Video Shows Touch-Screen Voting Machine Purportedly Flipping Vote From GOP's Perry to Green Party

[BradBlog]

Source: BRAD BLOG



Video Shows Touch-Screen Voting Machine Purportedly Flipping Vote From Republican Perry to Green Party Candidates in Dallas County, TX
Incident challenged by election official, reported to D.A., highlights familar problem with unverifiable machines
ALSO: Vote said flipped from Dem to Repub in Collin County...

Aaaand here we go again. Our first report of touch-screen vote flipping of the year during early voting. And, for an added twist, this time it's Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry who seems to be getting screwed by the 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system in question.

Most such reports of touch-screen vote-flipping or vote-hopping, historically, have been from Democratic voters seeing their votes flip to candidates of other parties, though there have been isolated reports over the years of Republican voters experiencing the very same problem. Indeed, another report has been published today from a voter in Collin County, TX who says his vote flipped from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White over to the Republican Perry.

The Dallas incident was posted as a YouTube video by programmer Don Relyea and began to go viral early this morning, before being set to "private", presumably by Relyeah, at YouTube a few hours ago. So, unfortunately (for now), we're unable to show the video itself, though we watched it several times this morning before it was made unavailable, and have a step-by-step analysis of precisely what is seen in the video, as detailed by an Election Integrity expert who reviewed it a number of times to explain what is actually seen in it.

The removal of the video, seemingly shot via a cell phone camera, may be due to Texas law barring recording equipment of any kind in polling places. Dallas County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbert told The BRAD BLOG that he has now referred the matter to the District Attorney for investigation, not due the purported incident of vote-flipping, but rather due to Relyea's video-taping of the event.

Sherbert's explanation for what is seen in the video, however, downplays the purported problem and does not appear to sync up with what is actually seen in the video supporting Relyea's contention that his attempted vote for Perry was being inappropriately flipped to a number of Green Party candidates on the ES&S iVotronic system...

FULL STORY, ANALYSIS OF VIDEO, RESPONSE FROM DALLAS OFFICIALS:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8141

Read more: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8141

[slackmaster]

1. Teh Greens are going to try to steal the election!

Or it could be a hardware problem (touch screens are flaky), or a programming error, or the result of some kind of software corruption.

K&R

:kick:

[Xipe Totec]

2. Or it could be the Pugs laying the groundwork to challenge the election if they lose.

Rig it one way, document it. Rig it the other way.

If you still lose, scream.

[slackmaster]

3. It wouldn't have to be Pugs doing that

[DJ13]

4. Look at them beady eyes, cant trust 'em!

:rofl:

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Guilty, every last one of 'em!

:P

[Xipe Totec]

6. Yea, yea. They look so cute when they're little

:evilgrin:

[Boudica the Lyoness]

15. Sneaky looking things

:loveya:

[Mnpaul]

8. or a reprogramming error

The damn software was supposed to flip the votes the other way

[IDemo]

7. My question about this

I've done programming of graphical user interfaces and (some) databases.
Not enough to claim expert status, but enough to be familiar with the subject.

If I were someone attempting to manipulate the e-numbers, the last thing I would want to
do is wave a flag in front of an unsuspecting user that I was doing so. A write to the
database or to a variable in memory could be done without displaying the swapped vote on
the screen. So, why would they?

note - I'm not questioning the facts of election theft and e-voting machine hijinks, just the methodology.

[BradBlog]

14. See the full article...

You're absolutely right and it's a point I speak to directly to in the article as linked in the OP. (On iPhone at the moment, so pardon me for not otherwise summarizing a fuller response here.)

[boppers]

17. If you can spread widespread mis-trust of voting, less people will vote.

Republican win.

[4lbs]

20. But if you can switch 10% of the non-Republican votes to Republican without people knowing it, then

it's also a Republican win.

[BradBlog]

21. Democratic Party knee-jerk nonsense...

I have found the exact opposite. The more folks realize the tenuousness of their vote, the more they want to fight to vote in a way that ensures their vote will be counted and counted accurately!

Don't fall for that nonsense that it's a "Republican win". In my opinion, that entire meme is a "Democratic Party fail" and is one of the reasons we're still using these 100% unverifiable voting systems that have the ability, in and of themselves, to kill Dems!

[boppers]

23. Take a look at this:

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/

eVoting, with paper trail. Best of all worlds.

I don't trust anti-technology bigotry any more than I trust pro-technology bigotry.

