It is NOT about ORCA! It's those "software patches."

[Atman]

(I posted a version of this in another thread, but thought it deserved its own mention.)

I believe it was Husted who was defending his last-minute "software patches" as not being about the voting, merely the tabulating, as if the two are unrelated. He crowed about how everybody would be able to go the SoC web site and see the votes tabulated in real time, and therefore there was nothing to fear. Then there is the post from earlier today in which it was stated the SoC site suddenly blocked access to this data just as the polls closed. Know wonder Rove freaked.

ORCA was about GOTV and demographic targeting. These Ohio "software patches" we're about taking the votes after they're cast, and flipping as they're sent on to the SoC. Husted also bragged about how his new system would allow everyone to know the winner virtually as the polls closed. This would go a long way toward explaining Rove's reaction, and actually lends plausibility to Anon's claim, IF Anon hadn't explicitly said this was about ORCA.

ORCA is a red herring.

[FarPoint]

1. Yes...it's about the patches.

Husted is a sly one indeed.

[global1]

2. Has Husted Been Heard From Since The Election?......

If so - what did he have to say?

[FarPoint]

24. Not a peep from Husted as far as I know...

Maybe in an undisclosed location...........

[brush]

15. Husted saw results . . .

. . . from other states coming in unexpectedly for the President, and knowing all eyes were on him and Ohio, ditched his and Rove's plans to use the software patches to switch votes to Romney as Ohio's results were suddenly not going to be as decisive as once thought. He probably also mulled over the thought of whether it was worth going to jail for Rove's fat ass.

[FarPoint]

25. That is my first impression...

Husted began to sweat.

[longship]

3. Neither had any effect on the outcome.

So, I don't know why people even bring this up. Like many here have asked the stolen election crowd, where is the evidence?

Now we have an anonymous Anonymous claiming credit. That's easy when it's a post hoc pronouncement.

[OKNancy]

4. Sometimes I feel like we are a mirror of FreeRepublic or redstate

with all the conspiracy stuff.

[RomneyLies]

7. Yep, and those who put all faith in the CT damn those who point out their folly

I wonder when those of us who won't buy this bullshit will start being banned here like FreeRepublic bans anybody who says anything against Birtherism.

[RobertEarl]

23. Folly?

Who the heck are you to tell us who have seen the evidence of vote stealing believe in a folly?

Really, what makes you think we should believe anything you have to say?

[Lars39]

5. Where is the transparency?

[longship]

12. Do you mean other than the thousands of observers?

And hundreds of lawyers in the wings?

Our electoral system works because of the transparency built into the system.

Yes, there are still serious problems, mostly suppression, but those are solvable.

[Lars39]

17. Programming naivete

[bahrbearian]

19. If they wanted transparency, the would hand count paper ballots in every precinct on CATV

broadcast that with an ongoing tally, not send it to some machine to count and tally at some server some where.

[longship]

27. You don't think there are observers watching the count?

I have even done so myself. They also do spot checks. Target precincts are sampled randomly to determine accuracy. If anomalies show up, the observers would know it.

Yes, there is transparency.

[Occulus]

13. If anything of the kind happened, the evidence is gone

and was gone an instant after the deed was done. That's how code like this works if you're covering your tracks- it erases itself.

That's the problem I have with people who constantly demand solid proof of this; all there ever are (if it's happening) are a series of bright red flags. To them, that's not enough to even inquire.

[longship]

29. Well, if it happened it didn't work very well.

But that won't stop the stolen election conspiracy theorists from both parties.

If a candidate loses, it must be stolen? I don't buy it.

And it is not up to me to prove it wasn't stolen, it's up to those claiming the theft to demonstrate it was. I find it convenient that you posit a theft where it didn't happen and where all the evidence somehow magically disappears. Sorry. I just don't buy it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. It's the perfect conspiracy theory - the proof is *NOTHING HAPPENED*, because there were 2

conspiracies. Thus the first, evil, conspiracy was cancelled by the second, virtuous, conspiracy - and the proof is that the election was won by Obama, just as the opinion polls and Nate Sivler predicted!

You can't let a simple thing like the absence of evidence get in the way of the need for conspiracy theories to shout about. All the proof needed that Karl Rove was up to something nefarious was that he had a sad on election night, which must mean he had been foiled in illegal activity. It couldn't possibly mean just that his theory, effectively racist, that Obama's support was too lazy to turn out and vote, had been proved wrong. That just wouldn't make him evil enough.

[RomneyLies]

6. It is NOT about REALITY! It's about those "conspiracy theories."

[MineralMan]

8. And here's the thing:

We won.

Despite all the outcry over election fraud and manipulation, and the worry about how powerful the Republicans were, and how they'd rig the election, we won. The Republican's computer prowess was amply demonstrated when their GOTV system crashed on election day.

Is election manipulation possible? Of course. Did it work in 2012? Of course not. Results were even better than expected by many for the Democrats.

332 electoral votes. Democrats won all but one of the so-called "battleground" states. We gained seats in the Senate and House. Several state legislatures switched to Democratic control.

So, where was this election manipulation so many people were theorizing and conspiracy-theorizing about? I'm not seeing it.

In my opinion, time is better spent working on getting Democrats to the polls in increasing numbers than in worrying about election manipulation. It seems to have worked OK this year, anyhow.

[RomneyLies]

10. But don't you see? Some anonymous person on the internet says they blocked the GOP from stealing it!

And since some anonymous guy on the internet said it, it MUST BE TRUE!

[rzemanfl]

14. I suppose you won't believe I am a male model from France either....

[robinlynne]

11. It is so dangerous to see the small picture.

[bahrbearian]

20. So just forget about 2000 and 2004, right got it, Move On nothing to See

[RomneyLies]

26. Nobody flipped electeonic votes in 2000 or 2004

Legitimate voters were purged in FL in 2000.

