Can You Trust the Corporations that Make the Voting Machines to Count Your Vote?

[Time for change]

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am posting large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

Chapter 2, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?", began by discussing the large discrepancies between the exit polls (which favored John Kerry) and the official vote count (which gave the election to George W. Bush) in the 2004 Presidential election. This discrepancy raised the strong suggestion that votes might have been switched electronically from Kerry to Bush. Chapter 3, “Can You Trust the Corporations that Make the Computers to Count Your Vote?”, follows up on that suggestion by discussing the hazards of “black box” voting (i.e. voting on electronic machines that produce vote counts that cannot be verified and have the potential to switch votes from one candidate to another) and presenting more substantial evidence of vote switching, in the 2004 and other elections.


The hazards of using Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines to register and count our votes

Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are those that directly record the voter’s vote electronically, without the necessity for any paper evidence of the vote.
What do you think would be the reaction of most U.S. citizens if they were told that a law had just been passed that gave the Party in power the right to count the votes and determine the winner of elections in private – without any oversight? Outrage, I would hope. And yet, today we find ourselves in a situation where votes are counted by computer software that is written in secret and made inaccessible to the public, with the rationale that the machines and software that count our votes are “proprietary”. Just as bad, they leave no record of the vote counting process, making recounts impossible. These systems are often referred to as ‘black box voting’, to emphasize the fact that the voting process employed by them is opaque. Is that situation different than giving one Party a box of paper ballots and allowing them to count them and determine the winner in private? And yet, where is the outrage?

Involvement of voting machine companies in our political process
The corporations that make the computers and software that count our votes often donate money to political candidates, including those who could potentially benefit if the election machinery is programmed to help them win elections. They sometimes employ convicted felons. And nobody questions the fact that it is possible to secretly program their computers to rig an election. An important question is, “Is that what actually happened in the 2004 Presidential election?”

According to a report by electionline.org on campaign donations by voting machine companies:

The largest share – $411,320 from 2001 to 2003 – came from Diebold, given to Republican candidates and party coffers…. Diebold and its board members gave mostly to Ohio candidates and office holders, and President George W. Bush. CEO Walden O'Dell vowed in a fundraising letter last year (2003) to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to Bush.

Why DRE machines are unfit to be used in our elections
A book by Andrew Gumbel, “Steal this Vote”, talks at great length about why DRE machines in the U.S. today are unfit to count our votes. Here is a general statement by Gumbel as to why these machines should not be used in our elections:

… there were two fundamental problems with the touch-screen DREs. First, as computer scientists had been warning for years without anyone paying much attention, they were inherently unsafe because of their vulnerability to software bugs, malicious code, or hack attacks. Even in the best designed system, removing votes from the physical world and storing them exclusively in electronic form was a risky proposition, because there was no way of being sure that the data put into the machines during an election would be the same as the data later spat back out. Hence the strong recommendation of academic experts… to create a system of paper receipts enabling voters to confirm their individual choices and providing election administrators with the wherewithal to conduct meaningful recounts.…

The second problem with the new-generation DREs is that they are often poorly programmed by their manufacturers and inadequately tested by government-contracted laboratories charged with their certification. This was a well-kept dirty secret… Because of the proprietary nature of the software, state and county officials had to take assurances about security almost entirely on trust. And take those assurances they did…

Gumbel then goes on to discuss how the Florida Task Force recommended that optical-scan machines are a much preferred alternative:

Jeb Bush appointed the twenty-one member Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards, and Technology… just forty-eight hours after the Supreme Court decision handing the presidency to his brother. They in turn reported back ten weeks later with thirty-five recommendations. By far the most important of these… stated that only one state-certified system met acceptable standards… That was the optical-scan system – with the added proviso that votes should be tabulated precinct by precinct, not centrally at county headquarters.

He then goes on to discuss how, due to Republican control of the state and a cozy relationship between ES&S and state officials, the Task Force recommendations were largely ignored, and touch screen machines were sold to twelve Florida counties. Similar events transpired in Maryland and Georgia.

Then, on National Bureau of Standards identification of DRE problems:

In his prescient survey of voting systems written in 1988, Roy Saltman of the National Bureau of Standards identified four problem areas in verifying the outcome of computerized elections: the absence of a paper audit trail, poor program design, trade secrecy provisions that stop public officials from examining those programs, and inadequate administrative oversight. The new DRE systems introduced in the wake of the 2000 election suffered from every one of these pitfalls…. The risk, he wrote, was that these oversights would be tantamount to an “abdication of control over elections to vendors.”

