I won't comment on whether online polls actually work or my thoughts on the election itself, but considering the various oddities in the recent US election I thought a few of you might be interested in this if you haven't already seen it...

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

-Mike

I assume you saw that Diebold paid off California yesterday to the tune of $2.6 million.

This is its settlement for selling shoddy voting equipment, as well as "disenfranchising" a number of voters back in the March primaries.

From that link:

Quote:
"Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?"

I probably am about as aligned with the likes of MoveOn.org as about anybody I have met. However, even as heartsick as I am over the outcome of November 2, I think you have to have more than "Questions are swirling around" as your lead-off statement. Maybe this is just a case of me not listening to what has gone down in discussion on MoveOn (I don't) and not understanding the background (sort of like me not watching Top Gear), but the petition statement sounds sort of bleatingly plaintive.

Forget "questions are swirling around". How about some links to specific allegations? Now when *those* are brought forward into the light of day, then, and only then, can this fine country...ignore them!

For more info about the problems with the voting this year check out:

http://blackboxvoting.org/

They are filing an act to get the raw data from the machines under the Freedom of Information Act.

Peter
Miaimi, FL USA

I generally have to be careful what I say on this topic, but here goes. Clearly, a number of things went wrong with the election this year. We have stories of malfunctions in Florida and Ohio -- the two most important "battleground" states in deciding the election, and we have even more amazing stories elsewhere. One stunning example are some machines in North Carolina that were silently dropping any votes they received after getting 3500 or so recorded. Thousands of votes were irretrievably lost.

But, like it or not, Bush had a strong margin of victory, and the bloggers' analyses we've seen online tend to have serious errors.

There are several sober articles that I might recommend people read:

- Bruce Schneier on What's Wrong with Electronic Voting.

- The Caltech / MIT voting project's reports on the 2004 election.

- The Boston Globe on dismissing the Internet conspiracy theories.

- The New York Times on Internet conspiracy theories.

Building an accurate, anonymous, and efficient voting system is a hard engineering problem, and most of the current systems aren't really up to the task. Ultimately, the goal is to provide convincing evidence to the loser that he or she did, in fact, loose the election. That needs to be the focus of our attention, rather than looking for some way to keep hopes for Kerry in 2004 alive.