Let’s kick off our first election day skullduggery thread with a personal story. Last night Dr. Mrs. Dr. F., a Pennsylvania voter, was poking around Talbot’s and similar for some new pants and a popover ad announced in big all-caps letters that “to prevent long lines, Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats will vote on Wednesday”. In case anybody is confused, yes, we all vote today: women, Democrats and everyone else. This particular scam is older than radio, but if it nets a few chumps then a bad actor’s modest effort usually pays off. DMDF closed the ad and the window so that’s all that I have for now. Have any of you seen this? I would love if someone could help me learn who is pulling this shit.
In other news, keep an eye for those now-standard stories about miscalibrated touch-screen voting machines. People get understandably upset when their device registers a vote for the wrong guy, but it seems to happen pretty much at random and has affected both parties. Like voter impersonation fraud this method of vote stealing is too easily caught, carries a pretty stiff prison sentence and it happens intentionally a lot less than people think. But it does happen, so double check before confirming your vote and verify on the printout if your voting machine has one.
ETA: If your machines do not have a paper printout, please ask your local elections office to check their heads.
Punchy
Also watch out for all the Blah Panthers patrolling East Surburby Heights’ polling sites with their rifles and scuds of 8-Ball. When does Fox report this….9AM or 9:30?
Morzer
@Punchy:
How long does it take Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch to get into blackface and find a suitably modified pair of wigs?
donnah
My husband, son, and I voted this morning at 8:00. The poll workers said there had been 35 voters ahead of us. We have Diebold machines, so I was careful at the end to doublecheck all of my votes on the printed paper.
It’s a little discouraging to vote in an election that seems predetermined, but I’m never going to miss an opportunity for my voice to be heard.
jibeaux
Have never understood why everyone doesn’t just use a simple scanned paper ballot. Best designed ones I ever saw just had a broken arrow pointing to the name, and you filled in the middle with a black pen to vote for the person. Touchscreens with paper confirmation feel like technology in search of a purpose.
jackmac
Actually let’s reverse that and encourage Democrats to vote on Tuesday and Republicans on Wednesday. There, problem solved.
Warren Terra
RE the paper printout: if the paper printout is not itself the ballot, you remonstrate. The whole point of fighting the risk of voting machine error/skullduggery is a voter-verifiable ballot. A printout claiming your vote has been cast in a certain manner is nice, and can help to avoid innocent errors such as miscalibrated touchscreens, but it cannot fight malign software that displays your intent accurately on screen and on the receipt while electronically recording something quite different.
PS on the scary and misleading message front: I haven’t seen anything like the pop-up you describe (and, really, that’s quite brazen; placing an ad like that could in theory leave an electronic trail back to the scum who placed it), but on Sunday I saw something seriously old school. Someone pasted to the back of a road sign nearby (in Pasadena, CA) a photocopied flyer with a pixelated picture of a grinning Obama and the words “Ebola Importer”.
dmsilev
@jibeaux: That’s what we have here (Chicago). Nice simple design. The problem here is that we have judge-retention questions on the ballot. Literally 100 “Should Judge x retain his/her seat” questions. It’s crazy.
Gin & Tonic
@jibeaux: We have those in RI, both for in-person and absentee – exact same piece of paper, AFAIK. Makes the absentee counting process seamless and timely as well. Easy to use, paper trail, quick optical scan, you see the counter increment to know your vote was registered. All the advantages and none of the disadvantages.
Belafon
@Warren Terra: Which is, in part, why I don’t have near the concern over electronic voting than some here. Say you’re in an area that does paper only ballots. As Lenin said, if you control the counters, you control the election. You can mark person A, but all it takes is the right “counting” of votes for person B to win. And, unless it’s close, who challenges the count?
Tim F.
@Warren Terra: Sure, but what you describe is not miscalibration, it’s hacking. An individual voter honestly cannot do much about that. We can raise hell that our local elections officials keep the machine handling process secure and transparent, and then tear our hair out when they don’t.