[BradBlog]

29. Seen it. It FAILS. Big time.

I'm very familiar with the OVC's touch-screen voting "solution". It too is an unverifiable electronic voting scheme. Don't be fooled.

Hand-marked paper ballots, counted on election night, at the precinct, before the ballots move anywhere, with everyone, including video cameras, watching. 100% transparent. Verified. Decentralized. Almost impossible to game. Easy. Done.

Has nothing to do with "anti-technology bigotry". I was a computer programmer for 10 years and my current work relies on them. Some of the greatest opponents to e-voting on the world's top computer scientists and cyber-security experts.

It's simply the wrong tool for the job for reasons to numerous to begin listing here.

Point is, you don't deliver a pizza with a space rocket. And you can't have transparent, citizen-overseeable elections when voting and/or concealed vote counting is carried out be computers.

[boppers]

32. "Almost impossible to game...." aside from the last 100 years of gaming.

If the vote counters are humans, they're bribe-able. If the precinct vote counts are determined *after* the vote is completed, rather than during voting, votes can be "vanished" before they're counted (but after they've been made). Likewise, if there are 150 people on precinct rolls who don't cast votes at all during the day, but all suddenly "vote" at the closing minute, there's no way to detect that anomaly.

Decentralizing potentially *increases* the number of weak points, ideally a solution would have checks and balances for central corruption as well as distributed corruption.

[provis99]

30. those can be easily rigged, because they're open source.

You can have the machine print out a Democratic vote, while a Republican vote is recorded in the database.

[boppers]

31. Huh?

"those can be easily rigged, because they're open source."

Uhm, with open source, *everybody* can see if it's rigged or not. Not so with closed source, where others cannot audit the code, to see if it's rigged.

Of course, with *every* system, a D vote can be counted as an R vote, it's really a matter of having transparency and a way of checking to see if the record reflects the intent.

[24601]

27. There ain't no less(or) people - except those covered by Buck

v. Bell, but perhaps fewer would vote - whether they be less or more.

[LawnKorn]

9. So the Republican's software hacker messed up the address pointers in the vote redirection

What would be an even funnier would be for votes cast for the Governor to start showing up is some obscure city councilman's bin.

[AtheistCrusader]

24. More likely the machines and or software are complete and utter lowest-bidder crap.

[Scuba]

10. All the security of an Etch-a-Sketch. n/t

[LiberalArkie]

11. Perhaps done by Perry, so that if the election goes the wrong way, it can be invalidated.

[rasputin1952]

12. These things are worthless and should be burned.

[nyy1998]

13. I voted for White, and it showed up as White so I'm not going to complain

[Canuckistanian]

16. Isn't that interesting

For two reasons:

1) That the votes were flipped AWAY from a Republican

and

2) That the Youtube video was pulled by the author, perhaps in response to possible law infractions due to filming videos in polling places.

I DO so wish that the Texas AG gets involved with this and actually presses charges - This might get MORE interesting.

[guruoo]

18. Even more interesting is that no one downloaded a copy of the video

before it was taken offline (apparently)

[BradBlog]

22. Are you sure? ;-) (nt)

[Canuckistanian]

25. Brad..... you're simply awesome

But I'm sure you hear that every day. :D

[BradBlog]

26. Thanks, and...

No, I don't hear that as often you might think! :-)

[DeSwiss]

19. K&R

- If it weren't for goon squads and crooked voting machines, we'd only have about half the Repukes in Congress that we've got now.....

[gtar100]

28. What gets my goat is that the Democrats did little if anything about voting systems

since they've taken a majority. If they want electronic voting then there should be technical standards for voting machines with audits to prove compliance. But there is too much inertia on this issue by those who are in power. ATM's machines can handle money with hardly a loss. It's no stretch that voting machines can be made to be verifiably accurate as well.

Funny (tragically funny) that there is so little incentive for a fair election system. I understand why the Republicans don't want it - they'd die a quick death in a fair and open system. They need cover-ups, corruption, lies, filthy money (in excessively large quantities) and dirty tricks just to assert they have a slim majority. But Democratic congressmen and senators? Why? It's like their own brand of corruption (taking money from big donors and voting against the needs of those they represent) sets them up to be pushed aside and replaced by a Republican (the ready-made corruptible party the big donors want in the first place).

Are the Democrats so lost in their own little worlds to see what is so obvious to all of us who are looking in from the outside? Fix the voting system! Make it undeniably fair and verifiable. The Democrats will win every time in much larger majorities than they have ever seen. Why don't they want it?

It just makes me sick that we have to continue this charade for another voting cycle.