Gumbel talks about how Bev Harris came upon files of code for Diebold machines on the internet. Harris copied these files and made them available to computer scientists, so that they could examine the files and ascertain their potential. Here is what Avi Rubin and his associates at Johns Hopkins University found:

What they found left them so incredulous… describe the Diebold code as amateurish, stunningly inadequate, and downright scary…. Every single Deibold machine was crackable… A malevolent developer could easily make changes to the code that would create vulnerabilities to be later exploited on Election Day. Specifically, it was possible through a variety of techniques to alter the outcome of an election without leaving a trace.

Gumbel notes that many of Diebold’s internal e-mails were leaked. Some made a big point of the need for them (Diebold) to have access to vote counting codes from outside during an election. He notes that there is great resistance of at least some DRE manufacturers to include auditable paper trails (i.e. where voters are given a paper receipt that denotes their vote, which they deposit in a ballot box for a later potential recount) in an election. Both of these things – access to the machines from outside during an election and the absence of paper trails – are recipes for election theft. Allowing access to the machines from outside during an election facilitates electronic manipulation of the vote. The absence of paper trails precludes the possibility of a recount of the vote. We should ask why voting machine companies insist on these things, and why they are allowed in our elections.


Evidence of vote switching

One of the scariest aspects of the DRE machines is the potential to switch votes from one candidate to another. There is much evidence that this occurs. Let’s consider some of this evidence.

An analysis of nation-wide vote switching reported by voters during the 2004 election
In order to assess the potential role of vote switching in the 2004 presidential election, I conducted an analysis of reports by U.S. voters to the Election Incidence Reporting System (EIRS) developed by the National Election Data Archive Project. All reports included in this analysis involve the U.S. national election of November, 2004. The EIRS database included 28,734 reported incidents, including 2,115 “machine problem” incidents. The material for this analysis was obtained by searching these “machine problem” incidents only in counties that used electronic voting machines, according to a database provided by Voters Unite!.

A report was categorized as a presidential vote switching incident if: 1) the report specifically referred to the presidential vote OR to one or both of the two major parties (unless referring specifically and only to non-presidential candidates); and 2) The report noted that the voting machine made it easier or more difficult to vote for one of the two major candidates. Typically these reports involved a voter attempting to register a vote for one candidate, and then the machine noting that another candidate has been selected. These “vote switches” involved switches from one to the other major party candidate, from a major party to a 3rd party candidate, or vice versa.

Results
The analysis showed 87 cases where the vote switch favored Bush and 7 where it favored Kerry – a 12 to 1 ratio in favor of Bush.

Of the 87 vote switches that favored Bush, 67 were reported from one of the 11 battleground states. The rate of these reports (per voter using electronic voting machines) from the battleground states was 9 times greater than in the other 39 states. The distribution of incidents by state and county was very uneven. Of the 67 vote switches reported from swing states, all were reported from four states: Florida (47 incidents), Ohio (8 incidents), New Mexico (8 incidents), and Pennsylvania (4 incidents)

Four voting machine vendors accounted for all but three of the 87 reported incidents that were favorable to Bush. These included Diebold, Danaher, Sequoia, and ESS. The rate of reported incidents was more than 5 times greater with touch screen machines than with other electronic voting machines.

Many of the voters who experienced vote switches from Kerry to Bush tried to vote for Kerry several times before the correct vote finally registered. Three voters said they ended up voting for Bush because they lost patience trying to change their vote. 24 of the reports noted that there were numerous additional reports of similar incidents in the same polling place, which used phrases such as “happening all day”.

Most of the reports did not specify precisely how the vote switch took place, although one gets the impression from reading many of these reports that the vote switch often took place immediately after the voter registered his/her vote, and that it was immediately apparent. On the other hand, 15 reports specifically noted that they were not aware of the switch until the end, when they checked the “review” or “summary” screen, or when they tried to “confirm” their vote. One of these voters noted that the switch on the summary screen took place right before her eyes as she was registering her vote, which meant that she accidentally voted for Bush. Several voters noted that the vote switch was difficult to identify, and only their watchfulness prior to registering their vote prevented them from voting for Bush.

Discussion of the results
What is the meaning of the voter reported incidents of vote switching that favored George W. Bush over John Kerry by a ratio of more than 12 to 1? Let’s examine the possibilities:

Statistical analysis showed that the odds against random chance (like flipping a coin and getting 87 heads and 7 tails) accounting for the large preponderance of vote switches favoring Bush over Kerry exceed ten million to one. So there is no reasonable probability that random chance explains the degree to which Bush was favored by these vote switches.

