Posted on 10/30/2014 11:38:13 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
A “calibration issue” that reportedly flipped Republican votes into the Democratic column isn’t the only problem plaguing Maryland voting machines. State officials say two touch screens malfunctioned during early voting, too.
Now the Maryland Republican Party is calling for an investigation.
“No matter what the reason, steps must be taken to protect the integrity of this election,” state GOP Chair Diana Waterman told the Baltimore Sun after Watchdog.org reported the glitches.
Nikki Charlson, deputy administrator of the Maryland Election Board, said the problems were limited to a handful of machines in just three counties.
“We took three machines out of service in Anne Arundel, Frederick and Howard counties for calibration issues,” she said. Two other units in Anne Arundel and Howard had faulty touch screens and were removed.
Charlson said she “cannot verify” if all 20 reports of mechanical vote flipping involved switches from Republican to Democrat candidates.
Robyn Sachs, president-elect of the trans-partisan group, Election Integrity Maryland, maintains that every ballot flip advantaged the Democrats.
“One-hundred percent of the reports we’ve had were Republican votes being flipped to the Democrat. Not a single report of the opposite occurred,” Sachs told Watchdog.
Watchdog also received reports of vote flipping in Queen Anne, Montgomery and Carroll counties.
Jim Reed, of Howard County, said the machine he used would not accept his GOP vote for governor after it flipped his choice to the Democrat.
He said the same thing happened in the partisan races for county executive and state comptroller.
“I had to go back and start over each time,” Reed said.
Other voters interviewed by Watchdog took umbrage at the state’s suggestion that “large fingers or long nails” could be to blame.
“I am suspicious of such a response, and certainly not satisfied. My wife has neither long nails nor larger fingers,” said John Sheldon of Anne Arundel County,
Charlson said election staffers could not replicate the vote flips on a dozen machines they tested. All votes from the impounded machines will be counted on Election Day, she said. Early voting ends Thursday.
True the Vote, an election-watch group that sued the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service, said computer glitches are to be expected.
“This stuff happens all the time and just needs a calibration,” TTV spokesman Logan Churchwell said from Houston. “Remember, these are machines purchased by cash-strapped government offices from the lowest bidder.”
Jennifer Bevan-Dangel, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, said the electronic voting glitches did not represent a “systemic problem.”
She advised: “Voters should always check their ballots before finalizing their vote, both in case of user error and in case of a machine glitch.
“But they can also feel confident that their votes are being cast correctly when they vote.
Frederick voter Donna Hamilton remains skeptical.
“The first time my candidate selection flipped I did wonder if I hit the wrong box with my nail,” she recounted. “After that, I was very careful to hit the box with the side of the pad of my finger, just as you have to do with a cell phone. It still flipped my vote over and over.
“I wonder how many people voted ahead of me that may have had their votes placed in error. Why aren’t the machines carefully checked and verified to be accurate prior to being put in service?” she asked.
Maryland’s Diebold machines — like the ones that misfired in Chicago last month— are programmed and tested primarily “in-house,” with occasional support by Election Systems & Software, Charlson said.
ES&S is also a contracted vendor in Illinois.
“The machines are only as reliable as the folks maintaining them,” TTV’S Churchwell noted.
Andrew Dodge, a lifelong Montgomery County resident, said he was a ballot box judge and then chief judge for several years before the advent of electronic machines.
“I have no confidence in them. There is no tangible record of anyone’s vote,” he said.
No, it is all electronic. Not a single paper verification. It’s all “put on a card (magnetic strip)”. One is supposed to verify it with the summary screen at the end, that is all. But how do I know if the summary is what will get recorded? And how do I personally prove it to anyone?
We dont know for sure how our vote is recorded since there "IS NO PAPER TRAIL !;therefore there is no verification of the vote.
Totally unsatisfactory ! Even the proverbial 'hanging chad' is better than this !
Recalibration , or tampering - what's the difference ?
Or who programs the voting machines special updates...
Diebold, IIRC.
The ones the Dems were whining about would make everything Republican. AFTER THEY insisted everything be “electronic”, as if that would make it fool- or tamper-proof.
Remember that all repairmen and calibration folks are union members.
Surely , the union memebers wouldn't tamper with the vote .. /s
As a programmer I could easily show one thing on the screen and tape, and then record another value behind the scenes that gets counted. I could easily do it only on every 10th Republican vote, every 5th independent, etc.
If the "tape" on the side of the machine you're referring to has a human-readable portion that tells you your vote was recorded as "x", it could still easily record your vote as "y" behind the scenes. It's not the human-readable part that gets counted. It's the invisible electronic value that gets counted.
I don't know any computer programmer who thinks electronic voting is a good idea. Perhaps they exist, but they're probably all Democrats and Satanists.
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.
-Josef Stalin, 1923, as quoted in The Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary (1992) by Boris Bazhanov
ANY Republican who loses should refuse to concede. A rigged election is never valid!
Kinda iffy as the finger is off the top of the Pubbie, but then with the proper "calibration" . . .
The very title of this article shows just the lack of common sense in it. "Can't verify" vote flips . . . just the fact that it happens shows how it HELPS.
Ya' gotta' be an idiot to think that it doesn't.
Re: #26
***sigh*** I believe you.
It’s time to go back to purple fingers and paper ballots and all night counting, I guess.
Yeah, the dem-lib-commie-rats have done it for decades, and continue to do it. The whole Stalin attribution is likely an urban legend, but close enough to reality to get a lot of play on the Net.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/stalin_quote.htm
✔
If the computer designers (crooks) were intent on preventing corruption, they could design the voting screens to eliminate or make it unlikely that wrong votes would be made or go undetected. Instead of placing opposing candidates immediately next to each other, they could space the touch boxes far apart on the screen. Now, they claim that voters with fat fingers touch the wrong area on the screen by mistake. Of course, this was likely their plan from the beginning so they could blame the machine switching on the voter.
Excellent.
Of course, if you are caught filming inside the polls in WI, you’ll be ejected, or arrested!
Why can’t a savvy (and dishonest) programer fiddle with our Optical Scanner machines to mis-count votes too? Of course the paper ballots would be a check to any skulduggery, but they’d never be checked unless there was reason to believe that some caper had gone down.
“True the Vote, an election-watch group that sued the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service, said computer glitches are to be expected.”
Just for starters: Touch screen voting needs to be outlawed. And to think they made up the crap about hanging chads to get to here.
No. You don't "call for an investigation." You SUE the manufacturer of the voting machine for FRAUD. I guarantee the manufacturer, to save its reputation, will find out RIGHT QUICK who messed with its machine. And will then blast the news everywhere.
“If voting was that important they would not let us do it.”
someone else.
Apparently it is that important and they are not letting us do it in a fair manner. Me.
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