April 10, 2006
Quarter Poll taken offline
The Washington State Quarter public opinion poll has been "temporarily suspended". Even the "results" page is unavailable.
UPDATE: The story has been picked up by the Associated Press: Reporter Curt Woodward contacted me after seeing Sunday's blog post. As I told Woodward, the real credit for discovering that the poll was being played goes to Jeff Boly, who reported this in the open comment thread on Saturday afternoon.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 10, 2006
10:16 AM | Email This
1. Another Gregoire election. It would be interesting to trace the vote input. The votes for version #3 couldn't all be coming from the basement of the King County Administration building, could they? Anybody seen Dean Logan lately?
2. They should be able to look at the logs and eliminate duplicate IP addresses, and then institute further checks once the poll comes back online. Hopefully that's what they are doing.
3. I heard they had to suspend the vote because King County Elections replaced Thomas Jefferson's head with Queen Christine's. I'm glad to hear the feds finally drew the line somewhere.
4. Of course, no mention of why it was suspended. And probably no attention to any result that the poll might generate, even if done properly. I'm actually hoping for design 3, because if it gets picked, there will be a huge outcry that Gregoire is simply pandering to the Indian Lobby. Oh wait....
5. Jeff B. - Why do think it was suspended? It is obvious there was an issue, or weren't you paying attention?
6. Of course I'm aware of the situation. Go back and check the comments, I was the first one her at SP to notice. My point is that Gregoire's office is quietly dismissing this, as they do all things negative.
They should simply fess up that they did a bad job with the poll in the first place since. Anyone who knows anything at all about online voting knows that you have to restrict it a bit to prevent bot voting. Gregoire has shown a consistently poor political instinct. It would be quite easy to take this situation and turn in around as a positive by saying that it's unfortunate a few had to spoil this poll for the many. And then pledge to get it right. Instead, the poll just goes offline quietly. Par for this administration.
7. It was probably suspended because Ms. Gregoire's favorite choice was loosing and her office was not yet ready to release their auto voter script.
8. To correct my above post, KC Elections replaced GEORGE WASHINGTON'S head with the Queen's. I guess with all the tax increases this year, it's been awhile since I had a quarter in my pocket to double check before posting!
9. Wow--even the bureacrats know that it's dishonest! They sure didn't need Gregoire to be associated with another fraudulent vote!
10. Considering how elections run in the state of Washington, our state quarter should just have George Washington's head on both sides.
11. It's not so easy to "de-dup" the voter records as Daniel suggests. Many ISP's and companies route hundreds of individuals to a single IP address via Network Address Translation. Over 500 people work in my office building, and any traffic that makes it past the office firewall registers as a single IP address.
Fact is, if they reopen the poll under the current system, the only way to "win" is to match the tactics of the enemy and pound the servers with your vote.
12. AP story sourced from a blog...my how times have changed. Although I wonder how many stories have ever been sourced from "HA!".
13. KOMO has it on their website now...
http://www.komotv.com/stories/42862.htm
14. Like we keep hearing---in the 'old' days, they used to get away with stuff like this. But with 'reporters' all over the place like Jeff B. being able to comment on widely read blogs like this to 'out' bad situations, they just can't get away with hiding this kind of stuff anymore. Cool!!
15. You people actually think a Democrat could commit voter fraud using a computer? After the cost and mistakes it took to upgrade King County's network?
Anyway, I thought Diebold rigged computer elections were Republican territory...
16. Chris Luka - Its a matter of weighing the lesser of two evils. The poll is more likely to be affected if you don't restrict by IP than it would if you do. Yes, some votes won't get counted because they come from the same IP address, but the only other choice would be to make this much more complex than the matter warrants. Given the circumstances I think they've decided to make a wise modification and restrict by IP. Not perfect, but a big improvement over what they had.
17. Stefan is in the Olympian!
Great job!
http://www.theolympian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060410/NEWS06/60410074
18. Montana was able to put together their coin design poll while preventing over-vote trickery, so how come this state couldn't?
Funny how those red states can think ahead...
19. MES,
How red is Montana?
Montana's governor is Brian Schweitzer (D), The Secretary of State is Brad Johnson (R), The AG is Mike McGrath (D), the state auditor is John Morrison (D), the Superintendent of Public Instruction is Linda McCulloch (D).
Both houses of the state legislature are also controlled by the Democrats.
Two of the three members of the Montana delegation to the US congress are Republicans, Sen. Burns and Rep. Rehberg, and one, Sen. Baucus, is a Democrat.
20. "They should be able to look at the logs and eliminate duplicate IP addresses, and then institute further checks once the poll comes back online. Hopefully that's what they are doing."
Don't the larger ISP's tend to use blocks of the same ip addys for their customers per region? If they simply eliminated duplicate IP's they would erase all votes from AOL, CS and MSN voters. I hope this is not what they're doing.
21. I liked this quote from Gregoire's spokesman:
""If we can, we'll just leave in the legitimate votes," Gerth said."
So will they be using the one corner, two corner, three corner, or the dimpled chad criteria? Or will they just figure out which one they want to win, and then figure out which criteria gets them there?
22. Interestingly, the Seattle Times story leaves out the part of how this problem was discovered.
23. Good job Stefan.
24. why are we voting? the decision is up to miss chrissy in the end.
100 bucks says the indian fish wins - so PC. I predict it will win the public vote, as the other 2 quarters are fairly similar and will split the votes.
in the end, the vote is meaningless (a theme that has been picked up on already). we placate the tribes all the time - why not give 'em a quarter too...
25. The poll is back up but it STILL broken. Yeah, it sets a cookie apparently, but if you clear your cookie, you can vote all you want. Who here wants to bet that desing #3 wins? But now it is even MORE crooked because the public cannnot monitor the vote count as before. YET ANOTHER CROOKED POLL BY DEMOCRATS!
26. Hmm, and here I was thinking this was just a public opinion poll about the design for the state quarter. My 6 year old nephew was excited about it, but now I might not let him participate knowing that it's a crooked democrat conspiracy.
27. Aren't we a voter-intent state. Can't they just look at the votes and determine which way the voter meant to vote. I'm sure I saw them do it before. Someone call Sam and ask.