Democrats Have Their Nominee. Will the Machines Let Him Win?

Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast at 11:19 AM on June 5, 2008.

So now we have our nominee, and Hillary Clinton is going to "suspend" her campaign this weekend after one last victory rally on Saturday. But any Democrat that thinks all we have to worry about now is John McCain is a fool.

Brad Friedman has been all over the completely FUBAR voting system in this country for the last four years now. If you're not reading Bradblog every day, you should be. Because when you go to vote in November, you have no idea what's going on inside that box.

I ran for county Democratic Committee this year after being recruited by a group of renegade Democrats in an attempt to topple the organization's pay-to-play, crony-driven, self-enriching Chairman. I didn't figure on winning, but it was a toe-dip into the political waters, because the town iin which I live is not only controlled entirely by Republicans, but no one from either party ever runs against the existing machine. I kid you not. We have elections every few years, but the only names on the ballot are the current mayor and council. Our mayor was busted in DWI charges last year with a cocktail waitress in the car, and his house is on the market. So who knows if he's even still planning to live in town? This year the council has allocated $1 million in a town of just over 9000 people to install artificial turf on the sports fields. The budget is determined behind closed doors, it's already been approved, and while you can go to the next open council meeting (there's only one a month) and voice your opinion (which I plan to do), it's already a done deal. This is part of the reason why voter turnout in at least my own voting district in Tuesday's primary was eight percent. Not eighty. Eight.

No, I didn't win, but I did get ten votes out of 37 votes cast, which I think is quite impressive considering I was up against a machine hack and my "campaign" consisted of a letter dropped off at around 20 houses. Imagine if I'd done a real mailing with follow-up. Of course, since the others running on my line got their asses profoundly kicked, I would have ended up on committee with a bunch of pay-to-play thugs, so it's actually a blessing that I didn't win.

But since I spent the last half-hour the polls were open as a "challenger", and stayed to get the numbers, I got to talk to the poll workers about what they do, and about the machines, and got a pretty good sense that these poll workers have absolute trust in the voting machines and absolutely no sense that these machines could be tampered with. Their "check" of discrepancies is to count the number of stubs from the tickets for each party they hand to voters against the machine's vote totals. Of course after I got through with them they had more of an idea of just how the software could be changed to produce a predetermined result, but my guess is they will continue to trust the voting machines, because what choice do they have?

In my county, we use the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. The brochure for the machine (scroll down to the last page) states:

The AVC Advantage requires no specialist knowledge to operate
or maintain. It performs a self-diagnosis at every power-up, and
its error messages display in plain, easy-to-understand language
for quick and simple trouble-shooting. Plus its modular-component
design allows easy in-field part replacement or system upgrade.

As a fairly well-known Election Integrity journalist who has personally covered, for years, the myriad election woes of thousands (if not millions) of voters around the country who have tried to bring seemingly endless stories of votes flipped on e-voting systems to the attention of officials, these stories always continue to be remarkable to me, even if not to many others in the rest of the mainstream media.

It's even more troubling when one realizes that so little ever seems to be done in light of so many of these horror stories, as those very same failed systems are still deployed across the nation, with little or no modification to correct the mountains of documented problems even now, as we head towards an election likely to be of historic proportions this November.

What follows is yet another one of those stories, where a voter had vote selections flipped by the electronic voting system, such that candidates were chosen other than the ones intended to be selected by the voter, though no fault of his own.

But this time, the voter is me.

Though I've covered so many of these stories, it was nonetheless remarkable to see it happen before ones very eyes, as occurred yesterday when I voted here in Los Angeles during our very low turnout California state Primary election.

The ES&S electronic voting system that I used to try to vote on yesterday, ended up flipping a total of 4 out of the 12 contests and initiatives for which I had attempted to vote.

Right before my very eyes, the computer-printed ballot produced by the voting system I was using, incorrectly filled in bubbles for four of the races I was voting in. Had I not been incredibly careful, after the ballot was printed out, to painstakingly compare what was printed to what I actually voted for, I'd have never known my votes were being given to candidates I did not vote for.

Had I been a blind voter --- as the system I was using is largely intended for use by the disabled --- I would have cast my ballot without having a clue that a full 40% of the votes I'd tried to cast for various California Superior Court judges were flipped to other candidates...


After speaking late last night about the problem to Dean Logan, the current acting Registrar-Recorder for Los Angeles County (the country's largest voting jurisdiction) and officials from the CA Sec. of State's office, I can report the failed e-voting machine in question is now being quarantined for testing to try and determine what happened in this, just the latest in a mounting string of failures by voting systems made by ES&S, the country's largest supplier of voting equipment.

Tagged as: elections, voting machines, voting rights