Bias would explain the disproportionate percent of cases favoring Bush if in reality the Bush and Kerry favorable incidents occurred with approximately the same frequency, but the Bush favorable incidents were more likely to be reported by the voters who experienced them. This possibility is similar to the hypothesis posed by Warren Mitofsky to explain the discrepancy between his November 2004 Presidential exit poll (which had Kerry winning by 3 %) and the official election results (which had Bush winning by 2.4%). Although I don’t find it difficult to believe that such a bias could exist, I do find it very difficult to believe that the magnitude of such a bias could be so great as to result in a 12 to one ratio. I can’t say it’s not possible. But it seems like a very unlikely explanation. Why would Kerry voters be so much more concerned about vote switches than Bush voters?

The remaining possibility is that there were many voting machines throughout the country for which it was more difficult to vote for Kerry than for Bush (or which switched or attempted to switch votes from Kerry to Bush), that such occurrences greatly outnumbered problems in the opposite direction, and that these machines were concentrated in certain areas of the country.

Vote switching on electronic machines can be accidental. But if they were accidental, then why would the vast majority of these incidents tend to favor one candidate over the other? And furthermore, why would the incidents be concentrated so heavily in battleground states? I cannot think of an explanation for how this could have happened accidentally.

If the tendency of these voting machines to favor Bush was not accidental, that means that someone programmed them to act this way. Depending on the magnitude of this phenomenon, that could have compromised the integrity of the election. This is especially true given the fact that Florida and Ohio were the two states where this problem was reported with the greatest frequency, and the fact that if either if these states had gone for Kerry, he would have won the election.

If voting machines used in the 2004 Presidential election were in fact programmed to make it more difficult to vote for Kerry than for Bush, or to switch votes from Kerry to Bush, what significance could that have had to the integrity or outcome of the election? 87 individual incidents of vote switching in an election involving more than a hundred million voters doesn’t seem like very much. But what if these 87 incidents represent only the tip of an iceberg – the known part of a much larger problem? Let’s consider some possibilities that would suggest that a much larger problem exists than these 87 reports.

No one knows what fraction of problems discovered by voters at the polls in November, 2004, were reported to the EIRS. It seems likely that the great majority of voters weren’t even aware that the system existed. Or even if they were aware of it, most people just don’t feel the necessity of taking the time to report such things.

A typical report noted that a voter would attempt to register a choice for President (or other candidate), and then prior to finalizing their choice would note that the screen registered a vote for the other candidate. How many voters would have noticed this, and how many voters would have failed to notice it, and therefore cast their vote for the other candidate?

If the machines were programmed to switch votes, the person(s) behind this crime would not have wanted the machines to register any visual evidence to that effect, thus enabling the voter to have a chance to correct the problem, or bring it to the attention of election officials, and potentially a much wider audience. But what if it was not possible to program the machines in such a way that they wouldn’t occasionally provide this evidence, or what if doing so would have required a level of skill that many of the programmers didn’t have? The bottom line is that it is possible that the great majority of vote switching went unnoticed, uncorrected, and unreported.

Other investigations have been conducted that strongly support the idea that the EIRS reports represent only the tip of an iceberg:

First there is a report by Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman that identified 19 reports of electronic vote switching in Snohomish County, Washington – all which favored Bush – from the Washington State auditor’s office, the Washington Secretary of State’s office, and a Snohomish County voter complaint hotline. This compares with only three reports made to EIRS.

Even more compelling is an investigation undertaken by the Washington Post regarding electronic vote switching in Mahoning County, Ohio. This investigation identified 25 electronic voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, each which transferred an unknown number of votes from Kerry to Bush. The Post report goes on to state “Due to lack of cooperation from Secretary of State Blackwell, we have not been able to ascertain the number of votes that were impacted or whether the machines malfunctioned due to intentional manipulation or error.”

Supporting the supposition of election fraud as an explanation for the vote switches described in the EIRS analysis, as well as the exit poll discrepancy nationally and in Ohio, sworn testimony of computer programmer Clint Curtis before the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff (which I will discuss in detail in chapter 4) suggests an intention on the part of Republican functionaries to utilize electronic vote switching software in the 2004 election. The strange "suicide" death of the Florida investigator who was in the midst of investigating Curtis’ allegations (after telling Curtis that his investigation revealed corruption “all the way to the top”) provides additional reason to believe that the implications of Curtis’ revelations were very important.