Redshift
My most entertaining time outside the polls this morning was watching an older Republican volunteer go through contortions trying to get black voters interested in their black Republican congressional candidate while avoiding mentioning that he was black, even though it was painfully obvious that’s the only reason he was hoping they’d be interested. (The guy was only there for about half an hour, and was apparently a higher-up in either the local party or the campaign.) The younger Republican volunteer who was there for two or three hours was smart enough to know that this wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Okay, the most entertaining bit was when the older guy was leaving, and I got to hear him stage-whispering to the younger guy about making sure people noticed the candidate because he was black.
Thor Heyerdahl
What are the odds on Waukesha County being the last county to report again in the WI governor race?
Cervantes
Not new. What follows is an excerpt from Tova Wang’s http://judiciary.house.gov/_files/hearings/pdf/Wang090319.pdf given after the 2008 election to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.
Read it and scream, or seek justice, or just read it again — anything but weep.
Redshift
@Belafon:
My concern over electronic voting has always been reliability more than election fraud, because voting machine companies use the razors-and-razor-blades sales model — the machines are loss leaders, and they require the jurisdiction to hire their contractors to program them for every election.
I’ve seen software written by contractors on a tight schedule, with pressure to minimize the cost. The results aren’t pretty.
I also have the experience of having been an observer at a recount in the days when we had electronic voting machines with no paper trail. The only “recount” for those machines was verifying that the counts on the tape had been correctly recorded in the poll book and the individual machine counts had been totaled accurately.
Jeff
White privilege prevented me from realizing this until today.
My polling place is in the local police station. My district in the south side of Chicago will go democrat for sure. But I wonder how many polling places are purposely set up in North Carolina, or Georgia for instance, to keep a level of intimidation going? Say your son has a warrant out. You going to show up at a police station in your district? Or you grew up with a healthy distrust of cops in general? the last place you are going to want to step foot in is the local police station.
Redshift
@jibeaux: After a several-year phase-out period, we now have electronic voting machines only for handicap access here. (And just this year, there are new machines for access that actually print out the same ballot that paper ballot voters use, to be fed into the same tabulator, instead of being tabulated electronically.)
I think the only other real reason for the Rube Goldberg system is that a lot of people were used to using electronic voting machines, and grumbled about changing. Around here, in 2008, I think, you could choose whether to use paper or electronic, and I observed a lot of people going with the electronic voting because that’s what they’d always done, even though there were lines for the machines, and no line to use a paper ballot.
I think it’s dumb to cater to that, though. You’re going to get grumbling however you do it, but nobody’s going to raise a big stink just because the voting system changed. Just bite the bullet and do it, and from then on it will be “the way we’ve always done it.”
Valdivia
while at my polling place an older gentleman was yelling and screaming about things now being like Russia! because he had to use a special ballot for the first time in 30 years.
If he had checked ahead or looked at the booklet DC sends all its registered voters, he would know that polling places were changed for the 2014 election so that the precinct that was located at this church had been moved to a school and my precinct which use to be in a school was now in this church. I think it’s a very common mistake which could have been solved by walking a few blocks or simply being happy with the special ballot which in DC would of course be counted.
I get being upset but what really grabbed my attention was the go-to This Is Russia line. Are all older people so radicalized that they see totalitarianism in the smallest things? The poll workers were excellent with him–calm, let him complain, gave him a complaint form to fill out, etc. Still he left the precinct yelling about how freedom was gone. *After he voted*
Le sigh.
Face
If you’re too dumb/gullible to believe that Dems and Repubs would vote on different days, I’m not sure you should be qualified to vote. I mean, these things come up every 2 years with shittons of fanfare, so to be suddenly hoodwinked by an online ad that suddenly announces a new voting day is a clear sign of a super low-info voter who may be better off not casting ballots for liberterians and green party candidates.
GregB
I like to complain loudly about how the USA has turned in to Nazi Russia.
