Well, who didn't see this one coming...?

[Relbeek Einre]

I already did, you just ignored it, due to you inability to admit you're wrong.

[Eidolon Faer]

As long as we're advancing wild-assed Konspiracy charges about the Florida Sec'y of State sacrificing chickens in a Black Mass to ensure the uncle of her secret alien love-child comes to power in accordance with the Prophecies of Krokk'bag'jiggl'hokk'poon...

Let's have a look at my prediction for the outcome of the 2008 election:

In September, 2008, the American Psychological Association will release the DSM-V. This gem of modern political...erm, scientific...thought will have several radical changes from the current DSM-IV. First of all, opposition to gay marriage will be classified as a serious mental disorder with commitment to a mental institution being the recommended course of treatment. Even more-interestingly, post-election selection trauma will be classified as a legitimate disease and health insurers will be required to cover therapy for the condition.

In yet another perfectly predictable backlash at heavy-handed dirty-tricks-intensive campaigning, like one that brought you the famous America Coming Together pamphlet in 2004, Hillary Clinton loses by a not-nearly-so-razor-close-as-she-might-have-hoped margin to the Taco John's Cowboy Monkey.

Undaunted, however, John Edwards decides not to sue for more than five or six recounts. Instead he launches a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all Democrat voters suffering from PEST and lists every American who voted Republican as a defendant.

In a heart-wrenching performance during which he channels the spirit of Andrew Veal, a jury of twelve single mothers in Los Angeles is reduced to tears and awards six months' paid disability to every Democrat, to be paid for by every Republican. Edwards collects a 1.4 trillion dollar contingency fee, which he uses to buy controlling interest in Phillip Morris.

[Relbeek Einre]

*shakes head sadly*

[davidking]

Oh now that's funny!


Jeb Bush 2008!

[Partha]

His fantasy assumes that Hilary will be the nominee in 2008. That won't be happening.

[Eidolon Faer]

I am SO archiving this page, Partha...

[Burz]

Let's have a look at my prediction for the outcome of the 2008 election:

No need. Civil War by the end of this year or start of next. John Titor would not disappoint.

[Alannia_Raindancer]

Auditor will purposely avoid looking at the big problems before they look at everything else so not cloud thier judgements.

What kind of auditor are we talking about here? Almost every -accounting- auditor I've had the pleasure of dealing with wanted their $50,000.00 discrepancies solved before their $6.00 ones. It has a tendancy of making the smaller issues easier to locate, because the big ones aren't mucking them all up.

Any Real Auditor will tell you.. the biggest problem is never where you see the biggest problem

Any good true problem solver would say similiarly, but again, I've never heard an accounting auditor say that. You make it more simplistic than it is though. When problems with any system, process, or situation arises, you troubleshoot it BACKWARDS, not forwards. How else do you plan to find root cause? And that holds true for almost every situation I can think of. And besides, where would you start looking exactly without looking at the biggest problem areas first? What would you even be looking for?

Eidolon: Caught your message from my sleep deprived evening, as well as the one about the dangers of bar coding drivers licenses or SS cards. I hadn't thought of that, to be honest. Thanks! As someone who's lost her purse at least twice in the last 15 years, you make compelling arguments.

I also realized that even if my computerized dream could be done (I -STILL- think it could be!), it wouldn't stop people from voting for their spouses, kids, or for the more unscrupulous types, anyone who's SS number they happened to get prior to voting. It would also eliminate any sort of paper trail for audits...in my scenerio, if the number of voters in an area comes up less than the number of votes, there'd be no way to trace it back.

Lastly, I heard from the news, as well as firsthand from friends in other states (Ohio included), that part of the reason for their long lines was because places were running out of ballots. Can someone enlighten me as to why a computer can't be available to print off blank ballots on an "as needed" basis? Even if it needed to be kept offsite in the same town for some strange security reasons, it seems it would have solved at least some of the delays.

For the sake of clarity, I don't believe that our polling places were intentionally "sabotaged" by any political party. But I do think that there are issues that make it too damn easy to question the end results, and for Valoria's sake, I will reiterate that I would have felt the exact same way if Kerry had won this election.

[Riggen]

I think my last reply to Ddrak regarding computerization got overlooked. It offered some clarifications and he has yet to explain why they wouldn't work.

