Reply #28: Are you saying that the ballots cast at the satellites AND the Absentees [View All]

[Bill Bored]

were all counted manually? I.e., ALL Early Voting ballots were counted manually?

Precinct count Op Scans (Diebold Accuvote OS) are still programmed via GEMS. You don't need to hack the hardware. Read on.

I agree that OpScan ballots are harder to screw up after they've been printed, but prior to that, the names can be easily be reversed on the ballot, but not in the database. This results in the vote totals being reversed in the database. Any way to find out when the Election Day ballots were printed?

Of course, the database totals can be altered after the election too.

Also (and this is a completely separate issue) could ballot rotation have been used to scan ballots in the wrong machines to reverse votes? I'm not sure how they are coded to prevent this. On the OH punchcards for example, it's done with a single header card for each precinct. Not very secure. Do you have ballot rotation in IA?

Other ways to exploit Diebold Accuvote Op Scans in GEMS are to turn off the error checking for over- and under-votes (which is actually OFF by default!), and to set up a counting option called "Combined" which causes the straight-party as well as the cross-party candidate selection to be discarded if they are both selected for the same race. And again, this can happen without a warning to the voter. (I know there was only about a 0.25% undervote in the county though, and this was lower for the Election Day Ballots.)

Perhaps you are in a position to organize a recount of the Election Day ballots? They are paper and you can probably get some students to help you if you're at ISU. You could say it's for a thesis or something.

Consider that even though the winner of the Election Day Voting was Bush instead of Kerry, his margin was still quite a bit less than Kerry's Early Voting margin. This is NOT inconsistent with your hypothesis that Kerry really did do better in Early Voting than on Election Day. If the E-Day totals were swapped, Kerry would have won the day, but by a much smaller margin than in the Early Voting.

Think about it.