Sherparick
I had to put this link into a Financial Times story about interview that Joe Kernen, will known Wing Nut broadcaster and Krugman hater, conducted CNBC yesterday with an Irish executive. A transcript, courtesy of the Irish Times for those without earphones or time:
CNBC: How does the tax policy turn out such a string of great golfers, Graham, Rory…is it the tax, is this another tax, how does the tax affect the…it is a small place to have so many good golfers?
Shanahan: It is the environment that is probably doing that. It is a pretty good place to live and visit and everything else.
CNBC: What has the weaker euro meant in terms of tourism?
Shanahan: So, I think, em, Ireland is a very globalised economy so we look to what is happening here as much as we do to what is happening in Europe and we look to what is happening in…
CNBC: You have pounds anyway don’t you still?
Shanahan: We have Euros.
CNBC: You have Euros in Ireland?
Shanahan: Yes. We have euros, which is eh…
CNBC: Why do you have euros in Ireland?
Shanahan: A strong recovery….
CNBC: Why do use euros in Ireland?
Shanhan: Why wouldn’t we have euros in Ireland?
CNBC: Huh. I’d use the pound.
Shanahan: We use euro.
CNBC: What about Scotland? I was using Scottish eh…
Shanahan: Scottish pounds.
CNBC: Scottish pounds.
Shanahan: They use Sterling.
CNBC: They use sterling?
Shanahan: They use sterling. But we use euro.
CNBC: What? Why would you do that?
Shanahan: Why wouldn’t we do that.
CNBC: Why didn’t Scotland? No wonder they wanted to break away.
Shanahan: They are part of the UK we are not.
CNBC: Aren’t you right next to er?
Shanahan: We are very close but entirely separate.
CNBC: It is sort of the same, same island isn’t it?
Shanhan: And in the North of Ireland they have sterling.
CNBC: They do?
Shanhan: And in the North of Ireland they use sterling.
CNBC: It is just too confusing…
I note that Kernen is apparently Irish-American, but somehow as managed not to a thing about Ireland and the U.K. last 100 hundred years of sad history.
FlyingToaster
@jibeaux: Yeah, I’ve had that ever since I moved to Massachusetts; either the broken-arrow or the fill-in-the-bubble, but optical scanners in both towns and all precincts I’ve lived in. And I’ve watched the live recounts (local cable access filming the recount from the floor of the HS gym) of the paper ballots, where it EXACTLY MATCHED the scanner count ( alderman’s seat by 8 votes, natch). And it is the same ballot absentee and at the polls.
@Jeff: Mine as well — though they tore down the school building and replaced it with a police station.
The cops aren’t actually around in the front assembly area during voting; there’s one uniformed cop in the side entry directing people to either the sergeant’s desk or the voting line, and another cop by the exit door (reminding people to leave out the front and not clog the side entry). Unless you’re a notoriously wanted criminal, I don’t imagine they’re going to care — at which point voting is probably not one of your normal activities.
Amir Khalid
I’m surprised that so blatant an attempt to cheat goes unremarked by the people in charge of the election. Deceiving people to keep them from voting is surely not protected by the constitutional right to free speech.
JPL
Oh no,my wireless went out. Fortunately AT&T was able to repair it on their end. Phew… I refuse to watch the results on TV so I was a tad concerned.
Iowa Old Lady
@Sherparick: I lost IQ points just reading that.
Patricia Kayden
@GregB: You mean Nazi Russia Benghazi!!!!
Hunter
@dmsilev: The Chicago Bar Association evaluates judges and publishes a list of their recommendations: http://www.chicagobar.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Judicial_Evaluation_Committee
And I always forget to check it before I go to the polls.
For those whose voting machines are totally electronic — i.e., no tape or paper printout of your vote — if it’s flipping votes, get a poll worker immediately and scream like hell until that machine is taken out of service.
Valdivia
@GregB: @Patricia Kayden: I swear its quite something to hear it in person instead of the tv. The whole precinct was staring at him like he’d landed from Mars.