[davidking]

Alannia,
Any time an auditor sees a 500,00.00 error, they know it's there, and of course they will fix it. Like I said, the 500,000 dollor error is not the worrisome thiing since either it's huge idiot making sure they will get caught for doing something completely idiotic, or there is a simple error somewhere.

Now, when you start seeing 6 dollars here and six dollors there missing in simple transactions, those are the ones you need to start worrying about, because someone is trying to be clever and can actually show you trends on how things are being missing.

A 500,000.00 error is not a trend, it's either highway robbery or a mistake, in either case something easy to fiind. As in these elections, if you are continuously worried about election fraud, fix the system, and look for trends and see if there is a serious problem overall, looking just at one state at a time will not help you find the trends that are causing the problems that you liberals believe are there..

[Alannia_Raindancer]

Alannia,
A 500,000.00 error is not a trend, it's either highway robbery or a mistake, in either case something easy to fiind. As in these elections, if you are continuously worried about election fraud, fix the system, and look for trends and see if there is a serious problem overall, looking just at one state at a time will not help you find the trends that are causing the problems that you liberals believe are there..

I don't totally disagree with that, and said as much. I think there are flaws in our system that should be fixed. However, you earlier argued that the "$500,000 mistakes" shouldn't be fixed, and I believe the term "whiny pussies" was used as justification. And when I was doing technical support for accounting software, I saw some of these $500,000 mistakes BECOME trends because of, you guessed it! A flawed system!
Of course, accounting and elections are not quite the same thing, and we could debate the differences and similarities until the next election that goes awry.

Better in my mind that we try to fix everything we can. We can't just ignore the big things, because despite what anyone thinks, they aren't just going to go away next election. It sounds to me like a fair number of people on both sides agree that things need to be addressed, but we disagree on where to start/what to fix. I think any voting reform needs to be done by some extremely non-partisan people, who can approach it from a stance of making sure PEOPLE aren't being hindered or turned away at the voting booths. People. Not democrats, not republicans. And in response to looking on a state by state basis, I partly agree with you there as well. We need to be looking at an overall big picture. BUT, when we have a system that puts so much weight on the outcome of a single set of states, states in which a mistake can tip the balance in either direction, you can't offhandedly say "ignore it, that's not where the problems are". I am immune to your jedi mind tricks.

If, come next election, a democrat wins with the same types of issues that we've seen in this last election, the republicans will scream. And this "liberal" will scream right along with them, just like I'm doing now, even if I do throw in an "I told you so!" every now and again while we're yelling. And I'm sorry, people not being able to vote or having their vote recorded as something other than what they voted is a problem, and if I'm not mistaken, those two problems have been substantiated as having happened, as well as not enough voting places/polling machines, insufficient quantities of ballots, and various other "little" things that can add up to big issues, especially in swing states.

I reiterate again: I don't want our government to spend a lot of time and money on non-existant problems. If I didn't believe that there were problems , I wouldn't advocate the recounts. I believe that if handled properly, these recounts are one way to narrow down the source of the problems, and help us hone in on the root causes so that we can start fixing the system. If wanting confidence that the person holding office in the
-future- is really what the people of our nation want by majority is being a whiny pussy, then so be it! 182,000 votes in a state with an approximate population of 11,435,798 is about 1.6 percent.

I'd have been happier to have flipped a freaking quarter to decide the election in the first place than to be fighting with my fellow Americans about obvious problems that should have been fixed years ago.

[davidking]

However, you earlier argued that the "$500,000 mistakes" shouldn't be fixed

Never said that. I was arguing, why Ohio? there were states with closer votes and other places with some of the same complaints. I argued that if you are gonna fix it, fix it right.

[Ddrak]

Riggen,

Yeah, kinda got lost. I think we may have been looking at different things now I reread the thread.

If the sole purpose is to eliminate duplicates then encryption is unnecessary. Just have a central computer store SSNs, Voter ID #, whatever as people vote and throw a fit when it sees them for the second time.

The real issues only start when you tag specific votes with specific id numbers, whether encrypted or not. As there is necessarily a link held at some stage between the id number and the person then votes become traceable.

