October 28, 2008
Brad Friedman
Bradblog.com
Our friends at VideoTheVote.org were able to capture some early coverage of the vote-flipping incidents on ES&S iVotronic machines in WV. We now have reports of votes flipping from Democratic to Republican (and other) candidates across the states of WV, TN, TX and MO. (See end of article for previous reports, and what you can do if it happens to you.)
Now you can watch the votes flipping on video before your own eyes.
And even how, after an election official supposedly re-calibrates the machine, it still fails to work properly!...Here's video of one of the first voters in WV to report the problem after her attempt to vote straight-party Democrat was flipped to straight-party Republican (appx. 2:15 mins)...
And in the following video, Jackson County, WV, County Clerk Jeff Waybright demonstrates actual vote-flips on the ES&S iVotronic, by showing how the failing machines, when not calibrated properly, can flip a vote from one candidate to any other. It's apparently just a coincidence that, so far, all of the confirmed reports of vote-flips this year have been awayfrom Democratic candidates.
It should also be noted that it doesn't matter what is shown on the screen when a voter votes on one of these god-awful devices which will be used by approximately one-third of American voters this year. The fact is that it's strictly impossible to confirm that any vote ever cast during an election on any Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machine was ever recorded accurately for any candidate or initiative on the ballot, as per the voter's intent.
This video, demonstrating one way that votes flip from one candidate to another on DREs, is also approximately 2:15 mins...
UPDATE: Note how even after Waybright has re-calibrated the machine in the following, the iVotronic still fails to record votes correctly, as a straight Republican ticket is selected, but the machine selected Ralph Nader instead of John McCain! At appx. 1:50 mins into the video...
Moreover, as this video from UC Santa Barbara Computer Security Group as commissioned by the state of California demonstrates, simply because a DRE machine produces a so-called "paper trail" doesn't mean there is any means of accurately verifying the voters' ballots or the final vote counts. Aside from the fact that such "paper trails" most likely will never be counted by anyone anyway, the fact is that these machines are easily tampered with, in about two seconds, such that even the "paper trails" can be hacked without the voter noticing, in such a way that they would match the internal hacked numbers perfectly. In such a case, as demonstrated by UCSB, even a 100% post-election "audit" of the machines "paper trails" would fail to reveal that they had been maliciously tampered with.
Source: Brad Blog
