. The commission held three days of hearings, interviewed 100 witnesses and reviewed 118,000 documents."
posted by owillis on Jun 5, 2001 - 40 comments

Wouldn't it be awesome if there were a web site where you could see the actual voting records of elected officials?
posted by snakey on Mar 9, 2001 - 19 comments

If the election left you with an odd feeling that something was not right in Florida, you're not alone.
posted by swanson on Feb 25, 2001 - 26 comments

"until every vote is coutned" : A review of 10,600 previously uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County showed George W. Bush gaining six more votes than Al Gore.
posted by tomplus2 on Jan 18, 2001 - 5 comments

The latest iteration of the Great Chad Count of 2001 has been announced. Some news organizations finally announce specifics about their planned gang-recount. They'll pay a nonprofit firm to "inventory" the votes, but each news organization will decide separately what the results mean. And one paper is holding an entirely separate count of its own. Inside.com summarizes: "When the laborious process is completed in 8 to 10 weeks, look for an orgy of tea-leaf discernment as any news organization willing to share in the costs will be free to spin and analyze the results in any way they please."
posted by aaron on Jan 9, 2001 - 2 comments

Media recount boosts Gore in Hillsborough County, FL I wish they would have recounted the whole state. Including the "undervotes."
posted by Dean_Paxton on Dec 30, 2000 - 57 comments

The current RISKS Digest carries a manifesto of sorts from Peter Neumann (of RISKS), Lauren Weinstein (of PRIVACY DIGEST) and Rebecca Mercuri (one of the AT&T voting wonks, if memory serves) on the dangers of electronic and Internet voting in the current technological milieu. Let's fix the problems, yes, but let's not create worse ones in the process.
posted by baylink on Dec 15, 2000 - 2 comments

Election Phone Calls Sorry if this has been posted before, but I just found out today.
posted by dilok on Dec 14, 2000 - 1 comment

YASL: Yet another Salon link. This could be the smoking gun. Or just smoke. Judgement?
posted by ethmar on Dec 5, 2000 - 6 comments