Talk:2004 United States presidential election controversy, voting machines

message: This article is huge. Would it not be better to make it more concise? Trampled 21:27, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's unreadable, needs to be trimmed down. -Brendan OShea 19:41, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I read it just fine.  Very comprehensive, very informative.  This is a very complex and incredibly important topic (we can all agree on that), therefore, it shouldn't be surprising that the article is "huge".  Sometimes bigger is better. Cowicide 13:44, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article size

message: Kevin baas 05:14, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Related news event

message: A bunch of my random suggestions:
1) More generally, the farther away we get from 2004, the more useful a general article on electronic voting in the US would be, rather than an collection of every allegation relating to 2004 voting.  Has anyone thought about starting a new article, looking at the issues relating to electronic voting without the connection to a specific election?  (I'd recommend starting with the official reports to set up a framework).  I also note that there's a bunch of stuff on here that's not specifically relevant to the 2004 election, such as the allegations of Chuck Hagel rigging vote counting machines in 199-whatever.
2) The Control, ownership, and political ties section is incoherent.  
:2.1) It would help someone could write a topic sentence at the top of the subsection that clearly indicates the point.
 
: 2.2) What is the possible point, in an encylopedia, of pointing out the guy who initially funded the brother of the guy who actually runs Diebold (i) contributes to CalTech or (ii) contributes to fundamentalist Christian causes?  It's like some kind of ad hominem attack twice removed - because Howard Ahmonson contributes to CalTech(!) and fundamentalist christian groups(!!), and because Howard Amonson was an investor in a predecessor company to Diebold, therefore Diebold steal elections!!!  Even if Diebold's CEO was personally contributing to conservative Christian groups, I don't see how that is evidence of election fraud.
If the point is that some of the owners of the major vote machine companies are conservative, I don't think that's surprising.  If it's that they're all conservative, then I think one or two sentences saying exactly that, plus an authoritative cite, would be enough for what is at best a tangential point.
3) The "programming fraud" affidavit section is incoherent.  As a reader, all I can tell is that (1) some guy somewhere signed an affidavit for somebody that he was asked to write fraudulent code for somebody; and (2) his german shepard died.
 
: 3.1) Is it really the standard of encyclopediaworthiness that that programming fraud affidavit guy's German Shepard died?  I would delete it, but I don't understand the point of the section enough to try to capture the essential meaning.  I generally don't advocate the removal of information either, but are we going to start entering the pet deaths of all noteworthy people?TheronJ 21:01, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: More Random Suggestions

message: I removed the "Voter suppression and racial discrimination, Florida 2000" section because it didn't have anything to do with voting machines. the section follows.
Source for this section globalresearch.ca, written July 2003:
:To understand how George W. Bush will win the next presidential election, it helps to understand how he won the last one. While all public attention rested on hanging chads, butterfly ballots and a skewed recount in the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, the root of the problem has been overlooked. As investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovered, the state of Florida purged over 90,000 people from their list of eligible voters under the guise that they were felons. In fact, almost none of the disenfranchised voters were felons...but almost all were blacks or democrats.
:Palast's investigation revealed that at the heart of this ethnic cleansing of voter lists was the creation of a new centralized database for the state of Florida. In 1999, the state fired the company they were paying to compile their "scrub" lists and gave the job to Database Technologies (DBT, now ChoicePoint). DBT, a private firm known to have strong Republican ties was paid $2.3 million to do the same job that had previously been done for $5,700.
:The first list of felons from DBT included 8,000 names of felons from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials. The state government said they were all felons, and thus barred from voting under federal law. Local officials complained about the list and DBT issued a new one, this time naming 58,000 felons. Palast discovered that the one county that went through the process of checking the new list name by name found it was 95% wrong ... Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons were barred from voting.
:DBT didn't get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, but they were matched for race, so a felon named Joe Green only knocked off a black Joe Green, but not a white person with the same name. There was no need to guess about the race of the disenfranchised: a voter's race is listed next to his or her name in many Southern states including Florida because racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
:DBT's fee of $2.3 million was supposed to include verification that the individuals on their list were actually felons, but Palast's investigation showed that DBT could not provide any evidence that they made a single phone call to verify the identity of the names scrubbed prior to the 2000 Presidential Election.
:Unfortunately, nothing is preventing this purge from taking place again on a national scale ... Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast recently co-authored a piece on the dangers of such databases, recalling the Florida debacle. Their conclusion: "Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace -- harder to detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic guardian of a new electoral segregation."
Kevin Baastalk 15:40, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  i removed a section from the article 

message: *WaPo
*USA Today - this was pretty big on the second page of the politics section.  (On the first(front) page was blackwell)
Kevin Baastalk 13:50, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  recent news (2006-06-29) 

message: * http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3467 Kevin Baastalk 15:57, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  princeton voting machine study 2006.09.13 

message: The section seems to have little if anything to do with the 2004 United States presidential election, which is unfortunate. It is however, completely inaccurate.
*CIBER (the Independent Testing Authority) not Cipher company
*The reference to VoteHERE is completely inaccurate as they've never been used in a public election in the U.S..
*The entire "Legislative regulatory regime for voting machines" section is without reference, irrelevant and inaccurate.
--Electiontechnology 08:48, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Voting system certification

message: The section "Technical overview:  Ease of hiding "back doors" in computer source code" is completely irrelevant to this article. It makes no claim to be relevant and only discusses references to UNIX in the 1970's. It has absolutely no place in this entry.
--Electiontechnology 08:56, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: back doors

message: This section seems poorly titled and covers a December 2007 study. I don't see how this is appropriate for this article. Thoughts?
--Electiontechnology (talk) 01:10, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Ohio’s top elections officials