FlipYrWhig
@Valdivia:
Of course. All lines that deter them from getting what they want are Russia. This is also why they hate the DMV, the Post Office, and the doctor’s office waiting room. Lines full of people who aren’t you, often administered by persons of color. You know, totalitarianism.
shortstop
@Face:
If you’re too dumb to write a simple sentence that says what you actually meant it to say…
terraformer
Huh. I’m in Iowa, and all searches of my polling place show a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road. Says that address is a school.
There are no schools within miles of what comes up on Google maps. Multiple “where do I vote?” sites show the same location.
I have no idea where to go…
Face
@Sherparick: Wait….a guy from CNBC doesn’t know that Ireland uses the Euro and Scots use the Scottish (and British) pound? Wow. Just……wow.
shortstop
@Hunter: I always check it, but it’s sure tough to get the bad apples out: every nonvote is counted as a yes.
Cervantes
@terraformer:
Try this.
And this.
shortstop
@terraformer: Maybe they want you to vote at someone’s homeschooling enterprise. In the breakfast nook. At the dinette set, with a big “Grace Happens Here” poster over you.
Eric S.
Two things.
1. The Chicago PBS station reported last night that a bunch of Robo calls went out to Chicago election judges. The call informed them they MUST vote a certain way and MUST attend mandatory additional training last night. Per the story, Chicago election officials reached out to 6000 or more judges last night letting them know it was a scam.
2. When I voted this morning there wasn’t much of a line. At 7:45 I was voter number 50 in my precinct. The slowest aspect was the number o provisional ballots being issued. I saw 4 at least. Two of the people said they had “registered about a month ago.”
The voters names weren’t on the electronic list of voters. One of the judges explained they found the names of those getting provisional ballots but they were on a paper list with a plus sign next to it and no one there knew what that meant. This may be perfectly legit but I’ve never seen so many provisionals being issued.
thalarctos (not the other one)
Paper ballots, counted by hand, in public. What is so hard about that?
Yes, it will be slow. So what? This is democracy, not American Idol.
Valdivia
@FlipYrWhig: I would vote for disabling Fox news in homes were people are over 60. I think it would help a lot.
shelley
Has Fox had breaking news on somebody who looks like a member of the New Black Panther party holding the door open for people (i.e. intimidating voters) ?
Roger Moore
I’m still using Ink-A-Dot, but my county is looking into touch-screen machines. The good part is that their touch-screen machines will have two strongly positive characteristics:
1) They will only serve as ballot printers, not as vote counters, so there will be an auditable paper trail.
2) The software for the machines will be produced as a work for hire, so the county will own the rights to it when the process is done.
Roger Moore
@jibeaux:
I can think of several possible problems with that system:
1) The actual ballot will wind up being huge when there are lots of races. My ballot will have 36 different choices on it, which would produce an unwieldy paper ballot of the kind you describe.
2) It may have problems for people with physical disabilities, like Parkinson’s disease, that make it difficult to draw a straight line on the paper. A touch-screen device that lets people correct their choice until it’s right will make things a lot easier.
3) My sample ballot includes information on how to get translated material in 9 languages other than English. A touch screen system makes it really easy to offer translated ballots in all those languages without having to worry about how many to print in each language.
Eric S.
@dmsilev: Re judges: NO! I don’t believe judges should be elected. I know many of the judges are good at their job but it’s my vain protest every election cycle to vote No on every judge retention.
Eric U.
I think I have two choices — PA gov and Congress. Dems didn’t run anyone against the PA legislators in my district
Snarki, child of Loki
I’d certainly HOPE that the New Blah Panthers are out in the ‘burbs, hangin’ in the polling-place parking lot, checking out those sweet rides that the Richy-Rich GOPers arrive in. And their arm-candy, too.
