Reply #31: Thank you for clearing that up. [View All]

[Bill Bored]

I was wondering if they had the precincts pre-coded, which would make sense. Do the OpScans work the same way?

However, you are assuming that the machines are actually programmed to read these codes correctly. What if the hack involved disabling this feature? Then you could mix up the ballots before or after the voting and no one would know.

Also, in Cuyahoga, with the long lines and presumably some chaos, voters could have easily been directed to the wrong collocated precincts. Wherever the shorter lines were, the voters would happily go. We would need some witnesses to testify that this had occurred. Maybe some voters did it on their own, not knowing that it would affect the results??? But imagine being on a long line and someone apparently in authority telling you you could cast your ballot on a shorter line. After hours of waiting, most of us would jump at the chance, unless we knew the vote wouldn't count! We do know that voters were told their provisionals would count even if cast at the wrong precinct and this was totally false. It's a small step to suggest that regular ballots could have been misdirected exactly the same way.

As far as programming touch screens, most of that is done via GEMS in the case of Diebold. I don't know about other vendors, although as I said GEMS allows importation of data, which means GEMS is multi-vendor compatible! But since the ballots are downloaded to each touch screen from the server, you could mess up every machine in the county with just one configuration change on the server. I am looking to see if it's possible to actually program a default candidate, etc. without a hack.

Oh, and what if the server configuration is changed AFTER the ballots have been downloaded to the DREs, to hide the bad configuration?

There are only so many hours in the day to look at this stuff. I'm sure others have already figured it out (I mean others on our side) but I'd rather see it for myself. That said, if anyone has documentation that shows how to do this, please post.