Blackwell made sure there were not enough voting machines for Democratic districts in 2004.

Voter suppression is the tried and true method for the GOP. Electronic vote flipping is a myth.

[robinlynne]

9. Thank-you!!!!

[rocktivity]

16. Well, SOMETHING, as my father would say, put a burr under Rove's tail.

His reaction was just too -- well, genuine.

ORCA was SUPPOSED to be about GOTV and demographic targeting. But what if that's a cover story -- what if ORCA was really about something else, like maybe vote tabulation?


rocktivity

[ProSense]

18. Oh, the confusion:

Anonymous Claims It Stopped Karl Rove From Hacking The Election By Hacking ORCA
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021832154

This is why credible evidence is needed.

If Anonymous has definitive proof that Rove tried to hack the vote, present it.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021842950

[Overseas]

22. The Florida recount in 2000 seemed so deliberately shaped to turn off the public from hand counting

of votes, with all those Republican staffers flooding the office shouting, while cameras focused on the bug-eyes of the vote counters looking at hanging chads.

Then voila-- we were encouraged to get on board with the new electronic voting.

Which may have been okay if we could also get receipts as we do with ATM machines, and it may have been okay if the software was not proprietary (aka a trade secret) of a company run by a Republican who pledged to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004. Without that history, we wouldn't have felt the need to file an injunction against a last minute "software patch" to be installed in a battleground state.

We need real election reform. Even the old fashioned vote engineering-- partisan Secretaries of State deciding to place fewer voting machines in Democratic districts, reduce the times for early voting, and create voter ID laws and other means of screening out opposition votes-- needs to be fixed.

And all the votes need to be verifiable and available for hand recounting. I didn't mind the hanging chad stuff. I was glad to see the hand recounting at the time. We have a lot of intelligent, responsible unemployed people who would be glad to have the work of hand counting our votes.

I am glad Republicans used lots of old fashioned voter suppression techniques this time, which has gotten more and more Democrats to stand up for election reform and making the process far less partisan.

The problems in Ohio 2004 were analyzed in a basement room in Congress and the report didn't come out until January 2005.

http://www.iwantmyvote.com/lib/downloads/references/house_judiciary/final_status_report.pdf

This fascinating and disturbing book is the official record of testimony taken by the Democratic Members and Staff of the House Judiciary Committee, presided over by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member. Originally released in January, 2005 by the Committee.

Witnesses included both Republicans and Democrats, elected officials, voting machine company employees, poll observers, and many voters who testified about the harassment they endured, some of which led to actual vote repression.

While shreds of the electoral chaos in Ohio were reported in the press, the issue soon faded from public view. What Went Wrong In Ohio provides new insights into the abuse and manipulation of electronic voting machines and the arbitrary and illegal behavior of a number of elected and election officials which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in order to change the outcome of an election.

[Orangepeel]

28. If the claimant had any credibility to start with, bringing in ORCA would have wrecked it.

Red herring or flat out bullshit, I don't know, but of course you are correct that ORCA had nothing to do with anything.

Old fashioned poll watching: the campaign sends someone into the polling place with a list of targeted voters -- people they are confident will vote for them. When those people come vote, the poll watcher marks their name down. Every few hours, a runner comes and gets a copy of the list to take back to headquarters where other people call targeted voters who haven't voted to get them to the polls.

What ORCA was supposed to do: The same thing, only electronically.

"Hacking" ORCA would screw up the Romney campaigns GOTV efforts to some degree, but certainly wouldn't swing the election. Old fashioned poll watching always worked better in theory than in practice, and GOTV is always more important to Democrats than Republicans because our voters are less likely to vote without being nagged.

[Stevepol]

30. I agree with the thesis of this post.

In "Hacking Democracy," the HBO show about the dangers of e-voting, Diebold claimed that the memory cards used to download the vote totals and transfer those results to the central tabulators could not transfer "executable" code to the voting machines. There's a scene in which the Diebold computer experts sware it couldn't be done. But in the experiment that is done using a Diebold opti-scan, Hari Hursti was given a memory card and in less than 5 minutes programmed it to flip the results. Which of course it did.

Anon didn't mention ORCA because ORCA is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the existing vote-counting program could have been altered by Husted's patches. I'm no computer expert but I would stake a lot of money that it would have been trivially easy for a computer "expert" to write a program that would have altered the vote counting and flipped the results and that Husted's patch could easily have been the modus operandi to embed the fix -- if it wasn't already a part of the programming code.

[Atman]

31. I'm just going to kick my own post instead of starting another one. Sheesh.

Yet ANOTHER post talking about Anon hacking ORCA...SO WHAT? ORCA was/is not the issue! ORCA was a GOTV/Demographics targeting program which was a joke.

The issue, once again, is the last SOFTWARE PATCHES Husted ADMITS to installing at the last minute, for which he received a good scolding. These software patches, Husted ADMITTED, were to allow "real time vote tabulating" which everyone could see on the SoC site...which went dark and locked people out just as polls closed.

Some would call this "circumstantial evidence" rather than a knee-jerk "conspiracy theory" response. But it still has to be pointed out, IT WASN'T ABOUT ORCA. That was a different program based in the TD Center/Romney HQ in Boston, and had nothing to do with Husted in Ohio!

Even a "conspiracy theory" should have some basis in fact!

[muriel_volestrangler]

33. 'Even a "conspiracy theory" should have some basis in fact'

So when will you present a fact? What are your 'facts' about the software patches? The patches were installed. Are you saying that the Ohio election result was invalid?