And being so polite and friendly, I’d expect them to provide some complements: “Ohhh, brotha, SWEET ride! New? Low mileage? Tight handling? Yeah, the car’s nice too”
shortstop
@Roger Moore:
1) The Chicago ballot IS huge — about a foot wide by close to two feet long. We’re used to it. The print is pretty large, which helps older and sight-impaired voters.
2) and 3) All polling places in Chicago, AFAIK, have at least one touchscreen that can be used by people who need or request it for any reason. That sometimes makes for lines, but the machines are available.
schrodinger's cat
What ever else, you may say about India. India does elections right, the Election Commission in particular deserves the credit for that.
Valdivia
There was a conversation yesterday about Latinos not voting in the midterms because of anger and Obama losing the Dems the Latino edge.
This link has some prediction but the more informative part (with data) is on the latino vote. Worth a read:
http://www.ndn.org/blog/2014/11/some-thoughts-election-day-2014
Mike E
During my gotv calls I had a lady describe to me how she was canvassed at home and was encouraged to fill out forms which signified her vote, no need to go to the polls! Needless to say, I directed her & anyone she knows who were similarly duped to go to the polling location today (she knew exactly where that is) request their ballots and, umm, you know, vote.
schrodinger's cat
@Mike E: That sounds like fraud unlike the imaginary fraud the Republicans are after.
Cain
You complain to Talbots who should be pressuring their ad company for participating in a felony.
catclub
@jibeaux: I read somewhere that because the generation of machines bought around 2002-2004 is breaking, more votes are being done on paper ballots.
Good!
catclub
@thalarctos (not the other one): Also this. It is not even slow if it is made highly parallel. Which is easy.
Canada does it much that way.
jibeaux
@Roger Moore: Those are good points. Our ballots ran onto the back this year, so there were huge signs about that and arrows at the bottom of the page — more on the back! — but I’m sure some number of people won’t turn them over. As for Parkinson’s, you can get assistance with your ballot if you’re physically unable to mark it. The languages is a good point, I don’t know how that works. We had a constitutional amendment on this time, so it could be important. The rest of it is just names and titles, and hopefully if you’re a US citizen you’d be familiar with most of the titles. Not that I know what soil and water conservation supervisor actually does.
max
ETA: If your machines do not have a paper printout, please ask your local elections office to check their heads.
They don’t and I would but it would be hopeless.
max
[‘This is tea bagger turf dude.’]
MCA1
I witnessed most of the problems of American politics epitomized in one solitary act this morning: As I left my polling place and got in my car, I spotted a woman at the entrance to the parking lot, pulling signs for her chosen candidate (you’ll be able to guess which party in a moment) out of the back of her vehicle. She then walked over to the grass, where there were 4 or 5 other signs for various candidates for various offices, and carefully planted her signs in the ground. Directly in front of those bearing the name of the person running against her candidate. Petty, small, vindictive, pathetic and selfish. The rules of etiquette clearly didn’t apply to this incredibly special person and her savior. I was so tempted to go confront her, or go move her signs after she went inside, but knowing that (a) it’s not a large community, (b) her guy’s gonna lose, anyway, and (c) seeing yard signs in front of the polling site on election day has probably swayed about zero people ever (plus, you could still see the telltale color of the other signs being obstructed, so it might actually backfire if people just think about how that placement probably occurred), I just shook my head and drove off.
I can’t wait for this election to be over around here, because the condescension coming from some people, their presumption that everyone with any sense believes that America’s a huge shitstorm of fail right now and we’re gonna collapse if we don’t give the reins back to Republicans, is nauseating. The alternate reality has fully taken root in this country, if some of the educated people I know really believe the fantasies they’re being told. They’ve been whipped into a froth about how this is the most important election of their lifetimes, and “so much is at stake.” It’s a f’ing midterm, Republicans are going to win because they’re defending much less turf, and the GOP has done a great job of making sure gov’t doesn’t work and that everyone blames the President. End of story.