Dd

[Alannia_Raindancer]

[quote="davidking]Never said that. I was arguing, why Ohio? there were states with closer votes and other places with some of the same complaints. I argued that if you are gonna fix it, fix it right.[/quote]

Then I apologize for misunderstanding you. I read your posts to mean you were against -all- recounts, and I also remember reading that you thought the dems should pay for every recount. On the latter, I think its unfair that any one party should cover the total cost of helping eliminate voting problems. I think that recounts are one way to LOCATE these problems to fix them in the future, but I might be wrong, and would be happy to see arguments to support the opposite WITHOUT listening to the drivel that the ONLY reason for recounts is to vote in our losing candidate. That's simply not the case with me, and I said that at the beginning. Even if a nationwide recount, or revote, or location of problems happened to come up with numbers that Kerry actually won (which I doubt, but even if it happened), I said it was far too late for that.

My concern is finding and fixing all problems that can be fixed. It behooves our country to do so. And while I don't think that Ohio should be the only one, when you're dealing with a system that has states with higher electoral vote counts, you focus on those states first. Why? Because problems in a state with very few electoral votes are going to have less of an impact than those that have higher electoral votes. AKA: a $6.00 discrepancy isn't going to bankrupt your company. It's still a problem, and it needs to be fixed, but the $500,000 discrepancy is going to have a higher impact, especially if it happens to be loan time and the bank wants your financial statements.

Ddrak, and anyone else who got into the computerized voting system discussion : When I originally posted my short sighted suggestion, it was my thought to impliment more of a "login" process using the SS number, not that the number itself should be attached to the vote in any way. Two seperate entities, one to get connected, and one to record the vote. There are still the issues of:

1. making sure there's a paper trail somehow, even if it means printing a paper "receipt" of the vote that gets fed into a machine
2. making sure that the person voting isn't using someone else's SS number to vote.
3. the time and money involved in even setting up such a system in the first place. If we could do it properly, I'd say spare no expense, but if the system causes just as many problems as we have now, it wouldn't be worth it.

I still see benefits in folks smarter than I persuing something of this nature...We could even go so far as to have centralized polling places, and for those who aren't afraid to do so, a web site that we could log into from our own homes to cast votes without ever worrying about 3 to 14 hour waiting lines or whether there were enough ballots.

[Alannia_Raindancer]

My apologies....I was in a hurry to get my son to an appointment, and thought I left that last message up for editing before I left. I was going to trim it some, and also add to the end:

"Of course I realize that any idea of that nature has it's own flaws to be nailed out well before it could be implimented".

[davidking]

Alannia, really, the reason the dems are trying so hard to do recounts and stuff is not to fix the system, cause they use the system themselves. They know how to get votes that aren't really there and also how to make polls look different then they really are.

The Dems are only doing this to put a slant on Bush's election and nothing more. They have said it themselves that they know a recount would not change the vote or the election. This is an act to save face from the terrible defeats they had this year. They can't, wont just go down admitting that the nation doesn't want them, they have to resort to this kind of drudery instead of moving on and moving foward.

Simple tactics used by a losing side to say they didn't lose but were cheated. Every sore loser does this and the Dems are the biggest losers of them all... well, besides Dan Rathers and Mary Mapes.

[Alannia_Raindancer]

"They can't, wont just go down admitting that the nation doesn't want them, they have to resort to this kind of drudery instead of moving on and moving foward."

Bush won the election by a majority vote. Go Bush! it's all really swell and good to tote the "party line" and cheer your team when they win, but you can't pretend that 48% of the population doesn't exist just because you won. The MAJORITY didn't want them, perhaps, but 48% did, for better or worse.

You claim that you believe that there's problems with the election process. You made your accounting analogy, and said they weren't looking in the right place. You offer no alternative suggestion, and then tell anyone who speaks up about those problems that they're being sore losers, and they should sit down and shut up. Maybe recounts won't fix the problem, and the democrat representatives are going about it wrong, or for the wrong reasons, but I haven't seen a lot of republican representatives offering other suggestions to help our ailing voting problems. I see a lot of people saying, "Yup! Elections need some work, but it's going to cost too much to fix them, and it's working to our advantage, so no biggie. Oh, and sit down and shut up, loser." They scared of something? Perhaps the 2% "landslide" didn't bury enough valley?

They see it. Even Bush admitted that it was a close election. Anyone who pretends that this election was won by some astronomical number is blind or fooling themselves.

I can't speak for the Democratic party, Val. I'm not a registered Democrat, would vote for maybe 1/4th of them, and quite frankly, I don't have a lot of faith in political "altruism", something I don't think exists. I do lean liberal on a majority of issues, but conservative on others. I simply stated why I thought the recounts could be a good thing, and what I hoped they would accomplish.

[davidking]

Alannia,

you just dont understand..