OK do you think this app created a vote if it looked like the person was pro-obama......and deleted a vote if they seemed pro-Romney.... and then sent the info in?
Did somebody hack the machines?
“Did somebody hack the machines?”
Well, I don’t think PBS would broadcast it if it had that capacity. This was sophisticated technology that was explained as get out the vote equipment. It collected so much information about voters, it was unbelieveable plus it created almost a friendship between the volunteers and the voters. The volunteers knew everything about the voter, even special needs, so the voters in the neighborhoods trusted the campaign workers from Obama’s camp. There was never a doubt who they would all vote for. The apparatus had been in place since Obama’s first election....4 years. Romney couldn’t get any technology on the ground with volunteers until he won the nomination. A few months at most. As far as fixing the machines? They forcibly removed our court appointed poll watchers. Even though a judge ordered them back, anything could have happened in a short time they were gone.
I live in a very affluent, and white if it must be said, area of west suburban Chicago. At my polling place the ballots were predominately optical scan sheets. There were a dozen or so “booths” or stands, for filling these out, and a single electronic station, which was being hawked by the election officials to little avail.
These optical sheets are, in fact, “paper ballots”, and anyone in control of a polling place which has them could stuff the ballot box with them to their heart’s content with impunity. The only mark on the ballots is an initial in the corner, so no problem there. An audit would have to match the ballot count with the voting records, but these are just more pieces of paper, ostensibly signed by the voter. At my poll they had my signature on the sheet, which was compared visually by several ( aged ) officials with the fresh signature, which is in fact rather distinctive. I’d love to look through some of the Philly records, if they do it the same way. A rather imaginary exercise, I imagine.
http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2012/05/obamas-digital-campaign-dashboard.html#
This seems a little innocuous, but I think it’s part of what I saw on PBS from Ohio.
Good question WildHighlander57. No one needs to hack a machine, whether a scanner or touchscreen device. There are no data with which to confirm the veracity of what is reported. There is no audit trail. No one can confirm that the results transferred from precincts, if indeed they even were transferred, are associated with the preferences stated by humans. Today, packets can be filtered so rapidly that no one would perceive that values contained in those packets have been altered.
The only voting mechanism, one still used in Israel and in a number of other countries, one which used to be used throughout the US, is to have local precincts count their own ballots, on site, immediately after the close of polls, and secure the ballots in sealed containers which are guarded and stored in secure vaults until challenges are no longer relevant. The counting was done by local precinct workers representing all parties, all observing the count, and free to check any ballot. Their count became the official count, and was what was forwarded to state and then federal election officials.
The reason given for the cessation of this mechanism was that television networks needed to report results immediately. They convinced someone that eliminating local counts would make the data available sooner. This was a time, justified or not, when few people questioned the validity of our sacred election process. The generated by machines were actually sent to, and counted, by a private corporation, Voter News Service, based in New York, and owned jointly by CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News. Voter News Service counted our votes, and reported those numbers to networks in real time.
The popularity of immediate television vote counts cost us any possibility of verifying the integrity of voting systems because only local counts provide a trusted basis. Today, the integrity of local voters, precinct workers, is circumvented. All counting is done in secret. Only total counts can be ferreted from voter rolls, and those data have been shown to be nonsense when one hundred forty percent of the number of voters registered voted in some Ohio precincts, with similar excesses in Colorado, Missouri, and many other Ohio precints. Any surprise that Ohio, upon which the election presumably hung, is the source for so many obviously corrupted voting events?
One of many books written about voter fraud was written by two counterculture brothers, the Collier brothers, rock concert promoters, one an attorney, who decided to challenge Claude Pepper, who had been a Florida congressman for about a hundred years. They published a very left-wing newspaper much like Berkeley's Daily Barb.
In pursuing why television was able to report exactly, down to the last digit, the results of their Claude Pepper challenge, only an hour or two after polls had closed, when the next day two precincts still hadn't been able to report for having broken machines, was so obviously proof of fraud that the brothers became inspired investigators. Their idealistic goal was to show that money wasn't necessary to compete in the political process. As aggressive counterculture journalists they made film of League of Women Voters punching extra holes into ballots, invalidating them, to adjust the counts. They had film of prepunched rolls in voting machines sitting in obscure Broward County warehouses, ready to be deployed. These rolls presumably recorded the count stored when voters pulled the voting lever. The President of the League for Broward County committed suicide when confronted with this obviously criminal behavior.
The brothers filed lawsuits against the FBI, Broward election officials, and the Florida Attorney General. They discovered that after the FBI behaved politely, and accepted a carton filled with thousands of documents and hundreds of hours of taped evidence, the FBI claimed never to have met them, or to have received any data. Finally, after years of legal battle, their cases were dismissed for having exceeded the statute of limitations, even though there is no such statute for vote fraud. The Assistent DA who dismissed the case was Janet Reno. Ghosts from the past!
The Collier brothers hypothesized that senior political figures decided, after the Kennedy assassination, that voting was too important a process to entrust to citizens. It seems far-fetched, but the fact is that without local counts, and carefully protected paper ballots, there is no way to prove that the will of the people is represented in their votes, and thus no way to know who or what they chose as part of the voting process.
We have not had verifiable elections for many decades. It isn't possible to know how often our flawed voting systems have been used to effect elections. There is absolutely no doubt that today's systems permit no audit trail. Only humans, with the check of the presence of their neighbors and peers, can insure honest representation.
There are many other ways to cheat, such as bussing Somali citizens to precincts and providing SEIU interpreters to tell them how to vote, or assigning SEIU employees to count absentee ballots, as is standard practice in California. All those concerns are valid. But without a traceable vote counting system, fixing those problems is insufficient. Sadly, for all of us, and for my children, it may take the complete collapse of our economy, and some measure of political coup, to begin to return to representative government. Our current leadership does not respect, or want to be governed by our Constitution, and they are well along in rendering it an historical artifact.