Touch-Screen Machine Poll-utes Votes In PA

Via l'Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments, in Pennsylvania, as Pam Spaulding tells us, a touch-screen voting machine reproducibly highlighted Romney when a voter selected Obama. Being a software developer, he experimented, tapping the buttons in small vertical increments, and found out that the entire area of the Romney button, plus the entire area of the Obama button, again reproducibly selected Romney. Only one small sliver between the two buttons actually caused Obama to be selected. The voter took a cell phone video documenting the phenomenon.

It gets worse. The voter asked the voters on either side of him, and found they had no problems. He then called over a volunteer assistant, who hemmed and hawed, then said something like "Don't worry. Everything will be all right..." and walked away, declining to do more.

Later in the day, that particular machine was pulled from service. How many are there like it in the field? How many states, how many polls, how many votes, are poll‑uted by this kind of tampering?

Jeebus Christ on a crutch in a crap-heap! If the voting machines really are... right now, today... tampering with our votes as we speak, what is there left to call "democracy"?

Harris County's voting machines may still be rigged, but if so, they are more subtle about it. For one thing, they do not have touch screens, but rather fingertip dials that move the selection bar, with a sort of Enter key that selects the currently highlighted candidate. For another, the selection in a race is visible for the entire time that ballot page is visible, and is again displayed for you in a list of your votes in every race at the end of the ballot; at any point, you may go back to earlier pages and change or verify your votes. As I said, this is not total security; such machines are, for example, still vulnerable to the "man-in-the-middle" approach described earlier in the post about Ohio. But at least a few hacks are precluded.

Users of e-voting systems: did you vote for Obama? did you merely THINK you voted for Obama? You'll probably never know.

There should be a "Boston voting machine party" in which these machines are all sent straight to the bottom of the ocean, after which actual voting is returned to paper ballots with a strict chain of custody both before and after they are marked. Yes, there are still ways to cheat on paper ballots, but it can be made much harder than it is with e-voting equipment.

It's 4:09 PM CST... where is YOUR vote?

Texans: You Can VOTE Starting TODAY!

This is it. In some states it's already been underway; in Texas, early voting starts today. If you need details, start with my early voting information post. If you vote today, expect a crowd, bring a book or magazine and wear comfortable shoes (heh... as if I have comfortable shoes). I am probably voting tomorrow instead.

Sweaters? jackets?
Not in Houston!

And remember to take your list along with your voter registration and, just in case (though it's not officially required), a government-issued photo ID which has your address on it, typically a driver's license. The self-appointed voter patrols (e.g., King Street "Patriots") are supposed to be out, checking up on everybody and making trouble. If someone hovers behind your polling station either to observe how you vote or to "advise" you, turn around and offer them instant dental work: you have an intrinsic right to a secret ballot, but that right is ill-protected in law. The bastards are probably just hungry anyway: offering to feed them a knuckle sandwich will likely make them go away.

If your poll has an e-voting system, in Texas, chances are good it's a Hart InterCivic eSlate. If you're inclined to vote straight-'D', remember that any subsequent selection of a candidate's name after you select the straight-party item de-selects that candidate.

May you be blessed with nothing worse than crowds interfering with your voting!

Texas: It's Almost Time To Vote Early

Basic info and necessary links for Harris County residents are available in my earlier post here. Early voting starts Monday, Oct. 22, and ends Nov. 2. The romance of Election Day voting (Nov. 6) is pretty much gone, superseded by wholly negative practical considerations... long lines, possible voting system failures and "failures," possible voter ID challenges at the polls by Republicans who do not like your skin color, etc. The short version: vote early.

Even if you overcome those obstacles, your vote may or may not be counted. In Texas, more than 200 counties including Harris now use DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines and systems made by Hart InterCivic, systems not without their problems over the years since their introduction after the 2000 debacle. Even at best, the systems generate no paper trail, and individual votes are aggregated by the polling-place-level system. Your individual vote disappears into the ocean the moment you press "Cast Ballot". But it's too late to request an absentee ballot, and those are fraught with problems of their own.

While not a catalog of the horrors of voting by DRE systems, this NYT article from 2008 has an assortment of examples. The history is not encouraging. Not only is stealing elections made easier than ever, but accidental loss of votes, sometimes whole precincts of them, is a possibility in ways it never was before.

How common is trouble with all sorts of voting systems in America? VerifiedVoting.org has a map of the status of voting systems in all 50 states; only five have the status "good." Expect problems, maybe in your state.

And Republican attempts to steal the election are already underway. Recently, for example, in Virginia, a Pennsylvania man working for a contracting firm in the employ of the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested after being seen tossing completed Virginia voter registrations (presumably by likely Democratic voters) in a dumpster. (The man's name is Colin Small; make of that what you will.) And this happened months after Myth Rmoney sent a letter to the Virginia attorney general asking for an investigation of alleged voter registration fraud by Democratic organizations. What GOPers do themselves is what they accuse their opponents of... isn't there a name for that phenomenon? other than "strategy," I mean...

When the CEO of Diebold, Wally O'Dell, told Republicans in a fundraising letter before the 2004 elections that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," he gave a warning that all Democrats should heed. Heads up, Democrats (indeed any non-Republicans): your vote is in danger, more than ever before.

(I don't know about you, but I resent like hell having even to think about this. It just isn't right.)

Rep. John Lewis On Voter Suppression And Voter ID: "Iʼve Lived This Before"

If you've ever read Walking With The Wind... the great Democrat from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis's memoir of the civil rights movement... you will know that Lewis is one of the toughest, most indefatigable and unbowed African Americans in our midst, a veritable icon of courage and steadfastness, repeatedly beaten and bloodied and fire-hosed but never subdued in spirit. I am fortunate to have found a used copy of the memoir many years ago; I turn to it when my own spirits need restoration. Lewis never fails to inspire me.

Thus Rep. Lewis is the perfect man to address the often politically untouchable issue of race in American politics. No one living... no one in this world... knows better than Lewis the heartbreaking, outraging consequences of racism once woven into the fabric of our nation's electoral process... and now being rewoven by Republicans today. As Lewis said,

I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

The poor. The elderly. And yes, racial, ethnic and selected religious minorities. All those American citizens face deliberate, unrestrained, thinly (if at all) disguised suppression of their votes by today's Republican party, through draconian voter ID laws (e.g., Pennsylvania and Texas), drastic pruning of voter roll in defiance of federal court orders (Florida), direct voter challenges at the polls leading to "provisional" ballots (many states), reduction of hours polls are open (again many states including Ohio), and outright vote-counting fraud executed using electronic voting systems (Ohio among others). Lewis conveys the message in his straightforward, uncompromising style:

Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state’s new voter ID law is ‘gonna allow Gov. Romney to win the state.’ That’s not right, that’s not fair and that is not just.

Do not let this courageous and highly respected American down. Do whatever you can to challenge Republican voter suppression in every state this November. Too much is at stake to let them get away with it. Do NOT permit the return of Jim Crow at the polls!