This spells disaster: Voting machines

[johan helge]

How is this possible? Why is the Kerry campaign and the media silent about it?

From http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.html:

"One of Mercuri's primary concerns is that electronic systems provide no way for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds to the vote being recorded. As Mercuri notes on her site, "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result." There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. Companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, which manufacture the machines and provide the code that runs them, simply take a "trust us" approach.

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In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes.

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Chuck Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 1996. Electronic voting machines owned by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) reported that he had won both the primaries and the general election in unprecedented victories. His 1996 victory was considered one of the biggest upsets of that election. He was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign in 24 years and won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican.

Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. He was re-elected to his second term with 83% of the vote: the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. Again, the votes were counted by ES&S, now the largest voting machine company in America."

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The 2004 election will be the first to use nation-wide electronic voting. With the purging of voter lists, secrecy surrounding voting machines, the lack of a verifiable paper trail combined with voting machine companies with strong Republican ties and funding from the radical right, a Bush victory is all but inevitable."

[greekspeak]

1. "a Bush victory is all but inevitable"

Whoever wrote this line is SO 2000. John Kerry & Co. are not going to roll over and play lap dog like Al Gore & Co. did 4 years ago. There isn't any LIEberman this time, whose main goal was apparently be the first democrat to suckle of the Shrub teet. There is more money for legal battles in Kerry's war chest. And a whole lot more Americans are on the watch this time, ready to challenge a BS outcome. I know that there is rampant cheating. The election has not even officially started and there are desperate Pukes doing everything from throwing away voter applications to intimidating voters to scrubbing voters. The disenfranchised are not going to smile sadly and wave a white flag for mercy.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Sad that they're replacing mechanical voting machines w/ BBV's

These were virtually tamper-proof...

[crispini]

4. The problem with the old mechanical voting machines was

human error. Pollworker cracks open the back, reads 317, writes down 817 instead.... woops!

Also, if you went in to vote, selected some levers, opened the curtain to ask a question.... woops! you're done, Sam, even if you weren't finished yet. Nothing to be done about that.

[teryang]

3. Salon.com has an excellent article on Florida battle

...particularly the attempt by Glenda Hood, the elections supervisor who attempted to block election challenges which seek to have the internal register of electronic machines inspected during vote recounts for problems. Her totally illegal rule making was reversed recently by a court and the state now anxiously await her next arbitrary ruling on election challenges.

[crispini]

5. This article overstates the problem when it says

we'll be using "nation wide" electronic voting. An awful lot of counties are voting on paper still.

Also, many of the local election boards have technology committees and/or are working with some external organizations to check and validate the voting machines.

Voter awareness is very high about this issue, and pretty much everybody is watching their local elections board like a hawk.

The thing that some people don't realize is that elections are not run nationally. They are run by the counties -- I believe there are over 3,000 counties in the US. So the voting processes vary from county to county, as do the equipment and the people involved. IMO because of this decentralization it would be hard to steal a nationwide vote.

Believe me, Black Box Voting has gotten a LOT of attention this cycle. It's pretty much too late to do anything about it NOW, but after the election, there will be a lot of citizens involved with their local elections board who want to see papertrails, etc.