Re: OT: Election technology question

From: Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing (winston_at_SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:10:00 GMT

In article <EtOdnT9m9rxsdR_cRVn-rw@igs.net>, "John Smith" <a@nonymous.com> writes:
>Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote:
>> In article <4182BA87.CFBD490A@teksavvy.com>, JF Mezei
>> <jfmezei.spamnot@teksavvy.com> writes:
>>> DL Phillips wrote:
>>>> Here's a link to an Associated Press news release that addresses
>>>> some of your questions.
>>>>
>>>> <http://www.ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/whatsnew.html>
>>>
>>> Thanks. So AP has people who are at the counting sites who call in
>>> the numbers. But the document still doesn't describe the interface
>>> between AP and the media organisations.
>>>
>>> There is an interesting paragraph about how their servers are built
>>> with lots of failover and fallback to different data centre. Sounds
>>> like a job of VMS. Does anyone know what technology they use for
>>> this ?
>>>
>>> I can understand why, no matter what OS, the manufacturer woudln't
>>> want to publicsize this since any voting problems would reflect
>>> badly (even if the problem is totally unrelated to the AP systems).
>>>
>>> Is it correct to state that there is no "official" national election
>>> office that tabulates the votes in an official manner and that the
>>> media is the one to actually decide which of the two will concede
>>> that night?
>>
>> Or not. (This was a subject of - to put it mildly - some controversy
>> in the
>> last Presidential election, what with some news organizations calling
>> Florida
>> for one side, and another calling it for the other, triggering a
>> possibly
>> premature concession which was then retracted...)
>>
>>>
>>> Do the states officially declare the winner during the course of the
>>> evening, or does that take days before the official pronouncement is
>>> made ?
>>
>> It depends; there may be enough challenges, recount demands, etc,
>> etc, to
>> delay an official result. The state election agency has some length
>> of time (generally specified by the laws or Constitution of that
>> state) to "certify
>> the election", which makes the result official and binding. So if
>> it's
>> controversial enough, they'll go out to their deadline, but they have
>> so far
>> usually called it the same night, and probably most states will call
>> it the
>> same night this time.
>
>
>See the following article for some of the tactics employed by Republicans in
>previous elections.... http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green
>
In fact, I'm aware of a lot of those tactics, but I was trying hard to answer
JF's substantive questions without reopening the (lengthy, painful, off-topic)
political arguments we had here in c.o.v. at the time, or to give the
opportunity to have a bunch of "your side's worse!" argument about it now.
(Not that I don't have an opinion about which side's worse, but that I'm
perfectly happy not to discuss it _here_.)

-- Alan