Nobody knows how many votes the electronic vote switching described in this article cost John Kerry. Clearly, these are issues that should be thoroughly investigated and widely publicized to the American people. The implicated voting machines should have been analyzed by the relevant experts in order to determine why they malfunctioned. Attempts to do this since 2004 met with objections by the voting machine companies to the effect that their machines are “proprietary” and therefore legally immune to government confiscation and analysis. I don’t understand how that argument can be given any serious consideration in a democracy, where failure to ensure the integrity of our voting machines is tantamount to failure to ensure the integrity of our elections.

Georgia, 2002 – Senate and Governor race
The elections for U.S. Senate and Governor in Georgia in 2002 were conducted entirely on unauditable DRE machines. Both races resulted in huge upsets for the Republican candidate. Andrew Gumbel says about this election:

On June 10 <2002>… six tabulation machines and a touch-screen voting terminal were stolen…. The theft was also an extremely serious security breach, because a technically adept hacker who gained access to the tabulation machines and the associated GEMS election management software could effortlessly – and undetectably – alter the outcome of an election not only in Georgia but anywhere in the United States where Diebold machines were used.

The November 2002 elections in Georgia were screwy in more ways than one. The state had its share of machine malfunctions … Most troublesome, however, were the results of the races for governor and U.S. Senate, which suggested wild double-digit swings in favor of the Republican candidates from the final pre-election opinion polls. Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor to be elected since Reconstruction, thanks to a sixteen point swing away from the Democratic incumbent, Roy Barnes. And Saxby Chambliss, the colorless Republican Senate candidate, pulled off an upset victory against the popular Vietnam War veteran Max Cleland, representing a nine- to twelve-point swing… But it wasn’t just the opinion polls that were at variance with the result. The voting pattern was also drastically different from Georgia’s open primary … in 74 counties in the Democrat-heavy south of the state, Chambliss improved on his own standing by a whopping 22 points. Were these statistical anomalies, or was something fishier going on? In the absence of a paper backup, or of any hint of transparency from state officials, the question was for the most part unanswerable.

Bev Harris writes about her investigation:

In early February, 2003, programmers for Diebold Election Systems admitted that they had been parking highly sensitive company files on an unprotected web site, a serious security mistake by anyone's reckoning. The very next week officials from the state of Georgia admitted that a program 'patch' was administered to over 22,000 unauditable touch-screen voting machines in Georgia. This took place shortly before the November 2002 election... Putting patches on 22,000 voting machines without looking at the underlying code has put the Georgia election results in doubt... No official at Diebold or the Georgia Secretary of State's office has provided any explanation at all about the OTHER program patch files – the ones contained in a folder called 'rob-georgia' on Diebold's unprotected FTP site. Inside 'rob-georgia' were folders with instructions to 'Replace what is in the GEMS folder with these'...GEMS is the Diebold voting program software.

Exit poll discrepancy in the 2008 Presidential election
On Election Day 2008, the Election Defense Alliance undertook an effort to capture exit poll statistics from all major statewide races (President, Senator, and Governor) prior to “correction” of the statistics to match the official election results (Once the statistics are “corrected” to match the official election results they are worthless for the purpose of assessing the exit poll discrepancy because the “correction” erases the discrepancy.) Barack Obama won the national popular vote in that election by 6.1%, whereas the national exit poll predicted an Obama win of 8.3%. Thus, the exit poll discrepancy from the official vote count (‘red shift’) in this election was 2.2% -- much smaller than the red shift of 5.4% found in the 2004 Presidential election.

Why was the red shift in the 2008 Presidential Election so much less than that seen in 2004? Nobody knows, and we can only speculate. Maybe it had to do with the fact that those in a potential position so steal an election in 2008 recognized that this particular election was being watched very closely for signs of election theft. Maybe they realized that Obama had a large enough lead in this election to make it too difficult to steal. Maybe they did not consider Obama as much of a threat to them as john Kerry. Nobody knows.

Whatever the reason, monitoring of elections with exit polls needs to be continued. Exit polling is considered a standard tool for monitoring elections, and it is especially important when vote counts are conducted electronically, with no paper trail. There is a good reason for this: Large discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts provide an important warning sign regarding the integrity of elections.

[IDemo]

1. I've always had a problem with this part of the issue-

what if it was not possible to program the machines in such a way that they wouldn’t occasionally provide this evidence, or what if doing so would have required a level of skill that many of the programmers didn’t have?

