Our CHADs still appear to be hung, people. It started with Diebold and now carries on with voting machines made by other companies. The following are instances of vote-flipping from Democrat to Republican or other that I’ve come across in just the last hour. An ACORN worker may have registered Mickey Mouse, but across the nation, a properly-registered Democrat’s vote actually flips to McCain or someone else. Have CNN and the “liberal media” turn this into a heavily-rotated flap. Also mentioned are incidents of voter suppression with instructions on how to report them.
* Via D – The Charleston Gazette reports that “more W.Va. voters say machines are switching votes. In six cases, Democratic votes flipped to GOP.” Local Republicans, the only overseers of the election in these cases, “blamed voters for not being more careful.” This is precisely why we ought to demand voting receipts:
“I asked them for a printout of my votes,” [Shelba] Ketchum said. “But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it.”
* Via Blagueur – The Brad Blog reports that, in Texas, ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine votes are “flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In every instance, it’s been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.”
* This Salon article details vote flipping by machines in Nashville, TN and Texas.
* Again, via Blagueur, the results of a Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy study which shows that “Sequoia e-voting machines [are] disturbingly easy to hack.” Important to Louisiana: Can someone please confirm that “Louisiana uses Sequoia voting machines exclusively?” Ars Technica has published another article stating that “superior court judge Linda R. Feinberg ruled that a technical review of voting machines used in New Jersey may proceed despite the objections of the manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems,” but not in time for this election.
* The Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch has put together an Election Protection wiki. If you come across instances of voter suppression (including instances of voters being turned away from their polling places) or voting machine boondoggles in your area, please take the time to login and report your story as specifically as possible. If you’re not wiki-driven, please call 866-OUR-VOTE or follow the instructions at this link on how to use Twitter to tweet election-related problems. This is protecting (our only major contribution to American) democracy at all costs.
Update: CNN.com is on a part of the story. Long lines nationwide and glitches lead voters to wonder about how accurately their vote is recorded. “Forty-two percent of those surveyed in a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll said they were not confident that their votes could be ‘accurately cast and counted.’ That number is up 15 percentage points from a similar poll conducted four years ago.”
Update 2: Wired reports that the state of West Virginia just presented an award of merit to an [Election Systems & Software] vice president, who had abruptly and mysteriously left the company in May after 11 years of service, while their machines are currently on the fritz.
Update 3: Oxdown Gazette writes that “Republican Party efforts to stop thousands of voters from casting meaningful ballots in 2008 because their registration information does not match government databases with high error rates was set back by legal rulings in Wisconsin, Ohio and Nevada on Thursday.” (HT, maisnon.)