Chris
@Sherparick:
You would think at some point it would occur to people like this that “okay, I’m missing a big part of the puzzle,” backtrack, admit they don’t know much about the situation and ask for clarification, instead of just digging deeper. I mean, you’ve already entered “now people know I’m a fucking idiot” territory, at least get out of it with some dignity.
Elizabelle
@MCA1:
Laughing, because seeing behavior like that would stiffen my spine. Tacky, petty, peevish, small.
Sherparick
@Face: And if you ever watch the guy, he believes he is a genius, a true member of the hardworking elite who should not pay a dime in taxes because he is just so awesome, like all his CEO butts he licks.
Sherparick
@MCA1: I always point out these folks President Obama has only been in office since 2009 and that things are a lot better now then they were then. Not bubbly growth, something steady and consistent. That Iraq and Afgahanistan may be ‘F’d up, but they were also F’d up since 2003 and at least we are no longer losing 20 Americas a week. The environment is cleaner, and despite the best efforts of school “reformers” and downsizers, schools are are better now and we have the lowest crime rate since the 1950s. Things are a lot better than 1938 (think Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, WWII impending and 37-38 recession part of the Great Depression. FDR popularity sank and the Democrats got wiped in 1938, 1946, 1962 (when Kennedy was President and just after the Cuban missile crisis), 1966 after the 1964 land slide, 1978 under Carter, and famously in 1994 under Reagan. When a Republican President is in the White House they are the Party on which free standing angst that everything is not perfect falls on, even with popular presidents like Eisenhower and Reagan (1954 and1958 and 1982 and 1986, resepctively). Unpopular Republicans lead to real wipeouts (1930, 1974, 1990, and 2006) in these off year elections. I am upset about some of the results, but this is not the world coming to an end; particularly since the Republicans.
Sherparick
@MCA1: I always point out these folks President Obama has only been in office since 2009 and that things are a lot better now then they were then. Not bubbly growth, something steady and consistent. That Iraq and Afgahanistan may be ‘F’d up, but they were also F’d up since 2003 and at least we are no longer losing 20 Americas a week. The environment is cleaner, and despite the best efforts of school “reformers” and downsizers, schools are are better now and we have the lowest crime rate since the 1950s. Things are a lot better than 1938 (think Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, WWII impending and 37-38 recession part of the Great Depression. FDR popularity sank and the Democrats got wiped in 1938, 1946, 1962 (when Kennedy was President and just after the Cuban missile crisis), 1966 after the 1964 land slide, 1978 under Carter, and famously in 1994 under Reagan. When a Republican President is in the White House they are the Party on which free standing angst that everything is not perfect falls on, even with popular presidents like Eisenhower and Reagan (1954 and1958 and 1982 and 1986, resepctively). Unpopular Republicans lead to real wipeouts (1930, 1974, 1990, and 2006) in these off year elections. I am upset about some of the results, but this is not the world coming to an end; particularly since the Republicans will likely overreach and make themselves, not Obama, the story for the next 2 years.
The Pale Scot
Anyone remember Anonymous’s claim that it had traced Karl Rove’s ORCA crashing and re-routing Ohio vote tabulations to a supposedly legit back up server in Tenn that was compromised, Anonymous claimed it put up a firewall that secured the server, preventing the GOP from changing the vote tallies as it is suspected it did in 2004, where exit polls in several AA majority counties were very different from the vote
Edit: Meant to point out that would explain his outburst on Fox news
Mnemosyne
@The Pale Scot:
That’s what I was about to say — I suspect it’s the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit from Anonymous, but it makes Rove’s meltdown that much more amusing if you can think that it was because he was trying to cheat and it wasn’t working!
The Pale Scot
@The Pale Scot:
Also, from a comment in Salon
Cervantes
@The Pale Scot:
By Craig Unger.
MCA1
@Sherparick: While there’s no question that they’ll overreach, there is much doubt in my mind that they’ll be taken to task for it where it matters. Over the last 6 years we’ve seen the most irresponsible obstructionist envelope pushing in the history of the republic out of the GOP, and they’ve not been called on it. Their takeaway lesson from tonight is likely to be that it worked, and they’re being rewarded for it.