I have done a bit of database programming and working with GUI's (graphical user interfaces) in general. In any modern programming environment, it's an utterly trivial task to make the output display whatever value you wish without regard to the data entered into the actual database. There is no advanced computer science or algorithmic magic required. For the perpetrators of the above fraud to have openly waved a red flag in the voters' faces strikes me as completely amateurish and self-defeating; wouldn't just one convincing demonstration of their shenanigan to election authorities get their machines tossed? They either used some incredibly inept programmers or felt totally secure in their business relationship with the state.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

3. x2

[Time for change]

27. "wouldn't just one convincing demonstration of their shenanigan to election authorities

get their machines tossed?

Great question, but apparently the answer is a resounding "NO". Their has been widespread documentation of the problem, and yet little or no discarding of these machines.

Then, when requests are made to examine the machines to try to ascertain whether they were programmed for fraud (following a suspicious election), the voting machine companies fall back on the claim that their machines are "proprietary". And our election officials accept that, and the machines are not examined.

[rhett o rick]

2. This is the most important issue we face today. nm

[xtraxritical]

22. Bring powerful magnets to the voting booth and f up the electronic voting machines.

Force the paper ballots. Vote absentee, there's a paper trail.

[rhett o rick]

26. We vote 100% by mail. The electronic monster is located elsewhere. nm

[lostnote12]

4. Is EX-Congressman Ney(Oh) out of prison yet?....the HAVA act over which he chaired has been

.....another blight on the spirit of our founding mothers and fathers.....I despise the HAVA ACT as it was inacted....open-source the calculations and a course-correction will be achieved immediatley....THANK YOU Dennis Kucinich for posting Diebolds FTP files on your Congressional website yrs ago.....History will view you kindly as an American that was well ahead of the current political curve in which we live

[sabrina 1]

32. I agree about Dennis Kucinich. He is a great Congressman, but had little

backing from the rest of Congress, shamefully, on the important issues he raised. And I agree, history will view him kindly. Not so much the majority of them who were either too cowardly, or who stood to lose personally, to stand up with him.

[Raster]

5. No. The first extremely suspicious election was Georgia in 2002, Clelland vs. Chambliss.

That was also the first election that normally reliable exit polling suddenly proved unreliable.

If memory serves me correct, since 2002 there have been 6 or 7 suspicious elections where the Democratic candidate - who was projected to win by pre-election polling and the actual exit polls - ends up losing. I also believe that in every one of those suspicious elections, the republican always ends up being the winner. I further believe that at least three of those elections involved a Bush.

[lostnote12]

6. excluding Bush vs Gore?....my memory is foggy as well....I only know that the Georgia election

....appeared to me to be the beginning of a populist pushback to the graft-induced HAVA ACT......Billions being tossed out to election supervisors who relished in the extra cash......in my District Fayette Co(Lex-Ky) a yr or so after the passage our Supervisors budget was audited and a million dollar surprise was discovered.....Ohios Blackwell shifting the Ohio results to be forwarded/filtered? to the GOP websites in Tenn. before the Ohio public was allowed to see their state results....also the individual(Mike McConnel) that oversaw those results for Rove in Tenn. goes down in a plane crash before testifying before a Grand Jury in Ohio....Our nation has experienced Treason on so many levels that its appearance has become common-place....we have become dullen to its impact NOT dumbed down in my opinion

[valerief]

7. Only a fool or liar trusts them. nt

[SalviaBlue]

8. No.

Thanks for the info.

[sulphurdunn]

9. It's not who votes

that counts. It;s who counts the votes that counts.

Attributed to Joe Stalin.

[Dj13Francis]

10. No.

Of course there are many like myself, Brad Friedman, and Clint Curtis who have been saying that for a very long time. Imagine that. We were right.

[a2liberal]

11. no (n/t)

[sabrina 1]

12. This happened to my friend in WV in 2004:

A typical report noted that a voter would attempt to register a choice for President (or other candidate), and then prior to finalizing their choice would note that the screen registered a vote for the other candidate. How many voters would have noticed this, and how many voters would have failed to notice it, and therefore cast their vote for the other candidate?

She did notice and she called the poll worker over and she tried again. Three times when she tried to vote for Kerry, Bush's name appeared as her choice. The fourth time it finally got it right.

However, you have to wonder, was it corrected by negating the three votes for Bush? Or did those votes register for Bush? I know this happened to many other people also. But there was no way to find out what happened to wrong votes, so we'll never know.

[Time for change]

30. Right, we'll never know -- because these machines are "proprietary" --

as if neither we nor our government has a right to inspect the machines that count our votes.

Nor should we assume that vote switching is confined to cases where the voter actually noticed the switch occurring on the screen.

[Phlem]

13. I work in technology and software

and have done so for 20 years, mainly 3d games, which usually pushes the bounds of hardware, that being said.

I know full damn well applications, like the kind that run electronic voting machines, can be hacked, period!

If it's code, it can be manipulated. I don't care how many bits of decryption you put on that key, you still need a key or several , usually generated by the same app that encrypted it, to get to the raw data if "it" hasn't been manipulated already by then.

ALL electronic voting machines need to gone, period end of story.

-p

[AJTheMan]

14. So? Are we all to stop voting?

I mean if it is meaningless...

[lostnote12]

16. NO!!!....wear a Red/White/Blue wrist ...band en mass if nothing else, so that the media will have to

...pick up on the passive aggressive message!!!!...just my two cents worth....

[Phlem]

17. Try absentee voting

get it and send it through the mail. There is a paper trail.

-p

[Time for change]

18. I absolutely did NOT say or imply it was meaningless to vote

What I'm saying is that there has been a lot of cheating, and that cheating has determined the results of some very important elections.

There are two things we need to do: We need to vote, and we need to do what we can to change our voting system, among other things by demanding our elected representatives get rid of proprietary electronic voting machines that count our votes in secret and produce unverifiable results.

In the meantime, the more we vote, the greater the leads our candidates have over the opposition, the harder it will be to steal elections. For example, Obama received so many more votes than McCain in 2008 that it's likely that they didn't have the capacity to steal that election.

[sabrina 1]

25. Did someone advise you to stop voting??

That is not the answer, so please do not suggest that. The answer is what the OP is doing, expose the problems and demand that they be fixed.

Never fails to amaze me that someone reads an analysis of a problem, and then suggests throwing their hands in the air, rather than the most obvious solution.

[zinnisking]

15. Michael Moore And Susan Sarandon Are Starting An Electronic Voting Machine Company! Already Contract

...contracted to sell to districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Other 48 states to come!

Obviously that's BS i made up.

If that really happened (it should) touch screen voting computers would disappear.

I told my Repub brother about that Diebold CEO O'Dell quote back in 2004. He said to me "don't believe everything you hear". LOL! He didn't believe that the president of a touch screen voting machine company could be so partisan.

How could we allow touch screen voting machines, ever, even for one election, let alone all the elections that have happened since the first TSVM showed up? Especially, how could we allow it when the vendors of the TSVM are led by right-wing partisans? Would right wingers allow Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon touch screen voting machines to count votes in this country? LOLOLOLOL!

[GarroHorus]

19. .

[randr]

20. If the millions of financial transactions

every day can be accurately processed without losing a cent then the counting of votes should be a no brainer.
The fact that voting machine security is still unverified is proof that there is a fly in the ointment.

[Overseas]

21. No. So I hope for overwhelming numbers voting Democrats in for all seats.

Because I don't think we have time to toss out the electronic voting like Ireland and Norway and other countries have.

And I keep hoping that electronic tampering is just done when elections are close, but this time we have some big excuses ready to cover up tampering-- Citizens United, voter roll purging.

I hope places with electronic voting call for recounts. But we also have whole groups ready to castigate those who question the titles as sore losers or conspiracy nuts because that has worked well in the past.

[Time for change]

29. Yes, our national "news" media will no doubt dismiss those who question the election results as

"sore losers" and perhaps their favorite term of all for anyone who questions their pronouncments, "conspiracy theorists" or "nutty conspiracy theorists".

Unfortunately, recounts cannot be done for electronic vote counts unless there is an associated paper trail, and depending on how the paper trail is produced, it may quite inaccurate as well.

[hobbit709]

23. I'd sooner trust an angry rattlesnake to not bite.

[flamingdem]

24. Good info

bookmarking..

[RKP5637]

28. No, there are too many opportunities for tampering, too much vested

corporate interest in the results, black box software, and as far as I know, no nationwide standard irrefutable validation/audit trail in use.

This has been discussed for years. Solutions are easy, a paper audit trail, but given progress seems scant to date validates my feelings there are a lot of shenanigans going on with electronic voting or at minimal a lot of potential for abuse.

Thanks for sharing all of the info with us!!! Great stuff!!!

[Egalitarian Thug]

31. No. Thank you for putting this together. K&R n/t