On the other hand, in two years they’ll be defending 24 Senate seats, in a presidential election year in which the consensus is that the White House is there for Democrats to lose. Those seats include those of Toomey, Johnson, Rubio and Kirk in blue or purple states, a few vulnerable folks like Murkowski, defending an open seat when Vinson runs for governor in LA, and facing heavy challenges from Democrats if they can find someone worthwhile to run against Ayotte, Burr, Portman and others in traditionally or trending moderate states. If the public moves back toward general ballots favoring D’s, there’s the potential for a huge pendulum swing. The Democrats will be worried about only Reed and Bennet in Colorado.
Robert Sneddon
@Face: There only is the British pound sterling. Several Scottish banks print their own notes as does an Irish bank and those notes trade one for one with Bank of England notes since everyone goes along with the joke.
We do weird things with coinage too — somewhere I’ve got a Falklands Island 20-pence piece, a special variant of the regular 20p piece with a sheep on the obverse. Places like Gibraltar also have their own coinage. The Scottish and Irish banks don’t do fiddling small change though.
Mnemosyne
@Face:
It’s worse than that — he doesn’t seem to realize that the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom are two different countries. It’s like being shocked that the US and Canada use different currencies.
JoyfulA
OK, I voted in PA and got my sticker (from a high school kid; I said I was delighted my tax dollars were supporting the education of such fine students. I always lay it on thick.)
There was a short line at 1:30, but the staff was running only one set of books (A-Z, not A-M and N-Z) and three voting machines, set up so that the voter in the middle like me had to wait until someone on either end was done.
Only three positions were open (gov, US rep, state rep), and for once the Dems had candidates for all spots, which doesn’t usually happen in the T. Our Wolf is a shoo-in for gov; PA rep is newly redistricted with a good Dem candidate, and for US rep we have a reasonable candidate, but this is still a quite red area. Here’s hoping!
moderateindy
@Roger Moore: I was an election judge for more than a decade in the Chicago suburbs. I always encouraged people to vote touchscreens for one simple reason, if you screw up you can easily change your vote. If you overvote, or mark the wrong candidate on paper you have to either start again, or in most cases people would say, “just put it through as is”, and the vote for the race they screwed up on would be negated. On the touch screens there was a paper trail at the end you got to review, after revieing your choices on the screen, before casting your final vote. So as far as IL is concerned there is actually a better paper trail using touchscreens than paper ballots because it is easier to secure a couple rolls of tape than a bunch of paper ballots.
We would have calibration problems occasionaly, and would inform voters to keep a look out for the problem, as it would always only occur for one or two races.
People don’t understand that changing votes for election fraud would be fairly difficult at the individual machine level, just because of the amount of manpower that would be involved, and the exact same type of hack could be done on the machine that tabulates paper ballots. After all you have no idea what the machine actually records when you put the ballot through. Actual changing of votes would probably be done either when transmitting the results to the state computers, or by hacking the state computer itself.
I don’t know how many other judges did this but if it wasn’t a really busy election we would spot audit some of the bigger races on the tapes of the touchscreen machines. The machines run through the tape and the tape has to be changed, and part of the tape gives cumulative numbers on every vote. We would go through the tape manually and record results by hand then compare that to the totals given at the end of the tape.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Mnemosyne:
“Whaddaya mean, you don’t accept American dollars? A dollar is a dollar is a dollar! The hell is wrong wit’ you people, anyway?”
It’s a fairly popular song just north of the border.
Gretchen
No paper receipt here in Kansas, no paper ballot option. Trust the machine!
Joel Hanes
@Warren Terra:
cannot fight malign software that displays your intent accurately on screen and on the receipt while electronically recording something quite different.
This. Oh, this a thousand times.
paper ballots marked in ink are your only man. insist on them.